The great David Cay Johnston published a really useful article last week, Don’t Be Duped by Misleading Economic Terms. It even includes a helpful glossary. One thing I learned from my time as an actual scientist was that nothing is all that hard to understand. Scientists love to make their work seem very impressive with a lot of mathematical jargon, but the concepts are always simple. The complicated stuff is usually important to the scientists themselves, however; and that’s how it is distinct from politics and the non-science of economics. When people are making these these things sound complicated, it is usually because they are hiding something.

I want to focus on the issue that Johnston did in the first half of his article: compensation. There is an overwhelming tendency on the part of politicians and journalists to talk about compensation as though it were charity. And this is especially true when it comes to people who work for the government. I’ve never been too clear on why this is, but people seem to think that when the government hires someone to do a job, it isn’t real and the worker shouldn’t be paid the same as if she were hired by a private institution. When stated explicitly, people claim government workers shouldn’t make as much as comparable workers elsewhere. That’s bad enough.

But as Johnston noted, the bigger issue is on benefits. There is a constant war on the retirement benefits of public employees. And by referring to them “government contributions,” it is implied that they are some kind of charity rather than part of the compensation package the government and the employees worked out long ago. Dean Baker has written about this a lot by contrasting it to bond holders. When a state is having financial problems, the CNBC crowd is all about reneging on these work related promises to pay. The idea that bond holders would get screwed is outrageous to these people. But they are exactly the same things. If I work for you in exchange for money to be paid to me in the future, you owe me money just as surely as if I loan you money to be paid back to me in the future. This isn’t hard to understand, but the use of words like “contributions” are designed to obscure the truth.

Related to this is the payroll tax. Most people think that they pay 7.65% of their income toward their future Social Security and Medicare benefits. But that’s not true. The employer also pays 7.65% toward this. But this is simply part of workers’ pay that is taken away. So why don’t our checks just have 15.3% in payroll taxes removed? Johnston has a good answer for that, “The other half of the tax does not show up on paychecks because it is part of a deception by Congress to make the tax seem less onerous than it is.” You can see why this is so. If everyone saw 15.3% come out of every paycheck they got, they might wonder why it is that they are paying more in that one tax than Mitt Romney pays in total federal taxes on the tens of millions he “earns” every year.

This is just one example of how the language is distorted to keep us from seeing the truth. And I suspect that even having written this, a lot of readers are still confused about how they are actually paying 15.3% (actually, it’s 14.2%[1]) when it doesn’t say that on their check. But do you know who isn’t confused about this kind of thing? The rich. They know what they are doing, and they love the fact the vast majority of people just accept the linguistic frame that allows them to stay rich at our expense.

[1] If your employer didn’t have to make its “contribution,” your pay would be 107.65% of what it is now. You would then pay 15.3% of your income: 15.3/107.65 = 14.2%.

A few weeks ago, Ian Ayres brought my attention to some amazing but unsurprising research, When Whites Get a Free Pass. The title is a literal description of a recent study out of Australia. Researchers looked at how often bus drivers would allow people free rides when their passes had run out of money. Not surprisingly, they were much more likely to let whites ride for free. In fact, whites road free twice as much: 72% versus only 36% for blacks. They did it in a lot of different ways too. In some cases they dressed the riders in business suits and army uniforms. It was always the same. For example, 97% of whites in army uniforms got free rides but only 77% of blacks did.

What’s critical here, is that the bus drivers don’t think of themselves as racist. They aren’t intending to disproportionately help whites. In fact, although the numbers weren’t as skewed, black bus drivers also helped out white riders more than blacks. That’s actually quite a well known effect. When tested for subconscious bias, blacks in America tend to be somewhat more positive toward whites. It puts a whole different spin on the conservatives’ great canard “reverse racism.” But the point here is that racial bias is something that is in the society itself and it infects all of us.

This is why I think we ought to calm down on all the freaking out about the explicit racism like we saw at Sigma Alpha Epsilon. We should use such incidents to highlight the broad nature of racism and what we can do about — not use it to feel good that we don’t sing songs about lynching African Americans. A much bigger issue than segregated fraternities is the fact that most Americans don’t understand white privilege and how affirmative action is one tool to fight it. George Will has spent the last several decades claiming that affirmative action is racist, and he’s held up as an exemplar of respectability.

What the Australian bus study shows is the ways that whites get a clear and tangible benefit from being white. And like so much else that has to do with privilege, it is done in a way that is invisible. If we wanted to create a policy to offset this, we would allow blacks to ride the bus for slightly less than we do whites. And just as with affirmative action, this would do two things. First, it would tell blacks in a very forceful way, “We’re helping you!” Second, it would allow whites to claim that they were treated unfairly because they don’t see their privilege. So even the efforts to fight racism would add to racism. It’s frustrating.

What I think needs to be done is that we white people have to get over ourselves. We need to have our noses rubbed in our privilege. And this is something that we are very reluctant to do here in the United States. And this goes way past race. We are supposed to believe that the rich white child going to private schools has the same chance of getting into Harvard as the poor black child going to a struggling public school. I understand that when it is put that way, it’s pretty obvious it isn’t the case. But that is the reality of America where most people absurdly claim that there is “equality of opportunity” (when they aren’t defining it out of existence).

I’m almost to the point of thinking that we will always have racism as long as we accept capitalism. The two seem to be related because capitalism wants to monetize humans. At this point, to really look at why African Americans own and earn so much less than white Americans — as Ta-Nehisi Coates has — is to question the justice of the whole system. I do know that a lot of it is government policy. But I just don’t see how you separate our economic and political systems. They feed each other. And any economic system that allows people to get really rich will also allow them to distort the political system to their advantage.

In the absence of fundamental change, the least we white people can do is to be aware of our privilege. Being a white person in a white community, I’m constantly assaulted with other whites whining about all the special “gifts” that black and brown people get. That’s the thing about white privilege: the more we have, the more we whine. And they both stop us from moving forward.

Last week, Tom Philpott wrote a really interesting article over at Mother Jones, People on Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us. It references a number of studies that back up this claim. And it isn’t surprising. I know when I’m hungry, the last thing I want is a candy bar. Those are things that people buy when they have the rest of their nutritional needs taken care of.

The fact that we assume that poor people eat poorly is just like assuming that African Americans smoke more cannabis, “I knew this black guy and all he did was smoke pot!” Of course, African Americans actually use cannabis a bit less than whites. But once a stereotype is formed, people filter data so it fits the narrative of the stereotype. I’m sure we’ve all seen people purchasing junk with a SNAP card. But that proves nothing. And think about it: is it something so common that you don’t even notice it? Or is it something that is rare enough that it sticks out? In my case, it is the latter.

What’s more, the issue is not whether people on food stamps are perfect consumers. The question is whether they are reasonable consumers. And the studies indicate that they are better than average. But an even better question is why we are so hung up on the issue at all. Philpott correctly noted, “No one denies me the occasional candy bar or Coke; why would I feel entitled to exert that kind of control over poor people?” Don’t worry: I am well aware what most people would say in response to that, “Because they aren’t paying!”

Except: that isn’t true. I’m so tired of this ridiculous notion that people have about government programs. Every person on Social Security claims that they deserve their benefits because they paid. But then they will claim that poor people didn’t pay for their SNAP benefits. That’s a total distortion of reality. We all pay taxes to the government and we all get benefits from the government. That’s how it works. And a rich person is being served by the safety net just as a poor person is, the same way people with insurance — whether healthy or sick — are being served by it.

The main thing about welfare in the United States is that we want to make the poor feel bad about any help that they are getting. When we help more affluent people, we don’t do that. In fact, we go out of our way to hide the fact that they are even getting welfare. Every year, the government pays my sister thousands of dollars toward her house in the form of the mortgage interest deduction. Yet my sister — and maybe even you, if you haven’t been reading me regularly — doesn’t think of this as welfare. And why should she? The program is designed so that people like my sister don’t feel that they are getting a handout.

But a handout they are getting! As I discussed a couple of years ago in Fixing the Unfair Mortgage Interest Deduction, this welfare program costs the federal government $70 billion per year. This is roughly the same price as the entire SNAP program. People who want to micromanage the nutrition of food stamp recipients really need to ask themselves why they don’t want to micromanage the housing choices of people who are benefiting from the mortgage interest deduction.

Really, it all comes down to the fact that people getting food stamps are poor. Now I don’t think that the average American looks down on the poor any more than they look down on African Americans. But it is now embarrassing for people when they explicitly talk about African Americans as if they were lower forms of life. But there are no norms that stop people from speaking about the poor as though they are lesser people or children who must be taught the basics of life. In fact, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. The Ayn Rand belief that capitalism is perfect and gives people exactly the amount of money they are worth is usually presented as in, “Mark Cuban deserves his billions.” But the other side of that is even worse, “The poor deserve their poverty.” And that’s something that you can hear any day on Fox News or CNBC. It needs to stop.

On Thursday, Jonathan Bernstein made a good point, Democrats Have No Bench? Be Serious. He’s been making the case that people should lay off the criticism of Hillary Clinton. A lot of people are making this assumption that Clinton is just being given the Democratic nomination for president out of some feelings of duty on our part — rather than her having earned it. The truth is that she would be the presumptive nominee regardless. But her four years as Secretary of State sealed the deal. As a result of that, there aren’t people lining up to run for the nomination. His point is that there are plenty of really qualified (And exciting!) Democrats to run.

But I’m focused on who the Republicans are running. Bernstein lists what he and most everyone else consider to be the top tier candidates: “Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Bobby Jindal.” Are we really supposed to think that these are great candidates? The only one on that list that strikes me at all interesting in a general election is John Kasich. Walker is exciting to the press because billionaires love him. Rubio continues to come off like a 12-year-old playing at being a Senator. And Jindal is destined to be the Herman Cain of of this election.

The fact that the Republicans think that a third Bush is their best route to the White House should be some indication of how desperate the party is. And he is the only person they have that dates from a time when the Republicans can claim to have been somewhat reasonable. And this is the guy who had a law passed so he could take control of the healthcare decisions of one particular woman. And he is the main “adult” that the Republicans have to run in 2016. That’s pathetic.

It makes me wonder just what it means to be a serious candidate for president. It seems that all it means is that the mainstream media take you seriously. There is a kind of tautology here where a candidate is serious because she is serious: the media take her seriously because the media take her seriously. And along with that is the media’s disinterest in anything substantial about a candidate. I keep coming back to Todd Akin, but his example is telling. Everyone knew that he was an abortion absolutist. But when he said the wrong words, the media decided that he was beyond the pale. And like the good social animals we are, many people just followed along.

At this point, does anyone really question but that Al Franken would make a perfectly good presidential candidate? He’s one person who Bernstein mentioned but who no one talks about. But it really doesn’t matter. If Clinton drops out or implodes, the vacuum will be filled with at least a few good candidates. In the end, it’s all going to come down to the economy in 2016. None of the Republican candidates pose a special problem, just like Ronald Reagan posed no special problem in 1980. It’s the economy, stupid.