The people at Crooks & Liars do a great service to the world by watching a lot of television and reporting back to the rest of us who are too sensitive to deal with it. And on Sunday, John Amato caught a little bit of video from Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace Smacks Rick Santorum on Flat Tax Myth That Helps the Rich. Unlike most liberals, I have a bit of a soft spot for Santorum because he really does have populist instincts. He says the right things about economics and the middle class. Of course, his policy ideas are horrible — never getting outside the Republican bubble.

On Sunday, we learned his proposal for “reforming” the tax system. Wallace laid out the basics, “You wanted only two income tax rates, 10% and 28%. Tax capital gains at 12%. And corporate taxes at 17.5%.” And then he went on to quote a Tax Policy Center report that showed that the tax cut would be highly regressive and would cut total federal tax receipts by 40%. Santorum just blows off the first criticism. He uses the old Milton Friedman line about how it would be good for the lower classes too. Even if that were right, it wouldn’t change the fact that the cut is regressive.

But Santorum’s response to decimating the federal government’s budget was a classic, “Well, first off, those numbers are based on a static model. That means that nothing is going to change in the economy if you create all sorts of incentives for people to grow the economy and for people to work with lower tax rates.” That’s just the old supply side argument: if you give rich people tax cuts, they will invest it and create a bigger economy and that will replace the lost revenue. This has literally never happened.

The fundamental problem here is that the government spends tax dollars just as much as individuals spend money that isn’t taxed. Conservatives like Santorum seem to think that there is some special sauce that makes money spent by the private sector better than money spent by the public sector. It makes no sense at all. What’s more, since the rich have more control of their own salaries, the lower their taxes are, the more incentive there is for them to keep more of the profits of business and to share less with workers.

We don’t need to deal with the lack of revenue, however. The truly vile part of Santorum’s plan — and really, pretty much every Republican plan — is that it hurts the poor in an absolute sense. First, of course, these tax schemes always come with a big push to savage aid to the poor. But more important, the federal income tax is the only tax in the United States that is moderately progressive. This is why Republicans are laser focused on it. The biggest federal tax for most people is the payroll tax and it is absurdly regressive. But no Republican is at all interested in doing anything about it, because it is the kind of tax they believe in: flat up to a hundred grand and then zero for everything above that. And nothing at all on capital gains!

But the poor are also harmed on the state and local levels. These taxes tend to be flat and even regressive. And if federal funding for the states dries up, the states will be forced to raise their taxes — shifting the total tax burden even more toward the poor. This is the end result when Santorum says, “The whole idea is to treat everybody fairly.” But that’s just because he’s a liar. He doesn’t care about treating people fairly — at least not enough to think through his tax “reform” ideas. And this makes him a typical Republican. They are never interested in looking at taxes overall. They are only interested in looking at the taxes that the rich pay.

I’ve always found newspaper rundowns of police activities strange because they mention who had been arrested. In a country that prides itself on the fact that people are “innocent until proven guilty,” such public shaming seemed anathema. Everyone assumes that people who are arrested are guilty of something. So printing arrestees’ names in the paper is a form of punishment without due process. I seem to be alone in thinking this. But the issue seems ever bigger as it changes from one name printed among many in a local newspaper to one name delivered globally to anyone who plugs it into a search engine.

This is just the very edge of a larger issue of criminal background checks for employment, housing, and even more trivial things. Gilad Edelman wrote an excellent article about the subject in the new issue of Washington Monthly, Second Chance, My Ass. It is nominally a review of the book, The Eternal Criminal Record. But it serves as a good primer about the issues that people with criminal records face in our hyper-connected country. It’s really disturbing. In 1996, only 50% of all companies did background checks on some new hires. Today, 75% of all companies do background checks on all applicants — and 90% do background checks on at least some.

Looking at these numbers, you might wonder how companies got along before. And remember: 1996 is far into the computer revolution. So if we go back to 1960, we are probably talking virtually no one but the CIA doing background checks. And I think this is the critical issue: background checks do not result in companies having better workers. Companies do background checks because they can. They are used as yet another tool to weed out candidates. And when you consider 12% of all Americans have felonies — not to mention those who simply have misdemeanors or simply arrests — it works really well!

I’ll tell you when companies did not do criminal background checks: during the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley. Companies were so desperate for any people who could do the work that they didn’t care. That was a heady time. All other times in my working life, I’ve been struck with the fact that employers were not terribly interested in getting work done. Interviews were more about fitting in and being the kind of person who wouldn’t upset anything — ever. I discussed this in, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. The point is that the modern American corporation seems more like a social club than a business.

This is why the use of criminal background checks and similar “weeding out” strategies are so pernicious. They really have nothing to do with business. They are just ways of keeping the poor down — maintaining existing social barriers. I mentioned that 12% of Americans have felony records: 25% of African Americans have felony convictions. As Michelle Alexander discussed at length in The New Jim Crow, this is the modern way to keep a whole race down.

In Europe, things are different. There are laws to protect individuals’ rights to privacy. But according to Edelman, the Supreme Court has found that in order to have transparent government, criminal records must be available to all. Think about that for a moment. According to the Supreme Court, we don’t need to know the people who can spend unlimited amounts of money on political candidates, but we do have to know every arrest and conviction of every individual in the country. But I have a hunch that this is not just a matter of legality. In my experience, employers from Europe and Asia are simply far more focused on getting the job done than they are on the misty-eyed nonsense that Americans focus on.

There is some good news, however. More and more places are making it illegal to ask job applicants if they have a conviction until after the job interview. This is a big deal. It is generally illegal to not hire someone on the basis of a criminal conviction. So what most employers do is simply never interview people who say they have conviction. If an ex-con lies, the employer declines to hire not based upon the conviction but rather because the applicant lied. So this is a good change. But, of course, we could and should do so much more.

Because of television and movies, most people have a highly unrealistic idea of the criminal justice system. They think that people go off to prison and so pay their “debt to society.” That could not be more untrue. The fact is that the society expects the convict to go on paying that debt for the rest of her life. And it is all in the name of making society itself worse. Edelman quoted some work from our friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (I assume she’s referring to this: Ex‐offenders and the Labor Market.) who find that keeping ex-cons out of the labor market costs the economy roughly $60 billion in output per year. But maybe that’s a small price to pay for this extra tool that allows managers to only ever have to manage workers who went to the same strata of colleges they did.