As you may have heard, Oregon passed a law so that people are automatically registered to vote when they go to the DMV to renew their drivers licenses. I am, of course, totally in favor of this. It is an outrage that people even have to register to vote. What is that all about anyway? For at least the last three decades, newborns automatically get social security numbers. We know who the citizens are so we know who is eligible to vote. And all this nonsense of revoking voting rights for felons in the more backward states is part of the same thing. It is all about limiting the voting franchise. So hooray for Oregon!

As Domenico Montanaro at NRP noted, the Oregon move is an interesting contrast to so many deep red states that are doing everything they can to make voting more difficult. One thing about us liberals is that we actually believe in democracy. Maybe it is because we know that in a fair fight — idea versus idea — we win. Or maybe it is just that we know that our policies are more popular. I don’t know. But it isn’t just Oregon that is moving in this direction:

The Republicans who are against this law argue that this could harm the privacy rights of individuals. That’s a laugh out loud complaint. If you are a driver, the government already knows all about you. And anyone can “opt out” of the program. I’m not clear who exactly is going to be interested in doing that. The conservative freaks will already be registered and the unregistered are unlikely to care one way or the other.

That gets to an important question, and the point of Montanaro’s article: would automatic voter registration increase turnout? We don’t know, but it certainly won’t hurt. I suspect that it will increase turnout by a small, but measurable, amount. The more important issue is that registration is a precondition for voting. Here in California, if it is four weeks before the election and a citizen decides that she wants to vote — it is too late. You have to be registered 30 days before the election — long before most people really start to pay attention. So automatic registration is a good thing.

As time goes on, conservatives are more and more open about the fact that they really don’t want people voting. Their policies are unpopular. They are dependent on the Fox News set to win elections — people who are convinced that they are the most knowledgeable people but turn out to be more ignorant of actual facts than people who don’t follow politics at all. And that brings us to another bit of news this last week. Apparently, Holly Yan on CNN posted something that the president said and reported the completely distorted headline, Obama: Maybe It’s Time for Mandatory Voting. That, of course, got the right wing media echo chamber going. Ed Kilgore reported about the whole thing, How Anti-Obama Myths Get Started.

But you have to wonder about half of the American political system that is so against this idea. To me, voting is something that we owe to our democracy, just as surely as we owe taxes. So there is nothing wrong with the idea of taxing people an extra couple of bucks for not voting. I can see problems with such a law, but I don’t see the very idea being the leading edge of tyranny. “Obama wants to make sure we all vote; it’s tyranny! We want people to be able to take jobs for a dollar an hour; that’s freedom!”

Anything that increases the ability of the people to vote is a good thing. And anything that encourages them to vote is a good thing. That’s not a controversial thing for a liberal to say. And the more we increase the ease of voting, the more it will become clear that conservatives oppose us, not for any good reasons, but because they don’t believe in democracy.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes created the metaphor of “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater,” the specific example that he had in mind was a socialist who was passing out literature encouraging young men to resist the draft for World War I. Today, there is much confusion about what that war was even about. And that is nowhere more true than in the United States. How was encouraging draft resistance “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater”? If anything, that’s shouting fire in a theater that is on fire. But at the time, I’m sure that Holmes thought the war was very serious business: the Central Powers posed an existential threat to us!

That’s the problem with government suppression of free speech. It is trivial to find examples that seem too extreme. And when people are afraid, clear political speech that the First Amendment should apply to becomes illegal. There’s a pretty clear distinction between “Kill the president” and “Don’t kill for the president.” Yet that distinction was lost on as great a mind as Holmes during the First World War. Of course, now most people would think that encouragement of draft resistance ought to be legal, just as most people think the Japanese deserved Fourth Amendment protections during the Second World War. We humans are great thinkers in retrospect.

In France, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the government enacted a law that blocks websites that encourage “terrorist” activities. It’s a wonderful irony, right? After all the marches and speeches about the right to say anything you like, the government comes in and clamps down on websites that say things they don’t like. I get it: most of those websites are probably pretty vile. But it’s curious, nonetheless. The government will shut down an entire website just because one page offends them. And the decision is made unilaterally — apparently with no due process.

Of course, I find this greatly disturbing. Governments do not have a great history of oppressing just the “right kind” of people. Just recently, we found out that American “security” forces were spying on a local Black Lives Matter group that protested at the Mall of America. Sadly, as far as the government is concerned, there really isn’t much of a line between advocating the overthrow the US government and protesting against the official murder of minority groups. Even if the new French law is perfect right now, eventually it will be expanded as more and more minor things are defined as “encouraging terrorism.”

This also has personal resonance. Let’s assume that right now the law is limited to people inciting others to acts of terrorism. I doubt it is, but let’s assume that. The same logic that allows the government to shutdown that kind of behavior applies to my writing an article defending those people’s rights. It could be called support for terrorism. And though I don’t generally accept slippery slope arguments, the government does tend to broaden such programs — especially when there is little to no oversight.

Glenn Greenwald provided a great overview of what’s happening, What’s Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name? He gave the details about the French law as well as laws and proposed laws in other “enlightened” countries. He pointed out how tyrannical governments use the same excuses to block free speech with a recent headline, “China Tells Seoul Messaging Apps Blocked to Curb Terrorists.”

You see: there are always terrorists! That’s one of the big problems with all this. At this point, I’m not even sure what terrorists are other than violent groups that we don’t like. Greenwald put it well:

I have to admit to being especially angry about this stuff for an odd reason. I am so sick of people — great and small, near and far — freaking out about something that is happening; doing something stupid about it; and then looking back and saying, “I guess I overreacted. Oh well!” My whole life is a history of overreacting to things. Over time, I’ve gain what I think is a little wisdom. When I hear a news report about some outrageous thing, my thought is, “I’ll bet when I learn more, I’ll find out that it isn’t what it seems.” That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still outrages — sometimes I’m more outraged the more I know. But I’m convinced that we humans are hardwired to have an addiction to outrage. And it is a very, very bad thing.

As you’ve probably heard, the new Republican House budget uses “dynamic scoring.” In a general sense, this is a process by which budgets take into account the indirect economic effects of the government policies. So if the the government cuts taxes, people will have more money that they will spend, and that will make its merry way through the economy. Similarly, government spending cuts also works their way through the economy — in the opposite direction. I actually have no problem with this. But as I reported back in January, this is not the way things currently work, Republican Disingenuous Changes at CBO. The Republicans are using dynamic scoring when it comes to tax cuts, but they don’t use it when it comes to the negative effects of spending cuts.

But there is an even bigger problem as Josh Barro reported at The Upshot earlier this week, Tax Cuts Still Don’t Pay for Themselves. It is primarily about a study by the conservative Tax Foundation that found that, for example, tax cuts on business investments would increase business investments so much that it would generate more tax revenue that would offset the tax cuts. But it is explicitly reversed engineered to find that. The question is whether the CBO will follow in this direction.

I think it is clear from the way that the Republicans have managed things thus far that if the CBO doesn’t descend into nuttyland, Congress will force them to do so. I wrote about the new budget earlier this week, Another Ridiculous Republican Budget. In it, I focused on how Republicans want to savage the federal government’s budget without a care in the world about the negative effects on the economy. And it is pretty simple. Imagine that you cut both taxes and spending by one dollar. A dollar will be removed from the economy because of the decreased spending. But a dollar will not be added back into the economy via the tax cut. Most of it will, but some of it will be saved.[1] So even such budget decisions will hurt the economy. And this new budget is mostly spending cuts — not that much in terms of tax cuts.

The whole thing is ridiculous. Apparently, the only point of “dynamic scoring” was to allow the one overriding Republican commitment — tax cuts — to look like they don’t cost as much as they actually do. Meanwhile, they continue to claim that no amount of spending cuts will hurt the economy. I’ve noticed this sort of thing often before. And there is a name for it: theology. There’s no economics in sight.

This is the state of things. One thing that bothers me is that it is asymmetrical. I just can’t imagine the Democrats changing the CBO rules to only use dynamic scoring on spending and not on tax cuts. That’s because Democrats are still wedded to reality. The economics profession — regardless of its many other failings — accepts that both kinds of government policy affect the economy. How could it be otherwise? Yet the Republicans just see what they want to see. The question was always going to be whether the Republicans were just going to turn the CBO into a propaganda unit. But we knew the answer to that back in January when they decided to do this one-sided dynamic scoring.

Once again, my mind flashes back to an insight I had long ago: this is how great empires fall. The Republicans fully reflect the shortsighted view of the business community. And the Democrats, when they don’t share that view, are unwilling to counter them on it. Meanwhile, our infrastructure crumbles, our children fall further and further behind, and our poor just die unnecessarily. But it is a great time to be rich! And that’s all the power elite care about.

[1] If the economy were booming, the private sector for use that saved dollar. In that case, the whole example would be a wash. But clearly, the economy is not booming. And the way economic policy is run in this country, the economy is rarely booming.

Last week, the economist Timothy Taylor wrote, When a Summer Job Could Pay the Tuition. He noted that when he graduated from high school (1978), one could work one’s way through college with a minimum wage job: part-time during the school year and full-time in the summer. Now that isn’t possible. He used the graph below, which he took from a lecture by David Ernst. What it shows is a time series of the number of hours a student would have to work to pay the tuition at the University of Minnesota. When Taylor was in college, it was about 300 hours per year. By the time I was in college — just a decade later — it was double that. And today, it is roughly 1,600 hours.

There are two aspects of this: tuition increases and the minimum wage decreases. I went to the University of Minnesota’s website and found this convenient document (pdf) that lists the tuition rates dating back to 1960. I chose a base year of 1968, because that was the high water mark for the minimum wage. The tuition at that time was $294 for instate undergraduates. Today, it is $12,060. That represents an averageincrease of 8.4% — a bit more than double the rate of inflation. If tuition had only gone up at the rate of inflation, it would be only $1,974 now. So tuition is a big part of the problem here.

If the minimum wage of $1.60 per hour in 1968 had gone up at the rate of inflation, it would now be $10.75. If the minimum wage had gone up at the rate of productivity growth (and it always did in the decades before 1968), it would be at nearly $22 per hour. Let’s look at these numbers. In 1968, $294 would have required 184 hours of work. Today, $12,060 requires 1,663 hours at $7.25 per hour. If the minimum wage had just gone up at the rate of inflation, 1,122 hours would have been required. And if the minimum wage had gone up at the rate of productivity growth, 548 hours would have done the trick.

Clearly, both education inflation and the regression of the minimum wage have been major factors in making a college education far less affordable. From the looks of it, I think that the minimum wage is the larger issue. It’s telling that the focus of the educational affordability discussion (even among liberals) is so focused on tuition. Whenever I hear this kind of thing, I think the subtext is, “Those college professors make too damned much money!” I have no special love for academics, but I’m skeptical when the focus for helping the poor is tearing down the middle class. The minimum wage hasn’t been decoupled from the economy so that college professors could make more money.

I have to give credit to Ernst and Taylor, because this is a good way to look at the question of affordable college educations. And I think what it shows is not so much that college tuition is growing too fast — although it is. It is more that the rewards of our economic success are not being widely shared. Notice that a big part of the increase in tuition in state schools here in California is not because education is getting more expensive; it is because the state is paying less and less of the bill. When I was paying $500 per semester in the 1980s, I was paying only a fraction of the cost of my education. Today, students pay a much higher percentage of the actual cost. (Very roughly, adjusted for inflation, students pay ten times what I did.)

There is a weird kind of tension in any discussion of college affordability. There are many people who claim that inequality is just a question of education and if we all got college degrees, everyone would be rich — or at least “middle class.” At the same time, our inequality has made getting an education extremely hard. But I think we have to stop thinking this way. The problem is that we have unsustainable levels of inequality. Making education more affordable is a laudable goal. But it is no substitute for addressing economic inequality head on. And in most cases, I think the loud voices crying about skyrocketing tuition are using the issue as a distraction to keep us from dealing with the more fundamental issue.