Regular readers know that I hate Ted Nugent. It is mostly just that he has an easy partisanship that is pure tribal identity. But there are so many facets to what is vile about him. And one thing that really bugs me is that he can make death threats regarding the president and nothing happens to him. Back in 2007 he said, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” And then in 2012 he said, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” That is a clear threat. But nothing happens to him because he’s white and rich.

Let me be clear: I think he should be allowed to say such things. I don’t think they mean anything. I do think they coarsen political debate. And they do have bad effects on people who are even more unstable than Nugent. But I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist. Regardless, I don’t see that the state’s interest in protecting individuals comes anywhere near its interest in allowing for the free exchange of ideas. I certainly think that Nugent and others should be socially ostracized. The fact that Mike Huckabee is a friend of his should make Huckabee unqualified for the presidency. But we all know that the right wing of this country is crazy, so clearly, I am asking for too much.

The problem is that if Ted Nugent were a Muslim with the same statements, he would have spent years in jail — twice. And all that says is that America has free speech as long as the speech is popular enough. And that means that we don’t actually have free speech. I am in the situation where the things I want to say are clearly inside the range of acceptable speech. But that’s hardly surprising. I’m a white male who grew up in the middle class. I don’t stray too far from that. I am the kind of liberal that such a background creates. So the fact that I feel unconstrained, means absolutely nothing.

The issue isn’t confined to the United States, of course. It is a problem in the west generally. Everywhere that countries congratulate themselves on their embrace of free speech, you will actually find incredible hypocrisy. This was well on display early this year with all the “Je Suis Charlie” protests. At the same time people were marching in the streets for “free speech,” the French government was going after a comedian. It certainly wasn’t because he was offensive. After all, wasn’t that what everyone was marching for?! It was rather because he was offending the wrong people. You see, Charlie Hebdo was offending Muslims, and the comedian was a Muslim offending non-Muslims.

Now we have another example, in the UK this time, A Quiz for the West’s Great Free Speech Advocates and Supporters of Anjem Choudary’s Arrest. It does indeed seem that Anjem Choudary is a vile guy. But then so are Nazis and Klansmen. But I support their rights too. In the article, Glenn Greenwald points out the ridiculous double standard that we commonly use in the west. Choudary gives speeches saying that he supports the Islamic State. Thus, the UK government claims that this is inciting violence. Okay. But so is the following that never got anyone arrested:

Greenwald provides many other examples. But it’s clear. This is just a double standard. It’s like all the FBI “sting” operations where the FBI takes mentally unstable Muslims and gets them to pretend to start a jihad. I wonder what would happen if the FBI had similar “sting” operations with unstable Ted Nugent fans. But we’ll never know, because the FBI would never do that. Because Muslims are the enemy. Not Ted Nugent or Sarah Palin fans. And not Alex Jones, whose listeners have been incited to think that Jade Helm 15 is an existential threat to America. Because we are hypocrites. Because we do not have free speech.

Some conservative ideas are bad like raising the retirement age. It is just a way of cutting social security benefits without actually saying so. And given that the poor don’t live as long as the rich, it is an extremely regressive way of cutting social security. It would be far more fair to just cut how much money people get. But that would be admitting that it is a cut. Obviously, we need to call this sort of thing out. Delaying retirement by two years is what all the Republican candidates (except Trump) want to do. But at least it would save money.

But there is a whole other level of wrongness. I thought Chris Christie put out the proposal very well at last Thursday’s debate. After saying that we must “first” raise the retirement age because, hey, everyone’s doing it, he said, “Secondly, we would [means] test Social Security for those who are making over $200,000 dollars a year in retirement income, and have $4 to $5 million dollars in liquid assets saved.” This is what passes for hard nosed thinking in the Republican Party. It sounds good because obviously such people wouldn’t be hurt. And it seems to say, “See: I’m going after the rich!” But it really doesn’t.

Look at the numbers he’s proposed. Just making a quarter million dollars per year isn’t enough to make someone too rich to need Social Security. They must also have $4 million is liquid assets. So supposed you just bought Bill Gate’s $63 million mansion. So you are only left with three and a half million dollars in cash. And you only get about a million per year in retirement income. Then don’t worry, you are still going to get your $2,663 check every month. Because Chris Christie isn’t a monster! Clearly, Christie has put together his plan so it won’t actually apply to anyone, but it sounds like he’s coming down hard on the rich.

But the worst thing about this plan is that even if it were real, it is meaningless. Dean Baker has been writing about this for years. Unless we want to eliminate Social Security for everyone with retirement benefits of $40,000 per year and more, there really is no savings. All it would do is make the accounting more difficult (something that Republicans are supposedly against) and make people less inclined to support the program (something that Republicans are very keen for). Even if Christie set a single standard of $200,000, it would be meaningless.

There are two parts of Social Security. The “pay in” is highly regressive — mostly between the upper class (who make around $100,000) per year, and the truly rich who make many hundreds of thousands or more. But it is nonetheless true that the upper class pay a lot of money into social security. The “pay out” is far more egalitarian. So there is money to be gained by soaking the rich — but it isn’t on the “pay out” side; it is on the “pay in” side. Of course, no conservative is willing to eliminate the payroll tax cap — or even increase it. That actually would cause a little pain for the rich, so it is not even discussed.

I don’t think this is a conspiracy. For one thing, I don’t think that Chris Christie is smart enough to say to his people, “I want to propose increasing the retirement age, which is a regressive benefit cut; what can I come up with that makes it looks like I’m hurting the rich too, but which doesn’t actually hurt the rich?” But I do think that people like Christie have advisers who know that anything at all is okay as long as it doesn’t hurt the rich. So if Christie ever got it into his head to raise the payroll tax cap, there would be someone close by to explain that he can’t do that. The problem is more systemic: the Republicans are in the can for the rich. And that’s the only reason they exist.

Dan Balz is the very definition of a Villager. The only time I’ve written about him was last year when he was making the same old, tired argument that the Republicans needed to pass immigration reform in order to reach out to the Latino community. I’ve long argued that it makes no sense for the Republicans to pass immigration reform, given that their attitude is, “Once we do this for you, it’s over! Don’t expect anything else!” But people like Balz think that immigration reform is critical for the same reason that all other Villagers do: because its what “everyone else” thinks.

Well, over the weekend, I saw a new Balz article, GOP Debate Contenders Give Democrats Reason to Worry. His main claim is that Democrats are hoping that Trump becomes the nominee so they will have an easy election. While it is true that few Democrats would mind that outcome, I do not know of a single Democrat who thinks that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. What’s more, have we heard Clinton or Sanders attacking Trump? Not at all. Everyone still thinks the eventual nominee will be Bush or Walker or maybe Rubio. But that’s the think with Villagers: they don’t let facts stand in the way of whatever narrative they’ve decided to push.

According to Blaz, in private, Democrats don’t feel as good about running against Rubio as they do about running against Trump. Oh, what a surprise! Does that mean that any Democrats are seriously worried about running against Marco Rubio? But Blaz says that Rubio “declared forcefully early in the debate that he would present the starkest future-vs.-past contrast to Clinton.” This is just repeating Rubio’s own claims. In truth, Rubio is pushing exactly the same supply side policies that every Republican since Reagan has. There is nothing new about what Rubio is pushing.

He also went on to talk about Scott Walker. But it was curious. Check this out, “He has been a divisive leader in Wisconsin, but he has the potential to unite the establishment and tea party wings of the Republican Party…” All that means is that Walker could get the Republican presidential nomination. It says nothing at all about how that might make him a particularly impressive general election candidate. So Democrats should worry why, exactly? There really is nothing behind the claim. The article reads like it was based on a press release from Reince Priebus.

But I fear the article also comes from the Clinton haters. Democrats are “nervous about Clinton.” Republicans could “mount a stiff challenge” to “a vulnerable” Clinton. Why are people nervous? How exactly is she vulnerable? Is she having an affair with her videographer? Balz doesn’t say, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have any reasons at all. Partisans are always worried that the person who runs is going to turn out to be a problem. But in Clinton’s case, we have two advantages. First, her life has been so picked over that it’s hard to believe that there is any major scandal lurking. Second, we know that she will fight back at least as hard as her husband did.

It boggles my mind that people like Dan Balz get paid large amounts of money to peddle this nonsense. It’s not just that it’s wrong. It is that it is predictable. Of course some Villager was going to write a story about how Thursday’s debate spelled trouble for Hillary Clinton specifically and the Democratic Party generally. That was a given long before the debate.

If you listen to economists and politicians — especially those on the right — you will hear them talk excessively about economic growth. Jeb Bush recently got a lot of attention by claiming that he would increase growth to 4% — partly by making people work longer hours. That was silly, but not any more so than the standard argument about economic growth. When Republicans are asked how they will reduce inequality, they cast aside things like the minimum wage and labor unions. Instead, they push one thing and one thing only, “We need to increase economic growth so that everyone does better!” The problem is that this just isn’t the way the economy has worked for the past 40 years.

I wrote about this issue quite explicitly recently, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. From the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, wages increased right along with productivity. But since that time, the two things have become uncoupled. Wages have been basically stagnant, while productivity has continued upward. My point was and still is that productivity doesn’t matter in the least so long as we have an economy in which all the gains go to the people at the top. But the truth is that conservatives refuse to engage with this fact.

Last week at The Fiscal Times, David Dayen wrote about another side of this issue, Why Conservatives Are So Desperate to Debunk One Hillary Clinton Chart. What he is talking about is a concerted effort among conservative economists to claim that, “If only you look at the data correctly, you will see that workers have done great!” But they haven’t. And many mainstream economists have been all over this. Mark Thoma has highlighted a lot of them over at his blog, Economist’s View. But here is the chart — it ain’t complicated:

A good example of how conservatives are trying to deny this reality comes from Harvard economist Robert Lawrence. He argued that you couldn’t just look at workers. So they threw in the management class. Obviously, this is begging the question. Why not throw in every person? Then, by definition, there would be no inequality. What Lawrence has done is to get rid of the median income and replace it with an average income. The difference is huge. And as Dayen pointed out: the fact that the average and median are so different is itself an indication of a large amount of inequality, “Using average rather than median compensation is like taking the average salary of five workers in a room when one of them is Bill Gates. The average salary will look pretty robust even if the other four workers in that room are struggling.”

But even with that adjustment, Lawrence only managed to make up part of the difference. So he was forced to look at total compensation and fiddle with different inflation indices — all in a totally disingenuous way. This is just what Christian apologist William Lane Craig does: start with the conclusion and work backwards. I’ve written about this a lot. Lawrence started with the idea that workers are doing just great and he cobbled together an argument to prove it.

Dayen’s article started with a anecdote, that I thought was very telling:

Pretty much everything that was wrong with Clinton economics was the result of Robert Rubin. Still, he was ostensibly a liberal economist. But he “didn’t know” that wages and productivity had been decoupled. Economists are lost in their own models. American workers don’t need the chart to know that their lives as workers are not turning out the same as their parents’. But economists are locked into assumptions like “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Well, maybe in the mythical free market — but not in our political environment where the rich can buy special privileges. Luckily, a lot of economists are waking up. But the conservatives will hold onto this ideology forever — or at least until the economy falls apart.

John Whitehead wrote a very interesting article, Are All Tax Increases a Bad Thing? He started by quoting conservative economist Greg Mankiw who had written that he’s in favor of Pigovian taxes. These are taxes designed to correct for economic externalities. So, for example, a tax on lead pollution would deal with the fact that lead is toxic but that this fact is not included in its market price. But Mankiw claims that such tax increases can only be acceptable if they are revenue neutral. So if the lead tax raised a million dollars, other taxes would have to be reduced by a million dollars.

I have a major problem with this. (So does Whitehead, but that isn’t the focus of his article.) Is it the case that we should still have lead in gas, but that gas should be more expensive? Isn’t the remaining gas still spewing lead into the air and stunting the brain development of children? Doesn’t it make sense to use that money to keep children away from lead filled air? Or to encourage development of non-lead alternatives? Why is it that taxes must stay exactly the same other than the fact that Mankiw ultimately believes that taxes can only ever go in one direction: down?

One reason, I think, is that this is all part of a cunning conservative plan. Taxes on consumer products fall most harshly on the poor. The rich don’t use proportionally more gas than the poor. So the poor will end up paying a far higher percentage of their incomes on any new Pigovian taxes. But given that our existing tax system is barely progressive, we can depend upon the offsetting tax cuts going mostly to the rich. Thus: what Mankiw is advocating is for taxes to go down on the rich and up on the poor. What a surprise!

But Mankiw wasn’t happy with just proposing a tax system that does exactly what he is always in favor of. He had to use it to attack liberals. It’s funny that he provides a value judgement that he thinks is some kind of law of physics: increasing taxes must be offset with decreasing taxes. Therefore, the liberals who don’t want to do this are irrational or providing a “stalking horse for a broader, big-government agenda.” But given that the taxes will not be increased on the same people that the taxes will be decreased on, this is not valid. If it is the case that the poor (as usual) are going to get screwed, then a truly fair system would be to give some of the tax savings to them — or design the tax such that it doesn’t shift income from one class to another.

Whitehead brought up another aspect of this. Conservatives might be concerned that liberals just want to increase tax revenues. (But it is ridiculous to say that liberals want big government.) Just the same, liberals are very right to be concerned that conservatives will make this deal, and then later eliminate the tax increase. But is that really what Mankiw has in mind? Well, he’s a very smart guy. And given he’s pushing a system that clearly shifts the tax burden down the economic ladder, I can only assume that he doesn’t mind the idea that the conservatives might be able to get rid of the Pigovian tax, and end up with lower overall taxes that fall more heavily on the poor. That’s pretty much the history of the modern conservative movement.

Afterword

I know in this article that I am very harsh on Mankiw. The problem is that this is not the first time I’ve written about him. This is the main thing that I associate with him:

This is what we are dealing with. In the economics profession, he has a great reputation. But I don’t care about that. He’s put himself out as a public intellectual. And as such, he talks about politics and uses his economics expertise in a very slippery way. I don’t doubt that he’s self-deluded. I’m sure that he thinks if only we did as he wishes, all would be well. But who cares? He’s still just an apologist for the power elite.