This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote, Why Optimism Is Still America’s Greatest Strength. Basically, I agree with him. Cynicism and pessimism don’t generally lead to reform. But a mixture is important, because there is a dark side to optimism; it can cause complacency. I want to talk about optimism from a different perspective, however.

The traditional conservative take on liberals is that we are pessimistic and think America is weak and evil. I think this is kind of a contradiction. For one thing, evil in the weak doesn’t really matter. I think that the United States is extremely powerful and that we often use that power to do great evil. But I am surprisingly optimistic about the future. Most of the time I think that the arc of history bends toward justice. But for the last almost four decades, it has been bending decidedly toward injustice.

On the other side, the conservative take on themselves is that they are optimistic and think America is powerful and good. But this isn’t really true of conservatives—today anyway. In particular, they only think we are strong in terms of our military. I guess that is to be expected, because to a conservative, power is only manifested in terms of bending others to your will. Regardless, they do not think we are powerful when it comes to anything else. In their eyes, America will always be less than some mythical America they apparently got from watching Leave It To Beaver.

What’s more, they are permanently pessimistic on the domestic front. Crime is always out of control, regardless of how much it falls. The Federal Reserve is powerless to help the economy, but it just might destroy it. We can’t take care of the poor because we are too far in debt. (Note: we are never too far in debt to fight another unnecessary war.) We can’t provide anything even close to equality of opportunity because rich children must be given better schools than poor children. In the conservative mind, we can’t do anything because times are bad and they are only getting worse.

The weird thing is that they are right to think this. Any given conservative is just a snapshot of the movement at a particular time. But if you go through American history, you will see that the conservatives lose basically every battle they fight. A conservative may be someone who stands athwart history, yelling, “Stop!” But history mows them down and moves on to younger conservatives yelling stop about something else. Conservatives were for the monarchy. Conservatives were for slavery. Conservatives were against women voting. Conservatives are always on the wrong side of history.

So conservatives are right to be pessimistic. As I’ve written elsewhere, “Conservative opinion only has a shelf life of a generation.” Today they celebrate Martin Luther King Jr, but at the time they hated and feared him and claimed he was a communist; they were at best apologists for Jim Crow. (And don’t bring up liberal Republicans from the past, because the parties used to not line up that well ideologically.) But as Corey Robin has argued at great length, conservatives will always be against expanding rights and so will always see the country slipping further and further from their ideal.

Of course, it is the conservatives who are always out there chanting, “We’re number one!” And that has always struck me as the kind of thing done by really insecure people. And I think this is why. Barring a fascist takeover of the United States (and I won’t rule it out), history will continue to run them down. And in addition to everything else, they’ll have to pretend that, “Of course I was always for same sex marriage!”—and everything else they were against when it mattered.

Shadow Government Statistics, usually referred to as simply Shadow Stats, is a company that provides, “Analysis Behind and Beyond Government Economic Reporting.” And by and large, people who ought to know think they do a pretty decent job of gather information and grind it into data. But it is also conspiratorial. It claims to be a newsletter that “exposes and analyzes flaws in current US government economic data and reporting.” And it is the ultimate fallback source for those who claim that inflation is actually really high but the government is hiding it from you.

Let me say something about that “inflation is higher than the government claims” claim. Wouldn’t you notice? I mean, a Sausage McMuffin is one dollar. And a Sausage McMuffin has been one dollar since at least the last Bush administration. If inflation were really high, I would have noticed it. Everyone would have noticed it! Some things, like milk do go up and down in price. So do gas prices, but even that tends to be pretty stable. But there is no talking to some people. I think it mostly comes from libertarians and others who really believe in the gold standard. They want there to be high inflation so they can justify their preferred policy. But the fact remains that inflation in the United States has been far lower and less volatile than it was when we were on the gold standard. Really: I want to pull my hair out talking to these people.

Anyway, there is this guy Cullen Roche. He runs a financial research company called, Orcam Financial Group, LLC. So unlike Shadow Stats that seems mostly to appeal to cranks who have an ideological ax to grind, Orcam has customers who have actual money on the line and need good information. Thus, we have a bit of a conflict here. Back in 2011, Roche wrote, “Shadow Stats has been predicting hyperinflation for at least 6 years now and every year the forecast gets bumped to the next year.”

In that same article, he used the Wayback Machine to show that while the prices of some things might have gone up, the price for a subscription of Shadow Stats had not. In 2006, it was $175 per year. And in 2011, it was $175 per year. Well, two months ago, Roche was back, Update: There’s Still Deflation in Hyperinflation Forecasts. In it, he noted that it is now eight years and Shadow Stats is still $175 per year. I decided to graph it to look at the trend in the price:

Now, Cullen Roche is not serious and neither am I. Or at least, not especially serious. But let’s just imagine for a second that the inflation rate in the United States was 15% per year since 2006 when Shadow Stats began predicting hyperinflation. The $175 subscription price would now be the equivalent of less than $50—just over 25% of it’s original value. Or to put it the other way, if the price had kept up with this “real” inflation level of 15%, it would now cost over $500 for a subscription. So if John Williams (the owner and writer of Shadow Stats) really saw his cost of living increase at that rate (Much less 50% per month!) he would have increased the price.

But I’m sure that John Williams and everyone else knows intuitively that inflation isn’t high, because the cost of living is very much the same as it has been for a long time. Which of course, brings us back to Roche’s original complaint: that Shadow Stats (and all of the inflation hysterics) always say that next year the inflation will arrive. It’s like Linus after the Great Pumpkin doesn’t arrive, “Just wait until next year!” The only problem is that Linus is five years old and a cartoon character. I don’t know what excuse the Shadow Stats folks have.

H/T: Paul Krugman

Dean Baker posted something this morning, and I was planning to chastise him for faux naivete. But he was just waiting for the last line of his post. You see, the Washington Post published an article by Al Kamen, So Whatever Happened to the Deficit? That title is actually a bit misleading; the article is about how newspaper coverage of the federal deficit has decreased. The article is fatuous in the extreme.

According to Kamen, the main reason that the deficit isn’t in the news is because it has gone so far down. Well, that’s true, I suppose. But he finished the article by quoting conservative Douglas Holtz-Eakin as saying that the deficit has gone down thanks to the, “American workers, entrepreneurs and families for their work toward economic recovery.” And that, “Washington has done essentially nothing, unless you count stopping making it worse.” Um, no. The economy recovered because economies recover. There is nothing special that the bizarre melange of “workers, entrepreneurs, and families” did for the economic recovery. But it is certainly true that the recovery we’ve had (such as it is) has helped drive down the deficit. But it is also true that the disastrous 2011 budget deal and the 2013 fiscal cliff deals were huge in bringing down the deficit. So Washington has been hugely responsible for pushing the deficit down.

Baker responded, however, that the lower budget deficit is not a good thing. This, of course, is something I rant about all the time here. But he noted, The Washington Post Says it Doesn’t Miss Lower Unemployment and Rising Wages. Because that’s what has actually happened. That’s why the recovery has been so anemic. If federal spending had done what it has always done during recessions since at least Nixon, we would have a roaring recover and our deficit might be even lower than it now is. Baker snarkily noted, “If the deficit hawks at the Post think otherwise they could grab themselves a quick Nobel prize in economics by showing how.”

And what about the two parties? Well, Kamen quoted Bill Galston who rightly noted that Democrats weren’t ever too keen on the deficit obsession. But the Democratic elites certainly were. Obama had a lot of elite Democratic support for his sudden abandonment of jobs in 2011 and sudden obsession with the deficit. It was, of course, just another pathetic example of Obama trying to “reach across the isle.” But Kamen noted that as a result, Democrats haven’t been pushing for credit for the reduction of the deficit. That’s simply not true. What is true is that reporters haven’t been interested in giving them any credit. And example number one is Kamen’s article that ends by saying that Washington should get no credit for the lower deficit.

Meanwhile, he noted that the Tea Party has other things to scream about. But the truth is they are still screaming about the deficit. But that just sets up the same old false equivalence, “Democrats say they have cut the deficit, Republicans say they haven’t. Who can say?” As anyone who has watched politics knows, as soon as there is a Republican President, the Tea Party will lose all interest in deficits. Suddenly, all the real economic arguments for running deficits during recessions will make sense. Because it was never about deficits or any other policy; it was always simply that they hate President Obama.

What Kamen’s article is then, above all, is an example of Villager Thinking. Al Kamen is an upper class columnist. He’s not worried about the unemployed. He ended his article, “Well, we don’t miss the deficit.” Dean Baker explained the problem well:

Well, there was never any confusion. There are, after all, almost no “labor” reporters, but no big time newspaper is without a slew of “business” reporters. It doesn’t matter what is happening to the poorer classes. Low deficits mean when Republicans get power again, they can lower taxes on the rich even more. Hooray for the “objective” press!