The Republicans really are divided. But it isn’t between the crazy and non-crazy. It is between the nihilists and the extremists. What are normally referred to as the Tea Party are just conservatives who aren’t interested in the political process and so want to send “messages.” As a result, those who want to, you know, win elections, are pretty upset at what is going on in Washington right now. Bear in mind, these people are not any more interested in what is best for the country than the Tea Party is; they just recognize that explicitly trying to destroy the nation is a really bad marketing campaign for the GOP.

Byron York is a man who I almost never agree with, but he was making a lot of sense yesterday. Over at the Washington Times he wrote, Actually, Senate GOP Can’t Filibuster to Defund Obamacare. It’s a really good article because it explains some of the ins and outs of congressional process that I have to admit to finding mysterious. He points out that the Republicans do not have the 41 votes they need for a filibuster in the Senate. But it’s worse than that. “Cruz & Co” can’t even stage an old fashioned talking filibuster.

This morning, the House passed their bill of a continuing resolution (CR) along with defunding Obamacare. But as York points out, Harry Reid can just strip this out of the bill with a simple majority vote:

All this information came from a Senate Republican aide. It is very clear that a lot of Republicans are just sick of all this bullshit. The aide said, “This is not a gimmick or a scheme. It is Rule 22 of the U.S. Senate. Everybody knew this. This is an existing rule. It is taught in Senate class when you do your orientation. It is not a surprise. Nobody sprung it on [Ted Cruz].”

By Democratic standards, I’m an extremist (that is, I’m a liberal). And from time to time, I am certainly in favor of hardball tactics. For example, in the end, I think the immigration bill that Congress came up with was most likely not worth supporting. But there is a very big difference between the good extremist fight and political self-immolation. This is the major rift in the Republican Party today.

Where this goes from here, I’m not sure. But one thing is for clear: the House Republicans will not be able to claim that they passed a CR and the Senate killed it. That means that public opinion on a government shutdown is going to come down hard on the House Republicans. If the Senate had voted the House bill down, the Republicans could have framed the issue as, “The Democrats are forcing a government shutdown just for the sake of funding Obamacare.” But as it is, they won’t be able to say that. Instead, the Democrats will correctly claim, “The Republicans are forcing a government shutdown just for the sake of defunding Obamacare.” The optics of that are really bad—so bad that Boehner may be forced to allow a clean CR vote and move onto the next (and far more dangerous) Debt Ceiling hostage crisis.

This week, the Census Bureau released data on the median family income in the United States. They found that it is lower than it was in 1989. That’s a big deal because the US economy has seen huge increases in productivity since 1989, but none of it has trickled down to the people. That isn’t really surprising. In general, since the late 1970s, productivity growth has not been shared with workers. There were modest gains during the Clinton years, small losses during the Bush years, and then huge losses following the 2009 crash. Still, it isn’t obvious to everyone. In particular, Matt Yglesias just doesn’t believe that people today are doing worst than they were 24 years ago.

I understand where he’s coming from. We have bigger houses now. We have more cars. More of us are graduating from college. He speculates that the consumer price index (CPI) is inaccurate over long periods of time. There is something to that. The CPI doesn’t just look at increases in costs; it also factors in technological improvements. So cars today are worth more than they were 24 years ago because they are now better. So even though the absolute price of a car may have doubled in that time, the inflation wouldn’t be 100% because now we get something equivalent to a car and a half. All of this means that the CPI is an imperfect measure, even though the example I just gave should (if anything) overstate how well we are doing today.

But I think that Yglesias is falling into the trap of thinking that marginal changes in standard of living are bigger than they really are. As Ha-Joon Chang noted, “The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has.” This is an argument that I’ve been having with high tech friends for a long time. In the 1950s, people had AM radios in their cars. Now they have satellite radio and MP3 players. Is this an improvement? Sure! But it is only a marginal improvement. It is easy to overstate the importance of such things.

The things that Yglesias mentions as indicative of affluence don’t really mean that much. Having a home is a lot better than living on the street. Having a 1,700 square foot house really isn’t any better than having a 1,600 square foot house. Having more cars is probably more a function of lifestyle changes—especially more members of the household working—than it is anything else. And more education has not led to more wealth for workers. What’s more, Yglesias admits that fewer people have health insurance now than did then. But even there he diminishes the change by noting that there are procedures available now that weren’t available then. Well, for one thing, that’s a very marginal improvement. But more important, a larger share of people’s income is going to medical care, so that must swamp any improvements and provide a distinctly decreased quality of life.

I think the graph that he provides tells us all that we need to know:

What we see here is roughly what we already knew. During the end of the Reagan-Bush years, wages had stagnated. Under Clinton wages went up. They again stagnated under Bush until the crisis when they plunged down. Are we worst off now than we were in 1989? Maybe yes and maybe no. The main thing is that we aren’t doing much different than we were 24 years ago. This is during a time when per capita GDP has increased by more than 70%. I think that Yglesias is just being picky. I don’t think he would question that the median family is not doing substantially better today. And that is the important point, regardless of how accurate the CPI is.

Update (20 September 2013 9:23 pm)

Matt Yglesias has written another article on this subject, The BLS Says Incomes Are Up Since 1989. In it, he notes that the BLS data indicate that after tax incomes are 11% higher since 1989. He is too caught up in the details of this. The point is, as I said above, that after 24 years the median family is at best doing very slightly better. The fact that statistics might be off by a few percentage points after all that time is not a story. The fact that Americans are not sharing in large productivity gains is a story.

Despite the heroic efforts of 22-year-old Miss Kansas, Theresa Vail, Miss America’s stereotypes are still firmly in place.

Not only is Theresa the first woman ever to join the National Guard, she took on the male-dominated world of archery with her femininity intact. How many beauty queens have those bragging rights?

Perhaps even more inspiring was her brave act of defiance when she willingly chose to “step outside the box” and flash her ink at the judges. In an interview prior to the competition, Theresa reminded anyone who was listening that showing her permanent support of AA was “a bold move!” She went on to say, “And it’s risky, it could very well cost me the crown.”

Theresa did indeed jump out of the box, hoping to leap the hurdles of beauty pageantry, only to be forced to prance around in a two-piece. Hopefully she will find comfort in knowing that she strutted her stuff with dignity.

The always great Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist have provided a summary of the new Republican plan to replace Obamacare, The Republican Study Committee Has a “Replace” Plan. Their take on it is very much the same as what I wrote yesterday, Republicans New Healthcare Distraction. That isn’t too surprising, given that much of my thinking about healthcare has been informed by Aaron Carroll. But as usual, they noticed some things that I had missed.

The big part of the Republican plan is to provide a standard tax deduction for purchasing health insurance. The current system is unfair. If your employer provides you with insurance, he gets to write it off; but if you buy insurance for yourself, you don’t get to write it off. So the Republican plan allows individuals to write off up to $7,500 per year for insurance. But there are two problems. First, this is going to be a very expensive program. It’s weird: when the government spends money to pay for a program, conservatives understand that this costs money. But when they cut taxes to pay for a program, they somehow think it is free. Regardless, of what they think, this program is not free.

The second problem is that this is basically just another tax cut for the rich. Most of the poor will not be able to afford health insurance, so they won’t get the tax break. Those poor people who do manage to buy health insurance will not see their taxes go down by much because they aren’t paying high marginal tax rates. So the program is little more than a giveaway to those relatively wealthy people who are already buying insurance on the open market. It will do very little to make insurance affordable for those without it now.

That is generally true of the Republican “replacement” program. Obamacare has two major goals. First, it tries to provide health insurance to those who do not currently have it. Second, it tries to reduce healthcare costs. Even though the program has not been fully implemented, we are already seeing success with these two goals. But the Republican plan does nothing to reduce healthcare costs other than the usual “magic of the marketplace” nonsense. And at best it does nothing to provide health insurance to those who currently have none.

It is more likely that the plan will make healthcare less affordable for those without it. A good example of this is the tired old conservative idea to allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines. Frakt and Carroll note, “[The policies will] be great if you’re young, healthy, or wealthy enough to afford to fill in the coverage gaps. They’ll be terrible if you are older, have a chronic condition, or, again, if you’re low income.” We see this time and time again with their ideas. It really is as simple as this:

What the Republicans seem to be saying is, “Obamacare is a law that involves healthcare, so here is a replacement bill that also involves healthcare.” There is no consideration of what the new healthcare law is actually being used for. And that’s because the Republicans are not putting forward this “replacement” plan in good faith. It is only put forward as political cover. It is like replacing SNAP (food stamps) with another “poverty program” that let’s everyone write off their food purchases.

Of course, the media is not covering it like that. For example, the Christian Science Monitor covered it as though it were a real plan and only mentioned a single (weak) liberal complaint against it. And that’s the big problem with political coverage: the media will always present clear Republican nonsense as though it were a real effort at legislation. There continues to be no downside for the Republicans’ continuing efforts to destroy civil society. And so the Republicans continue to try to destroy civil society.

Congratulations to Nina Davuluri. Her genetic lotto ticket really paid off!

She and loser Theresa Vail are both stunning examples of American Exceptionalism. They both encapsulate our country’s obscene attraction to all things superficial and its tacit acceptance of implicit misogyny.

As for the racist flak that is being hurled at Nina, I hope she can ignore the hate grenade tossers—they won’t go away, but they’ll be distracted by another target soon enough. In the meantime, she can amuse herself with the thought that if her family did own a 7-11, Theresa’s family would be buying chewing tobacco from them.

Don’t cry for Theresa though! As a lovely distillation of America’s exceptional white trash patriotism, she’s sure to get an offer from Playboy any minute now. That validation of her true merit will undoubtedly ease the pain of losing to someone who didn’t even have the decency to be born a dyed-in-the-blonde American such as herself.

A couple of important scientists were born on this day. The first is Adrien-Marie Legendre, who was born in 1752. He was actually a mathematician, but that’s close enough. He did a lot of great work. For example, his work on polynomials led to Galois theory. And he proved Fermat’s last theorem for n = 5. But most of all, he is known for the Legendre transformation. It allows you to transform a function from one set of variables to another. There are two classic examples of this. One is to transform the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics into the Hamiltonian formalism. The other is the transformation of thermodynamic internal energy—which we can’t measure—into enthalpy and other variables that we can measure. Unfortunately, the mathematics is not easy—it requires about a year of calculus and even then, it isn’t exactly trivial.

The second scientist is Leon Foucault who was born in 1819. If you’ve ever been to a big science museum, you have doubtless seen the Foucault pendulum. Basically, the idea is that the pendulum—because of its inertia and slow rate of rotation of earth—continues oscillating in the same direction. So as the earth rotates, it looks like the pendulum precesses. This was the first very simple and readily understandable experimental demonstration that we are, in fact living on a big ball that is spinning around. Of course, Foucault did much else in his short lifetime. He did a lot of work with electromagnetism and performed one of the earlier measurements of the speed of light.

Other birthdays: Dutch realist painter Anton Mauve (1838); novelist William March (1893); actor Jack Warden (1920); the best of The Ramones, Dee Dee Ramone (1951); actor James Gandolfini (1961); singer Frankie Avalon (74); comedian Fred Willard (74); journalist Chris Hedges (57); and cyclist Lance Armstrong (42).

The day, however, belongs to the great actor Greta Garbo, who was born on this day in 1905. At this point, she is probably better known for disappearing from public life for the last 50 years of her life. But she really was a great actor. She had an extremely naturalistic style when such things were rare. Here she is in Grand Hotel saying the line she is most remembered for, “I want to be alone!”

Happy birthday Greta Garbo!

Ezra Klein wrote an article this morning, The White House Doesn’t Think it Can Prevent a Government Shutdown. It is all about how the White House is ringing alarm bells for business interests that the Republicans really are crazy enough to close the government and throw in a nice default sweetener. The idea is that hopefully, the the big Republican fundraisers will apply some pressure and stop the madness.

As far as all of this goes, I believe that the administration should always have taken this approach. The Republicans only respond to power and giving them power by allowing them to use the Debt Ceiling as leverage was a bad idea. But Klein mentioned something that greatly concerns me:

This is a big part of the problem with Democratic politicians. I spent months after last year’s election ranting about how the Republicans were not going to moderate just because Obama won a solid victory. What’s more, I argued that they shouldn’t moderate for that reason. National elections are national elections. Just because Obama won didn’t mean that any given congressional district voted for him. Clearly, the Republicans (Rightly!) didn’t listen to the idiot pundits. But when the situation was reversed, I guess the Democrats did. Of course, that’s also what they did when Reagan became president. We would have a much better country today if they had continued to represent their constituencies rather than yielding to Reagan’s supposed mandate.

But the situation was even worse when Obama and his people were thinking that the 2010 elections were a mandate to cut social spending. In fact, the situation was exactly the opposite. The Republicans did well during that election because they got the people to think that Obama had cut Medicare coverage. So these people weren’t voting for the Republicans because they wanted more cuts—they were voting for the Republicans because they wanted less cuts—especially on entitlement programs! And remember, that was Obama’s “grand bargain”: cut entitlement programs in exchange for higher taxes. There is no way that the people voted for that!

Democratic politicians are always looking for opportunities to turn right—to move their policies closer to the Republicans’ extreme and unpopular positions. In this sense, liberalism is dead in the United States. When the people rise up and vote for what they think are liberal politicians, all they end up with are moderate policies. Ted Kennedy was still alive and the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate when the White House offered up a pathetically underfunded stimulus that was one-third tax cuts that aren’t very effective anyway. And in the early discussion of healthcare reform, there was no serious discussion of a single payer system or even much support for a public option. From the very beginning it was the Republican healthcare plan. That’s what we get from our modern Democratic Party when it controls all the branches of government by a wide margin: Republican policies that get no Republican votes.

After everything that has happened and some quite terrible stuff that probably will happen, I won’t be shocked if the people vote the Republicans back into office. As a practical matter, they cause the government to grind along in the worst way possible. At least they are hypocritical enough to do a better job when they are in power. If Mitt Romney were in office, we would probably have had some kind of jobs program by now. Sure, it would have been inefficient and larded up with deficit expanding tax cuts that the Democrats would feel compelled to fix through more spending cuts once they were back in office. But it would have done a lot of good nonetheless. So if the people think that’s a better thing than paralysis and at best moderate to conservative policy from Democrats, I wouldn’t fault them for it.