Rationalizing extremism

The Heritage Foundation doesn't exist to research credible conservative alternatives. It exists to provide pseudo-intellectual claptrap to paste a fig leaf over the nasty bits of wingnut prejudice. Heritage proposed Obamacare in the 1990s, only to go full metal jacket on it when a Democrat proposed it.

Same on immigration:

[T]he study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically.”

The wingnut bullshit artists are in charge, and they need to keep the rubes inflamed so that they don't notice it's the plutocracy who are screwing them.

Update: My man Paul Krugman agrees with me. Usually it's the other way around.

The truth is that Heritage has never been in the business of doing economic analysis; it’s just a propaganda agency posing as a think tank.

What Krugman doesn't say

For Paul Krugman, the role of Cassandra has to weigh like a curse he didn't earn.

look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.

Of course, Cassandra didn't earn hers, either.

The people who oppose stimulus aren't all ignoramuses. Sure, they've bought the fealty of the Republican Party, and it's filled with ignoramuses who are so unprincipled they'll say anything to keep the Koch up their nose. But the billionaires aren't foolish men.

It's clear that a stimulated economy is a bigger economy. The plutocrats don't care. They have plenty, and they want more, but there's something they want more than larger fortunes.

They want a docile, servile, and inexpensive workforce (that's us) whom they can dispose of on whim. They want to run everything.

Extreme inequality of income and wealth is not an accidental outcome of their policy preferences. It's their underlying goal. With the rest of us in penury or afraid of it, their lives become much simpler. That's what they want.

The source of our doom

America is not in trouble because we've fallen away from god. We're in trouble because bullshit, rather than honest inquiry, is the social norm:

[A]t this point the conventions of punditry call for saying something to demonstrate my evenhandedness, something along the lines of “Democrats do it too.” But while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.

The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

The wealthy want to steal your retirement

It's really that simple:

[T]he deficit scolds aren’t giving up. Now yet another organization, Fix the Debt, is campaigning for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, even while making lower tax rates a “core principle.” That last part makes no sense in terms of the group’s ostensible mission, but makes perfect sense if you look at the array of big corporations, from Goldman Sachs to the UnitedHealth Group, that are involved in the effort and would benefit from tax cuts. Hey, sacrifice is for the little people.

Like private pension funds before them, that's where the money is. You own it, and you should make sure that anyone who covets it for their already grandiose private fortunes does so at risk of being pilloried - or worse.

This is serious, people. The rich want to reduce the rest of us to penury so that we're easier to control and so they can have extra billions they don't need or deserve on top of the billions they already couldn't possibly spend in a dozen lifetimes.

Wingnuts - and, for example, the completely smarmy and duplicitous ad from JPMorganChase on one of the NFL games today - claim that plutocracy is free enterprise. The only thing free about it is the freedom of the moneyed players to lift your bank accounts without any chance of prosecution. Au contraire, they'll be honored as lynchpins of the economy.

Update (11/28): When they keep theirs and arrange for ours to be taken away to avoid paying even a smidgen of their fair share, that's stealing. Eventually, we serfs will rise.

In a wingnutshell

"An Inconvenient Truth" is an apt description of a huge part of reality as perceived by Republicans:

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.

Over and over and over again, Republicans rely on propaganda to overcome falsehood. They know they can't win on the empirical truth, so they try to win on bullshit, repetition, and disproven received authority from traditional sources.

As usual, Paul Krugman is right on. Read the whole thing.

Not worth celebrating yet

Those great employment numbers for September? Don't believe them.

No, there's no dark conspiracy to make President Obama look good. That's another zombie lie out of the feverish and fact-immune rationalization machines that wingnut brains are. It's just that the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are too imprecise to justify celebration:

These numbers are always tremendously volatile, but the reasons are statistical, not political. The volatility arises because the numbers are based on a tiny survey with a margin of error of 400,000. Every month there are wild swings that no one takes at face value.

So:

• The main signal is there in the data, but it's very noisy due to inherent uncertainty in a small survey.
• There may be an underlying longitudinal change in seasonal behavior that seasonal adjustment models simply haven't yet caught up with.

But that's too complex a reality for tiny wingnut amygdalas. Let's not join them in stupidity on the left, o.k.?

Update: Paul Krugman believes this jobs report is a return to trend:

[T]here is real if modest improvement over the past year. Also, the September numbers looks not like an aberration but like a return to trend from what looks like noise in the data over the previous couple of months.

Clearly far from party time, even so.

Suicide by central bank

Most analysts continue to parrot the wrong prescription for economic woes, at home and abroad:

The fact that Spanish public pensions are not only off limits to the budget knife but also are being enhanced, is a reminder of one reason that European debt and deficit problems have proved so difficult to resolve.

Only Greece, under duress and at a point where the move may be coming too late to salvage the government’s finances, seems prepared to risk the consequences of severe pension cutting.

The real crisis is not debt - although it's a long-term problem. The real crisis is:

In Spain, pensions have become a lifeline. With unemployment at 25 percent, and even higher among young people, many Spaniards now rely on pension-drawing parents and grandparents to support them. Economists estimate that up to 1.7 million of Spain’s 16 million households have no salary earners.

and:

Of course, as many economists would note, such a reduction in Greek public spending is likely only to compound an economic decline in which gross domestic product shrank 25 percent over the past five years.

These countries are in full-blown economic depression, yet their governments and their bankers continue to urge penury and worse on people who did not cause the debt crisis.

Europeans should be in the streets, should topple their governments. Americans should choose a better path, one that grows first, then reduces debt. Paul Krugman gets it, why not the rest of the New York Times?

(Note to American conservatrolls: You think Fannie and Freddie caused the mortgage loan debacles here in the U.S. Does their legal power over the market reach Europe? Of course not, you stupid twerps.)

Massive resistance

Republicans have withdrawn their consent of the governed in favor of massive resistance. Elections only have consequences when they win, in which case they govern as if they won a mandate. When they lose, they'll obstruct all implementation of the majority's plan.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

Even those 60 votes included several closet Republicans - not of the Teapublican strain, to be sure, but nonetheless often not willing to side with President Obama. Ben Nelson was probably the most Republican. Joe Lieberman, Kay Hagan, Blanche Lincoln, and Mark Pryor were a few of the other Senators in the 111th Congress who often wouldn't vote cloture.

Nothing the Republicans have done about the economy makes any sense at all unless they are motivated by lust for power more than by the prospect of prosperity for the nation as a whole.

More liberal bias

Arithmetic.

[D]oes Romney think we’re stupid? Hey, he also thinks we’ll buy into his promises to slash taxes by $5 trillion but make up the revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in a way that doesn’t raise taxes on the middle class – which turns out to be arithmetically impossible. So the answer is, yes, he thinks we’re stupid.

Too boring for Republicans to make it add up.

Teapublicans have to lie

The truth would kill their chance of election:

[I]f we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.

Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk.

Once they've increased the deficit yet again (see the maladministration of Duhbya and Darth), they'll be back for yet another round of budget-busting tax cuts for the very, very wealthy.  And the wingnut morons who vote Republican while living in the shrinking middle class will be fooled again.

Schlerotic Teapublican faith-based economics

The shrill Cassandra does it again:

So how did we end up in this state? How did America become a nation that could not rise to the biggest economic challenge in three generations, a nation in which scorched-earth politics and politicized economics created policy paralysis? 

We suggest it was the inequality that did it. Soaring inequality is at the root of our polarized politics, which made us unable to act together in the face of crisis. And because rising incomes at the top have also brought rising power to the wealthiest, our nation’s intellectual life has been warped, with too many economists co-opted into defending economic doctrines that were convenient for the wealthy despite being indefensible on logical and empirical grounds.

This time with co-authors...

I find it weird and flattering that, with relatively little formal training in economics and that colored by what was once called the neo-classical synthesis, I arrived at pretty much all of Paul Krugman's conclusions. Maybe I chose the wrong field.

My bemused vanity aside, it's pretty clear that conservative economists either chose the wrong field or only chose their field in order to monetize their credentials in the service of a pack of lies.

What Romney learned at Bain

To pander to his audience without meaning any of it.

He's of course applying that to politics, and even the Teapublicans can tell, despite having turned their bullshit detectors so low they can't see the arrant bullshit of the other candidates. Krugman on Rmoney:

Should those who don’t share the right’s faith be comforted by the evidence that Mr. Romney doesn’t believe anything he’s saying? Should we, in particular, assume that, once elected, he would actually follow sensible economic policies? Alas, no.

For the cynicism and lack of moral courage that have been so evident in the campaign wouldn’t suddenly vanish once Mr. Romney entered the Oval Office. If he doesn’t dare disagree with economic nonsense now, why imagine that he would become willing to challenge that nonsense later? And bear in mind that if elected, he would be watched like a hawk for signs of apostasy by the very people he’s trying so desperately to appease right now.

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.

The difference between Bain's takeovers and a political campaign is that takeovers end quickly. The affected workers and executives learn by the end that you lied to them, but you don't have to convince them of anything further, since you already own their asses. Not so the Teapublican nomination.

Liberals subsidize the economic fallacies of red state conservatives

It has been well known for some time that liberal states such as my home state of Massachusetts subsidize conservative states such as my original home of Tennessee. The idea bubbled up recently from Aaron Carroll to Paul Krugman to Matthew Yglesias. Krugman explains the graph best, but this point of Yglesias's is key (though badly written):

[H]igh-income people living in low-income states are generally very conservative in their political ideology but probably benefit more from federal income support programs more than they realize. If you own fast food franchises in the Nashville area, for example, you're going to form a self-perception as a self-reliant businessman but the existence of Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are helping to ensure that your customers have adequate income to sometimes eat at your Taco Bell.

Hard to understand why he didn't say Godfather's Pizza instead of Taco Bell.

Conservatives imagine themselves as heroes in Ayn Rand's fantasy novels, and liberal aid to the poor is one reason they are not confronted with the sheer vanity of their imaginations.

The year in deja vu

American and European elites fucked up 2011:

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

Of course, moronic teabaggers - members of the 99% fighting for the 1% - aren't elite. They may think of themselves as elite. After all, they're white and old, so they expect to be elite as their birthright, as their due of Confucian filial piety Ten Commandment Christian honor. And the teabaggers contributed with every vociferous shout-down and reactionary vote to the total fuck-up that was 2011, due to the completely irrational mindfuck of the 2010 midterm elections.

The elite central bankers took care of other bankers and told the rest of us that our dire straits were our own damn fault, never mind that the very same profligate bankers crashed the world economy. But they went to Harvard and the Sorbonne and Heidelberg, so we have to take care of them and their vacation homes and their taxpayer-funded bonuses, even if it means they have to sacrifice - oh, the humanity - by witnessing with their virgin eyes the homeless living in refrigerator boxes - how gauche, how outré, how lacking in fellow feeling toward their noble betters. Where's a Potemkin village when they need one for their refined sensibilities!

I am really fucking sick of the blind selfish wealthy, tired of being an upper middle class peasant with a white-knuckle death grip on my job, destined for Ayn Rand penury in old age, blamed for my own laziness, when in fact I work much harder than the shitheads who cream off an ever-larger proportion of the GDP.

Let me say this right now: If I find myself broke and hungry in old age, screwed out of Social Security and Medicare in a giant profit-making game of three-card monte, discarded by craven plutocratic feudal elites, I will not go gentle into that good night.

Is that a threat? You're goddamn right it is.

Truth on employment

The drop in official unemployment is not good news. It only looks like good news. Labor force participation is horrible.

I would guess that the picture for would-be workers between 55 and 67 (the most recent full Social Security retirement age) is even worse.

According to Republicans, all this despair is the fault of the despairing. According to Democrats, there's not much more they can do.

The Occupiers are right.

Testify, brother, I mean, cousin

Why is it that American big media is so thin on brutal truth-telling such as this?

The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country's reputation.

...

What a nice club that is. A club of liars, cheaters, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites and ignoramuses. "A starting point for a chronicle of American decline," was how David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described the current Republican race.

Remnick, even, is late to the party. The starting point of the chronicle of our decline was the Republican scandal-mongering response to Bill Clinton's election in 1992.

Update (12/5): Is help on the way for the redoubtable Paul Krugman? Thomas Edsall joins the growing chorus of those of us sick and tired of Republican lies:

Struggling to justify a recent television spot that reached new heights of deception, a top operative in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign put it plainly, while insisting on anonymity:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

Republican economics is total bullshit

The puzzle remains why so many otherwise sane middle class Americans still shill for the wealthy, even the very, very wealthy who do nothing more than skim off the cream:

[W]ho are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”

They must watch a lot of stupidity-inducing Fox. A lot...

My hypocrisy knows no bounds

I'm employed, yet I support unemployment benefits.

I'm white, yet I support civil rights for minorities.

I'm a man, yet I support civil rights for women.

I'm not pregnant, yet I support abortion rights.

I'm not hungry, yet I support food stamps.

I'm not retired, yet I support Social Security and Medicare.

I'm not stupid, yet I support education.

I'm an atheist, yet I support freedom of religion.

What a hypocrite!

Seriously?  Conservatives claim Elizabeth Warren is a hypocrite because she has achieved wealth but still advocates for the middle class?!?

“I don’t begrudge her own personal wealth. I begrudge her hypocrisy of trying to play the demagogue against those who have achieved and who have created wealth,” said Rick Manning of the conservative group Americans for Limited Government.

You'd think they would be celebrating her. Instead, they've gone fucking soft in the head and believe they're permitted to redefine words however they choose to score points with their ignoramus base.

They're not so much post-modern as they have all the ethics of the advertising industry and, like it, are paid to repeat lies so long and so often that they start to sound plausible to the weak-minded.

Yet wingnuts think class jealousy is the problem

The wealthy say that spongers, moochers, and leeches are stealing their rightfully huge share of the GDP. Here's the truth: Unless you're in the top 1%, your share of the GDP hasn't gone up. After taxes.

I guess we now know who the spongers, moochers, and leeches really are. In my dreams.

What the graphs don't say: The bottom 80% did see income some growth, but nearly all of it came from the meteoric rise of two-income households.

By the way, don't forget where these quintiles divide.

Enemies of the state

Democrats may be learning disabled where it comes to the politics of governance. But Republicans spend their entire lives in denial of reality:

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.