I know that I have fairly negative feelings about the following list of countries: China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. It’s not that I hate them — not at all. But I think a whole lot worse of them than I do, say: Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. I’m sure there are a lot of things that go into this. I associate all of these countries with authoritarian governments, even if Iraq is now technically a democracy. But mostly, they strike was as kind of Old Testament in their outlook on life. This isn’t necessarily fair, but certainly a case can be made.

So I wasn’t terribly pleased when I saw this recent Amnesty International report, Death Sentences and Executions 2013 (pdf). You see, the top five countries for the death penalty are these Abrahamic countries and, of course, the “enlightened” United States of America. It makes me want to break out in song, “Oh, say can you see: all the people we kill?!” But I guess we can take some comfort that we are fifth on the list! For once we aren’t “Number one!” on a list of bad things.

Here is a great graph that Business Insider put together to illustrate the situation, China Executes More People Than The Rest of the World Combined:

There is good and bad news about this. The good news is that executions are down in the United States. Fifteen years ago, we executed 98 people. The bad news is that maybe we would have ranked higher before. But even with our reduction in executions, we are still a major outlier. We are the only nation in North or South America to carry out executions. Think about that. All those supposed backward people down south still manage to avoid executing anyone. We make up roughly one-third of the population of the two continents, but we killed 39 and they killed zero. Also, “The USA was the only country of the 56 member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to have carried out executions.” Are we not proud?

One interesting statistic is that between 2012 and 2013, the number of nations executing people went down slightly. But the number of executions went way up: by 12%. I think executions can be seen as a kind of contagion. Clearly, executions are not a rational response to violence or crime. It reminds me of the response to “Typhoid” Mary Mallon. She was locked up even while other typhoid carriers were not. She was locked up as a kind of public relations effort — to make people feel better about the disease. And that’s largely how the death penalty in the United States works: it doesn’t make anyone safer, but it shows that the government takes murder seriously — even if the government doesn’t take it seriously.

It’s all pathetic. But it does drive home an important point. When we think about our country, we shouldn’t compare it to other advanced economies with democratic governments. We should think of our real peers: China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Next to them, we really do stand out like a shining city on a hill. Compared to Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, we really don’t. So let’s embrace our Iron Age culture. We’re one of the best!

I was talking to my father the other day about Obamacare. He is a fairly typical conservative in that his opinions change like a pinball. Sometimes he is quite liberal, but let Fox News work on him for a few minutes and he’ll reverse course. In fact, I can generally determine what it is that Fox News is pushing by the changes in his opinions. About a year ago, out of the blue, he decided that Obamacare was too complicated. Why oh why couldn’t we just have had a simple law like Medicare for all?! He didn’t put it quite that way, but that was the substance of it. I told him the truth: because conservatives like him wouldn’t stand for such a law; Obamacare was an attempt for liberals to get along with conservatives; and the liberals got paid back with fake outrage about the bill being some kind of socialist plot. I did not mention that liberals also got paid back by conservatives like him complaining that the law was too complicated and claiming that they would have been just find with a single-payer system.

Up until last week, my father seemed to have made peace with the new healthcare law. But such acceptance could not withstand the 57 segments that Fox News did this week on Jonathan Gruber’s statement about the law being designed so the CBO didn’t score it as tax. According to Fox News that meant that the Democrats had lied to the American people. It’s very annoying, because the entire right wing echo chamber is being disingenuous. Did we not talk for years about the tax penalties for people not getting insurance? What exactly did the Democrats slip by us?

So Fox News is all over this and now my father thinks that Obamacare is some kind of secret plot to get everyone dependent upon the government. I find the whole thing exhausting. And this is why I don’t much talk to my father about politics. It isn’t that I can’t convince him of things. But the one hour of Fox News he watches each day would require that I spend at least two hours every day to counter. The truth of the matter is that Fox News is very good at what it does. The hosts and producers know all my father’s prejudices and they feed him disinformation based on it. Watching Fox News is the intellectual and emotional equivalent of slipping into a warm bath.

Meanwhile, there are actual facts about Obamacare. In addition to all the active disinformation, Fox News acts as a kind of information filter. If there is bad news about the law, it will be reported on Fox News — and often. But if there is good news about it, it simply won’t be reported except in passing at the beginning of Special Report with Bret Baier (the show my father watches). It certainly won’t be discussed by the “Fox All-Star Panel.” And we had some good news on Obamacare yesterday.

Frank Newport at Gallup reported, Newly Insured Through Exchanges Give Coverage Good Marks. A recent poll found that people getting insurance on the new exchanges are roughly as happy with their coverage and price as people getting it through their employers. Of the newly insured, 71% rated their coverage good or excellent — compared to 72% of everyone who is insured. But you won’t be hearing about that on Fox News.

It is much easier to rant about how the American people were lied to and that the evil liberals are trying to make everyone dependent upon the government. My father is almost 82 years old. You know: the typical Fox News viewer. And he sees himself as fiercely independent. Of course, he is entirely dependent on the government. He is on Social Security, with very little personal savings. And he gets his healthcare from the VA who take amazingly good care of him. But government dependence is terrible! For other people. Apparently. Because that’s what Charles Krauthammer and George Will and Fred Barnes tell him on Fox News.

Last year, I wrote about a 60 Minutes segment that investigated disability fraud. It was an amazing thing to watch, because in the old days, the show went after powerful people. Now it is primarily a rage program. It ought to be on Fox News. The segment focused on poor people living in economically devastated areas using the program to make ends meet. Certainly we don’t want them doing this but it is a sign of the desperation of the times. But apparently the oligarch apologists can’t be bothered to do stories about government officials at every level doing everything they can to stifle the economy.

I noted at the time that the bad thing about the fraud hysteria is that by making it harder to get disability, more people who ought to get it will be denied. So just how big a problem is disability fraud? According to Associated Press, there has been $2 billion of fraud in the last seven years. That sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn’t. Dean Baker noted this morning that it represents just over 0.2% of the entire outlay of benefits.

Conservatives, of course, will claim that no level of fraud is acceptable. But that’s just stupid. There will always be crime — the vast majority of it never solved. Does that mean we should just stop living? Baker pointed out that it would make no sense to spend $10 billion to stop $2 billion in fraud. As long as fraud is minor, it is acceptable.

One of the annoying things about these reports is that they imply that such fraud doesn’t exist in the “perfect” private sector. But that just isn’t true. According to Blue Cross Blue Shield, fraud may cost the healthcare industry $200 billion per year. This number is almost certainly greatly inflated. But it shows that the private sector deals with fraud and some level of fraud is acceptable. It is all about the costs of fighting it.

Another example is shoplifting at Walmart. The company supposedly loses $3 billion per year from theft. They do what they can to minimize theft. But what they don’t do is try to completely eliminate it. They could, for example, require that everyone leaving the store submit to a strip-search. Clearly that would be both effective in eliminating theft and catastrophic to the company’s bottom line.

But none of this kind of reasoning seems to come up in discussions about fraud in government programs. Part of the problem is that private companies don’t make that big a deal out of the theft that effects them. But more important, when it is the government, the press makes it out as a big deal. You know: because it is our money that is getting stolen. But that’s also true of private sector healthcare fraud and shoplifting at Walmart. That theft causes prices to go up. So this razor focus on the minor imperfections of government programs is just an anti-government double standard.

Dean Baker is right that Associated Press never would have written such a story with the relative values. “Disability Program Defrauded of 0.2% of Outlays” just isn’t an exciting headline. But it’s another matter with, “IG: $2B in Disability Claims Approved by Mistake.” As noted, that $2 billion figure is for seven years, so even it is deceptive. Why not a big headline, “Walmart Losses $21 Billion to Theft Increasing Price of Toilet Paper”?

What’s most frustrating is that the article is presented as simple objective reporting. But it is rich in political significance. Like the 60 Minutes segment last year, the implication is that the disability program is rotten to the core. But neither report made any mention of the size of the program nor the relative size of the problem. Although the reporters involved probably have little idea, they are working as propagandists for anti-government activists who want to destroy the program for entirely different reasons.

And the result will be that poor people get harmed. According to the Associated Press article, “The average monthly benefit for a disabled worker is $1,146.” This is from a media establishment that can’t get worked up about billions of dollars in fraud committed by the world’s largest banks. But when a poor person is getting less than $14,000 per year, well, that’s an outrage!

Matt Yglesias wrote a great article at Vox today, The NAIRU, Explained: Why Economists Don’t Want Unemployment to Drop Too Low. I know it sounds very technical and boring, but it isn’t. It is about the Federal Reserve and how economists have spent the last 40 years doing everything they can to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

NAIRU is an acronym for “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment.” It is supposedly the unemployment rate at which inflation will be flat. If unemployment gets below that level: inflation will take off. The problem with it is that, like much in economics, it doesn’t have much in the way of empirical evidence to support it. So why does everyone believe it? Simple: it provides a justification for keeping unemployment at a high enough level where workers have little leverage. It is a big part of the reason why workers have seen almost no share of productivity gains over the last 35 years.

What we’ve seen since the early 1980s onward is that inflation has remained low — most of the time, too low. And this is because the Federal Reserve has always prioritizes attacking even the threat of inflation above stopping actual job losses. You see, there is no doubt that there is a relationship between inflation and employment. In the late 1950s, William Phillips showed that inflation and employment were inversely related. High levels of employment tended to cause inflation, and vice versa.

This graph is for the 1960s, but the graph for the century before that looks pretty much the same. What I find most interesting about this is that to me, the sweet spot on the graph would be an unemployment rate of less than 4% with an inflation rate of 3%. But the Fed — and most other central banks — are obsessed with a 2% inflation target, which they generally think is compatible with a 5-6% unemployment rate. That’s an extra 2-3 million unemployed people, just so the rich don’t have to worry about even a hint of inflation. And it just so happens to keep wages low. It’s good to be rich.

With just the Phillips Curve alone, there might be some pressure on policymakers. But instead, there is this whole “rational expectations” theory behind it that basically says that even allowing inflation won’t help employment. So the Fed may have a dual mandate to minimize inflation and unemployment, but in practice it has a single mandate to minimize inflation and let the American worker starve as he may.

Yglesias pointed out that even if you accept the NAIRU, the Fed has consistently kept unemployment above it. Other than at the end of the 1990s, periods of time where the unemployment rate was below the NAIRU were brief and shallow. And even during that 1990s period, there was no increase in inflation. I would have thought this would mean that economists would throw away the NAIRU or at least recalibrate it to allow for a lower target unemployment. But no. Instead, they seem to have just convinced themselves that the late 1990s was a special case. And this is why the Fed currently is on the verge of raising interest rates. Because employment is doing so great. (Note: sarcasm!)

What’s so frustrating about this is that it would never work the other way. If there was sketchy evidence for allowing inflation of 5%, it would not be economic dogma. It is only economic dogma when it just so happens to benefit the power elite. I have begun to see economics as a kind of theology. What economists primarily do is apologetics: justifying established dogma. It’s not that they aren’t smart guys. Theologian are smart too. But that doesn’t make them right.

In the past, there have been whole classes of people whose job it was to justify the power of church. We have the same situation now — just with a different power center. The economists use math to show that the power elite really do deserve what they have — and more. And so we’ve had anti-union and anti-inflation policies for the last several decades. We are told this is necessary so we can all have nice things. But it is all about justifying taking what should be the nice things from the poor and giving them to the rich. And it is done in the name of “Science!” Economics isn’t a science. It is a conspiracy of the rich.

This morning, Jonathan Chait noted that the era of the “reasonable Republican” did not last long, Conservatives: Let’s Prove We Can Govern by Shutting Down the Government and Impeaching Obama. Basically, the party tried to hide its kooks in the basement, but that isn’t working out too well. It is one thing to get Joni Ernst to not talk about the coming black helicopters while trying to get power. It is quite another to shut up the loonies once they have power. As Chait put it, “[I]t is already clear, just days after the election, that contrary to the fondest hopes of Boehner and McConnell, the kooks will not be going quietly.”

The biggest problem is that Obama insists on doing things and generally acting like he’s still president. And this is what I find so interesting. In 2008 and 2012, the Republicans were quite right to dismiss calls for them to change and work with the Democrats because of the “mandate” from the people. But in 2010, right after the election, Republicans everywhere were calling for no work to get done with the lame duck Congress. And even though they did not control the Senate or the White House, they thought that the Democrats should just kneel before them because they had won the most recent election.

Similarly, this election we’ve heard two things. First is the fairy tale that the Republicans are going to “govern” — as though people in the minority can’t govern. The same thing that stopped them from governing then will stop them now: they don’t have complete power to do exactly what they want. As it was, in 2011, Obama showed himself to be such a feckless negotiator that the Republicans got almost everything they wanted and still the crazies would not go along. Now they think they really have all the power. So in 2011, 98% wasn’t good enough. What is it today? Is 99.999999% of what they want not good enough?

What we see from Republicans is this hypocritical oscillation. When they win an election, they think they should be in charge, even though the United States government is not set up that way. When they lose, they yield not an inch. And this is a problem. Politics is not an art form. Perfection is never a possibility. So it is always a matter of making the best of a situation. That would normally mean accepting minor gains when you don’t have power and major gains when you do. But with the Republicans we get only a grand scheme that looks toward a day when they will have all the power and be able to realize the perfection of their vision. This is the danger of ideology and most often it leads to authoritarianism.

The Republicans can deal with their current situation well or poorly. The problem is that a great many of them have been sold a bunch of nonsense. One of the most common things that conservatives think is that politics is about the will. If only they stick to their principles, all obstacles will crumble. And it doesn’t matter how much power they actually have. Will Obama’s executive actions cause them to harm themselves? Very possibility. But it is important to remember that it is their addiction to ideological purity that stops them from being effective at their jobs. Sadly, it is also what makes them extremely dangerous when they do get complete control of Washington.

This is from a Vox article, This Chart Shows America’s Old Testament Thinking on the Death Penalty. It shows the change in the reasons that people give for support of the death penalty over the last 25 years. The “eye for an eye” reason was and still is the biggest reason for it. But it is going down. In fact, all of the reasons are going down. But there is one reason that didn’t even register 25 years ago, but which now is the reason 15% of Americans give for support of the death penalty: it saves tax-payers’ money.

That one is funny, because as anyone who even casually follows the issue knows: it costs a lot more to kill someone than it does to just lock them in a cage for the rest of their lives. Sadly, my experience when telling this to capital punishment fans is that they then start grousing about the fact that we don’t just just shoot them right there on sentencing. This position is untenable, so such conversations always leads to either (1) the fan turning back to “eye for an eye” logic; or (2) the fan claiming that wrongful executions are just an unfortunate aspect of their efficient killing system.

But think about the “saves tax-payers’ money” argument. It is a psychopathic argument: other people’s lives are not worth spending any money. These are the same people who think it is just fine with the huge oil companies getting billions of dollars in tax breaks. But paying a small fraction of that to make it slightly less likely that an innocent person is executed is just too much. This is not just the thinking of a psychopath; this is the thinking of a stupid psychopath.

The graph is also interesting in that “they will repeat crime” and “set an example” have gone down to almost zero support. So apparently, people have given up on these notions. This is good because they simply are invalid: people don’t escape from prison and the death penalty doesn’t discourage people from murder because murder is almost never a rational crime. And maybe these are the people who moved into the anti-death penalty camp, because overall support is down from 1991:

Regardless, what it all shows is that support for the death penalty is not rational. Most people are for it out of a sense of revenge (understandable but hardly good policy) or they believe it will do things it doesn’t do. But I think that people like myself who hate the death penalty should be careful. Many think that support for it is decreasing. But that’s not really true. As you can see in the graph, support peaked during the Reagan and Clinton years, but all that has happened since then is that the hateful fever has lifted. Now we are back to where it always is: with roughly 60% of Americans thinking it is a great idea despite the dozens of death row inmates who have been exonerated.

I disagree with Jonathan Gruber: Americans are not especially stupid. But they score very high on “evil.”