On Tuesday at Vox, Ezra Klein wrote, Why Marco Rubio Is Insisting That His Massive Tax Cuts Will Pay for Themselves, Explained. Of course, you don’t need to read the article to know the answer. Anyone around here knows the claim: his tax cuts will unleash the economy and cause such an increase in tax revenues, that the tax cuts will pay for themselves. This is literally the idea of every major Republican politician since at least late 1980. This is especially funny considering that Rubio pushes this image of himself as the hip-hop loving young guy with the new ideas.

What’s really bothersome is that Rubio now has one of these fake think tanks that spit out “studies” that prove that conservative policy would be just awesome. In this case, it is the Tax Foundation, which Klein stated charitably, “It produces research, churns out charts and tables, and scores tax plans, but it’s motivated by an anti-tax agenda.” Not that it is any worse than the Cato Institute, but let’s be clear: it is an organization that will only ever produce ideologically appropriate studies. In other words, it isn’t in the truth business; it is in the dogma justification business.

So now Rubio can go on television and not worry. Anytime someone questions him about his ludicrous tax plan, he can say, “The Tax Foundation has scored my budget and finds that it will create surpluses. Also: ponies for all good boys and girls!” The Tax Foundation even describes itself as “nonpartisan.” That, of course, means nothing at all, other than that they don’t specifically align themselves with the Republican Party. Of the three people on their board of directors that I can find out information about, all are Republicans. Conservative hack Glenn Hubbard used to be on its board. It’s a conservative group with a very big ax to grind.

This wouldn’t be a problem if we have an actual free and independent press that took its job seriously. But instead, when we get a discussion of it at all, it will be of the typical form, “The Tax Policy Center says Rubio’s plan will create a huge budget deficit — just like all the previous similar plans have; but the Tax Foundation says it will create surpluses and ponies; who can say which is right?!” And it is this kind of reporting that allows Republicans to continue to claim that their tax cuts pay for themselves after decades of false promises to do so.

You have to give the Republican Party credit. They were the first to see that we live in a postmodern world. They saw that you could just lie and the press would frame at opinion. Global Warming isn’t a matter of science, but rather a matter of opinion. Is Planned Parenthood extracting viable fetuses from mothers and then extracting their brains while they are alive? It’s a matter of opinion! I’ve long thought that we get the government we deserve. But I’m beginning to think that’s wrong. We get a truly dysfunctional government because our news outlets have decided that their job is to entertain rather than inform. Marco Rubio is the creation of our media system.

Matt Taibbi wrote a really interesting article last week, Wells Fargo’s Master Spin Job. It’s about this program that Wells Fargo has started, HomeLIFT. In it, qualified homeowners will be given $15,000 for a down payment on a house. So in the Detroit area, Wells Fargo is putting $5.25 million dollars toward this program. Why such an exact figure? It turns out that this is the amount that the bank is required to give to the area. The money it is paying is punishment for wrongdoing, but politicians and reporters all over the nation are presenting it like it is a great act of kindness.

This is all about the robo-signing scandal of the last several years. “People all over the country found themselves booted out of their homes thanks to bogus affidavits signed by ‘vice presidents’ and ‘regional managers,’ who were often scraggly kids just out of college blindly signing hundreds of documents a day, if not more.” Wells Fargo was one of many banks caught doing this and was part of a $25 billion settlement. There are various parts to the settlement, and Wells Fargo figured out this great way to spin their punishment to make it look like they are the good guys.

Taibbi documented how in most cities, the press has just gone along with Well Fargo’s framing of the issue. KMOX wrote, “Local Companies Join Forces For Home Ownership.” That was about the HomeLIFT program in St Louis that was putting in $4.75 million, “Again, this was exactly the amount specified in the court settlement.” The same thing in Fresno, “The $7.5 million Fresno program was, again, exactly the amount mandated by the Westland settlement.” And when Taibbi confronted Wells Fargo, they said it was just an extension of its CityLIFT program. But then it turns out that CityLIFT was just another court mandated program because of Wells Fargo’s discriminatory loan practices.

But I was wondering about what this would all mean if Wells Fargo were doing this voluntarily. It wouldn’t make me feel good about it. It’s kind of like the guy who beats up his wife and then brings her flowers the next day. Sure, the flowers are nice, but they hardly make up for the beating. And it is only too clear that the flowers are a kind of bribe, “Forgive me because the most recent thing I did is nice.” It’s certain that the guy is going to beat up his wife again. And he knows that the flowers work just fine — and if they fail, perhaps some jewelry.

This program is not going to make up for all the people who were wrongly thrown out of their homes. It is just a marketing campaign. But that’s the really sick part of this whole thing: this part of the settlement was explicitly meant to be marketing, “The terms mandated that the bank spend $67 million on a series of measures to repair its reputation in communities hit the hardest by foreclosures and robo-signing.” Our “justice” system is making sure that people continue to trust the banks that it wouldn’t allow to fail back in 2008. It’s disgusting.

Recently, Donald Trump was on 60 Minutes. I watched parts of it and I agreed with a number of things he said. This was before his “tax reform” plan came out and he showed himself to be a really typical, boring Republican. But one of the things he talked about in the segment was NAFTA. He said, “It’s a disaster…” And Mark Thoma, decided to look into the question, Is Donald Trump Right to Call NAFTA a “Disaster”? As I’ve pointed out in the past, Thoma is no firebrand. He’s a careful, if liberal, economist. And so his conclusion is that it is complicated.

Fair enough. But the main claim that was made for NAFTA was that it was going to a boon for jobs. But what did we see? We saw the loss of “somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 to 700,000 jobs.” But to be fair, in a nation the size of ours, that isn’t a huge hit — between a quart and a half of a percent. But the point is that it was supposed to be a job creator. On the one thing that the deal sold as, NAFTA was indeed a disaster. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do.

The evidence for its impact on Mexico is not even great. Brad DeLong — who might be biased, since he worked on the deal — finds that it netted a million and a half jobs. Others claim less. And as Thoma pointed out, “But whatever the actual number, just like for the US, it’s also relatively small.” There was no economic boom in the region. And the reason for that is that China became a big deal so all those jobs that would have gone to Mexico went to China instead. That’s obviously bad for Mexico, but also bad for the US, because if the jobs had gone to Mexico, those workers would have bought a lot of stuff from America that the Chinese are not.

But I think that Thoma is being too kind. I don’t think that the point of NAFTA was ever to create jobs. It was designed to make it easier for rich people to screw over working people here in the United States. Well, that’s probably putting too negative a gloss on it. It was a way for the rich to enrich themselves even more. In other words, it was yet another government program designed to help out the people who least needed helping. The fact that those people saw greater profits by going to China hardly changes the dynamic.

And now we have the TPP. It’s a treaty that isn’t even about breaking down trade barriers. Most of the signatories already have low tariffs. The big thing in the agreement is intellectual property law, and these will put unheard of tariffs — hundreds and thousands of percent — on covered items. Is this going grow the economy? Is this going to create new jobs? One thing that NAFTA clearly did do was increase inequality. TPP will surely do the same thing. It will make the poor poorer. It will make the rich richer. But in the end, no in power will care, because they know they can always hire another lackey like Obama to push through the next trade deal.

NAFTA might not have been a disaster in a general sense. But it wasn’t a good thing. And we have responded to that by passing trade deal after trade deal. We don’t live in a democracy, my friends.