Part of my day job over the last couple of weeks has consisted of writing profiles of a number of companies based outside the United States. This led me to check out their prices — which were listed in things like the euro, real (Brazil), złoty (Poland) — in US dollars. And it always looked just like the graph on the left: over the last four years, the values of these currency have gone down — dramatically — compared to the dollar. It was usually roughly one-third. And what this meant was that the prices of these companies were really attractive if you happen to live and work in America.

But then it hit me: this is why having a strong dollar is such a bad thing for the American worker. The products and services in all these countries are really attractive to buyers. We as consumers don’t much notice it, because most of what we buy comes from a lot of different places. And yes, it means that the stuff we buy is cheaper as a result of this. But when you see that the Japanese yen has gone down by 30% in the last four years, you know that Japanese steel is a whole lot more competitive than American steel, and that means there are fewer jobs for Americans.

Last Friday, Mary Amiti and Tyler Bodine-Smith at Liberty Street Economics wrote, The Effect of the Strong Dollar on US Growth. And what they find is pretty amazing, “Our analysis shows that a 10% appreciation in one quarter shaves 0.5 percentage point off GDP growth over one year and an additional 0.2 percentage point in the following year if the strength of the dollar persists.” In the last year, the Japanese yen has gone down 20% compared to the dollar. But overall, the trade weighted change of all nations is 10% — still a cause of great concern.

What I find most interesting about this is that the over-valued dollar isn’t just hurting jobs; it is hurting economic growth. I would think that the power elite would care about this. But they don’t seem to be especially interested in it. They already have huge amounts of money. So the more that that money is worth, the better. Who needs economic growth in the US, anyway? (Besides workers.) They can just use the great exchange rate to invest overseas. In fact, one aspect of this that Amiti and Bodine-Smith didn’t take into account was the reduction in domestic investment spending as a result of less demand for US products.

The main thing is that we all need to remember that a strong dollar is by and large a bad thing. If you are one of those loser Americans who actually has to have a job to get by, you need a weaker dollar. If you are sitting on piles of cash, then by all means be glad that the US dollar is doing great compared to the currencies of most of our trading partners. But don’t get caught up in the nationalistic braying about being “strong.” When it comes to the dollar, being significantly weaker would be great.

There is a common conservative argument that I continue to hear in polite society. It is used in many areas, but it seems especially to be prevalent when discussing education. If you note that Finland has an excellent educational system without focusing on “job skills” and testing, you will often hear the refrain, “But Finland is such a homogeneous country!” I’m frankly shocked that people say this. They would never say, “Of course that works in Finland — they’re all white. We have all these black and brown students!” Yet that is what I hear whenever people make these arguments about homogeneity.

Matt Bruenig noted another aspect of this, An Actually Meaningful Homogeneity Argument. He pointed out that this is used as a common excuse for why some countries manage to grow and innovate just as fast (Or faster!) than the US even while having “higher tax levels, lower poverty, and lower inequality.” The causality here is mystifying on an economic level. Bruenig writes at too high a level to discuss this, but it’s clearly just racism: “Of course that works in Finland — they’re all white. We have all these black and brown people who are just lazy!” That is undeniably the argument, right?

But Bruenig pointed out that there is one case where having a homogeneous population would help in relieving poverty. It is where direct assistance is given. So rather than cash aid or even food stamps, think: food banks. An argument against this is that not everyone wants or needs the same food. So it is better just to give them money to buy the food that they want and need. But if the society is homogeneous, it is much easier to give out food because, for example, all white people like Swish cheese!

It’s important to note that Bruenig’s idea here is not real. It is a purely hypothetical situation. No group of people is that homogeneous. People always have different tastes and different needs. But it is no doubt a lot easier to fulfill the needs of the 5.5 million relatively homogeneous Fins than it is to fulfill the needs of 320 million quite diverse Americans. But Bruenig is giving the conservative argument the absolute maximize chance he can. And of course, it falls apart.

Here’s the problem: it is liberals who want to make aid to the poor as free as possible. Conservatives are the ones who are concerned that the poor are not going to spend their assistance on exactly what the conservatives think is right for the poor. Remember how angry conservatives were recently that a surfer kid was buying lobster with his EBT card? At one time the complaint was that poor people shouldn’t be buying drugs. Then it was that they shouldn’t be buying junk food. Now it is that they shouldn’t be buying perfectly healthy food that conservatives is too good for the poor. I don’t think anything has changed: it was always about spite, but it is crystal clear now.

But what all this means is that conservatives want to make policy that acts in direct opposition to the one argument they are most likely to use against having welfare. But it really does come back to the fact that conservatives are disingenuous. They don’t actually think that we have to screw over (or at least forget) the poor so that our economy works properly. They just hate the poor. And there is a big — even overwhelming — racist aspect to this. Still, I don’t think their opinions would change if we really did have a homogeneous (white) country. It’s only that they would have a much harder time convincing the rest of the country.

I constantly find myself at a loss to understand what mainstream commentators think about the Republican Party with respect to recent immigrants — most especially Latinos. It really makes me wonder who treats Latinos worse: the Republicans or the commentators. Because you would really have to think that Latinos are idiots listening to the arguments for what the Republicans should do to appeal to them. Thus it is with an article Jonathan Chait wrote last week, How Donald Trump Destroyed the Republican Party’s Best-Laid Plans.

It started by noting that the Republican’s “most important strategic imperative” was to “narrow the gap between its core voting base and the immigrant communities.” That’s just nonsense. The most that the Republican Party has ever been willing to do is try not to go out of its way to insult the immigrant community. There was never any way to narrow the gap between Latinos and the Republican base, because hating immigrants (and just about everyone else) is more or less what defines it. The plan was always to make the party seem softer to immigrants, but not to do a damned thing.

Chait claimed that the first thing that the Republicans needed to do was pass immigration reform. It’s now three years since I started hammering on this issue. Just at the very top, this makes no sense. The Republican approach to it was always, “Okay, we’re going to do this one thing for you, and then we don’t ever want to hear from you again!” This was not something that was ever going to appeal to the Latino community. My argument all along has been that passing some symbolic legislation is not going to fool immigrants when it is only too clear that the Republicans are doing it with great reluctance. As it was, a two decade path to citizenship wasn’t good enough for them. They couldn’t do it cheerfully, so why do it at all?

But the other side of this is that immigrants are like everyone else. Immigration just isn’t that big a deal to them. A Gallup poll back in 2012 found that Hispanics rated healthcare, unemployment, economic growth, and inequality above immigration as their top issue. But I get it: immigration is a disqualifier — an issue that is necessary but insufficient. But that just gets us back to my main point, which is that Latino voters are not going to vote for Republicans because they make one ostentatious display, while being willing to do less than nothing about the issues that harm the poor in this country.

Chait went on to claim that the second thing that the Republicans needed to do was keep control of the debates. Well, if that was the case, they certainly didn’t agree. The party just threw up its hands and allowed the cable news channels to decide how to do the debates. But it is on this subject that Chait brings up Trump — as though there wouldn’t have been at least one major candidate who saw political gold in appealing to the most predictable aspect of the base.

The Republican Party depends upon angry white people for its power. It is not going to release its grip on this base because it sees that in the future this will be untenable. The Republican Party will change when it has absolutely no option to do anything else. Chait is just silly to think that the party’s discussion of immigration reform was ever serious. And he’s unintentionally offensive in thinking that Latinos and others would buy the little con that he thinks the Republicans should be running.

Over at Fed Watch, Tim Duy made, The Case For September. The issue at hand is whether the Federal Reserve will start raising interest rates in September. As Duy pointed out, there really isn’t much of a reason to do this. But sadly, the Fed knows from long experience, that it doesn’t get blamed for low employment levels, but it does get blamed for even the slightest hint of inflation. It’s a very bad situation where the Fed does not get the proper incentives. Nominally, the Fed is supposed to care as much about employment as it does price stability. In fact, employment takes a distinct backseat to inflation. When inflation is absolutely, positively not a problem, the Fed does what it can about employment. Of course, normally when inflation is not at all a risk, there is very little that the Fed can do for employment. Funny that.

Anyway, Duy pointed out that the big issue here is not that raising interest rates will cause the economy to go back into recession. Rather, it might “lock the economy into a sub-par equilibrium.” I’m not sure that any of these people care about that. That’s another part of the screwed up incentives at the Fed. The people there represent the power elite. Almost half of them are directly appointed by the big banks. They define the common good as being what is good for themselves and their class.

But I would prefer that the Federal Reserve raise interest rates in September. At least if they screw up and do throw the economy into a tailspin, there will be time to fix their mess before the 2016 election. I would rather that the Fed decide that if it doesn’t raise interest rates by the end of this year, that it won’t do it for the first three quarters of 2016. Because we know that if the Fed tanks the economy next year, it will result in President Bush or President Walker or even President Trump.

Since at least 1976, the performance of the US economy for the first nine months of the presidential election year has been the single biggest factor in determining who becomes president. It’s depressing. It doesn’t matter what the cause is. For example, the economic collapse of 2008 was not Bush’s fault, but the fact that he was in power when it happened meant that John McCain had basically no chance of becoming president. Or it worked to liberals’ benefit in that case. But I would hate for the Supreme Court to become overloaded with extremists on the right just because Janet Yellen doesn’t have quite as good a grip on the economy as she thinks she does.

Of course, it is almost inconceivable that the economy will grow enough over the next year that inflation actually becomes a problem. Currently, the employment to population ratio for prime age workers (age 25-54) is 3.2 percentage points below its pre-crisis level. It is 4.8 percentage points below it’s Clinton level peak when the inflation rate was roughly 3%. It is even 3.2 percentage points below its’ Reagan-era peak when the inflation rate was 5%, and people thought that was fine. The the economy is actually still really depressed regardless of what the U-3 rate says.

But the truth is that there aren’t a bunch of unemployed people talking to Yellen and her minions. They are only talking to really rich people who are not happy that bonds aren’t paying as much as they want. And so there is constant pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates, even though clearly, the right thing to do is to wait until after the next election. And maybe that will happen. We’ll see. But Yellen seems to have been itching to raise interest rates for the past year. And the urge only gets stronger.