I’ve been a reader and, frankly, fan of P M Carpenter for a long time. But lately, I wonder about him. I’ve noticed that a lot of liberal bloggers seem to be unable to see reality when it comes to their pick for the Democratic presidential nomination. I suppose there is some of that with me too. I’ve defended my personal choice: Bernie Sanders. But I’ve also been clear that I think he has a relatively low ceiling of support. I hope I’m wrong, but that seems to be the case. Maybe it is because I rather like backing losers, but I’m certainly not going to make up stories about how Sanders is going to win the nomination, become president, and end up the first man over 70 on the moon.

For a while, it’s been apparent that Carpenter is a supporter of Joe Biden. That’s fine. As should be clear to everyone, Democrats are very fond of all of them: Clinton, Biden, and Sanders. I really like Biden and as I’ve said publicly many times before: he’s the best retail politician around — distinctly better than Bill Clinton, who is no slouch. But Carpenter recently published, My Biden Scenario. And in it, he looks at — Wait for it! — approval ratings. What’s more, he looks at approval ratings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Ugh!

My political science professor used to talk about “yellow dog” districts where you could run a yellow dog and as long as she was a Democrat, she’d win. Well, that is akin to the way I see the 2016 election. As long as the economy continues to grow, it won’t matter who the Democrats run and even more, it won’t matter who the Republicans run, the Democrats will keep the White House. This may explain why I don’t much care who gets nominated. I have my choice, but the others are fine.

My liberal colleagues seem to be so concerned about who gets nominated because they don’t believe what I do about the economic fundamentals of presidential elections. I’ve never gotten the impression that Carpenter hates Hillary Clinton. I assume that he will happily vote for her in the general election. It is all about vague notion of electability. But even with that, does it make any sense to talk about favorability ratings between an announced candidate and a vice-president who no one is paying attention to? Clinton’s favorability rating was sky high before she started running.

Of course, Carpenter is no fool. He realizes that Biden’s approval rating will go down after him announcement. But he piles so much hope on top of this as to make it a useless analysis. In his speculation, Clinton’s approval rating will continue to go down. But will it? I mean, her husband had terrible approval numbers before he didn’t. As all these fake scandals move to the background, her numbers are likely to improve. But regardless, Carpenter is looking at the two states that Sanders is hammering on. And most national polls that include Biden show Clinton with a clear lead with Sanders and Biden a distant second and third.

As I said, I really don’t care. But I also don’t think that the Democratic nomination contest needs Joe Biden. I’m looking forward to the debates, which I think will be good — and substantive. If Biden joins in, they will be that much better. But approval ratings? In Iowa and New Hampshire? I love P M Carpenter’s work, but he’s reaching further than the minions.

Last week, USA Today published an article, Report: More Than Half of Immigrants on Welfare. When I first saw that, I scoffed. The truth is that almost all Americans are on welfare. So I was sure that the “report” didn’t take the mortgage interest deduction into account. I was sure that they were using the standard and incorrect definition of welfare as direct aid — the definition that just so happens to make the poor look bad and the rich look good. Funny that!

But there was some push-back on the “report.” On the left, FAIR wrote, USA Today Provides a Platform for Anti-Immigration Think Tank’s Flawed Study. And on the right, the Cato Institute reported, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Report Exaggerates Immigrant Welfare Use. It turns out it was a typical “study” in which the conclusion was predetermined and they just played around with the data to find a way to justify it.

In particular, they looked at “immigrant-headed households.” This is a way of inflating the numbers, because children are very often US citizens. The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of welfare is not available to immigrants. Take, for example, Obamacare. But USA Today couldn’t even keep this distinction clear; it used “immigrant” and “immigrant-headed household” interchangably. So even if you accept the study as valid, the reporting by USA Today was not.

In addition to this problem, the fraction of households getting welfare does not mean much. If one immigrant-headed household has a (US citizen) child who gets free milk at school, is that equivalent to a non-immigrant-headed household that gets a couple thousand dollars per month from disability? As FAIR noted, “CIS does not provide a comparison of the cost of welfare going to immigrant and non-immigrant households — presumably because such a comparison would have weakened its anti-immigrant case.”

So what exactly is the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)? Well, it certainly isn’t a group that objectively studies immigration. It is a fanatical anti-immigration group that puts out faux-studies for propaganda purposes. (This is distinct from Cato that does real studies, and if they don’t further the libertarian causes, they are simply buried.) In 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote, “CIS was started in 1985 by a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton — a man known for his racist statements about Latinos, his decades-long flirtation with white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, and his publication of ugly racist materials.” And last year, The Daily Beast described the group as “the immigration false-fact think tank.”

But in another FAIR article, Ben Norton looked at the wider context of all this, Ignoring the Cause of Welfare: Not Laziness but Low Wages. He pointed out that the mainstream press tend to use “welfare recipient” and “freeloader” interchangeably. At one time, that might have been understandable. But there has been excessive coverage — in the mainstream press itself — of all the welfare that workers qualify for because wages are so low. Consider this, “Research conducted by the University of California at Berkeley shows that 73 percent of Americans who receive welfare are members of working families.”

It turns out that immigrants actually work more than native born Americans. What more — and I find this shocking — “American Immigration Council found that immigrants spend 45 times more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.” This is because undocumented immigrants have taxes automatically taken out of their paychecks, even though they are not allowed to benefit from most government programs. In addition, at the state level, they pay an average of 8% of their income in taxes; this is substantially higher than the 5.4% that is paid by the top 1%.

Here is the bottom line:

But it is so much easier, and so much more pleasant for the power elite, to pretend that people are poor because they won’t work. It would upset our whole way of thinking if we had to grapple with the idea that our system is unfair and that for decades, we’ve been blaming the victims.

Paul Krugman wrote a recent post, Jeb The Unready. And he started with some great sarcasm, “I can’t help noticing that Jeb Bush has now come out with the highly original proposal that we give rich people and corporations big tax cuts.” And then he marveled at the fact that Bush seems to think that he can jump-start his campaign by appealing to Stephen Moore and other big promoters of supply side economics. I think it is fair to say that people like Bush and Trump really do live in an alternate reality. They really don’t know how the other 99.9% live.

Let’s think about this for a while. One thing I hear from conservatives all the time is the Democrats have no new ideas whereas they are just bursting with them. Well, when they do burst with them, two things become clear. First, they are clever — but still often good — ideas. But they have to be clever, because the ideological base of the Republican Party forbids doing obvious things that will work. Second, the Republican Party as a whole will never back these ideas. So the “great” and “new” Republican ideas are constrained by ideology, but it still isn’t enough to make large numbers of Republicans support them.

As a result of this, Republicans stick with the tried and true. Reagan cut taxes, so let’s cut taxes! Reagan cut aid to the poor, so let’s cut aid to the poor! Reagan greatly increased corporate welfare, so let’s increase corporate welfare! And that’s all we are getting from Jeb Bush: more supply side economic. That is the idea that if we give more money to the rich, they will invest and create jobs. We’ve been doing it for forty years. It has been completely demolished as a policy idea. It doesn’t work. But still Bush is pushing it.

But here’s the thing: the American people don’t buy it. The Republicans have been great at destroying confidence in the government. But the good side of that is that people are especially skeptical of Republican economic ideas. That’s what happened in 2005 when the newly re-elected George W Bush decided what the people really wanted was for the government to privatize Social Security. Bush pushed hard on that and the people pushed back even harder. They are used to being conned — especially by Republicans.

This is not to say that Republicans won’t get elected and then implement supply side tax cuts. But it does mean that the people will not elect Republicans because they are promising economic growth through the magic of tax cuts for the rich and corporations. I have given up hoping that the electorate will ever pay enough attention to vote against the Republicans for this reason. Ted McLaughlin recently provided a good rundown of the fact that, Democratic Presidents Are Best For Jobs and the Economy.

Does Jeb Bush really think that hauling out the old supply side economics — which is being hocked by every candidate except for Trump — is going to jump-start his campaign? I doubt it. I suspect he is just signaling to the power elite that they shouldn’t give up on him and that they (and not he) need to find a way of getting rid of Trump. After all, their tax cuts depend upon it.

While I was spending a very hot weekend afternoon applying water sealant to the deck of a different family member, my father and older sister were sitting close by watching. Normally, this is a job I do with my sister, but she is recuperating from surgery. And my father was just smart enough not to get involved. But I heard them talking about violence and guns, and that is never a good thing. I’m interested in the subjects, but when people casually talk about them, ignorance and stupidity is sure to follow.

My sister said that her husband always says that if everyone knew that everyone else had a gun, there would be a lot less violence. That was too much for me to let pass, so I noted that it really wasn’t true. Areas with a lot of guns often have very high homicide rates and that the wild west, while hardly the violent free for all that many people think, was hardly a bastion of peace. Ultimately, my greatest issue with easy gun availability is with regards to suicide. It’s just too easy for people to kill themselves with guns without thinking. This is one reason why gun purchase waiting periods are a great thing.

My point here is not about guns at all. My point is that people in casual conversations filled with “common sense” are very often completely wrong, and when not, they greatly simplify complicated issues. It’s part of social bonding. We tell each other the things that we all “know,” so as to signify to everyone that we are of the same tribe. That’s a good thing. Humans are social animals and its either this or sniffing each others’ butts. But there are better and worse ways to bond and I don’t think simplistic myths about guns and violence represent one of the better ones.

Society needs people like me. And trust me: I know how people see me from the outside. We live in a society that fetishizes certainty because it sees it as a source of strength. Sometimes it is. My ability to consider all sides of an issue and endless possible contingencies really can paralyze me. It’s good to have people around who are good at taking in information and making a decision. But as we see in politics, this is not usually the way things work. Instead, it is like my father and sister chatting. George W Bush decided he was going to war with Iraq and then he set about justifying that. This is, of course, exactly backwards from the way it ought to work.

Because I am smart and (frankly) make a fetish out of knowing stuff for no real reason, a lot of people come to me with questions. And if they really want an answer, they are generally very disappointed. Because I’m not big on simple answers. “Yes” and “no” are two of my least favorite words in the English language. I prefer to tell you that on the one hand there is something and on the other hand there is something and on the third hand there is something — like some hyper-discursive blue-skinned Hindu deity. But this is what you get when you decide to think seriously about things.

The funny thing is that I am a prototypical academic. And you would think with so much larger a share of people with college educations, that there would be a whole lot more people like me. But it just isn’t true. In fact, there may be less. And I think that is really the outcome of what William Deresiewicz wrote about in, The Neoliberal Arts. By turning higher education into job training, we’ve greatly endangered our entire democracy.

Over the weekend, I was with my nephew who is a social worker. He works with a lot of people on disability — especially for mental problems. And he mentioned that people who had committed felonies in California could not vote. That came as a surprise to me. I told him that I had spent more time going over the California voter registration form than any sane man would. And I thought I would know. My understanding was that as long as a felon was not under state care (prison, parole, or probation), she could vote. He responded that he had read it somewhere, but he was glad I countered him on it because he wasn’t sure.

It turns out that I was wrong — but only because I was being too harsh. According to Nonprofit VOTE’s Voting as an Ex-Offender, page, in California:

The truth is that it is generally possible for ex-felons to vote, although some states make it really hard. But before we get to them, let’s discuss the way that our voting system should work. In Maine and Vermont even people in prison vote. I know that this idea is shocking to many people. Think about my nephew for a moment: he’s a social worker who is studying criminal justice and even he had fallen into the trap of thinking the default was that ex-felons couldn’t vote.

There is a widely held belief that not only can ex-felons not vote, but that they shouldn’t be able to vote. And that goes along with our incredibly punitive society. Somehow, throwing a woman in jail for a decade because she was caught with a small amount of cannabis in Florida is not enough. She also has to be effectively forbidden from ever having a good job again. She can’t be allowed on public assistance. And she can never vote again. It’s just madness, and, I think, indicative of just what a horrible people we are.

But there are a whole lot of states where your past doesn’t matter. If you are out of prison, you can vote. These include:

It’s interesting that even in a number of conservative western states, we get more liberal policy. I think this is part of the tradition of the west: people make mistakes but they should be allowed to get on their their lives. Interestingly, it is only liberal states who don’t let parolees vote: California, Colorado, Connecticut, and New York. That’s actually not a good idea. Voting is one of the ways that you welcome a person back into polite society. A parole officer could demand that the parolee register and vote.

Next we get to the states where the ex-felon has to be totally free of the system. I think this is bad, but acceptable:

And now we get to some really punitive and vile states. But it gets complicated. And that’s part of the problem. None of these states automatically give back voting rights. Here is a list of the states where you can get your voting rights back as long as you didn’t commit certain felonies:

In general, those felonies are pretty bad: murder, rape, etc. But not always. There are things like bribery and voter fraud. And Mississippi is totally bizarre. They have 21 specific crimes that stop you have getting your voting rights back. Some of them are fairly minor like check fraud. But here’s the weird part: if you weren’t convicted of one of these felonies, you can vote while in jail. But in all these states, ex-felons have to fill out paper work and run the bureaucratic gauntlet and pay fees.

The last states are just completely vile: Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia. In these states (and the previous ones if you have committed the wrong kind of felony), you have to file and individual petition on get a pardon from the governor. And in general, you have to wait years before you can even apply (also true of some of the previous group).

The system is terrible. For one thing, where’s the equal treatment in this? Ex-felon Floridians can’t vote in a presidential election but ex-felon Californians can? That isn’t fair. We really do need a constitutional right to vote.