Yesterday, the CBO came out with an estimate of the effects that a rise in the minimum wage would have on the economy. They determined that an increase of the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would cause a range of effects on the economy from the loss of as many one million jobs to a gain of a small number of jobs. Their “most likely” estimate is a loss of a half million jobs or roughly 0.35% of all jobs. The estimate for a $9.00 per hour minimum wage was a loss of 100,000 jobs, or roughly 0.07% of all jobs. Not surprising, the Republicans have run with this. Raising the minimum wage is a job killer!

There are a number of things to note about this. First is that this is a small number of lost jobs. Second, the purpose of raising the minimum wage is not to create jobs, even though there is a decent amount of evidence that it would do that. The idea is to allow those who work to get paid a reasonable wage. The Republican argument that we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage is the same as the argument for getting rid of the minimum wage altogether. I realize libertarians would make that argument, but very few mainstream Republicans would. And remember: according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 58% of Republican voters want the minimum wage increased.

Jonathan Chait brings up an excellent point about this, The Congressional Budget Office and the Bizarre, Partisan Jobs Debate. He takes a minor swipe at liberals, “[T]he party accustomed to heeding its findings has had to painfully spin.” I don’t think that’s right, but that’s all he has to say about that side. Quite rightly he focuses on the hypocrisy of the Republicans who are only ever interested in job losses when they come from programs for the poorer classes.

The Republicans were eager to end extended unemployment benefits. The CBO says that cost the country 200,000 jobs alone. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus”) that Republicans claim did no good has increased employment today by between 100,000 and 800,000 jobs. And the Sequester that Republicans see as their greatest recent accomplishment has destroyed almost a million jobs with a range from a quarter million to a million and a half.

Add on to this all of the things that Republicans are not willing to do to create jobs and you get what you always get: a party that is focused exclusively on the rich. What I find amazing is that anyone listens to the Republicans on these matters. They are clearly disingenuous on matters of job creation. They don’t care at all about creating jobs. It is just a cudgel to use to argue for policies they do like: tax cuts for the rich, military spending, and cutting programs for the poor.

Over the years, I have written a lot about the corpse under the bed. For those of you who do not know it, it is the story of motel guests who complain about a bad order that is determined to be a dead body rotting under the bed. What’s sad about the story is that it isn’t a legend. It happens all the time. Here’s one from just last year, Police Arrest 40-Year-Old Connected to Suspicious Death at Hickory Motel. And each and every story sounds pretty much the same, “One guest at the motel described smelling a foul odor Thursday, but it wasn’t until lunchtime Friday that police got the 911 call…”

To me, these stories are about a fundamental problem in our society. People don’t stuff dead Senators under motel room mattresses. They stuff people who they think no one will miss. It makes me think of Matthew 25:40, “To the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.” Generally, the people who stuff bodies under beds are desperate and frightened people, but they are also serial killers. There is a larger indictment of society here.

Gawker reported last night, University of Chicago Student’s Body Found Decomposing in Dorm. It seems that 20-year-old Nicholas Barnes died in his dorm room over a week ago and just like the classic story, no one noticed until the smell of his rotting flesh started seeping out into the hall. This is, of course, very sad. A young man has died. But as a society, we should be ashamed that it took a bad smell to notice.

According to CBS News, Barnes was a Germanic Studies major who spent last fall in Austria. It quotes Dean of Students Susan Art, “Nick will be painfully missed. He was an excellent student, admired by faculty and peers alike.” I don’t doubt that this is true. And that makes it all the worse.

In our society, someone can be well liked with lots of what passes for friends now days. But when they disappear for a week, no one notices. The modern world allows us to have social connections that are a mile wide and an inch deep.

I used to just worry that as a society we were dividing into the worthy and the unworthy. But the death of Nicholas Barnes reminds me that our problems are much deeper than even that. We are becoming a society of individuals who only know how to interact in the most facile ways. Oh, you were sick? I just thought he decided to leave Twitter! I really question whether these are the kinds of lives we want to lead. But habit is a powerful thing. And we have developed some very bad habits.

Thomas Frank is back with a great article at Salon, The Matter With Kansas Now: The Tea Party, the 1 Percent and Delusional Democrats. It is the angriest I have ever seen from Frank. He argues that the pseudo-populism of the Republican base did not come about in a vacuum. The base really is angry at the elites of the country, but while the Republicans appealed to that in the most disingenuous way, the Democrats did nothing.

The only word I disagree with is “nothing.” The Democrats actively pushed the social conservatives away by turning into a socially liberal but economically conservative party. As a result, the social conservatives had no choice but to go with the Republicans. They could either get social conservatism with economic elitism from the Republicans, or social liberalism with economic elitism from the Democrats. At the same time, economic liberals have been effectively demoralized. They will vote for the Democratic Party, but they are none too excited about it.

Frank sums up what happened pretty well:

The problem is that being wrong hasn’t changed them. After the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we needed up with yet another New Democrat who on economic issues is only distinguished from the Republicans in being slightly less eager to enact more neoliberal policies. It almost makes me think there was a conspiracy. The power elite took control of both parties so that we would have no real choice on economic issues. Then they made the Republicans so crazy on social issues that liberals dare not go to a third party for fear that it would cause a Republican to win. In this conspiracy theory, Ralph Nader would be key.

Of course, we need no conspiracy. It is simply that money is extremely important in politics. Politicians have to appeal to those who have money. They do it by giving them the rich policies that they want. Frank’s solution is for the Democratic Party to make a populist turn on economic issues. But the fundamentals of politics push against that. We see that right now in the jockeying for the Democratic presidential nomination. The reason that everyone thinks Clinton is unbeatable is only partly because of her poll numbers. The bigger issue is that she will be a fundraising juggernaut. And I don’t think anyone expects that as president she will be anything much different from her husband or Obama. Remember: Obama got lots of little donations, but he’s governed entirely in the interests of his big donors.

I expect for this to continue on for the rest of my life. As it is, in the mainstream press “liberalism” has been redefined to mean what I call “social liberalism.” But there is no doubt that the Democratic Party is better on economic issues than the Republican Party. The Republicans want to makes things far worse while the Democrats want to limit how fast things get far worse. But Thomas Frank is right: even on the level of electoral politics, it is likely that the Democrats will lose. There are too many people who are angry and if the Democrats don’t appeal to that on a rational level, the Republicans will on an irrational level.

Via Metro Hussein Jerry:

Well, it’s President’s Day. But according to the federal government, it isn’t; it is instead Washington’s Birthday. I don’t especially like that. The best thing you can say about our first president is that he wasn’t ambitious. Many people (most notably John Adams) wanted to form a native aristocracy. Luckily, we didn’t get that explicitly in our politics, but we certainly got it implicitly in our society generally. So maybe the country should celebrate Washington, but you will forgive me if I don’t.

Washington is generally considered our richest president (but wait a few years and I’m sure that this will change as income inequality gets ever worse). Like almost all rich people everywhere, he was not rich through work but through owning. And in his case, what he owned were human beings. For 200 years, people have been trying to make out that Washington was against slavery. This is almost entirely by cherry picking statements he made. Any non-psychopath who is doing something evil will occasionally have bouts of moralizing.

What’s more, Washington never seemed to have any problems with slavery as long as his slave population was young and profitable. As they got older, they were less profitable. So as Washington started have economic problems with his slave population, his moral reasoning kicked in. “These slaves are costing me money… And you know, slavery is wrong!” And just look at his slave holding. He started at the age of 11 with ten slaves. And he actively acquired them as he got older, ending with 317.

According to a review of Joseph J Ellis’ His Excellency: George Washington, “He concluded that slavery was economically inefficient and that people who were compelled to work would never work hard.” You can just imagine the scene. Washington is looking out the window of his mansion sipping tea. He sees the slaves working in the tobacco fields and thinks, “If only those slaves worked harder, slavery would be a whole lot more morally defensible!”

When Washington was president, he wanted to bring some slaves to work from him at the President’s House in Philadelphia. The problem was that if a slave was in the state for more than six months, he was automatically freed. So Washington just cycled the slaves so they never spent six month continuously at the President’s House. What a great guy, huh?!

One slave working at the President’s House, Oney Judge, escaped. That didn’t please the Washingtons. They spent years trying to steal her back. In The Pennsylvania Gazette advertisement of reward for her capture, they mentioned that they didn’t know what she was wearing. This was true, “As there was no suspicion of her going off, nor no provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone, or fully, what her design is…” Yeah, what could have caused her to escape?!

The Washingtons never got Judge back. She died in New Hampshire at the age of 75—older than either of the Washingtons. George Washington did free his slaves in his will. So that’s something. But it is interesting that Judge was one of the Washingtons’ dower slaves who ultimately belonged to the Custis Estate. So she would never have been freed.

Afterword

If Washington had wanted to free the dower slaves (there were 154 at the time of his death), he could have brought them to Pennsylvania for six months. Of course, that would have required him to lose some of his wealth while he was alive. Anyway, they were all getting such a great deal being one of his slaves. All that “hardly working” and free room and board! When you look at it properly, George Washington was doing a great service to his slaves. And I’m sure he thought that most of the time.