Up the Rubicon without a paddle......

State of the Union Address

2012-01-26T13:15:00.000-06:00

....And I am back.

Took a little time off from ranting about politics to spend quality time with Old Republic, as well as recharge before the election craziness got fully into gear.

So what better time to get back into things then with the Presidential State of the Union address to congress and the nation?

I cannot think of another myself actually!

By and large, I liked the speech. Let me start off by saying, if you expect the SotU to be about specifics you are fooling yourself. The SotU is all about the President talking about what they have done and what they would like to do. It is an "explaining" speech, for the great unwashed masses, who do not have the time or inclination to scour the inter-tubes. This is an important thing politically and substantively. The President gets to make his case to the American people, laying out what his priorities have been and are. While the American people get an opportunity to evaluate the words their leaders speak versus their actions taken.

So as you can guess, I tend to be a fan of SotU speeches. I have watched them all since President George H. W Bush was in office, and whether I agree with the current office holder or not, I listen intently. Why? Because they are my President, whether they chose to ignore me or pander to me.

Back to the speech itself. The portion of it that really caught my attention was the middle section. Starting here:

...the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.
The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What's at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.

This is a basic restatement of the social compact we all understand in the States. That if you work hard, and keep your nose clean, you will get ahead and can be successful. This is something hardwired in American DNA. We recoil from any intimation that this is not true. Even in the face of demonstrable proof to the contrary.

That was a nice setup for this bit:

Let's remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren't, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people's money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn't have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

People tend to forget how bleak things were in '07-'08. Policy makers were genuinely concerned that we were staring at the onset of another Great Depression.

So this states the situation he inherited. Which leads to here:

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we've put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

The state of our Union is getting stronger. And we've come too far to turn back now. As long as I'm President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.

This is the argument the President is making, "Things were/are bad, but we are making them better. You will hear that we have made things worse, but that simply is not reality.".

I think that is a pretty fair argument. I have my disagreements with this administration, but when pressed, I honestly do not think the alternatives are better. More to the point, I think, if their rhetoric is to be believed (it should be), they would have been worse.

This is the crucial argument of the next 9 months. Shall we continue to work for a more equitable society, or shall we cede more power, control and influence to our "betters"?

-Cheers

Yet another reason to not be a Republican....

2011-12-06T07:01:00.001-06:00

I have had some epic rants about the anti-science strain currently inhabiting the modern Republican party, but this National Journal article is just plan demoralizing...

I seriously do not expect the parties to agree on most things. But when there is consensus as widespread and durable as that of climate change in the scientific community you would think that both ideologies would offer solutions based on their world view. But that is not what we are seeing. Instead we are getting this:

One senior House Republican who appears comfortable with his positions on climate science is Texan Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Science Committee. Asked if climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer, the lawmaker charged with shaping national science policy responded, “I don’t think it’s the cause. I don’t think we can control what God controls.” Hall said that on the issue of climate science, he is “pretty close” to the stance of his fellow Texan, Rick Perry—believing that climate science may be a conspiracy theory put forth by scientists who are working in concert to receive funding for research. A reporter pointed out that last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a survey concluding that 97 percent of climate-science researchers are in consensus that human activities have led to global warming. “And they each get $5,000 for every report like that they give out,” Hall scoffed. He added, “I don’t have any proof of that. But I don’t believe ’em.”

It is hard to have a useful conversation in this sort of setting.

-Cheers

Super-Committee...not so super....

2011-12-05T07:47:00.000-06:00

I am a little late on this, but evidently the super-awesome-superdooper Committee of "was never going to work" failed to come to an agreement on solutions to our debt issues.

I know that is shocking. I was going to post a series of charts and graphs about the actual drivers of debt, but instead, I am going to leave it up to Chris Hayes....

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yeah that about sums up my feelings on the issue. You could probably lump the balanced budge amendment claptrap in with that as well...

-Cheers

Opening shots for '12...

2011-11-03T13:53:00.002-05:00

This is the sort of the comparative combative narrative the White House should have been embracing since late '09. Take a look beneath the fold for the infographic.

-Cheers

Goverment is the problem....except when it comes to your uterus...

2011-10-30T11:57:00.002-05:00

Pretty much that is the gist of a ballot initiative in Mississippi this year, as Irin Carmon.

That’s partly because the Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.

What I wonder is, if the ACA is so invasive then how is this not?

-Cheers

Tea Party Vs. Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-14T09:01:00.003-05:00

It can be summed up with the signs......

Tea Party

Occupy Wall Street

Now this is not to poke fun (okay maybe a little), but well I like graphs!

-Cheers

Fire up that TARDIS....

2011-10-10T15:00:00.001-05:00

The estimable Ezra Klein does thorough cataloging of the what went down with the Obama administration during the Great Recession of 2008. It is a very interesting read and does a good job of getting a lot of the relevant information, that is easily forgotten today, out there.

Pretty much the gist of it is: We were more screwed then we thought, and our systems of governance are just not good at handling these sorts of problem.

But I will let the man speak from himself on the subject:

To understand how the administration got it so wrong, we need to look at the data it was looking at.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency charged with measuring the size and growth of the U.S. economy, initially projected that the economy shrank at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the last quarter of 2008. Months later, the bureau almost doubled that estimate, saying the number was 6.2 percent. Then it was revised to 6.3 percent. But it wasn’t until this year that the actual number was revealed: 8.9 percent. That makes it one of the worst quarters in American history. Bernstein and Romer knew in 2008 that the economy had sustained a tough blow; t hey didn’t know that it had been run over by a truck.

There were certainly economists who argued that the recession was going to be worse than the forecasts. Nobel laureates Krugman and Joe Stiglitz were among the most vocal, but they were by no means alone. In December 2008, Bernstein, who had been named Biden’s chief economist, told the Times, “We’ll be lucky if the unemployment rate is below double digits by the end of next year.”

Here is an updated version of the original graph. The original Romer graph, that was circulated at the time of the initial Stimulus design:

Now I am firmly in the court of those who do not think we did enough. But in some ways we just did not know how deep the hole we were in. However, doing nothing would have left us in a measurably worse situation. I know voters are not interested in counter-factuals, but it still remains true, that even though the scope was too small. What was done had a net positive effect.

Paul Krugman, adds his 2-cents here.

-Cheers

What this party needs is more graphs....

2011-09-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

I know it cause major butt hurt any time "taxing incomes above 250k" is mentioned.

Yes I know that people who make 250k+ are not "rich", but lets not kid ourselves, they are not middle class either.

I have seen the middle and 250k is not it. This is not about class warfare, but an actual accounting of where individuals stand on the income scale.

-Cheers

Take this job and shove it.....

2011-09-29T11:50:00.000-05:00

A very depressing infographic about working in the United States. Andy this post is for you!

Created by: Online Masters Degree

Have a good day at work everyone!

-Cheers

Time for a change....

2011-09-29T08:48:00.003-05:00

It has been a while, but I decided the blog could use a face lift......

So we shall see how it goes, and other then the impenetrable prose, let me know if the contrast makes it harder to read.

-Cheers

A good place to start....

2011-09-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

When talking about the diagnosis about what ails our economy it would be good if we could actually agree on the causes. Mike Konzcal does a good round up of the "competing" philosophies being litigated today, in Venn Diagram form! So you know I had to post it!

The Keynesian view

The Supply-Side view

I am firmly in the Keynesian view, but it is good to have the various arguments sketched out so we can compare them for accuracy.

-Cheers

The King I know....

2011-09-08T11:45:00.000-05:00

With the recent anniversary of the "I have a Dream" speech, I find myself a bit reflective. When people talk about Dr. King there is this sort of (what is the opposite of demonization?) Santa Clausification.

I understand the need retroactively claim a hero. But let us not forget while King was alive, he was hated and unpopular to large swaths of the public.

So it is important to remember what Dr. King and his contemporaries actually did for the African American community. Not the country at large, but specifically African Americans. I personally do not have the words to describe it, nor did I live it. But my parents did, and my grand parents as well. I remember the "stories" and the "lessons", about how to act. The pervasive sense of fear that existed in this country for a segment of the population.

It will seem unrecognizable to most today. To be born black in this country prior to the last couple of generations was to be born into a brutal dictatorship. This piece, "Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did", does a wonderful job of articulating that feeling and conveying it to a generation that does not remember, and has not experienced it in such a concentrated form.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his "I have a dream speech."
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, "he marched." I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

So when I hear Rep. Michelle Bachmann lecture us about how the Founding Fathers fought slavery, or how Gov. Rick Perry talks of squabbles over taxation rates, as of a kind, with the Civil Rights movement.

Once and for all, your ideological struggle is not like the civil rights movement. Unless you were forcibly placed in bondage, taken from your home, your men beaten and tortured, your women raped, and you children sold. Much like the Holocaust, there are no equivalents to these acts. You favor lower taxes? Make your case. No one likes taxes it will be pretty easy to make. Leave some of the greatest crimes against humanity out of it.

-Cheers

Word of the day!

2011-09-04T12:06:00.000-05:00

Your word of the day is : flounce

flounce

[flouns] Origin Like this word?

verb (used without object)

1.to go with impatient or impetuous, exaggerated movements: The star flounced out of the studio in a rage.
2. to throw the body about spasmodically; flounder.

noun
3.an act or instance of flouncing; a flouncing movement.

-Cheers

Your modern Republican Party....

2011-09-04T11:32:00.002-05:00

I understand that my pleas to "No both sides are not the same!", often fall on deaf ears. It is the received conventional that the system is irrevocably broken due to both parties. Even if that is not the case, and demonstrably so, it fits the narrative better.

This piece over at Truth Out by, recently retired, longtime republican staffer Mike Lofgren is jarring.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It is a long piece, but it very much deserves a read. Republicans the lunatics are running the asylum! I actively support a coherent Republican party. Even if I disagree with them, they form a necessary corrective. What we have today is not that. These are individuals who do not accept even the basic premise of government. They believe in some mythical past, devoid of wrongs and injustice. They ignore or vilify anyone who disagrees with them.

That is no recipe for a functional democracy.

-Cheers

Austerity Now!

2011-09-02T11:25:00.002-05:00

Well they released the August jobs numbers, and they are terrible.

Here is a rundown of "teh librurl coverage":

Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:
Whether the GOP wants to admit it or not, the economy is advancing exactly as they want it to. The private sector is being left to its own devices; the public sector is shedding jobs quickly and scrapping investments; and the only permitted topic of conversation is about debt-reduction.
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:
Though the trends might be better than they were in early-2009, the labor market is in much worse shape, and it's clear that more action, and perhaps even big action, is desperately needed. I do not, however, expect that to be the actual response to this news.
Bill Gross of PIMCO over at Bloomber g is soundingly some wild-eyed hippie.

I would just like to echo what Benen has said. This is exactly what the policies advocated by conservatives yields. I am not saying they sit around trying to screw the economy (though it is hard not to speculate how they might be acting if they controlled the White House and one other branch i.e "in control of government"), but the policies the champion have this effect in a recession. They have told us time and time again, that shrinking government, cutting taxes, and deregulation would spur job creation.

Well not to get into a post hoc fallacy mess, but here are two graphs which show jobs creation since the Obama administration began (via Steve Benen).

Democratic control of Congress

Republican control of the House
Again I know, causation and correlation and all that. But is anyone really going to make the argument that we haven't been essentially following the Republican plan over the last 6-8 months? Basically less government spending and leaving the private sector to its own devices?

This is what austerity gets you in the midst of a severe financial contraction. I wait with baited breath to see the bipartisan rush to ameliorate this. Basic macroeconomics spells out clearly what you do in this situation.....

-Cheers

Word of the day!

2011-09-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

It has been a while, but here we go. A new word of the day!

Your word for the day is: parergon

noun, plural -ga [-guh] Show IPA.

1.something that is an accessory to a main work or subject; embellishment.
2.work undertaken in addition to one's principal work.

It would seem that during a period of recession, it is only expected that we all be more of a parergon.

-Cheers

Best hospitals in the world?

2011-09-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

Whenever I get into arguments about health care. One of the first rationales proffered for our excessive expenditures is that we "have the bestest hospitals in the world". Generally I just state that yes, we do have some of the finest hospitals in the world, but in the aggregate we are not getting much better care for the money we spend. This is generally met with derision, cause everything the US does is "better". Even though we have demonstrable evidence that we could
be doing much more to bring down costs.

So that brings us to the chart of the day (via the Dish): How Hospitals Harm Us

-Cheers

No Social Security is not a ponzi scheme....

2011-08-30T09:59:00.000-05:00

It has become de rigueur, of late amongst Republicans to attack Social Security as a ponzi scheme. Gov. Rick Perry has been the most vocal recently. Of course this completely incorrect! And to help us illustrate that....a venn diagram!

Via Ezra Klein:

As he explains, a Ponzi scheme is a fraud that relies on new investors being unaware of the program’s financing mechanism. Social Security is a fully transparent system of age-based redistribution that releases regular actuarial reports explaining, in great detail, how it is financed now, and what it will need to be fully financed into the future. Or, as Russell Long (apparently) put it, “Social Security is nothing more than a promise to a group of people that their children will be taxed for that group’s benefit.” You may like that structure or you may hate it, but it’s not a Ponzi scheme.

Yeah...I know government is evil...

-Cheers

What the Stimulus did...and didn't do....

2011-08-25T14:59:00.000-05:00

Dylan Matthews over at Ezra Klein's blog has been doing serious work. He has gone and compiled the most recent studies looking at whether the ARRA was a net positive or not. I would go into the details of it, but it is definitely worth the read.

I have been hugely critical of the size of the stimulus, mainly that it was not big enough. But that was never to imply that it should not have been done.

But enough of my babbling, I will let Mr. Matthews take over:

Each approach runs into its own set of problems. The econometric studies have to deal with what social scientists call “endogeneity”: that is, the variable whose effect we’re trying to determine (the stimulus) could itself be affected by what we’re trying to study its effect on (the state of the economy). In this specific case, this means that econometric studies sometimes have to correct for the fact that harder-hit areas tend to get more stimulus spending. This says nothing about the stimulus’ effectiveness, but it can confuse attempts to evaluate that effectiveness statistically.
All of these studies have their own methods of overcoming the endogeneity problem, some of which are more effective than others. Whichever corrections one uses, however, one cannot run a perfect experiment with messy, real-world data, which necessarily limits what these studies can say. Of the five econometric studies detailed here, three conclude the stimulus had a significant positive effect, and two conclude it did not have much of an effect at all.

I know this will not really change anyone's mind, but having data always makes me feel a little better on the subject.

-Cheers

Taxes and the Poor...

2011-08-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

It has been circulating for some time with mounting rage that there are some lucky duckies who are getting a free ride, because they do not pay income tax. You hear it a lot, "Everyone needs to pay in to have some skin in the game!". It has become near ubiquitous in conservative circles that it would be better to increase the tax burden on the middle class and working poor, then to raise even a dime on high wage earners.

Ezra Klein does the work on this issue showing why exactly the poor are not savaged by income tax by design. It is endlessly pointed out that payroll taxes (SS, Medicare, Medicaid) fall disproportionately on the poor:

A new report (pdf) from the Tax Policy Center breaks it down. In 2011, about 46 percent of households won’t pay income taxes. For about half of them, the standard provisions of the income tax wiped out their liability. If you don’t make any money but you take a standard deduction and have a few dependents, you’re not going to pay any income tax. Roberton Williams, one of the report’s authors, gives the example of “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400. They get an $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700, and that takes their liability to zero. As he says, “the basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.”

So to reiterate, the reason the poor do not "pay" income tax, is because of credits that wipe out their tax liability. Or better yet, because they are fucking poor.

-Cheers

Both sides do it....

2011-08-19T13:36:00.003-05:00

No they don't.

I need to find something to drink.

-Cheers

If you repeat it, it makes it true.....

2011-08-19T08:58:00.003-05:00

I have a problem with the modern version of the Republican party it can be summarized with this clip of Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) talking about funding abstinence education in Texas and its consistent dismal record on teen pregnancy.

The repetition, and the lack of an demonstrable facts to support his assertions. This is a prime function of movement Conservative thought. Steve Benen adds this point:

In a case like education and lessons on sexual health, the left tends to look at this in terms of results: what works in preventing teen pregnancies and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases? For the right, the question is philosophical: what’s consistent with their morality.

I will go further, then that. It is a feature, not a bug, of this day and age to disregard relevant statistical data in favor of ideology. If it does not comport with your philosophy it is simply not true.

The stupid...it burns....

-Cheers

Lucky Ducky

2011-08-18T10:14:00.000-05:00

(Scott Meyer's website)

Momma always said......

2011-08-16T16:28:00.001-05:00

This is something that just gets under my skin.

Socialism and Communism are political philosophies. The merits of each can be argued for eternity. What they are not however, is synonyms for "things I do not like".

This is something that happens all to often. Even if a policy is socialistic in nature that does not make it bad policy. We have a mixed economy for a reason.

-Cheers

Those evil unions....

2011-08-08T10:19:00.000-05:00

I have been off my game for the last couple of months. I blame Facebook and the arguments I have there diluting my desire to post long form entries. Be that as it may, this is an issue I have taken up a few times. The subject being the importance of unions in our economy.
I have often said that unions perform a vital role in our society. Whether you are in one or not, as a worker, they are the may body that works for workers' interest. That should not be underestimated. Of course business does not like them, the very goal of unions is to provide workers with leverage they do not have. As is the case in most things, individuals have very little negotiating strength.

I would like to say something positive here, but unions have been successfully demonized. They lazy union worker is as much a part of the collective psyche as the greedy banker, or the sleazy lawyer. Whether that is the case or not.

In a system where increasingly, power and focus are aligned with the most moneyed interests in society some sort of corrective is necessary.

-Cheers

Nah...I am sure they are just lazy...

2011-07-27T09:38:00.001-05:00

The Pew Research Cente r released some truly disheartening numbers on the wealth disparities between Caucasians and minorities in this country.
Pew goes into some detail about how the recession has hit minorities much harder then their white counter parts, but few have actually looked at the numbers.

According to the study, the inflation-adjusted median wealth among Hispanic households fell 66% from 2005 to 2009. Black households suffered a 53% drop in net worth over the same period. By contrast, whites saw a decline of 16% in household wealth.
In 2009, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth. Hispanic families had about $6,325 in wealth. The average white household had a net worth of $113,149.
The study also showed that a third of black and Hispanic households had zero wealth, meaning that their debts were larger than the value of all their assets.
Overall, the study attributed much of the disparity to the decline in home values, which hit black and Hispanic households hardest.
In addition, the downturn in the housing market was most severe in states with large populations of Hispanics and Asians, including California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan, according to the study.

Combine that with the unemployment numbers for blacks and you have a much clearer picture of the problems we face as nation.

Talk about those shiftless "others" all you want, but there are still serious structural impediments to economic progress amongst minorities.

-Cheers

American Ostrich....

2011-07-19T17:00:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that most of the people in this country are willfully ignorant of their circumstances. They do not understand how their government works, nor do they care to. They just assume that there are simple solutions to the vast array of problems, we face as a people.

Governing is hard and this graph is probably one of the most disappointing things I have seen in some time.

That public at large does not know the difference between debt or deficit. They certainly do not understand that the debt limit refers to money we have already spent (or agreed to spend), in the budget. That money is spent. It does not affect future spending. It sounds responsible to say we shouldn't raise the limit. But I ask this question. If we do not raise the debt limit, and the economy implodes, will all those who said it would not stand up and take responsibility for their actions?

Didn't think so.

-Cheers

Logic and Reason ain't what they used to be.....

2011-06-28T08:53:00.004-05:00

Recently I have come to some disturbing realizations. First, we are reaching a point of complete political paralysis. This article by Ezra Klein shows how screwed we are:

The president sold himself as the great post-partisan hope, the leader who could bring comity and peacefulness to a town riven by partisanship and rancor. When McConnell refuses to come to bipartisan agreements with Obama, he damages Obama’s brand. More than anyone else, McConnell has been responsible for his failure, and key in demonstrating how little any one leader can do to change the tone in Washington.

There’s supposed to be a curb on this sort of behavior: If you don’t participate in the legislative process, you don’t get anything out of the process. Here’s McConnell’s most important insight: That’s wrong. Withholding minority-party votes forces the majority party to hand its most moderate members — and the most moderate members of the other party — an effective veto, which drags the legislation substantively to the center, and in the current situation, to the right.

Health-care reform was more conservative than it would have been if more Republicans had been willing to support it. The stimulus was smaller than it would have been if conservative senators had been willing to back the whole in return for concessions on the parts. It turns out that a partisan political strategy results in more bipartisan policy. The opposition can have its cake and eat it, too. That doesn’t leave much reason for it to be bipartisan, of course. But for a minority party that wants to defeat a president who sold himself as a unifier, that’s a plus.

What you are left with is an opposition that has no incentive to ever compromise. Think about that. Possessing a majority in 2/3rds of the government means you can not govern. The public has so little interest/knowledge in policy that this is an effective strategy.

The majority is so desperate to accomplish anything, they will accede to the demands of the minority, just to look as if they are moving forward. So you get bad policy. I do not want to mince words here. The main republican goal is to defeat Obama. If they must blow up the economy to accomplish that. The so be it. They have told us so themselves. Crying hypocrisy is useless, call them out for what they are doing.

Secondly, bad economic argument is all the rage. Bad ideas get traction because the media is compliment and people are stupid. No one likes taxes, so Republicans have the ability to just lie about basic economics. Two graphs that illustrate our problems:

Revenues are simply a part of the equation. With out them, you have no equation. You can not have deficits and you can not have surpluses. It is just juvenile to assert otherwise. The President absolutely needs to hold Republicans to the fire on the debt-limit. It needs to be draped around their neck like a gigantic scarlet letter of mendaciousness and stupidity. But the President is so wrapped up in his brand that we will all suffer on the alter of false comity. And when the policies he capitulates on don't work or out right make things worse, he will be blamed. As well he should, because it is his own hubris which made it happen. One person does not change Washington. You have to have willing partners. He does not. It is time to accept that.

That he won't is what keeps me up at night.

-Cheers

Austerity is the new black

2011-06-12T11:35:00.000-05:00

Watching Fareed Zakaria this morning and he had an interesting panel Eliot Spitzer, Chrystia Freedland, Ann Coulter, and Andrew Roberts.

They were talking about the Republican presidential field as well as a discussion of Keynes vs Hayek. What I found interesting is, that when you have austerity advocates, they never explain the mechanism by which austerity works. Do not get me wrong there is a time and place for cuts in spending and to be more thrifty in general, however, when you are in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and pushing up against the zero lower bound. You need to explain how removing money from the economy will encourage growth. I have not heard that explanation given. Generally it is cloaked in talk of "confidence", and not the standard language of supply and demand. So I am highly suspect of it as an explanation.

That being said, Paul Krugman does a spectacular job of illustrating what the problem is with the austerity movement during a recession:

Self-defeating Austerity
There’s a quite good case to be made that austerity in the face of a depressed economy is, literally, a false economy — that it actually makes long-run budget problems worse.

People like me have been hesitant to make this argument loudly, for fear of being cast as the left equivalent of Arthur Laffer — but the heck with it, I’m going to lay it out.

So here’s the outline. Suppose you slash spending equal to 1 percent of GDP. That looks like a budget saving, right? But if you do it in the face of an economy up against the zero bound, so that the Fed can’t offset the demand effects with lower rates, it’s going to shrink the economy. Let me use a multiplier of 1.4; you can adjust the numbers as you wish.

Now, a weaker economy means less revenue. Assume that every dollar up or down in GDP means $0.25 in revenue, which is conservative. Then the fiscal austerity reduces revenue by 0.35 percent of GDP; the true saving is only 0.65 percent.

Now, the government has to borrow those funds; let’s say the real interest rate is 3 percent (it’s actually much lower now). Then the long run impact of the austerity on the fiscal position is to reduce real interest payments by 0.0195 percent of GDP.

But wait: what if there are long-run negative effects of a deeper slump on the economy? The WSJ piece showed one example: workers driven permanently out of the labor force. There’s also the negative effect of a depressed economy on business investment. There’s the waste of talent because young people have their lifetime careers derailed. And so on. And here’s the thing: if the economy is weaker in the long run, this means less revenue, which offsets any savings from the initial austerity.

How big do these negative effects have to be to turn austerity into a net negative for the budget? Not very big. In my example, the real interest payments saved by a 1 percent of GDP austerity move are less than .02 percent of GDP; if the marginal tax effect of GDP is 0.25, that means that a reduction of future GDP by .08 percent is enough to swamp the alleged fiscal benefits. It’s not at all hard to imagine that happening.

In short, there’s a very good case to be made that austerity now isn’t just a bad idea because of its impact on the economy and the unemployed; it may well fail even at the task of helping the budget balance.

It’s important to realize that I’m not saying that government spending always pays for itself, and that saving money is always counterproductive. These kinds of effects are specific to a liquidity trap situation. But that’s the situation we’re in.

I have not seen a counter to this other then, "Austerity will increase confidence!". We have a demand problem. Until that is addressed confidence is the least of our worries.

-Cheers

The Resilence of Zombie Lies.....

2011-06-10T15:00:00.002-05:00

The 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts was early this week, and it is safe to say that they were pretty much the mistake economists said they would be.

Annie Lowry does a great job of summing up just how spectacular they were at not accomplishing anything they were predicted:

In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a few years' worth of budget surpluses, so it decided to cut income tax rates, double the child-care credit, and sharply reduce the levies on investment income. The economy then slowed, even entering a brief recession. As a form of stimulus, the administration doubled down, expanding and hastening the 2001 changes. Bush promised that the tax cuts would do a whole lot more than put money in people's pockets—which, in fact, they did. He said they would "starve the beast," forcing Congress to reduce the size and scope of government. He promised they would increase the prosperity of all Americans. He also vowed: "Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate new wealth. And tax relief will open new opportunities."

.....What about the president's claims? Take his pledge that the cuts would spur job growth. To be fair, we'll ignore employment changes during 2008, the year the Great Recession seized the economy. During the 2001 to 2007 business cycle, America's economy enjoyed 52 straight months of job growth. But it was sluggish—in fact, the slowest rate of jobs growth on record since World War II, and just one-fifth the pace of the 1990s.
Then there's wealth. Put simply, the aughts were a decade of income stagnation: The tax cuts failed to bolster most taxpayers' earnings, even before the recession hit. Median real wages actually dropped from 2003 to 2007. Household income from business-cycle peak to business-cycle peak declined for the first time since tracking started in 1967. As documented by my colleague Timothy Noah in his series "The United States of Inequality," this did not hold true for the nation's billionaires and millionaires. Garden-variety high-wage earners saw their income go up. And incomes for the top 1 percent skyrocketed. For some people, obviously, the cuts "generated new wealth," in the president's phrase. But overall, inequality got worse.

Interestingly enough....this is virtually the same exact logic that Gov. Tim Pawlenty is using.
Whatever the problem, tax cuts are the solution. Economic boom? Tax cuts! Economic Recession? Tax cuts!!!! Global warming? Well that doesn't exist...but if it did...TAX CUTS!!!!!

Not make light of the subject, but honestly there is a time an a place for cutting taxes. This just isn't it, especially when you are going to run around screaming about the debt.

-Cheers

Gone Fishing....

2011-06-06T08:16:00.000-05:00

A bit of a long break from blogging recently. Contracted some virulent virus that sidelined me for a few weeks. But everything seems to be on the mend, so back to complaining!

First off a couple posts on the state of the economy:

Paul Krugman on the mis focus of our economic discussion
Jared Bernstein on "Shoulda vs Coulda" in politics
Krugman again, on how it is looking more like 1937

I am going to avoid the "Weiner-gate" and "Palin's ride with Paul Revere". The truth is I just don't care. The unemployment rate has jumped back up and all the commentariat can talk about is debt. We have human capital being squandered and the only thing Republican's want to talk about (and by extension the media), is how to shrink government.

I would honestly like, just once, for someone to ask the leading Republican officials/contenders how austerity will create jobs or growth in the economy. And if I hear one word about confidence, I will hit them with a fish.

-Cheers

New day...same as any other...

2011-05-10T11:22:00.003-05:00

So I am officially one year older today, and I thought, "What would be better then posting about health care?".

"Nothing!", was my answer. So here you go. A nice infographic that illustrates what is wrong with our health care system.

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

-Cheers

A wrong set of priorities.

2011-05-08T09:14:00.003-05:00

This is just disturbing.

A teenage girl who was dropped from her high school's cheerleading squad after refusing to chant the name of a basketball player who had sexually assaulted her must pay compensation of $45,000 (£27,300) after losing a legal challenge against the decision.

The United States Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a review of the case brought by the woman, who is known only as HS. Lower courts had ruled that she was speaking for the school, rather than for herself, when serving on a cheerleading squad – meaning that she had no right to stay silent when coaches told her to applaud.

I am sure what to even say about this, honestly. The dripping misogyny is disturbing.

She was 16 when she said she had been raped at a house party attended by dozens of fellow students from Silsbee High School, in south-east Texas. One of her alleged assailants, a student athlete called Rakheem Bolton, was arrested, with two other young men.

In court, Bolton pleaded guilty to the misdemeanour assault of HS. He received two years of probation, community service, a fine and was required to take anger-management classes. The charge of rape was dropped, leaving him free to return to school and take up his place on the basketball team.

Four months later, in January 2009, HS travelled to one of Silsbee High School's basketball games in Huntsville. She joined in with the business of leading cheers throughout the match. But when Bolton was about to take a free throw, the girl decided to stand silently with her arms folded.

"I didn't want to have to say his name and I didn't want to cheer for him," she later told reporters. "I just didn't want to encourage anything he was doing."

Richard Bain, the school superintendent in the sport-obsessed small town, saw things differently. He told HS to leave the gymnasium. Outside, he told her she was required to cheer for Bolton. When the girl said she was unwilling to endorse a man who had sexually assaulted her, she was expelled from the cheerleading squad.

This is one of those stories that makes me feel ashamed. The sort of "sports mentality" that made the superintendent think this was the best way to handle this situation is one reason, that I have very little love for organized sports.

I guess the thought is, it is her fault for being a victim. Further cementing my view of Texas as the shit hole of the universe.

This ruling lacks even basic humanity.

-Cheer

Why go after Unions?

2011-05-07T18:17:00.003-05:00

Two graphs that illustrate why we see the republican movement against unions.

Lets repeat together. It is not about balancing budgets.

Between that and the attempts to pass numerous "anti-voter fraud" laws, you might think they were just trying to starve their opposition of resources.

-Cheers

News of the day

2011-05-03T10:11:00.002-05:00

It is hard to judge or measure the effect of these events, and I am sure I could write reams on various issues with regard to the death of Osama bin Laden.

Evidenced by the numerous writing battles I have engaged in on Facebook. But I think here, in this space I will instead just be relieved that someone so heinous is no longer walking the earth.

And well this:

-Cheers

The bar...

2011-04-27T08:13:00.003-05:00

Is simply higher for a minority then it is otherwise. I do not know why I forgot this. But today I feel sorry for the President. I wish he had not had the state of Hawaii release his "long form" birth certificate. It will only embolden the opposition.

The President has done more then any other, to prove his citizenship. Now he has asked the
state of Hawaii to wave its privacy laws.

The problem is, they will never stop. The main impulse behind the birther movement is bigotry. They do not believe he is legitimate. There is nothing that will dissuade him. Now they will ask for his college records, then his tax forms, probably even his children's birth records.

They will never stop.

-Cheers

Oh no that isn't racist.....

2011-04-25T19:11:00.002-05:00

Yep. I am glad, that someone has these facts! I did not know I was on welfare!

Wow....seriously. Wow....

You know sometimes when you call someone racist...they are in fact racist.

-Cheers

Health Care is not like other products...

2011-04-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

We here a lot, that we just need to open health care up to the "free market". That the "invisible hand", will do wonders for the health care market.

The problem is, as many have pointed out patients are not consumers (in the normal sense of the word). This is an excellent graph that gets to the kernel of the issue.

This graph was part of an excellent post on the subject here.

Shadowfax list 3 compelling reasons why health care expenditures are not like any other market. Amongst those reasons are:

health care is generally not a refusable or electable
asymmetry of information (doctors don't know how much a procedure will cost to a given consumer, consumers have no good way to judged varying costs between providers)
purchasing power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of "consumers".

While all of the points mentioned are important, the third one is perhaps the single most compelling one.

This is the wooden stake through the heart of the idea that consumer behavior can effect cost containment. The functioning of a free market is dependent on the ability of consumers to vary their behavior to force suppliers to compete. However, you and I can be as scrupulous and cost conscious as we like. We are not sick. (Well, I'm not anyway. I hope you're OK.) The driver of cost is the small fraction of people who have serious medical conditions. It's the old 80/20 rule writ large.
Though the data is a few years old, I doubt the distribution has changed. To emphasize, HALF of all health care costs in the US is concentrated in only 5% of the population, and 80% of costs are accounted for by the top quintile! (source: Kaiser Foundation PDF)
So the effect here is that with such a concentration of costs in such a small segment of the population, the ability of the larger population to move the market is highly restricted. You can make 80% of consumers highly price sensitive, but they can only affect a tiny fraction of healthcare spending. And for the generally well, their costs are probably those which are least responsible for the spiraling inflation. They're not getting $30,000 stents or prolonged ICU stays, or needing complex chronic disease management.
Conversely, those who are high consumers of health care simply cannot be made more price sensitive, since their costs are probably well beyond what they could pay in any event, and for most are well beyond the limits of even a catastrophic health insurance policy. Once you are told that you need a bypass/chemo/stent/dialysis/NICU etc, etc, etc, the costs are so overwhelming that a consumer cannot possibly pay them out of pocket. Since, by definition, these catastrophic costs are paid by some form of insurance, the consumer cannot have much financial interest in cost containment. For most, when they are confronted with a major or life-threatening illness, their entire focus shifts to survival, and they could care less about the cost. Further, many who are in this sick/expensive category have some diminished capacity with regard to their information gathering and decision-making.

So yeah, if ever there were an argument for some sort of single payer/hybrid/NHS style health care system this would be it. Individual "consumers" simply do not have the power to shift costs much, even with perfect information. You need a system which allows the entire market to be affected as a whole. Competition over state lines simply won't accomplish that.

-Cheers

For the last time Government is not like a household!

2011-04-17T08:06:00.000-05:00

Seriously, it just a plain bad analogy. Ezra Klein does a great job of explaining why it is so bad.

When economic times are good, households should spend and invest more, while government should spend and invest less. When they’re bad, households need to cut back, and the government needs to step in. But as Karl Smith says, that’s not the only place where the analogy breaks down. Another — and one that’s increasingly relevant — is “not realizing your personal control over spending versus revenues is essentially the exact opposite of the governments control over spending versus revenues.”

Mr. Smith goes on to explain the different relationship governments and households have with revenue and spending:

Most middle class folks can cut back on their spending with relative ease. They probably won’t get sick, malnourished or injured from exposure as a result of spending cuts. What this means is that if revenues are running higher than spending – a necessary condition for building up debt – the most obvious choice is to cut spending. Therefore, as a rule of thumb people develop the notion that debt comes from living beyond your means...to the government, the exact opposite is true.

It is much easier for the government to raise revenue than to cut spending. Moreover, most of the movement in the deficit is tied to movements in revenue, not movements in spending. Thus the exact same reasoning that leads you to associate debt and spending in your personal life should lead you to associate debt and revenue for the government.

This is not to say that that government can not spend too much. But that the primary reason the deficit has grown so much over the last decade is mainly due to a massive drop off in revenue, Bruce Bartlett explains:

Revenues were 20.6 percent of GDP in 2000 and 18.5 percent of GDP in 2007, at the peak of the business cycle before the recession reduced them to 14.9 percent of GDP, where they have been for the last two years. (The postwar average is about 18.5 percent of GDP.) Without the Bush tax cuts – and those added by Obama – revenues would likely be more like 17.5 percent of GDP, which is where they were at the trough of the last three recessions.

If revenues had been 2 percent of GDP higher over the last 10 years, the federal debt would be about $2.5 trillion smaller. Instead of having a debt of about 60 percent of GDP last year, it would have been about 44 percent. And that doesn’t take into account all the interest that would have been saved that now adds about $60 billion to the deficit annually. Together, higher revenues and lower interest spending would have reduced last year’s deficit by one-third.

I know it won't stop people from saying it, but it is a bad analogy. Reality works the opposite of what is implied.

-Cheers

These days are still those days....

2011-04-16T19:01:00.000-05:00

In honor of the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, I wanted to post something nice and reflective.

But as it seems to be the case these days, I am finding it increasingly hard to note the progress made. Instead focusing on the distance we still need to travel.

Two stories caught my eye this week:

Via Balloon Juice, Mickey Kaus is a Jackass. Now you might be wondering why someone would say that, here is the offending text in a blog post Mickey wrote about President Obama's badness as a politician:

Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.

Now this bothers me. It bothers me on a personal level. We are not talking about Flava Flav being the President, Jay-Z or even Al Sharpton. We are talking about a Harvard trained constitutional lawyer, who was a state legislator and then a U.S senator. Despite what you think of the Presidents politics, he earned his place in life. Fighting against the constant racial inequities that most individuals of a fairer heritage have no inkling of.

This is very personal to me. That someone who seemingly knows nothing of the individual he comments on or how he won his office would make such a comment is jaw dropping. That I have had people say similar things about myself probably doesn't help matters. Evidently because I am black getting into Northwestern/U of I is impossible with out the help of affirmative action.

The President is a Harvard trained constitutional lawyer, who was a state and national legislator. That hardly sounds unqualified. Bad at politics? That is completely possible. But an Affirmative Action baby? Not hardly. Implying such is the worst sort of bigotry out there.

Combine that with this and you don't have to wonder why minorities are quick see bigotry, or to comment that racial issues have not noticeably changed.

The Weekly has obtained a copy of an email sent to fellow conservatives this week by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party.
Under the words, “Now you know why no birth certificate,” there’s an Obama family portrait showing them as apes. (I won't post the picture, because I find it offensive)

I know that Mr. Robinson, would have just held his chin up, smiled and took it. Because that was
the only way he could get that door open for rest of us. He had to take it and endure, so that we all would even have the chance.

That is courage. I wish I had it.

The President has some of it. Sometimes it is easy to forget, the risks he has taken to get to the White House. The vitriol he has to take and endure, all the while keeping up that smile. So that the rest of us have a chance.

Savage his policies. He doesn't deserve this sort of attack.

-Cheers

Backing it up...

2011-04-15T09:45:00.000-05:00

The other day the frustrations of the last couple of day boiled over into this pos t.

Some may have noticed that the President gave a speech this past week on the budget. It was a pretty good speech actually.

But consider me skeptical. I need to see some steel and fire out of the democrats. I need to see them willing to engage and argue for progressive aims. They may lose that argument, but they need to make it. Dr. Krugman sums up most of my feelings on the speech here.

To get my active support, that is what will be necessary. Make the Republican party pay for their fecklessness.

And since it is tax day this little chart for you all:

Yep, collectively we are paying way too much.

-Cheers

Enough is Enough....

2011-04-12T09:46:00.000-05:00

I have been a fairly reliable supporter of the President and his Administration, but at what point does a person stop reacting to the fear of "Palin, Bachmann, or Newt" and actually hold their elected officials responsible?

The President has done an absolutely horrid job negotiating with a petulant GOP. He has shown no inclination whatsoever, to defend any liberal/progressive alternative, or even offer one.

Bipartisanship is no virtue in service to bad policy.

I am tired of the constant pre-capitulation on every issue. The GOP's plan is to destroy the democratic party and this administration. Look at who and what they target. If there is a
source of democratic support, they attack it, they defund it and if they can they try to outlaw it
(unions, "trial lawyers"/tort reform, ACORN, NPR, voter ID laws).

The president says and does nothing about this. Have to protect that brand after all.

Whether it was the budget deal, the tax cuts, or even the ACA all we ever get is increasingly a right wing frame on right wing terms.

I promise if I get a fund raising letter from OFA, I may have to slap someone.

I will vote, I always do. But unless I see some fire and steel from Obama and the dems, they need to just forget about my enthusiastic support.

The GOP has become a party of bullies, unless you are willing to stand up to them and make them pay a price for their actions they will continue what they are doing.

Don't like them playing "games" with budget? Stop. Fucking. Pre-negotiating. They want a far
right propsal? Then you slap down a far left one and then haggle from there. That is how negotiating works.

Not happy.

-Cheers

Safety Net? What Safety Net?

2011-04-04T09:52:00.000-05:00

Personally I think it is time to call the Republican Party the "Let them Eat Cake" party. In the next day or so the Republican leaders in the House will release their budget plan.

Now until we have the specifics a few items have come to light and it seems that Republicans are going to try to privatize and voucherize Medicare/Medicaid.

Dr. Paul Krugman had this to say about what we know initially:

More when we have some details. But two key points:

1. Privatizing and voucherizing Medicare does nothing whatsoever to control costs. We’ve seen that from the sorry history of Medicare Advantage. I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.

Oh, and for all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word: suckers!

Ezra Klein talks a bit about it as well this morning:

The House GOP’s 2012 budget, prepared by Rep. Paul Ryan, will privatize Medicare, block grant Medicaid, and cost $4 trillion over a decade, reports Naftali Bendavid: “Republicans will present this week a 2012 budget proposal that would cut more than $4 trillion from federal spending projected over the next decade and transform the Medicare health program for the elderly, a move that will dramatically reshape the budget debate in Washington...The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills...Mr. Ryan’s proposal would apply to those currently under the age of 55, and for those Americans would convert Medicare into a ‘premium support’ system...The proposal would also convert Medicaid, the health program for the poor, into a series of block grants to give states more flexibility.”

First they targeted unions, now they come for the social safety net.

Targeting those who are the most vulnerable is the means and the ends of the modern Republican Party.

-Cheers

It's the Stupid....it Burns....

2011-04-01T14:59:00.003-05:00

I have to say, this is probably one of the more willfully ignorant gambits the Republican Party has engaged in.

1) Plays on the public's inability to understand complex subjects.
2) Would make our current fiscal problems worse.
3) Mind-numbingly stupid.

Specifically this segment of the proposal:

Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless two-thirds of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a roll call vote.

This is what California has, pushed through during a republican administration many years ago. Do nothing to actually effect spending, while making it near impossible to raise revenue (taxes!). There is more stupid here that should be talked about, but my head is sore from banging it into my desk, while reading the actual document and then the 'objective' reporting on the subject.

So instead, Ezra Klein, Johnathan Bernstein, and Bruce Bartlett go to town on how this idea is just more of the stupid. From Ezra:

A world in which this amendment is added to the Constitution is a world in which America effectively becomes California. It’s a world where the procedural impediments to passing budgets and raising revenues are so immense that effective fiscal management is essentially impossible; it’s a world where we can’t make public investments or sustain the safety net; it’s a world where recessions are much worse than they currently are and the government has to do more of its work off-budget through regulation and gimmickry. I would like to say something positive about this proposal, say there’s some silver lining here. But there isn’t. This is economic demagoguery, and nothing more. It’s so unrealistic that it would’ve ruled all but two of the last 30 years unconstitutional, which means it’s so unrealistic that there has not yet been a Republican president who has proven it can be done. And that doesn’t just suggest it can’t be done: It suggests that when Republicans are actually in power and have control of the budget, they know perfectly well that it shouldn’t be done. They’re just pretending otherwise for the moment.

-Cheers

A note on Collective Bargaining....

2011-03-30T07:51:00.002-05:00

April 4th is the anniversary of the Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.

I thought it was important to remember why it was, that Dr. King was in Memphis.

Dr. King was there to:

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: The right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME.

I really don't have much more to add then that. But I just want to say that worker rights have long been a civil rights issue. It is important to remember where have come from, and what is at stake.

-Cheers

Douche-Bag of the day.

2011-03-28T08:29:00.003-05:00

What does it take to be a Republican nominee these days? This is the sort of bigotry that the republican party has cultivated.

The sort of willful ignorance of the constitution should disqualify you from holding office. There is no law against being a bigot, but if you use that as a means to deny employment, then you are breaking the law.

-Cheers

Happy Birthday ACA!

2011-03-23T07:35:00.002-05:00

On the anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the Kaiser Foundation has put together a very nice flow chart on how the ACA works (h/t Ezra Klein).

Pretty straight forward. While, I am still not pleased with the process, it is an impressive first step for dealing with health care costs in the States and in making the system both less costly and more humane.

There is still more work to be done, but it is important to see how far we have come.

Also Mr. Klein does an admirable job of explaining the whole thing here.

-Cheers

....A little bit more...

2011-03-19T15:57:00.002-05:00

I initially posted this as an article on Facebook, but I thought it could probably use a little more discussion:

Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

As to why this is extremely disturbing:

The bill also calls for unconstitutional residency requirements, not allowing the debit card to be used across state lines and other provisions that the Welfare Rights Committee and others consider unacceptable.

Buechner testified, “We’ll leave you with this. It is not right to punish a whole group because of the supposed actions of a few. You in this room could have a pretty rough time if that was the case. It is not right to stigmatize and dehumanize women living the hard life of trying to raise children while living 60% below the poverty level. It is not right to use racist, bumper-sticker hate to inflict human misery for political gain.”

E.D Kain does a nifty job of analyzing this issue. I like the gratuitous addition of limiting teachers' ability to negotiate.

It seems to me that very notion of equitable negotiation is under attack these days. Employers should have all the leverage, and the only option the worker should have, is to find another job. So really, no negotiation at all.

A world where the poor and middle class are constantly under attack, is a world where the wealthy consistently erode the rights and wealth of the middle class and the poor.

-Cheers

It bears repeating....

2011-03-13T18:05:00.004-05:00

I am glad that Dr. Krugman went back to this issue again. With all the strum und drang over the deficit, it is worth remembering that this is always the case. Once again I think Matt Yglesias' (By way of Greg Sargent) comments on the subject ring true:

Public understanding of fiscal policy is hazy, inaccurate, and dominated by fallacious analogies between a national government and a household. What’s more, voters believe that deficits are primarily driven by wasteful government spending. So when a recession strikes the deficit spikes, and people complain.

The government is not like your household. It just isn't. It is like comparing a remote control car to the space shuttle. Sure they both have "engines", but they do very different things.

As Steve Benen notes, I do not even know why most republicans in congress are being treated like they have any authenticity on deficit reduction:

I'd be remiss if I neglected to mention how amusing it is to hear Mitch McConnell express concern about the debt. The Kentucky Republican voted for the Bush tax cuts, and added the costs to the national debt. McConnell then voted to finance the war in Afghanistan by adding the costs to the national debt. He then voted to put the costs of the war in Iraq onto the national debt. McConnell supported a massive expansion of the government's role in health care, Medicare Part D, and voted to pile all of its costs right onto the national debt, and then backed the financial industry bailout, and added the bill to the national debt. All the while, McConnell had no qualms about voting to raise the debt limit.
But now McConnell is willing to risk default unless Democrats agree to a plan to help clean up the mess McConnell helped create. Fascinating.

It would be fascinating if it weren't so terribly frustrating.

In other news. With all the focus on Japan after the horrific earthquake/tsunami that struck late last week. I have found this post to be the most important in regards to the reactor issues going on there.

Finally this is one of those stories (via Glenn Greenwald) that has people wondering if the parties are any different. I have to admit this is horribly disappointing on the part of the administration. This is not the sort of treatment that someone who speaks honestly on a despicable situation should be treated. And why exactly should the military be the objective source consulted when talking about possibly illegal activities that the military is involved in?

Just poor form on the part of the Administration. Just leading more credence to the the David Frum axiom: The Republicans fear their base, while Democrats despise theirs.

-Cheers

On the side your bread is buttered.

2011-03-11T17:13:00.000-06:00

Of late there are just so many things to write about, that I am suffering a bit of writer's block.

So instead of the pieces I wanted to toss out on Wisconsin, or the Luddite leanings of our new Congress, instead I will just focus on this little chart comparing the stated deficit reduction targets of the GOP versus the tax breaks they are offering. Consider it "The rich have needs too!" chart.

When you look at this chart, I can't help but think what insulated bastards we have running our country. The rich must never be made to share in any sacrifice, because they are innately responsible and all our well beings are dependent on the beneficent ruler-ship. While the poor (cause they are always irresponsible) and middle class needs to reign in their behavior and to stop expecting any assistance from the federal government.

Combine that with a shaky understanding of budgetary issues and the lack of any meaningful push back from the center-left contingent, I think Matt Yglesias gets to the kernel of why the public doesn't care about deficits yet politicians are obsessed with it:

Politicians don't understand that the voters don't care about the deficit because the voters themselves don't understand that they don't care about the deficit. Black, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and I all believe that with unemployment high and interest rates and inflation low that a larger short-term deficit will help post real output and reduce unemployment. If most people agreed with that, then politicians would talk about the deficit in a different way.
But they don't. Public understanding of fiscal policy is hazy, inaccurate, and dominated by fallacious analogies between a national government and a household. What's more, voters believe that deficits are primarily driven by wasteful government spending. So when a recession strikes the deficit spikes, and people complain.

So that is what is consuming my thoughts for right now. Why more people don't stand up and fight about this, is beyond me.

-Cheers

Lost Posters.....

2011-03-04T14:41:00.002-06:00

This may be the most awesome lost poster of all time. Of to St. Louis, to visit with old friends, and avoid unofficial.

-Cheers

Flying.....

2011-02-25T15:12:00.001-06:00

Caught this video that is part of the TED series:

The music is cheesy but, that looks pretty close to flying to me.

-Cheers

Wisconsin State of Mind...

2011-02-20T11:50:00.000-06:00

Recently there has been quite the hubbub over the last week or so. Politifact does a nice job of clarifying one of the claims at the center of dispute here. Wisconsin is facing a budget shortfall this year, but the methods being discussed will not address that shortfall. Also, the tax breaks the Gov. Walker signed into law in the first month will add to further deficit woes in future budgets. So Gov. Walker, did not create the budget shortfall, but neither did the public union employees.

I am going to seriously pimp Ezra Klein (if you are not reading him you need to) here, he and TPM have been doing yeoman's work on this topic.

But here we go. Mr. Klein, goes to bat on what the causes are for the Wisconsin shortfall are here. From there Klein does some corrections on his initial statement, but really gets into the nuts and bolts of of the issue (here, here, here and here).

The basic gist of Ezra comments being that, this has very little to do with balancing the budget and has more to do with legally dismantling a organized constituency that tends to be hostile to Republicans. From reading the bill itself and listening to the Union's willingness to accept the compensation cuts, but not the massive changes to collective bargaining in the state, I tend to agree with the commentators that cast this as union-busting.

Again, I feel like we need to talk about what the wealth distribution is like in this country, and how whenever someone says, "shared sacrifice" and "hard choices", they seem to always be directing that sacrifice at the middle class and the poor, exactly at the time when they are most set upon (h/t Balloon Juice).

As E.D Kain points out:

Alex notes that, “As you can see, this is why the wealthy in this country pay most of the taxes — they have most of the money, by a staggering amount.”

More charts and graphs here.

And Dr. Krugman talks some serious sense about entitlements.

-Cheers

Is are kids learning?

2011-02-11T15:27:00.000-06:00

Been a busy couple of weeks so extremely slow on posting. With Grilling of the Meats XII officially in the books, several birthday celebrations (Jay-Z, Penis, Julia W and Michelle Ray), the arrival of a new member of the Voss clan, and shenanigans with Ms. Terri and DMB have made for very little time to get any posts up.

Lots and lots going on in the political world to talk and write about, and hopefully I will have a little more time over the next couple weeks to dig into that.

So I am gonna try to use this post as a bit of a catch-up on what I have been reading recently.

First up we have two stories that inspired the title of this post:

This article from the New York Times on the teaching of Evolution in today's classrooms is just depressing:

Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.
That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise......
....But Dr. Moore is doubtful that more education is the answer. “These courses aren’t reaching the creationists,” he said. “They already know what evolution is. They were biology majors, or former biology students. They just reject what we told them.
“With 15 to 20 percent of biology teachers teaching creationism,” he continued, “this is the biggest failure in science education. There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology.”

[emphasis added mine] This would be like a fifth of physicist and engineers turning their noses up at the Conservation of Energy. Evolution and its understanding is that fundamental to the study of modern Biology. Yet we see this sort of division. But it isn't like we are talking about the arguments that surrounded the inclusion of Einstein's Theory of General and Special Relativity into physics or that of Quantum Mechanics. These are arguments predicated on not know or not trying to answer questions. That is what I find abhorrent about the sort of methodology used by creationist. It is anti-learning. They already have the answer they want, so no study is necessary. This is a bad way to teach children and cripples our discourse on any scientific topic.

Next up the lack of knowledge the electorate has on how the government spends money is truly mind-boggling:

A January CNN poll found the same result, with 81% of Americans supporting cuts to foreign aid, while opposing, by around the same margin, cuts to Social Security and Medicare (which alone comprise roughly one third of the overall budget).

So how much money do Americans think could be slashed from international aid?

In a World Public Opinion poll conducted last November, respondents guessed, on average, that foreign aid spending represented 27% of the federal budget. To trim spending, the same respondents suggested that, on average, foreign should make up a slimmer 13% of the total budget, surely delivering massive savings.

The problem? Foreign aid is actually a minuscule 1% of the total budget. Even eliminating it altogether would do little to balance the budget or reduce the deficit.

This same sticking point -- Americans' misconceptions of actual spending levels -- seems to work the other way around when it comes to the military. When it comes to defense spending, Americans generally oppose cuts and wildly underestimating how much is already being spent.

I never cease to be amazed at how little most people know about their world. The budget of the United States is, more or less, a quantifiable thing. Its spending can be traced and tracked, to see what our tax dollars are spent on. Yet whenever it comes time to talk about spending cuts the first thing that is always mentioned is Foreign aid.

Virtually every time. Even though it makes up less then 1% of our budget. Cutting it entirely would have almost no effect on our deficit. But it is always the first thing mentioned. Medicare/Medicaid, Department of Defense, Social Security?

If you are a partisan politician you might mention which ever one is your particular bugaboo. Aside from that, it follows in most cases, the determination is, "Does this cut effect me? If no. Do it. If yes. Get your government paws off my Medicare!".

And we wonder as a society why our children struggle in school, when we personally do not seem to apply the most basic of critical analysis.
------------

Now just a few links to articles I just enjoyed for one reason or another.

The most engaging post I have read on abortion/women's rights in a while. Mainly cause it deals with how easy it is for men to sit in judgement of the subject, but never face the very real risks.
The Economist on Climate Change.
The sex trade has embraced the future. Possibly making pimpin' even less easy. Money quote:
"I asked one of them how pimping experience helps him in the legit economy: “You learn one thing,” he said. “For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.”"

That's all I have for right now.

-Cheers

Matters of the day....

2011-01-28T15:41:00.000-06:00

I had been working on an exceptionally long post about the State of the Union address, the coverage of that speech, and the stupid things Rep. Michelle Bachmann/Sarah Palin said about it.

But instead I started reading a couple of different articles about rape.

I highly recommend reading both, if you don't feel a sense of revulsion and/or anger, you are dead inside.

First we have a piece about "prisoner rape". The sheer brutality of the prison state that has been erected in the US should be frightening to all citizens. While those who brake the laws of the land, on human being should be subjected to this:

The biggest risk factor found in the study was prior abuse. Some 65 percent of kids who had been sexually assaulted at another corrections facility were also assaulted at their current one. In prison culture, even in juvenile detention, after an inmate is raped for the first time he is considered “turned out,” and fair game for further abuse.²² Eighty-one percent of juveniles sexually abused by other inmates were victimized more than once, and 32 percent more than ten times. Forty-two percent were assaulted by more than one person. Of those victimized by staff, 88 percent had been abused repeatedly, 27 percent more than ten times, and 33 percent by more than one facility employee. Those who responded to the survey had been in their facilities for an average of 6.3 months.

Restitution is one thing, being raped repeatedly is something entirely different. That this continues to happen in the US should be a national shame. But because it involves prisoners it is something that is joked about or otherwise ignored. A variation on the "they deserve it" mentality. This thinking is wrong on so many levels. 95% of the incarcerated population will eventually be released. The physical and emotional scares of rape only make these individuals more likely to engage in disruptive behavior, not less.

The other article I read, would be another shot across the bow of long standing abortion debate in this country.

There should be a vigorous debate on the topic of abortion, that is not something I disagree on. It is a complicated and contentious issue. But when you have to stoop to changing the definition
of rape in order to accomplish your task, you may want to pause for just a second:

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion.

Ahh....so only physical violence counts. This is wrong on so many levels and shows an corruption of thought that I find appalling. Rep Smith should be ashamed for bringing this bill to the floor. But I guess for the party that preaches about "excessive governmental intervention", the on goings of its citizens' uterus is worthy of exacting controls. Even after severe physical and emotional abuse telling someone what they should do with their body is not off limits.

All in all these sorts of things just fill me with a sense of dread. The ever coarsening of rhetoric and the constant diminishment of your opposition just leads to an ever more callous society.

-Cheers

Down the rabbit hole....

2011-01-19T13:39:00.000-06:00

The subject of race in this country is always a prickly issue. So much so, that I tend to wade in only very occasionally.

This is even more true, when the subject at hand, has some relation to the societal/institutional force referred to as "white privilege", a topic that is always certain to get strong responses.

With that said, I came across a post this morning that I found fascinating. It was titled "An Object Lesson in White Privilege: What if Sarah Palin were Black?". A provocative title to say the least. The article-OpEd, is highly worth the read. I would also recommend reading the comment section to see the sorts of responses that are made (Preemptively if you compare the Republican and Democratic parties of today with those same parties from the mid 20th century, you are already on shaky group. Back then there were liberal republicans and well the dixie-crats broke off from the democratic party in spectacular fashion over civil rights. So a straight comparison is misleading at best.)

This passage in particular spoke to me:

To be White is to be "normal," "invisible," and quintessentially "American." It is also the freedom to be an individual. When crazy white people bomb buildings, kill cops in the name of radical right wing politics, go on shooting rampages, or more generally just act like fools, it is never framed as a "White" problem. I would suggest that these actions are rarely, if ever, interrogated for what they reveal about Whiteness and/or white folk at large. In short, there is no "I hope that person isn't white" moment. Why? Because a given white person's actions are usually a reflection of their individual shortcomings, not a commentary on white people as a whole.

This is a very hard thing to convey to someone. How do you explain the sort of hurt you feel, when all your accomplishments are judged through an "affirmative action" prism? As if you are always part of some sort of collective.

It is saddening how internalized this is. When Mike took his job in news, one of the first things I asked him was to, "...never interview that black guy in the tank top and missing teeth, about anything. Ever.". I felt something similar to that after the recent tragedy in Arizona. My thoughts in order were:

I hope this wasn't political
Man I hope those people are alright
Ugh..I hope he (cause they predominately are "hes") isn't Muslim.

That may seem strange to most people, that someone would think in that fashion. But ask yourself how the coverage would have been different if Jared Loughner had instead been Muhommed Fahad, Jose Calderon, or Tyrone Jackson.

Anyway, I really don't have much to add to the discussion, but thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

But in answer to the challenge of the linked post I guess my response would be: If Sarah Palin were Black we would have never heard of her. The details of her life combined with ethnicity would have made her toxic from day one.

Simply put, the standards that ethnic minorities are held to is always directly related to the stereotypes they live under.

-Cheers

Health care debates...

2011-01-18T17:19:00.002-06:00

I wish there was more of this in the lead up to the ACA vote:

REPEAL OBAMACARE (iq2us.org) from Intelligence Squared US on Vimeo.

This sort of debate, though I am clearly on one side, is infinitely better then what we had.

-Cheers

A tale of two speeches....

2011-01-13T08:52:00.002-06:00

I thought I would throw up a post with the speeches of both Mrs. Palin, and President Obama.

Watching them I just could not ignore the radical differences in both delivery and and substance.

Mrs. Palin:

President Obama:

A few comments. If their were any doubt, this should clear it up. Mrs. Palin seems to be incapable of reaching out to anyone who disagrees with her. She is a living, breathing, seething personification of resentment. I do not doubt that she feels aggrieved over some of the comments that have been lobbed her way over the past few days, and I believe she has internalized those feelings. Some of those comments directed at here have been way over the line, but this day was not about her or her hurt feelings. The level of narcissism Mrs. Palin exhibits is extraordinary. A normal person in her position would probably offer that, though they were not culpable in this senseless tragedy, perhaps one should be more circumspect in the words one uses to describe and assault their opponents. There was none of that in Palin's speech.

As for the President, well his words spoke to something different.

-Cheers

Douche-bag of the day...

2011-01-07T19:03:00.000-06:00

Yep Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is an idiot.

-Cheers

The very terrible, no good, horrible....thing the other guy suggests!

2011-01-07T14:54:00.000-06:00

I understand the desire to say/think everything your ideological opponents suggest is wrong. But that is simply not the case. This piece by Steven Pearlstein is a nice refutation of that sort of mentality, especially with reference to the republican tendency to classify anything democratic idea/initiative or government activity as "Job-Killing":

What's so curious is that it's hard to find almost any Republican concern about employment homicide during 2008, when George W. Bush was president and the economy was shedding 4.4 million jobs. Given the lag with which economic policy works, the biggest net job loss that could credibly be assigned to Obama during his two years in office would be less than a million.

I know that to point out republican hypocrisy is nothing new or revolutionary, but the sheer scope of the demagoguery is awe inspiring.

Ironically, the first order of legislative business in the new Republican House will be to repeal last year's health-care reform law. Since the immediate impact of the measure will be to allow 30 million more Americans the chance to buy drugs and medical services from doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, it's hard to imagine a more effective way to reduce employment in the one sector that is actually adding jobs.

The other GOP priority is to cut $100 billion this year from the government's domestic spending, which translates into the loss of close to a million jobs for government workers and contractors. Apparently, in the stylized way that Republicans count things, those positions don't count as real jobs.

What's particularly noteworthy about this fixation with "job killing" is that it stands in such contrast to the complete lack of concern about policies that kill people rather than jobs.

Repealing health-care reform, for instance, would inevitably lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths each year because of an inability to get medical care.

Although lack of effective regulation led directly to the deaths of 78 coal miners last year in West Virginia, Republicans continue to insist that any reform of mine safety laws is bad for miners' employment.

It is a matter of accumulated wisdom in conservative circles that government is useless in the most benign sense, or an outright evil, liberty stealing and freedom crushing monstrosity on the far end (especially when Democrats are in control). Sometimes the government is the lesser of two evils, or the buffer which keeps business from grinding us all up in its greed induced frenzy.

I wish the media would do a better job of point out this sort of red baiting, intellectual dishonesty when it happens. Not only point it out, but shaming the individuals who continually spew this sort of nonsense.

That is asking a lot, but a boy can hope?

-Cheers

A better world....

2011-01-05T15:08:00.000-06:00

From XKCD and here is the wiki page.

What a better place this would be, if when someone told a blatant falsehood there was some
mechanism to hold them accountable and shame them into not being a dumb ass....

-Cheers

Economics for dummies....

2011-01-05T12:47:00.003-06:00

Over the next few days you will be treated to all sorts of Republican officials stating that all of our problems are a result of the massive over spending of the Obama administration. They are lying.

Also you will hear that the solution to our woes are more tax cuts and cutting spending. This is just pure fantasy. So much so, I am gonna start smacking people who indulge in this crap with this chart when they do!

So yeah, hello 112th Congress. The current administrations contribution to the debt problems is fairly
small in comparison.

-Cheers

Talking about Wikileaks....

2010-12-28T19:36:00.003-06:00

I have some conflicted feelings on the whole Wikileaks scandal. In general I am certain that the government is abusing its ability to classify its activities as "secret". But I am aware that Julian Assange is definitely an ass, and is accused of rape, so yeah not the most savory of individuals.

But this discussion on CNN, involving Glenn Greenwald, is as good a summation as you will get on the various points. Warning Greenwald drinks both of their milkshakes. Ms. Yelin and Ms. Townsend are out of their league on this subject.

-Cheers

Miller Time....

2010-12-22T14:53:00.003-06:00

There have been many days that I have been an extremely vocal critic (and will still have those days in the future) of the President, but on a day like today I am impressed still. Taking concrete steps to make this a more equitable society need to be applauded when they happen.

So yeah you know the drill....

A heartfelt "cheers" to those who can no serve their country openly and with the dignity that they have for so long been denied.

-Cheers

Tom Toles....

2010-12-21T10:06:00.003-06:00

Some times a comic just sums up everything.

Rise of the oligarchs.....ctd

2010-12-20T09:58:00.001-06:00

Continuing the previous conversation this piece here pretty much covers all the bases:

Estate Tax Exemptions
More important to many upper-middle-class Americans than the estate tax rate are exemptions that mean the vast majority of Americans won't have to pay any estate taxes at all. The first $5 million in assets passed on to descendants in a lifetime would be shielded from any taxes. Also, married couples can more easily combine their exemptions, protecting a minimum of $10 million for most families.

"That's going to allow a lot more people to transfer a lot more wealth to future generations free of estate taxes or gift taxes," says Chris Roe, senior wealth adviser at Waldron Wealth Management.

The number of people who must worry about estate taxes, already tiny, would shrink to less than 0.2 percent of the population, estimates Richard Behrendt, senior estate planner at Robert W. Baird & Co. In 2009, when the exemption was $3.5 million, 14,713 people had fortunes large enough to file taxable estate returns, according to the IRS. Just 4,296 of those people had estates of $5 million or larger. Compare that with the 2.47 million Americans who died in 2008, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If Congress does nothing, the exemption would be just $1 million and the tax rate 55 percent in 2011. From 1942 to 1976, the estate tax rate was 77 percent for estates over $10 million, and only estates under $60,000 were exempt from the tax entirely.

Favorable Rules
For those wealthy enough to still need to worry about estate taxes, the new tax legislation is written to make it much easier to manage their fortunes. For example, individuals can easily pass their remaining tax exemptions on to their spouses after death, without creating complex trusts. Also, new rules treat gifts to children during a donor's lifetime the same as those made after death, making it easier to pass on estates before assets appreciate and incur extra taxes.

Low interest rates make this the perfect time for many clients to set up trusts like Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts, known as GRATs. In a GRAT, parents loan assets like stocks or even an interest in a private business to the trust at the lowest interest rate possible under the law, which is set each month by the IRS. If the value of those assets increases over time, the GRATs' beneficiaries reap any benefit above that interest rate. Luckily for those who set up GRATs now, interest rates are at record lows—the IRS set the December rate at 1.8 percent.

I honestly blame a poor history education for the amount of argument over this issue. This Business Insider article aggregates a lot of charts showing the same things. The wealthy keep getting wealthier and the poor keep getting poorer:

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

If you're in that top 1%, life is grand.

This is a real problem, for a stable democracy.

-Cheers

Rise of the oligarchs.....

2010-12-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

This is gonna be an omnibus post of sorts. There have been a lot of things going on the past couple of weeks.

A couple of articles and topics have absolutely consumed my attention recently.

This piece by Roger Simon has to be the prototype of elite reaction to the current economic situation the country finds itself in.

Don't like the way wealth is distributed? Then you can join congressional Democrats and grump about it, or you can get some wealth for yourself.

This has to be the most tone deaf thing I have read in some time. The utter lack self-consciousness and dripping condescension is awe-inspiring.

I think the folks at Huffington Post really hit the nail on the head:

There was second hypothesis: Maybe a good chunk of the political class is just so insulated from the realities in the report that they don't feel the same sense of urgency that most Americans do. Things are terrible on Main Street, but on Wall Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and K Street, they don't look so gloomy. How else can we explain why everyone in Washington was talking about deficit reduction (at least until they decided to blow another hole in the budget), even while polls show that Americans ranked it way, way below fixing the economy?

It's not clear which is scarier -- that our leaders don't think they can lead, or that they don't want to.

Either way, the middle-class economy keeps falling, and no one is there to hear it.

Pretty much.

Also, Fox news makes you dumb.

Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)

Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)

The economy is getting worse (26 points)

Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)

The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)

Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)

The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)

When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)

And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

But the other news orgs didn't exactly cover themselves with glory:

Daily consumers of MSNBC and public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) were higher (34 points and 25 points respectively) in believing that it was proven that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates. Daily watchers of network TV news broadcasts were 12 points higher in believing that TARP was signed into law by President Obama, and 11 points higher in believing that most Republicans oppose TARP.

We are so screwed.

-Cheers

Man I miss me some Dave....

2010-12-02T13:47:00.004-06:00

Politics has seriously got me in the dumps recently....

But this clip for the Chappelle show just makes me laugh......

Aluminum Tubes!

-Cheers

And now for something different....

2010-12-01T10:57:00.002-06:00

The season finale for the Venture Brothers was a couple weekends ago, and I finally got around to watching it.

As always it did not fail to amuse....but there was one segment of the episode, that will live on in my mind for the ages along side the infamous "Gimme my money" from the Family Guy.

Behold, "What's a Rusty Venture".

-Cheers

Douche-bag of the Day!

2010-11-30T13:30:00.003-06:00

It has been a while since I have done one of these, but well, I thought Rep. John Shadegg performed above and beyond the call of duty.

The people of Arizona could not hope for a more clueless representative:

I will just let you bask in his idiocy. I am no huge fan of Mike Barnacle, but from an economic standpoint he has the right of it......

-Cheers

We are just tribal creatures.....

2010-11-30T11:33:00.001-06:00

These sorts of articles just absolutely crush any optimism I have for a rational society.

The phenomenon is referred to as motivated skepticism. Ezra Klein pulls a lot of this stuff together, to start my day off badly. The reasons for this are obvious. It has recently been a topic of some conversation, the motivations of the Republican Party.

The money quote of the piece, for me would be:

Three scary sentences from the piece: "when reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not."

Rational analysis, is completely secondary to identifying with your group. Let that roll over in your mind for a bit. Presented with verifiable information, party id mattered more then objective policy content.

I really don't have a good retort for this right now. Normally I like to game out strategies and such to work around these sorts of obstacles, but with the high level of polarization in the country, I am not sure what the solution is.

Mr. Klein also reminds us of a quote by one of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell:

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."

That leads me to one question. We all agree that the economy is bad, and on shaky ground. The President has proposed multiple "moderate" (read as warmed over and retreaded Republican plans from the past, from the health care reform bill, to the Stimulus) policies to help ameliorate some of the massive problems we have been through the past couple of years and that is characterized as socialist. So one has to wonder if presented with a choice of taking steps to fix the economy that yield politically positive benefits for President Obama or stymieing that effort, what would be the Republican answer for that?

Thus far, the answer is "No".

You should be very concerned. One party is concerned about governing during a severe economic recession and the other is concerned with returning to power.

The president and the democrats seem unwilling to accept that.

If the president is having a hard time understanding why his base is demoralized, he need look no farther then his decision on the federal pay freeze or the Bush Tax Cuts. An inability to make your opposition pay for their intransigence and an unwillingness to fight for your ostensible beliefs.....

Yeah I am not happy this morning.

-Cheers

Now for the negotiations.....

2010-11-29T18:19:00.003-06:00

I am sorry Mr. President this is a stupid move. It is bad economics during a recession and bad policy when dealing with an intractable opposition.

Pre-conciliatory gestures will get you nothing sir. Nothing at all. The republicans want to destroy your presidency. It further depresses your base. It just doesn't make any sense. Get out there and fight for your beliefs.

Bad move.

-Cheers

Putting a pretty bow on it....

2010-11-29T10:04:00.001-06:00

Over the last couple of weeks I have been in a number of lengthy political arguments with conservatives via Facebook. It has been illuminating.

Those who know me well, know that I am not an overtly aggressive person, but I can be combative when discussing issues I view as matters of fact (i.e what were the employment numbers from the 90's as compared to the 00's, increases and decreases in real wages, health insurance enrollment or poverty statistics). Anything that there is documented evidence or data for, I feel on much firmer ground when discussion.

Both of the major discussions I had, started from different points but converged in an interesting way. One started from a commenting stating that the Bush Administration oversaw the "greatest economy ever". The other began when I made a comment about Mrs. Sarah Palin in which I provided a quote from her about her support for the TARP program, when Bush implemented it during the last presidential election. The quote was a nonsensical collection of republican boilerplate, which showed no grasp of the relevant policy or its implications. That to me was terrifying.

From those two points the conversations spiraled down in the same way and the "arguments" of the individuals in questions had the same whiff of sententiousness and a heavy reliance on argumentum ad populum. I will not re-litigate those arguments here, but I wanted to comment on the general tenor. What I saw was a complete disregard of any data which contradicts their perspective, an unwillingness to provide any support for their assertions and a willful misreading of their opponents arguments. It was somewhat maddening.

I am fully aware that once an argument starts that no one will ever change their opinion based on that discussion. It is profoundly human failing. It is alright to appear stupid or even bigoted, but wrong is never an option.

Okay now that I have gotten that substantial preamble out of the way, I really just wanted an excuse to post a couple links that caught my eye.

First off that, Argumentum ad Populum (additional analysis here) that I spoke of before:

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they’re just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That’s part of the Tea Party’s litmus test: “How far will you go?”
Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there’s no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I’m not saying that they’re small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they’re all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you’re arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?

Taibbi: I interview these people. They’re not basing their positions on the facts — they’re completely uninterested in the facts. They’re voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that’s enough for them.

Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?

Taibbi: I’m not saying they’re beneath serious conversation. I’m saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.

Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.

In my opinion this discussion perfectly distills that logical fallacy. Simply because large numbers of people believe something does not always make it true. Sixty years ago in the United States, large swaths of Americans believed that blacks were less deserving of equal treatment then whites. Or if you prefer a non-racially charged analogy, during the dark ages large portions of the afflicted communities believed that carrying flowers protected you from the Black Plague.
To take Taibbi's point the people he interviewed would eschewed any data that disagreed with them. In his estimation that made them crazy.

Now the next two blog posts are Palin related (here and here). Mrs. Palin, has changed the political equation, she has touched a nerve politically and the pundits (and her opponents) have been slow to realize this. As the able guys and gals over at Balloon Juice explain in the most plain language I have seen:

This is a standard beltway political analysis, and it reflects a basic misunderstanding of Palin’s strategy in general, and specifically why Palin doesn’t give a shit about Michelle Obama’s gender or popularity.

Palin’s goal is to mobilize a base of Fox-watching, resentment-driven primary voters. These people are mainly white and male, and they do not like Michelle Obama. Palin’s characterization of Michelle Obama as an elite black woman who thinks she knows better just stirs the pot of resentment that Palin thinks will drive her primary victories. In the eyes of the typical Palin primary voter, Mrs. Obama’s anti-obesity program is in no way “benign”—it’s another example of that uppity Princeton-educated black ballbuster thinking she knows better than real Americans.

Second, if Palin does get the nomination, she’ll be a weak candidate with little or no positive agenda. So, she’ll have to attack Michelle and Barack Obama, Sasha, Malia and Bo, repeatedly and without regard to their poll numbers. She will run a constant Twitter and Facebook attack machine with the goal of making Obama look weak if he doesn’t respond, but also making him look like he’s picking on her and her family if he does. Her strategy for attracting women voters will be to make Obama look like he isn’t tough enough to defend his wife and family, and then to make him look like a jerk for attacking poor defenseless Sarah.

Palin will be able to pursue this strategy in large part because she won’t be subject to the same media rules as her primary or general opponents. The mainstream media dutifully reports her every tweet but is unable to question her directly on the horseshit that she spews. My guess is that she won’t travel with any press but Fox and associated friendly outlets. She’s shown a basic capability of participating in a debate and not making a complete ass of herself, if she’s prepped correctly, so she’ll probably outperform the low expectations that will accompany that little ritual.

My point isn’t that she’s unstoppable, just that the campaign analysis in the mold of Teddy White and Jack Germond isn’t the way to understand the Palin project. She isn’t part of that system, and she doesn’t play by its rules.

And this reflection from Andrew Sullivan:

There is no maturity here; no self-reflection; no capacity even to think how to appeal to the half of Americans who are already so appalled by her trashy behavior and cheap publicity stunts. There is a meanness, a disrespect, a vicious partisanship that, if allowed to gain more power, would split this country more deeply and more rancorously than at any time in recent years. And that's saying something.

Say what you want about our current president, from his statements and actions he just doesn't have the same disdain for his opponents as this woman shows.

Now none of these were fact based arguments other then looking at the on record quotes of individuals and evaluating those statements. What they do illustrate is an unwillingness to entertain doubt. That there are times when you ideology is not sufficient to address all issues, and that even sometimes it may be incorrect.

And as Master Kenobi tells us, "Only a sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.". So when I see arguments that lack support other then the force of opinion, I will do my best to attack and probe them. Why? Because I must. It is the only way to better the discourse we have.

-Cheers

Off the beaten path...

2010-11-28T09:26:00.003-06:00

A little break from politics today. I found this blog post about "sex with Aspergers", incredibly compelling.

It was an interesting perspective, that honestly, I had never thought about. I have know several people that fall ,at various points, on the scale but I never once thought about how frustrating/difficult it must all be.

Almost instinctively, for most of us, we have and understand that their is a game that must be played in the pursuit of sex. Not once do we even question it. It simply is the way it is. Whether we are proficient or not, we know the rules.

So what would it be like with out that sort of knowledge? Other than in some sort of anthropological sense, it would be terrorizing. That all being said, I giggled like a little school boy when I read this little passage:

We dated. To get rid of him, I told him I was a lesbian and I only wanted to date him if there could be another woman there, too. That didn’t just make him pursue me with more fervor. It made the whole trading floor pursue me. And I had no idea why.

Notice how there’s one theme here: I have no idea how other people think about sex.

At least in this regard Mrs. Trunk is not alone. I honestly have no idea what other people think about sex. You just kind of hope that your sexual habits do not scare off whoever you are trying to bed.

Interestingly enough I find that oddly comforting.

-Cheers

Pernicious Lies.....

2010-11-20T07:20:00.001-06:00

Okay now can we stop with how tax cuts are the tonic which solves every economic ill.

I am guessing no. The magic economic fairy will come along and create jobs! All we need to do is reduce revenue and spending and all will be right!

-Cheers

Like a record spinning.....

2010-11-17T11:21:00.000-06:00

With all the talk of the deficit commission going around, I had prepared a very lengthy post on the relative merits of the commission. I was going to post lots of charts, graphs, and discussion of the topic focusing mainly on the points raised by Dr. Krugman.

But that post had gotten so overly large as to be unwieldy, so instead, I will just sulk and point to this post from earlier this year:

It really sucks to be right about the predictability of politicians and the punditocracy. But if I recall, some extremely brilliant blogger had this to say several months ago:

It is like people refuse to learn the lessons that history teaches us.

Reminder FDR listened to those who were clamoring for "deficit reduction" and that plunged the US back into depression.

I make this simple statement ignore the budget hawks for now. Do what we must to repair the economy and get job growth positive. I guarantee the public will not say a fucking word about the deficit if that happens.
The American people have an extremely limited vocabulary when it comes to economics. During high economic anxiety deficit reduction is always the first thing people say they want, even though it is the wrong thing to do in the midst of an economic contraction.

But don't listen to me, I don't really know that much about economics or "liquidity traps", but there are a few articles, from actual experts like Dr. Paul Krugman here and here, with a solid piece in the Washington post, here.

This is why we need to do better at teaching history.

This also looks very bad, for the rest of us, because the people in charge are either to blinded by
ideology or too stupid to take the proper corrective.

That's right, I have quoted myself twice! Anyway, this push for austerity is common during economic contractions. When it is absolutely the wrong sort of thing to do. Cutting spending in the midsts of a recession is a sure fire way to prolong that recession.

So again I must ask, why do we have a deficit commission instead of a "growth" or "get people jobs" commission?

There are some arguments and suggestions in the chairman's commission report that do bear some discussion, however, the very existence of the commission is concession to the arguments made by Republicans. The idea that we are talking about this instead of ways to create more jobs or encourage growth is extremely disappointing and demoralizing.

-Cheers

What the People want....

2010-11-10T09:48:00.000-06:00

There have been a lot people running around talking about how the democrats over played their hand on health care reform. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post posted and interesting chart on various previous of the health care law.

Massive parts are the bill are wildly popular, when the public is informed of them. While the ways of paying for them are not.

This shouldn't be surprising, paying for anything is never popular. But here is the chart:

Now democrats have done a lousy job of informing the public on what is in the bill, but then that isn't surprising either. Republican messaging is easier on this. Health Care is massively complicated so especially susceptible to demagoguery.

-Cheers

Why we are screwed.

2010-11-09T11:17:00.000-06:00

I know it is all the rage that "both sides are the same". A matter of collective fact, as it were.

But how do square this quote:

What have I told you about diet and exercise? Exercise is irrelevant.... "How do you know all this?" One of the reasons I know what I know is that I know liberals, and I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama's gonna be out there ripping into "food desserts" and saying, "This is why people are fat," I know it's not true. "Rush, do you really believe that? It's that simple to you, liberals lie?" Yes, it is, folks. Once you learn that, once you come to grips with that, once you accept that, the rest is easy. Very, very simple. Now, my doctor has never told me to restrict any intake of salt, but if he did, I wouldn't. I'd just spend more time in the steam or the sauna sweating it out.

Show me the prominent progressives, or liberals, or Democratic leaders who would say this about Conservatives or republicans? This is anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti- anything that makes sense. The two sides are not the same. Not even remotely.

To paraphrase Robert Novak (from the excellent Lee Atwater documentary Boogie Man), the difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats truly believe in governing, and Republicans just want power.

He is right, and they illustrate that with every day. Just watch their rhetoric. Holding two contradictory positions simultaneously is common place (we will cut spending and create jobs all while during a economic contraction. An economic impossibility.).

So again, I absolutely agree with Bill Maher from my previous post.

-Cheers

False Equivalence

2010-11-07T13:50:00.002-06:00

I found this monologue from Bill Maher to be compelling, and I have had a hard time expressing this very same sentiment.

-Cheers

Change those dressings....

2010-11-03T08:25:00.003-05:00

It was a bloody night for the democrats last night. No doubt about it. Lots of coverage on the elections. I would recommend staying away from most of it. A lot of it is conjecture and idle speculations will be crap. I would recommend reading this post by Brendan Nyhan:

I'm bracing for an avalanche of nonsense tomorrow night about why Barack Obama is responsible for the expected Republican landslide. Here's a guide to what you should expect.
It's long been obvious that Obama's political standing would decline as a result of the poor economy and the passage of time. Similarly, substantial Democratic losses in the House were always likely given the large number of seats the party had to defend in a midterm election in which it controls the presidency. The continued weakness of the economy subsequently appears to have enhanced the Republican advantage, helping to produce tomorrow's pro-GOP wave.
Instead of focusing on these structural factors, journalists and other political figures have constructed a staggering number of ad hoc claims about messaging, tactics, etc. to "explain" what has happened to Obama and the Democrats:

Also the in fighting shall begin, and we shall hear how much to the left Obama has gone. It really is simple the economy is crap. Nothing else matters. Perhaps on the margins there is some movement here and there. But you can not message past that.

I continue to be amazed how uninformed the electorate actually is. The lack of understanding of basic economics is saddening. If I have to look at Rep. Cantor (R-VA), and listen to spending cuts and tax cuts....well I suspect the next two years will be good times for me blogging.

Keep your head up and start working to make the country better tomorrow.

The White House seriously needs to do a better job of dealing with its base. Insulting them, ignoring them and treating them like naive children will not endear them to that base. Also if the White House believes that the republicans will work with them, they absolutely are mistaken. As I have said in other medium. This was a positive feedback loop for republicans. They will only continue on their path.

-Cheers

Obama = Keynesian

2010-11-02T12:17:00.003-05:00

I am sure I will make some of my friends who attended the Rally for Sanity slightly angry with this post, but this totally made me laugh.

Pragmatism, centrist, moderate these are ideologies as well. Both sides are not the same, it is one thing to complain about the volume of the discourse, but at least know what the discourse is about.

Also, if there is one thing that is consistent across the political spectrum, it is ignorance. There are stupid people everywhere.

-Cheers

Why I will vote tomorrow...

2010-11-01T20:40:00.003-05:00

I remember too.

I had written a very lengthy explicative filled post about voting, but I thought this video gives a good idea of why I will be voting mostly democratic tomorrow.

I will always be supportive of a party that at least tries to solve problems, over one that pretends they never caused any. Or places their own gains for power over the countries needs.

Go vote tomorrow.

Sex Charts!!

2010-10-25T09:12:00.002-05:00

Reading this was pretty fun. So I thought I would share.

You might be an idiot if.....

2010-10-18T14:37:00.004-05:00

You carry around a sign that says:

I implore people to go out to vote, because you can damn well be sure this idiot will be. Also I hope this person does not have children.

----------

On a lighter note, though I have been disappointed with the Administration on a number of issues (and it is not because they didn't get everything I wanted or wished for, but maybe because they capitulated on virtually every issue and echo many of the rights talking points, and rarely make the case for progressive causes. Also they hurt my fee-fees when they called me "whinny" for not being ecstatic by their list of achievements), but this does my science loving heart some good.

-Cheers

You think you have had a bad at work....

2010-10-12T14:02:00.003-05:00

Imagine being this guy:

I am pretty confident I would have been fired on the spot for my response.

Also I would like to reiterate, if you ever have to make the statement "But I'm not a racist.". Sadly, you probably are.

-Cheers

Classy...

2010-10-07T12:22:00.003-05:00

Eric likes to call him "Crazy Larry", but Lawrence O'Donnell, did something rather classy last night on his new show.

He apologized to RNC Chairman Michale Steele.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He did not have to. I am no fan of Mr. Steele, in general I think he is a poorly qualified example of failing upward, with a horrible grasp of policy. That being the case, I completely agree with Mr. O'Donnell's need to apologize. Words have weight, and their improper use has lasting implications.

So I applaud both Chairman Michael Steele and Mr. O'Donnell, for their graciousness and their humanity.

It is sadly rare to see in this political environment. When every political conflict is some sort of Manichean struggle. Where the opposition is evil.

It is nice to see too men who disagree, treat each other like human beings.

-Cheers

Simple Question...

2010-10-07T08:40:00.002-05:00

Why has no one been prosecuted for the financial meltdown that we experienced a couple of years ago?

I am serious. There were prosecutions during the Great Depression, during the Savings and Loans scandal, but nothing now.

This is an issue were I definitely thing the Administration screwed the pooch. A deficit commission; before a return to full employment commission, or even a "who fucked up our economy" commission.

It shows how afraid the Administration is of right wing frames, and lacks the voice to be a successful advocate for the non-wealthy.

-Cheers

New Edition to the Blog Roll

2010-10-01T11:32:00.002-05:00

I haven't really be on top of my updating as normal. I will admit it. I am a bit disillusioned with the whole political process right now.

The opposition is ascendant in my view, and for all the wrong reasons, and my chosen political allies are craven.

But that doesn't stop me from reading a lot about it. So I thought I would add another blog to the roll. This one is by a "conservative" commentator, who I have been reading for sometime.

While I do not agree with every thing he says, the clarity of his prose and the logic he brings to bear are compelling.

Daniel Larison of the American Conservative does good, thoughtful analysis. I wish there were more political commentators like him (left of right).

Drop by and check his blog out there.

-Cheers

Now this is actually informative....

2010-09-30T15:35:00.000-05:00

This is some good stuff. Easy and accessible. Informative on what the tax debate actually is, and who gets what. The sort of thing I could get enthused about and post, tell others about. Now if only the Administration would stop targeting American citizens for assassination and invoking "states secrets" to do so.

But what the hell do I know? I am just a whiny unserious pie-in-the-sky leftist who is angry that the administration did not, by fiat, institute a completely socialist regime.

With a nice bit on morality and economics from Dr. Krugman here.

-Cheers

Let them eat cake....

2010-09-27T09:30:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to do a post on this blog entry from Todd Henderson (as saved by Dr. Brad Delong because Dr. Henderson deleted the post after the backlash) for a week on so.

But I thought it warranted being quoted in its entirety.

We are the Super Rich « Truth on the Market: The rhetoric in Washington about taxes is about millionaires and the super rich, but the relevant dividing line between millionaires and the middle class is pegged at family income of $250,000. (I’m not a math professor, but last time I checked $250,000 is less than $1 million.) That makes me super rich and subject to a big tax hike if the president has his way.

I’m the president’s neighbor in Chicago, but we’ve never met. I wish we could, because I would introduce him to my family and our lifestyle, one he believes is capable of financing the vast expansion of government he is planning. A quick look at our family budget, which I will happily share with the White House, will show him that like many Americans, we are just getting by despite seeming to be rich. We aren’t.

I, like the president before me, am a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and my wife, like the first lady before her, works at the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she is a doctor who treats children with cancer. Our combined income exceeds the $250,000 threshold for the super rich (but not by that much), and the president plans on raising my taxes. After all, we can afford it, and the world we are now living in has that familiar Marxian tone of those who need take and those who can afford it pay. The problem is, we can’t afford it. Here is why.

The biggest expense for us is financing government. Last year, my wife and I paid nearly $100,000 in federal and state taxes, not even including sales and other taxes. This amount is so high because we can’t afford fancy accountants and lawyers to help us evade taxes and we are penalized by the tax code because we choose to be married and we both work outside the home. (If my wife and I divorced or were never married, the government would write us a check for tens of thousands of dollars. Talk about perverse incentives.)

Our next biggest expense, like most people, is our mortgage. Homes near our work in Chicago aren’t cheap and we do not have friends who were willing to help us finance the deal. We chose to invest in the University community and renovate and old property, but we did so at an inopportune time.

We pay about $15,000 in property taxes, about half of which goes to fund public education in Chicago. Since we care the education of our three children, this means we also have to pay to send them to private school. My wife has school loans of nearly $250,000 and I do too, although becoming a lawyer is significantly cheaper. We try to invest in our retirement by putting some money in the stock market, something that these days sounds like a patriotic act. Our account isn’t worth much, and is worth a lot less than it used to be.

Like most working Americans, insurance, doctors’ bills, utilities, two cars, daycare, groceries, gasoline, cell phones, and cable TV (no movie channels) round out our monthly expenses. We also have someone who cuts our grass, cleans our house, and watches our new baby so we can both work outside the home. At the end of all this, we have less than a few hundred dollars per month of discretionary income. We occasionally eat out but with a baby sitter, these nights take a toll on our budget. Life in America is wonderful, but expensive.

If our taxes rise significantly, as they seem likely to, we can cut back on some things. The (legal) immigrant from Mexico who owns the lawn service we employ will suffer, as will the (legal) immigrant from Poland who cleans our house a few times a month. We can cancel our cell phones and some cable channels, as well as take our daughter from her art class at the community art center, but these are only a few hundred dollars per month in total. But more importantly, what is the theory under which collecting this money in taxes and deciding in Washington how to spend it is superior to our decisions? Ask the entrepreneurs we employ and the new arrivals they employ in turn whether they prefer to work for us or get a government handout.

If these cuts don’t work, we will sell our house – into an already spiraling market of declining asset values – and our cars, assuming someone will buy them. The irony here, of course, is that the government is working to save both of these industries despite the impact that increasing taxes will have.

The problem with the president’s plan is that the super rich don’t pay taxes – they hide in the Cayman Islands or use fancy investment vehicles to shelter their income. We aren’t rich enough to afford this – I use Turbo Tax. But we are rich enough to be hurt by the president’s plan. The next time the president comes home to Chicago, he has a standing invitation to come to my house (two blocks from his) and judge for himself whether the Xxxxxxxxxs are as rich as he thinks.

Yes, we have entered a new gilded age. There have been a number of responses to this across the web, but I believe that Dr. Delong and Dr. Krugman, have the right of it. I will to continue with Mr. Delong:

By any standard, they are really rich.

But they don't feel rich. They have a cash flow problem. When the bills are paid at the end of the month, the money is gone--and they feel that they have to scrimp.

I know how they feel. My household income is of the same order of magnitude than theirs (although somewhat less) and we too had to juggle assets quickly when it developed that an error in Reed College's housing system had caused them not to charge us $5,000 that we owe. We too have chosen to put our income in places (tax-favored retirement savings vehicles, building equity, housing, private college costs) where we think it is better used than $200 restaurant meals, $1000 a night resort hotel rooms, or $75,000 automobiles. But I don't think that I am not rich.

Professor Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx's problem is that he thinks that he ought to be able to pay off student loans, contribute to retirement savings vehicles, build equity, drive new cars, live in a big expensive house, send his children to private school, and still have plenty of cash at the end of the month for the $200 restaurant meals, the $1000 a night resort hotel rooms, and the $75,000 automobiles. And even half a million dollars a year cannot be you all of that.

But if he values the high-end consumption so much, why doesn't he rearrange his budget? Why not stop the retirement savings contributions, why not rent rather than buy, why not send the kids to public school? Then the disposable cash at the end of the month would flow like water. His problem is that some of these decisions would strike him as imprudent. And all of them would strike him as degradations--doctor-law professor couples ought to send their kids to private schools, and live in big houses, and contribute to their 401(k)s, and also still have lots of cash for splurges. That is the way things should be.

But why does he think that that is the way things should be?

And here is the dirty secret: Professor Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx thinks that that is the way things should be because he knows people for whom that is the way it is.

Cast yourself back to 1980. In 1980 a household at the bottom of the 1% rich households in America had an income equivalent in today's dollars $190,000 a year. They know of 1000 people--900 of them poorer than they are in income brackets 90-99% and 100 people richer than they are in the top 1% income bracket. The 900 people poorer than them back in 1980 had incomes from $85,000-$190,000 a year. Those are, if you are sitting at the bottom of the top 1%, the middle class who are not as successful as you. You don't look downward much. Instead, you look upward. Of the 100 above you, 90 in 1980 had incomes less than three times their incomes. And they would have known of 1 person of that 100 who was seven times as rich as they were.

Thus Professor Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx in 1980 would have known who the really rich were, and they would on average have had about four times his income--more, considerably more, but not a huge gulf. He would have known people who were truly rich, and he would have seen himself as one of them--or as almost one of them.

Now fast forward to today. Today a household at the bottom of the 1% rich households in America has an income of nearly $400,000 a year--the income of that slot in the labor market has more than doubled, while the incomes of those at the slot at the bottom of the 10% wealthy has grown by only 20% in two decades. The 900 people he knows in the 90%-99% slots have incomes that start at $110,000 a year. Compared to Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx's $455,000, they are barely middle class--"How can they afford cell phones?" Xxxxxxxxx sometimes wonders.

But he wonders rarely. He doesn't say: "Wow! My real income is more than twice the income of somebody in this slot a generation ago! Wow! A generation ago the income of my slot was only twice that of somebody at the bottom of the 10% wealthy, and now it is 3 1/2 times as much!" For he doesn't look down at the 99% of American households who have less income than he does. And he looks up. And when he looks up today he sees as wide a gap yawning above him as the gap between Dives and Lazarus. Mr. Xxxxxxxxx doesn't look down.

Instead, Mr. Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx looks up. Of the 100 people richer than he is, fully ten have more than four times his income. And he knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.
And so he is sad.

That is what we are contending with. That is the perspective of those making the most noise on the possibly extension of the Bush tax cuts. Let's face it tax are going to have to go up, as well as, spending being brought under control. If you think just one of these will solve our problems you are delusional. And for too long (the last 20-30 years) while the amount of income has shifted increasingly to the top earners, their tax burdens have been decreased. Yet this is what they are complaining about a 2-4% increase on income above 200,000-250,0000.

Near 10% unemployment and this is the complaint we hear. The utter lack of social consciousness is startling. You are in the top 99 percentile....

I do not believe that the "rich" are evil, by any stretch of the imagination, but the lack of any feeling of culpability on the part Wall Street and business officials is jarring. Now Mr. Henderson, is but an economics professor at the University of Chicago, but the mindset is very similar. These are the titans of industry. They believe that a 2-4% increase in taxes are draconian. So you decide what they are.

-Cheers

Better Living Through Science

2010-09-20T13:08:00.003-05:00

I saw this article and thought it was mighty nifty. I will be back to political kvetching later this afternoon.
But I thought this was a nice, feel good, distraction for a Monday.

Basically it is a pouch used to transport grain foodstuffs and once it is emptied, it can be used as a solar power water purification device.

Ingenious.

-Cheers

On bigotry.

2010-09-16T14:15:00.001-05:00

Recently there have been a number of polls, articles, news stories about the rise of Islamophobia in the country.

A couple weeks back Howard Dean defended the the American people and the opponents of Park 51, from the accusations of intolerance and bigotry:

I think some of my own folks on my end of the spectrum of the party are demonizing some fairly decent people who are opposed to this. And, again, in no way am I defending, you know, the right wing of the Republican Party. But there are 65 percent of the people in this country are not right-wing bigots. Some of them really have deep emotional feelings about this.

To me this is a hollow sounding rationale. Simply because a majority supports something does not imbue it with virtue.

Why is that?

Well Jim Crow laws were widely accepted through much of the country not long ago. Women were disenfranchised until the turn of the last century, and that was popularly held belief. When surveyed, American troops supported segregation pre-WWII. Bigotry can be just as popular in this country as baseball and apple pie. If history has taught
us nothing else, it has taught us that; and there was nothing virtuous about any of the above . It is and was that the time, just simple bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates does an admirable job of talking eloquently about this. Simply because a lot of people believe a thing it still can be prejudiced or biased or even racist.

The notion that that there are no actual bigots in America is hinted at in Dean's last sentence, that opposition to Park51 comes from "deep emotional feelings," as opposed to a presumably thin and shallow bigotry. In fact, bigotry is often quite substantive and emanates from "deep emotional feelings." The planter in the antebellum South who refused to emancipate his slaves was not committing evil simply because it felt good. He was, in the main, doing it to protect the interest and welfare of his children. In other words, he had "deep emotional feelings" about the fate of his progeny and the nature of their inheritance.

That about sums it up, for me.

-Cheers

Things that are hard to convey

2010-09-13T09:10:00.000-05:00

A problem I have had for a long time, is trying to explain something that is counter intuitive to a hostile audience.

This comes up from time to time. It is even hard to explain something counter intuitive to a sympathetic audience if they are not already aware of the phenomena.

A couple of examples of this are things would be this, a variation of the Monty Hall Paradox, and Quantum Mechanics.

Recently a couple of topics have come up that I find to have this characteristic: Conversations on the effects of the Stimulus, and Climate Change.

First on economics. I will be the first to admit that I am no master of economic theory, but I do understand aggregate effects. So I can understand why Dr. Krugman may be pulling out his hair over the general dialog with regards to "counter cyclical" spending (Stimulus), especially how public opinion rarely coincides with the proper action. He returns to the topic many, many, many times.

Whenever the issue of fiscal stimulus comes up, you can count on someone chiming in to say, “Only a moron could believe that the answer to a problem created by too much debt is to create even more debt.” It sounds plausible — but it misses the key point: there’s a fallacy of composition here. When everyone tries to pay off debt at the same time, the result is contraction and deflation, which ends up making the debt problem worse even if nominal debt falls. On the other hand, a strong fiscal stimulus, by expanding the economy and creating moderate inflation, can actually help resolve debt problems.

In particular Dr. Krugman is obliquely referencing what is known as the Paradox of thrift.
The idea that an individual action when multiplied over a large group worsens the status of the group as a whole.

Ezra Klein chimes in here as well, just to show how mainstream some of these economic ideas are.

On the environmental front this piece, is an interesting read. What do you do, when there is a very tangible immediate benefit, but the consequences are safely in the future, so that those who reap the benefits never have to pay the consequences associated with those actions?

So in short, I was just stricken by how pervasive this is. No matter the proof you bring to bare, it runs headlong into the inability of people to understand aggregate effects.

-Cheers

Round-Up

2010-09-12T12:22:00.002-05:00

Posting has been a lot slower of late. Lots of stuff keeping me occupied recently, from Dawn of War II, to bar crawl preparations.

Anyway thought I would toss out a nice Sunday afternoon post on things non-political.

I recently switched from Comcast to At&t U-verse.

I must say I have been impressed with it thus far. First off the receiver is nice and compact, not the clunky contraption that Comcast provided. So it fairly easy to put it near the tee vee with little hassle.

The modem/signal box/wi-fi device that they use to convert the signal from the telephone jack is pretty snazzy as well. It resembles a large cable modem, but has a pretty informative display
to give you feedback on what components are being used.

The actual service is enormously different then what Comcast offers. There are far more bells and whistles in this At&t product. From the layered menus, to the interactive options (updated weather, stocks and scores displayed on screen), to even a built in on screen dual view option.

So all in all I am pretty pleased with my purchase. In general I loathe the bundling cable tee vee does. It is designed to bilk as much from customers as possible. That all being said though, the channel selection seems pretty good. And lets face it, I would be excited about anything that lets me not have to deal with Comcast.

I would highly recommend it, if for no other reason then to give Comcast some serious competition. Maybe then they would lower their prices and improve their customer service.

-Cheers

You are going to hear this alot....

2010-09-01T06:49:00.000-05:00

....Over the next few months you are going to hear a lot of very important people say, "
No one could have predicted this!".

Now I loathed this when Republicans did it with the Iraq War (as Glenn Greenwald ably documents) and I hate it even more when Democrats do it with regards to the Great Recession.

Asked if the stimulus bill was too small, [White House press secretary Robert] Gibbs says: "I think it makes sense to step back just for a second. ... Nobody had, in January of 2009, a sufficient grasp of ... what we were facing." He adds that any stimulus was "unlikely to fill" the hole the financial meltdown created.
"What the Recovery Act did was prevent us from sliding even into a deeper recession with greater economic contraction, with greater job loss than we have experienced because of it," he says.

But in this case, one of the main critics who called them on this is not afraid to speak up. Not because he is always correct but because this what always happens when errors in judgment are made. First, it is "unprecedented", then "No one could have known", always an attempt to deflect and pass blame. Well "nobody" was "concerned" at the time.

The truth is that some of us were practically screaming back in January 2009 that the administration was proposing too small a program. Start with this post and work forward. And no, the point isn’t that I’m so smart — it is that given the forecasts we had at the time, and given historical experience of recessions after financial crises, it wasn’t at all hard to see that the plan was too small. Things have been worse than expected — but not that much worse.

And why does this matter? Because the best chance Obama et al have to change things now is to make the case that we need to do more, and that Republicans stand in the way. Yet here they are, apparently trying to run on the claim that they had it right all along, or something. Is this just boneheaded political strategy? Is it about the egos of the advisers who called it wrong? I don’t know — but it fills me with despair.

Me too Dr. Krugman.

And the Democratic leadership is surprised at the lack of enthusiasm in their base. Maybe if you didn't lie about even this. You would have shown a small glimmer of the leadership we had hoped for.

-Cheers

New Blog Links.

2010-08-25T18:47:00.002-05:00

I have been a little remiss in updating my blog links.

So I have a couple to add:

For economics I have come to trust Dr. Krugman. His ability for explaining complex economic principles is invaluable.

Since moving to the Washington Post Greg Sargent has been doing yeoman's work on all manner of politics. It is a good place to get a good rundown on politics.

And it is good to see David Wiegel with a blog again.

So they will be getting added to the blog roll.

-Cheers

Washington Post Chat

2010-08-25T10:08:00.002-05:00

Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post had a reader chat the other day, that was pretty good. I wish there were was more commentary like this on cable new. I found this portion particularly
interesting:

Q.

NYC Mosque

You are simply misinformed and misguided and blinded by your liberal bias. It was a minority of Germans and Japanese that brought the horrors of WWII to the world. It similarly is a minority of Muslims that have brought 9/11 and soon nuclear horrors to the world. Like the Germans and Japanese ALL Muslims must bear the responsibility and wear this stain on themselves for generations until they have cleansed themselves thru good acts as have the Germans and Japanese. Additionally Obama said this Mosque will prevent another 9/11. Why haven't the exiting 100 Mosques prevented 9/11? This Mosque is a symbol of Muslim domination over America and IT WILL NEVER STAND.

–
August 24, 2010 5:37 AM
Permalink

A.

Eugene Robinson writes:

Sigh. first, since the Germans invoked God in committing their atrocities, by your logic we should blame all Christians, no? Second, establishing an open-door community center devoted to interfaith understanding would seem to me to be a "good act." There is no question of "Muslim domination over America." Give me a break. Do you have so little faith in our Constitution and our nation?

– August 24, 2010 11:08 AM

This is just a microcosm, of what the essential arguments being made by the mosques opponents are. All Muslims are to blame for 9/11. That is simple bigotry and religious intolerance.

Should all Christians be tarred with the actions of the IRA, or the actions for murderous anti-abortion activists? I believe the answer to that question is "no". But it seems for far too many of my fellow citizens the resounding answer is "yes".

-Cheers

Real Profiles in Political Courage....

2010-08-24T08:10:00.000-05:00

Seriously, kudos to Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) for showing clear and real courage for standing up for fundamental rights.

Merkley made the essential point here:

The debate swirling around the proposed mosque and Muslim community center in lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center site has, for many, tapped into strong emotions of a national trauma that is still raw. But in the churning political and constitutional arguments, one question has not been adequately addressed: what makes a mosque near ground zero offensive....
[M]any mosque opponents argue, just because it can be built does not mean it should be. They say it would be disrespectful to the memories of those who died on 9/11 to build a Muslim facility near the World Trade Center site. I appreciate the depth of emotions at play, but respectfully suggest that the presence of a mosque is only inappropriate near ground zero if we unfairly associate Muslim Americans with the atrocities of the foreign al-Qaida terrorists who attacked our nation....

And Mr. Paul makes the salient point about rights here:

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don't want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society--protecting liberty.

I am not a fan of Rep. Paul, but his argument is a fundamentally libertarian one. So I applaud him on standing up for first principles.

-Cheers

You know you have gone too far....

2010-08-18T11:30:00.003-05:00

...When Pat Buchanan calls you out for going to far in demagogueing a minority group:

Seriously...Pat fucking Buchanan is calling you out on intolerance....

I did not see that coming.

-Cheers

Word of the Day

2010-08-13T10:12:00.003-05:00

It has been a while, but I thought I would fish out a word for people to use.

Today's word is :

Pomander

po·man·der
[poh-man-der, poh-man-der] Show IPA

–noun
1.
a mixture of aromatic substances, often in the form of a ball, formerly carried on the person as a supposed guard against infection but now placed in closets, dressers, etc.

2.
the ball, box, or other case in which it was formerly carried.

I don't think we need a sentence for this one. I just sounded delicious.....

-Cheers

Up the Rubicon without a paddle......

State of the Union Address

Yet another reason to not be a Republican....

Super-Committee...not so super....

Opening shots for '12...

Goverment is the problem....except when it comes to your uterus...

Tea Party Vs. Occupy Wall Street

Fire up that TARDIS....

What this party needs is more graphs....

Take this job and shove it.....

Time for a change....

A good place to start....

The King I know....

Word of the day!

flounce

flounce

Your modern Republican Party....

Austerity Now!

Word of the day!

par·er·gon

Best hospitals in the world?

No Social Security is not a ponzi scheme....

What the Stimulus did...and didn't do....

Taxes and the Poor...

Both sides do it....

If you repeat it, it makes it true.....

Lucky Ducky

Momma always said......

Those evil unions....

Nah...I am sure they are just lazy...

American Ostrich....

Logic and Reason ain't what they used to be.....

Austerity is the new black

The Resilence of Zombie Lies.....

Gone Fishing....

New day...same as any other...

A wrong set of priorities.

Why go after Unions?

News of the day

The bar...

Oh no that isn't racist.....

Health Care is not like other products...

For the last time Government is not like a household!

These days are still those days....

Backing it up...

Enough is Enough....

Safety Net? What Safety Net?

It's the Stupid....it Burns....

A note on Collective Bargaining....

Douche-Bag of the day.

Happy Birthday ACA!

....A little bit more...

It bears repeating....

On the side your bread is buttered.

Lost Posters.....

Flying.....

Wisconsin State of Mind...

Is are kids learning?

Matters of the day....

Down the rabbit hole....

Health care debates...

A tale of two speeches....

Douche-bag of the day...

The very terrible, no good, horrible....thing the other guy suggests!

A better world....

Economics for dummies....

Talking about Wikileaks....

Miller Time....

Tom Toles....

Rise of the oligarchs.....ctd

Estate Tax Exemptions

Favorable Rules

Rise of the oligarchs.....

Man I miss me some Dave....

And now for something different....

Douche-bag of the Day!

We are just tribal creatures.....

Now for the negotiations.....

Putting a pretty bow on it....

Off the beaten path...