Earlier today, Talking Points Memo reported that Harry Reid is upset about the state of the filibuster. He reportedly said, “These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didn’t. And they were right. The rest of us were wrong—or most of us, anyway. What a shame… If there were anything that ever needed changing in this body, it’s the filibuster rule, because it’s been abused, abused and abused.”

Oh wait! Reid said that early last year. This year Reid is whining about the stopgap budget deal that is being delayed for no good reason by the filibuster. To this, Reid said, “It is things like that that will cause the Senate to have to reassess all the rules because right now they accomplish so little. I’m disappointed.”

How can this be?! Reid and Mitch McConnell shook hands about this! Could it be that Harry Reid was fooled? You know what they say: “Fool me once with a handshake deal, shame on you; Fool me twice with a handshake deal, the Majority leader in the Senate is an idiot.”

In all seriousness, I don’t see what Reid gets out of his repeated threats to “reassess.” Unlike Hary Reid himself, we liberals don’t get fooled a second time. He should just keep repeating, “I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold.” If he says that three times, he gets a pony.

As regular readers of this site know: government spending as a percent of GDP has gone down each year the last three years. This, in fact, is the reason that we are very slowly crawling our way to economic recovery. It is an indictment of not just the Republicans but also the Democrats, who managed to get themselves completely diverted from our unemployment crisis to the supposed debt crisis when we can borrow for less than the rate of inflation. It is very sad.

Jared Bernstein provided the following graph a few days ago. It shows the decrease in the fractional GDP deficit with the red line. What may come as a bit of a surprise is the blue line that shows the deficit in actual dollars. It is up by 0.6%. I don’t yet know if those are inflation adjusted dollars. If they aren’t, then we haven’t even seen this small rise.

[Update: I contacted Jared Bernstein and he tells me that the numbers are nominal. So in fact, spending in inflation adjusted dollars has also decreased. Assuming 2% inflation in 2009 and 1% for the following years (it has been higher than this, so this is a lower bound) total federal spending is roughly 4.5% less than it was in 2009. Assuming the more reasonable 2% throughout would make it roughly 7.6% less. That’s three Sequesters! -FM]

Bernstein comments on the graph:

I haven’t been writing about the upcoming Debt Ceiling fight, but it hasn’t been far from my mind. The Republicans only pushed it off for a few months to allow them to regroup. They most definitely have not given up on the idea. In fact, their belief that they won the Sequester fight has only made them more aggressive. As I’ve noted many times before, the only way to negotiate with Republicans is from a position of strength. Any show of weakness or openness to compromise is met with ever greater demands.

On a recent radio interview with Sean Hannity, John Boehner said, “Do you want to risk the full faith and credit of the United States government over Obamacare?” Boehner seems to live in a land where it is always “opposite day.” He isn’t risking the full faith and credit of the US government; Obama is by not giving Boehner everything he wants. Mitch McConnell is saying much the same kinds of things.

Bruce Bartlett has an article on the Economix Blog arguing that Obama needs to be prepared to use the 14th Amendment clause, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” He provides the history of this clause and it is fascinating.

Basically, after the Civil War, a lot of Democrats wanted to just default on the loans the government had taken out to fund the war. Most of these loans were to average people who would have been hurt. The nation changed the Constitution to stop this from happening. Does this really apply to what is happening now? Bartlett thinks so:

The question is whether Obama will really do it. As I have documented before, Obama caved on his “No Debt Ceiling Negotiation” stance. At this point, we may have no other option.

Afterword

I wrote this back in December:

This morning, Paul Krugman wrote another article trying to understand why conservatives and moderates who are shown to be wrong time and again never reflect that maybe “all the people they know” just don’t know very much. The specific target is John Hinderaker at Powerline Blog. Yesterday, he was channeling Chicken Little over an immanent economic crisis. Krugman disagrees of course, but also points back to 2005 when Hinderaker mocked Krugman for saying there was a housing bubble.

I went over and looked at that article, That Hissing Sound Is Krugman. In the article, he doesn’t argue against Krugman. He just claims that Krugman is not making an argument—or at least that he doesn’t understand it. This is odd, because the argument for the housing bubble was pretty simple: home prices have always risen at the rate of inflation; at that time, home prices were rising substantially faster than inflation. There was no underlying reason for prices to rise so fast other than that there was a bubble.

The basis of Hinderaker’s argument is just that Krugman is a partisan. He writes:

So, not only is Hinderaker wrong about the housing bubble, he’s also wrong about Krugman. He should have left out that second sentence. Of course, I don’t think Krugman is pessimistic necessarily; it is just that in these times the rational, knowledgeable position is pessimistic.

But what is really great about John Hinderaker is that he is just as clueless as Krugman says. After being totally wrong about the housing bubble, Hinderaker added the following update to his original article today:

No argument. No admission of being wrong. Just a statement that we need to move on. And as the years go by and there is no economic crisis, Hinderaker will again say it is time to move on. We don’t want to spend any time thinking about how wrong we’ve been! That might cause us to rethink our conservatism.

I mentioned the song “The Walls Came Down” to a friend of mine. It got me thinking about Jericho and so I did a little research and I found that the wall of Jericho is extremely old: 9,000 BC. That’s really interesting, because the events in Joshua are supposedly less than 2,000 BC. What’s more, I read that the wall was primarily for flood control. I also read about the great archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon who had done the most important digs there. This kind of stuff fascinates me, so I went looking for any documentaries on the archaeology of Jericho.

It didn’t go well. Almost everywhere I looked, I found videos where people were trying to prove that the events depicted in Joshua are true. There are two problems with this. First, I’m interested in the earlier settlements. Second, honest (non-apologetic) digs have shown that Jericho was not populated at the time of Joshua; at best, there was a small number of squatters, but certainly no city.

This is a big problem with religious dogma: it limits what you can think. These people can’t just enjoy the wonderful stories that archaeology can tell us. They must shoehorn the data in pre-existing narratives. I’ll admit, it is pretty cool when history and literature do intersect as in, for example, the Iliad. But it isn’t necessary: either for the story or the place.

My searches for documentaries led me to Netflix where I found a History Channel production of Ape to Man. But I was immediately annoyed because the description alerted me, “This film is: controversial.” After watching it, I can tell you the only controversial thing about Ape to Man is that it doesn’t accept the biblical dogma that the earth is only 6,000 years old. But then, I’ve found that the History Channel often panders to biblical fundamentalist. It is but one of very many problems with the network.

The documentary itself wasn’t bad. It can be forgiven getting some things wrong. As they even note in the video, the field moves so fast that things are always changing. Now, for example, it isn’t generally believed that humans drove the Neanderthals to extinction. But one thing that always seems to be present in these documentaries is a very pro-human take on the competition of the two species. Humans had more complex social groups or humans had better communication skills or humans had something else. That’s the reason that the Neanderthals went extinct. Never mentioned is that humans very nearly went extinct. To me it is just dumb luck.

Most of what is wrong with us as a species comes from our unjustified belief that we are some quantum level above the rest of the universe. That’s why many people deny natural selection. But even among those who do accept it, there is a tendency to think that we are special because we build houses, drive cars, and watch television. We really aren’t. I was thinking about this earlier. The first settlement of Jericho was right around the time of the Neolithic Revolution: when humans started to farm. We did that for 2,000 years before we invented pottery—8,000 years ago. At that time, the people making pottery were like the people designing rockets for NASA today. If we survive another 8,000 years (which I highly doubt), it is unimaginable what we will be doing. And we will look back on who we are now as apes with a few tricks. Of course, that’s what we are now and what we will be then.

Afterword

They blew the horn, and the walls came down!