[One of the primary examples used in this article (quoted in our usual box) has been updated. One of the winners, Wallace Coulter, declined the award because the Foundation could not document that the work was done with government money. Having worked on numerous government contracts, I don’t think this matters in the least. Wallace Coulter’s career was subsidized by government contracts. The Foundation is claiming that they can’t say if he was working on that particular bit of research under a government contract. See the Update below if you want to look into this issue more. -FM]

Ben Florsheim wrote a really good article over at Washington Monthly last week, Against the “Golden Fleece” Award. For those of you who are not familiar with this award, it was created by Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire. He was something of a star among liberals. Not only did he have the right positions on pretty much all policy questions, he did not take money from Political Action Committees. Of course, it was the case that he was dearly loved in Wisconsin and didn’t need that money. But still: Proxmire was a good guy.

The one bad thing about him—and it is really bad—is his starting of the Golden Fleece Awards. And now, they are about the only thing people remember about him. Fully half of the Wikipedia page section on his legislative career is dedicated to the awards. And that is in a page that makes no mention of his refusal to take PAC money. The Golden Fleece Awards were given out for wasteful government spending. Unfortunately, the awards often came down to simply not understanding the need for basic scientific research. Everyone can have a good snicker about funding research on Monarch butterfly sex. But when species decline starts to affect agricultural yields, it stops being so funny.

In a sense, the award was the beginning of the modern wave of anti-intellectualism in American politics. Now it is common for (almost always) conservatives to claim that this or that research is a joke based only on its title. As Florsheim noted about the beginning of the award, “The NSF had spent $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to fund a study on the origins of love. Proxmire didn’t think that was a good use of $84,000. And thus, a new generation of headline-grabbing anti-intellectualism was ushered into an institution where such posturing had a storied legacy on which to build: Congress.”

As you can see in that example, there are big problems. First, $84,000 isn’t a lot of money. It is one thing to point out a useless weapons system that the military doesn’t even want. And Proxmire certainly did that. But more often, the target was small research contracts that, even if they were of dubious value (and that was rarely the case), didn’t save any real money. But even more important, it just added fuel to the widely held belief that the government wastes all kinds of money when that just isn’t the case.

Last year, a group of like minded people decided to push back on this nonsense by creating the Golden Goose Award. It is meant “to celebrate scientists whose federally funded research seemed odd or obscure but turned out to have a significant, positive impact on society.” Florsheim explains this years winners:

There is nothing more annoying to me (and probably most people) than people showing total ignorance while feeling superior. The very idea of the Golden Fleece Award is bad because it flatters people’s prejudices. There is certainly government waste, but the approach to it should be argument, not shame. All shame does is lower confidence in the government. The Golden Goose Award is a needed palliative, but I suspect it won’t be that effective. “Outrage: Government Funds Gila Monster Venom Study” sells newspapers. “Scientist Finds Treatment for Diabetes” doesn’t. But we’ve got to try.

Update (2 December 2013 5:56 pm)

A commenter noted that the Wallace Coulter Foundation declined the Golden Goose Award. He seemed to think this undercut the entire article, but to me it matters not at all. The Foundation declined the award, “While there can be no doubt as to the extraordinary achievements of Mr. Coulter, who discovered the Coulter Principle and invented the Coulter Counter, the Foundation determined that it could not be certain that federal funding was involved in the discovery of the Coulter Principle, which was the basis for the award.” Does this change the article. I will leave that to you to decide.

There isn’t a lot to do in an elevator so if you’re like me, you’ve read everything on the walls. And that means you have seen this: Otis Elevator Company. It was founded by Elisha Otis who was born on this day in 1811. He didn’t invent the elevator, of course. But he did invent a mechanism that stopped an elevator from falling when its hoisting cable fails.

The Croatian composer Ivan Zajc was born in 1832. Here is his To Battle, to Battle!

Writer of The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark was born in 1909.

Crime writer P. D. James is 93 today. Singer Tony Bennett is 87. I don’t know what it is about him, but I just don’t find his work that compelling. I mean, he’s a fine singer—just not very interesting. Actor Martin Sheen is 73. Martha Stewart is 72. And director John Landis is 63.

The day, however, belongs to the great Dolores del Rio who was born on this day in 1905. She was a huge star during the last days of the silent era and the early days of the talkies. She then went on to be an important part of the blossoming Mexican film industry in the 1940s and 1950s. I can’t find any good clips of her. Here is a bit of Bird of Paradise that will give you an idea:

Happy birthday Dolores del Rio!

The other day, I discovered that a BBC documentary series that I really liked was available online. It is Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War. What I didn’t know before watching the series was that people thought that The Iliad told the story of a real war. And indeed, 150 years ago, it was conventional wisdom that the Trojan War was nothing but myth. Then Heinrich Schliemann started digging and the rest is history. Well, mostly. There are still debates in the academic community. But I think we can reasonably say that there was a great city very much as Homer described it in the place Homer said that was destroyed when Homer claimed. Regardless, the more evidence that has been found, the more it looks like The Illiad is based upon a much earlier poem about the sack of that city.

I can’t help but contrast this to the historical Jesus. That is a much more slippery subject. As time has gone on, it looks less and less like Jesus was a real man. And I say this as one who wants to believe. I don’t mean that I’m a Christian, because as regular readers know, I am certainly not that. But the whole idea of him wandering around Palestine spreading the word and performing miracles (even if they were only stagecraft) is really compelling. What’s more, from a theological perspective, it doesn’t really matter if Jesus was a physical being. Certainly you can read all that Paul wrote without thinking that Jesus actually walked the earth. Although I will admit that most modern day Christians would find the idea hard to stomach, but that is more a reflection of the fact that religions tend to accrete beliefs that have nothing to do with the core of the faith. (And note: this is a big issue between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics claim that the church traditions are the church whereas the Protestants believe they can find the church right there in the Bible. I tend to side with the Catholics on this; just look at the fractured Protestant movement. But I really don’t have a dog in this fight!)

One of the reasons that I question the historicity of Jesus is the sheer volume of apocryphal Gospels. It seems everyone was writing them. And what they show is that the different factions were fighting for their version of the church. To me, it just stands to reason that people would start to say, “Jesus believed this and I know it because he said it.” But even more troubling is the archaeological evidence. The Gospels are filled with places that were populated when they were written, but were not when they are supposed to have taken place. Such anachronisms are of great concern. How can the title character be Jesus of Nazareth when Nazareth didn’t even exist then?

Let me be clear about my position. I don’t particularly have an opinion as to whether Jesus was a real human or not. What I do think is that if there was a real man, he has had so much mythology piled upon him that he has effectively disappeared. It seems to me that books like Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth are fool’s errands. All they really do is try to sift the truth from the myth. And in the end, what is the point? The religion is the religion. You either feel God in it or you don’t.

The Old Testament is very much like The Iliad. In fact, it is now widely believed that Moses is a fictional character. But more to the point, the Old Testament is a collection of stories from pre-history that were finally put down in print. But here we get to a critical difference between scripture and literature: it is all in the mind of the reader. They are both documents of what people were saying and listening to at a particular time. And they are great stories. But when people think they must be literally true, their thinking about them ossifies and they stop appreciating them for the great literary works that they are.

It would be terrible if people today worshiped Zeus and so thought that The Iliad had to be literally true. It is cool that there appears to be an actual war that it was based on and a place that we can visit. But that doesn’t change the pleasures of reading Homer. And the same should be true of the Bible.

Here is the first episode of In Search of the Trojan War. It is much recommended!

Afterword

Christian apologists often claim that there is no more evidence for the existence of Socrates than there is for the existence of Jesus. That’s true. But skeptics claim that it doesn’t matter. It is not the man we care about but rather his teachings—whoever their actual writer or writers were. I don’t see why the same is not true of Jesus. I guess it’s that whole “fear of death” thing people have. But it’s sad.

Last night, I was watching All In and Chris Hayes interviewed Michael Steele about something. I forget what it was exactly. The main thing is that Steele, as usual, had nothing insightful to say. Of course, that is his purpose on MSNBC: to act like a Republican who isn’t totally insane. But that’s his purpose everywhere. That is his claim to fame. And it is really an easy job. As I’ve written before, there is a huge affirmative action program going on for conservatives. People like S. E. Cupp and even George Will would never have become the media darlings they are if they were liberal. And that’s equally true of Steele.

At the end of the interview, Hayes reminded his viewers that Steele was once chairman of the Republican National Committee. It only occurred to me then what a nakedly cynical move that was by the Republican Party. It reminds me of a scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou? In it, Pappy O’Daniel is losing badly in his re-election bid to Homer Stokes who travels the state with a midget. Pappy’s son proposes that that get their own midget, but one that is even shorter. Pappy thinks this is a stupid idea, and says, “You slump-shouldered sack of nuts! Why, we’d look like a bunch of johnny-come-latelys. Bringing out our own midget. Don’t matter how stumpy!”

That is the level of thinking of the Republican Party. The Democrats elected the first black president. So the Republicans looked around for an African American—Any African American!—who they could put in the job. Of course, it didn’t work. Steele is a charming and capable man. But his pick was nakedly political. And it only made the Republicans look more racist, even if their real problem with Steele was that he wasn’t crazy.

Also last night, I got a chance to see another conservative affirmative action case. David Brooks was on the PBS Newshour. This is a standard thing. Normally they bring on a conservative and a moderate to discuss the week’s news. Why a moderate and not a liberal? Balance! Actually, it is because they think moderates are liberals. It is one of the many subtle ways that the media keep all discussions on a conservative footing. Brooks was paired with Ruth Marcus. And they talked about unemployment. Brooks pushed the old conservative canard: structural unemployment.

Let me explain: structural unemployment is a concept that allows conservatives to do nothing about high levels of unemployment. The idea is that people aren’t out of work because there are no jobs. All their jobs are being taken away by robots. And the new jobs require skills the people just don’t have. This is exactly the argument that was used by conservatives during the Great Depression. But somehow when demand returned due to the buildup for World War II, people did have the skills for jobs. Dean Baker explains all in an article this morning, Brooks and Marcus on PBS News: Getting Just About Everything Wrong on the Economy.

It’s true that the “liberal” didn’t come off looking great. She’s a Villager, what do you expect? But she isn’t a total idiot whose only skill is dressing up conservative talking points like Brooks (and for that matter Steele). Also, Brooks’ column yesterday was, The Neocon Revival. Stuff like this deserves to be buried deep in the Red State archives—not on the OpEd page of the New York Times, the PBS Newshour, or “liberal” MSNBC.

Before I get to the birthdays, I think we should deal with a bit of history. On this day in 1934, Adolf Hitler became Fuhrer of Germany. Don’t you just love those 20th century despots? They could never use a regular word like “president” for a title. They always had to come up with something specific to themselves like “grand poobah.” So Hitler becomes his grand poobah-ness. That’s another thing about the Nazis: I’ve always been fascinated with its cult like structure. When the Nazis took over the parliament, they disbanded it and made Hitler the Grandest of the Grandest of Grand Poobahs. I never understood that until the last couple of years. Now I fully believe that if a strong Republican leader came along, the Republicans would be willing to legislate Congress out of existence and give complete power to this leader. Look: I know that all this sounds very Godwin’s Law. But how can it be otherwise when one of the great American political parties is running with full force toward fascism?

Anyway, five years later—To the day!—Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard (two “Jewish” scientists) wrote their famous letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt about the bomb. The two events are clearly connected. Eventually humans would have created nuclear bombs, of course. But Hitler moved the idea along. I still blame the United States for both of its attacks on Japan. But there is no doubt that Hitler was more of a villain, even in this one way.

Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, was born on this day in 1612. What I find remarkable about her, is that she was not a beautiful woman. And this is true even though she died at the young age of 29. But she does look like she had blond hair and blue eyes. So there’s that. French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was born in 1834. Guess what he designed? Very possibly the inventor of the telephone Elisha Gray was born in 1835. Alexander Graham Bell managed to get the patent for it, however. This is something very typical that I talk about a lot: few people are really ahead of their time. And those few who are, are generally ignored in their own lifetimes.

One of the greatest stained glass artists ever, John Radecki was born in 1865. The great American painter John French Sloan was born in 1871. He was one of the founders of the Ashcan School. Think: Edward Hopper. The Russian city artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky was born in 1875. Producer Jack Warner was born in 1892.

And now we must discuss the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann who was born in 1905. He is not exactly a twelve-tone composer, but he’s pretty damned close. This is a form of music developed by Arnold Schoenberg. It is also called “atonal” and “serial” because it uses the 12 notes in the western octave and uses them in the same order over and over again. And truly, there are twelve-tone pieces that I quite enjoy. But it’s rare. They are really difficult to listen to. They seem designed to annoy. So here is Hartmann’s Symphony No. 2 Adagio. Listen if you dare:

That same year, 1905, the beautiful and sassy Myrna Loy was born. Here are a number of scenes with her as Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies:

And TV’s Archie Bunker, Carroll O’Connor was born in 1924.

Actor Peter O’Toole is 81 today. I’m not a big fan of his, but I love a number of his films. And nowhere is he better than in Dean Spanley, one of my favorite movies:

For the record, not only is Dean Spanley a great film, it is one of those rare movies that is better than the source material. In this case, it is Lord Dunsany’s My Talks with Dean Spanley. If you haven’t seen it, please do. It is currently on Instant Watch on Netflix.

Horror film director Wes Craven is 74. Musician Mojo Nixon is 56. I’m not that into him, but his song “Don Henley Must Die” is a classic:

Actor Mary-Louise Parker is 49. And director Kevin Smith is 43. I respect his work but it does nothing but annoy me.

The day, however, belongs to the great writer James Baldwin who was born on this day in 1924. I don’t really know him as a novelist. But his essays are amazing. I don’t think of him as a “black” writer because it often seems like he understood what it is to be white better than I do. Here is a quote from an essay “The White Man’s Guilt” that very much catches the essence of being limited by your own privileged:

Happy birthday James Baldwin!

With all the talk of 2014 being a big year for Republicans, it is easy to lose sight of what the coming election really looks like. Thankfully, Jonathan Bernstein has put together a useful primer on the next collection of Senate races. Up to now, I’ve just vaguely figured that the Republicans had a fifty percent chance of taking back the Senate. It turns out that their chances look a good deal worse than that.

Let’s start with the overview. Assuming that the Democrats get back the New Jersey seat vacated by Frank Lautenberg, they will start with an advantage of 55-45. That’s a very likely case. I often think that the Democrats are incompetent politically, but I don’t see how they could blow this one. Given that, the Republicans have to gain 6 seats in the Senate. That’s because Joe Biden would be the 51st vote for the Democrats if the Republicans only closed the difference to 50-50.

According to Bernstein, there are three Democratic seat retirements that are likely to go Republican: Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia. These are all strong Republican states where strong Republican candidates are running. There are also four Democratic incumbents who are running in strong Republican states: Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina. That’s a total of 7 currently Democratic seats that are vulnerable.

On the other side of the calculation, the Democrats have two decent opportunities to pick up seats. One is due to the retirement of Saxby Chambliss in Georgia. The other is Mitch McConnell’s race in Kentucky. Interestingly, his challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes is currently beating him in polls. So if the Republicans are to gain control of the Senate, they must hold these two seats and get 6 of the 7 good opportunities they have.

Let me put some numbers to this. As usual, I’m going to push hard to make this look as good as possible for the Republicans. Let’s assume that the 3 open races are almost sure things: 80% likely. Further, let’s assume that the 4 incumbents are favored to lose: 60%. Plus I’ll give George an 80% chance of staying Republican and McConnell a 60% chance of re-election. The statistics on this are a little involved because we have to look that the chance of the Republicans winning all and all but one of these races. Still, the chance turns out to be 17%. And even if I up the Republican chances to 90% for the likely cases and 70% for the favored cases, the chances don’t even break 50% (but they come really close).

So things look good for the Republicans, but they are definitely a long shot at taking over the Senate in 2014. Of course, this is just how it looks right now. But events could move in either direction. And as of now, I don’t see the Republicans doing anything to help their chances. Personally, I’m hoping for a Susan Collins retirement!

This morning I was having a discussion about income inequality. It still amazes me that the power elite don’t see the problem. Of course, I’m expecting too much; the power elite are as shortsighted as anyone—maybe even more so. The problem is that as fewer and fewer people have all the money, the economic system just doesn’t work. As billionaire Nick Hanauer has noted, the rich only wear one pair of pants at a time; they only drive one car at a time; they only get one gallbladder operation at a time. Income inequality will eventually destroy the economy. The rich may end up a very exclusive club, but they would be lords of a dark age where being rich wouldn’t mean much. As conservatives like to say, the poorest American today is better off than than richest European king of 500 years ago. (That’s not technically true, but you get the idea.)

Matt Yglesias has been hammering away at a related point for some time now. I haven’t found it that compelling. He’s been arguing that all the cash that corporations are sitting on should either be invested, distributed to shareholders, or (best of all) paid out in bonuses and higher salaries to employees. I’ve tended to think that Yglesias is being hopelessly naive. I’ve seen this with most conservatives: they think that we don’t need government regulations because businesses will generally do the “right” thing. But I know this isn’t a description of Yglesias; he’s a well informed and thoughtful guy.

This morning, he wrote an article that better explains where he’s coming from, How 40 Years of Union-Busting Has Failed America. He’s making the same argument, but looking at it in a different way. He starts by noting that the big anti-union push of 40 years ago was justified by an argument. It was an argument in three parts: (1) if unions were less powerful, companies would have more profits; (2) if companies had more profits, they could invest more; (3) if they invested more, there would be more economic growth and we would all be richer. But as he shows, only the first step has happened: companies have not invested more and the productivity gains have not been any better (they are actually worse) than they had been.

There is an obvious argument to be made here that Yglesias is again being naive. It is true that conservative intellectuals made that argument about unions. It is not true that policy makers basically defined unions out of existence for this reason. It always was (and this dates back well over a hundred years) the case that the business community hated the very idea of unions because they do not want to share the fruits of their businesses with their workers. Like I said, this is a shortsighted view. But this is the way that people think. No one can seriously think that eliminating the minimum wage is going to increase economic growth. Yet the same people who hate unions hate the minimum wage. And it is for the same reason: so the rich can have more money.

But Yglesias is right that the three part argument is the only argument that a majority of the people might accept for destroying the unions. And the data are in and we know the results: destroying unions has been bad for everyone. (I do mean everyone: even the rich would be better off in an absolute sense if we had less income inequality.) On a macro-scale, it all makes sense. But to any individual business owner it doesn’t. It is the same as the paradox of thrift. If an individual business pays its employees less, it will have a competitive advantage and thus make more money. But if all businesses pay their employees less, they will see their profits go down as consumers (who are also the workers getting paid less) don’t have as much money to buy things.

I suspect that there are many ways that we can go about fixing this problem. The first thing to do is for the government to start enforcing those labor laws that are still on the books. Then they could pass some pro-labor laws like Card Check. A more progressive federal income tax and a less regressive payroll tax would also help. Yglesias mentions a couple of his own, but I prefer mine that go directly to the heart of the problem. The point is that there are a lot of things we could do. And literally everyone should be on board with this.

Steve Benen has written an excellent article about media coverage of the supposed IRS scandal, When the Media’s Attention Span Turns Reckless. As we all remember, the media was all over the story originally when the Republicans were making big allegations about the supposed scandal and how it reached all the way to the White House. Remember how IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times? Oh yes, those were the days of big media attention—the days when they didn’t know what was going on and so just passed on talking points.

But as facts came out, the media lost interest. On one level, this is nothing new. The media is only interested in exciting stories. But there are two reasons why we should care in this case. Benen discusses the first reason at some length: media outlets didn’t stop covering the “scandal” when nothing was happening; they stopped covering it it when things were happening, just things that pushed against the original narrative. He links to a paper in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Scandal Attention Cycle. It provided the following graph of scandal coverage in Politico, Washington Post, and New York Times:

One thing I find really interesting is that there is no increase in coverage on 18 July 2013, when Inspector General Russell George testified that his report was in fact one sided and focused only on what the IRS had done to conservative groups. In fact, there were no front page articles from the two newspapers that whole week. The New York Times managed only one article at all in its A section; the Washington Post managed two. That to me was the real scandal. George claimed that Darrell Issa never told him to only look at targeting of conservative groups, but all indications are that this was the case. Now that’s a scandal that a young and ambitious journalist might grab onto. And that brings us to the second reason you should care about the initial media freak out and subsequent disinterest.

The media is not doing its job. There is no journalism going on. When there were spikes in coverage, it is because the Republicans were making allegations. The original peak in coverage reflected only that Republicans said that there were bad goings on and Democrats were cowed. No one (other than a few bloggers) dug into what was known even at that time. While the mainstream press were still ramping up their coverage of this supposed scandal, I was writing that there was no scandal—and this was hardly a major issue for me! So why was it that someone as far outside the loop as possible could get this right while the professionals at major news agencies treated this nonsense like it was serious? That’s because most journalists really are nothing but reporters: they report what the two sides say and don’t dig any deeper. After all, finding the truth might lead to bias because as everyone in the mainstream media knows, the truth is right in the center between what the Republicans say and what the Democrats say.

The study puts the situation as bluntly as you will ever see in such an article:

The press may be enshrined in our Constitution, but at this point I hardly think it matters. For every courageous reporter like Glenn Greenwald, there are hundreds who are ready to run him down for the sin of not pandering to power. It reminds of the time right before George W. Bush went to Ireland. He was interviewed by Carole Coleman for Raidio Teilifis Eireann, the Irish public service broadcaster. He was clearly shocked that a reporter would ask real questions of him. But the issue wasn’t (as many liberals thought) that Bush would never allow real journalists to interview him. The issue was just that any president could assume he would be handled with kid gloves by the American press. And that’s more true now than ever.

Afterword

Before I get some push back on that last sentence, let me explain. The mainstream press are always more harsh with Democrats. There are two reasons for this. First, Democrats are generally more capable of holding their own. No reporter wants something like Sarah Palin not being able to mention any Supreme Court cases. Second, people in the mainstream press are paranoid about having liberal bias. I assure you that if Romney had been elected president, the American press would treat him with even more deference than they did Bush.

On this day in 10 BC, Roman Emperor Claudius was born. Almost everything I know about him I learned from watching I, Claudius. So most of what I know is that he looked a lot like Derek Jacobi. But it does seem that the basic story is correct. Because Claudius limped due to a childhood illness, the family kept him out of public. As a result of this, he was spared from the family purges of Tiberius and Caligula. When the latter was assassinated, there were literally no other male relatives left alive. And not surprisingly, Claudius went on to be a pretty good emperor. He did have a lot of his enemies killed, but that’s understandable given that they were likely trying to do the same to him. And we are talking Roman emperors here. There is a lower standard for them than there is for real humans.

The great Italian Baroque painter Sebastiano Ricci was born in 1659. Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson was born in 1714. Astronomer Maria Mitchell was born in 1818. Labor organizer Mary Harris Jones was born in 1837. One of the most interesting of the late Romantic composers Hans Rott was born in 1858. He went quite insane in his early twenties, was committed and died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. But just listen to his String Quartet in C Minor. It is amazing:

Mathematician Otto Toeplitz was born in 1881. Physicist Walter Gerlach of the Stern-Gerlach Effect was born in 1889. Comedian Dom DeLuise was born in 1933. Guitarist Jerry Garcia was born in 1942. And Jim Carroll was born in 1950. Here he is with his band doing “Lorraine”:

Folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is 82 today. Blues great Robert Cray is 60. Here he is doing “Smokin’ Gun,” which you probably know:

And Adam Duritz of Counting Crows is 49. He’s an amazingly great songwriter. I always think of him along with Mark Eitzel. What Duritz has that Eitzel doesn’t is the ability to be emotionally naked. Eitzel makes up for this by being funnier. Here is Counting Crows doing the sweet and funny “Mr. Jones”:

The day, however, belongs to the greatest failed novelist of all time, Herman Melville who was born on this day in 1819. I have mixed feelings about Melville. On one hand, most of his stuff is really difficult to read. It is so dense, there is no doubt that the man was trying too hard. On the other hand, he’s so interesting. It is really wonderful the way he integrates all of his various passions into his work. I wonder what his later writing would have been like had his great work been appreciated. As it is, he hardly wrote anything the last 25 years of his life. Regardless, it is sad that like many other great American artists, he was never really appreciated in his own country during his lifetime.

Happy birthday Herman Melville!

On Monday, the Huffington Post published an article claiming that McDonald’s could double its wages and it would only increase the price of their offerings by 17%. So instead of a McDouble being $1.29, it would be $1.51. The understandable response to this was, “That doesn’t sound that bad to provide a living wage to McDonald’s workers.” It turns out that it isn’t quite so simple, but as you will see, I’ll show that it still works out about the same.

The original article was called “Doubling McDonald’s Salaries Would Cause Your Big Mac To Cost Just 68¢ More.” Unlike most news outlets, however, instead of just adding an update, they’ve replaced that article with a full discussion of what was wrong with the article. In the simplest terms, the whole thing was more or less a prank. A student at the University of Kansas did a back of the envelope calculation. McDonald’s entire employment costs are indeed only 17% of their operating budget. The problem is that most of the workforce costs are not due to the corporation but rather the 80% of all the stores that are franchises. Of these franchises, roughly a third of their expenses are due to workforce costs. So that $1.29 McDouble would cost $1.72.

But again, it isn’t that simple. Huffington Post quotes Dean Baker on two related issues. First: doubling wages would doubtless cause some layoffs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Increased work costs have a tendency to make employers more efficient in how they use their labor force. What’s more, the increased wages would attracted better employees. The second issue is more important. Increased labor costs are generally shared between increased prices and decreased profits—with profits getting hit twice as hard as the prices. (I talk about this all the time!) So if labor costs go up by one dollar, the cost will go up 33 cents and profits will go down by 67 cents.

If that’s the case, then a 33% jump in labor costs (double the current cost) would cause an increase in McDonald’s food prices of 11%. So our McDouble would go up from $1.29 to $1.43. That would be even better than the Kansas prankster suggested. But again: it isn’t that simple. I suspect that McDonald’s is already extremely efficient with a very low profit margin. So that rule of thumb 1-2 costs-profits number may be a little or even a lot optimistic. But it most certainly isn’t the case, as the Huffington Post now claims, that the price of McDonald’s food will go up a full 33%.

The real question here is not if McDonald’s can afford to pay all of its employees double the minimum wage. Strikers are asking for this, but it is clearly a negotiating tactic that President Obama would be smart to study. What all of this math shows is that McDonald’s could increase their pay rate. In fact, raising it up to $10 per hour would probably have a negligible affect on prices and business viability.

H/T: The Young Turks

Update (10 September 2013 10:09 pm)

Dean Baker did a much more careful analysis of this problem and found that fast food prices would increase by about 5%. It is very interesting and well worth reading.

Matt Yglesias has a knack for great headlines. I subscribe to his RSS feed, but try as I might, I find it pretty near impossible not to click on his stories. Such was the case this afternoon when he offered up, Turkeys vs. Hummingbirds in Contemporary Central Banking. I really had no idea what he was talking about, but it turned out to be really simple. When it comes to monetary policy, people are broadly divided into hawks and doves. Yglesias thinks we should move the discussion to hummingbirds and turkeys.

Hawks are now and forever more worried about inflation. Doves, in the current economic environment, are not worried about inflation at all. Yglesias claims that there are currently no hawks because everyone knows inflation is not a problem. Oh grasshopper! That can’t be what he really thinks. There is literally a whole industry that does nothing but explain that inflation may be low now, but this could change instantly and we could be back in the 1970s—or worse. What’s more, there are huge numbers of people (admittedly, more on the margins) who claim that inflation is high, it is just an evil Obama conspiracy to trick us all to believe that inflation is low. Have you not seen what’s happening to the price of milk?! I’m sure that among the people who Yglesias trusts, it is the case that “we are all doves.” But in the policy debates, there are a hell of a lot of hawks and they are well connected and vocal.

The key point about hummingbirds and turkeys is their ability to fly. So Yglesias claims that turkeys are those who say that nothing the Federal Reserve can do will help the economy in the current situation. Hummingbirds believe that the Fed can stimulate the economy by raising inflation expectations. Here again I think he is wrong. There are some people—most notably Karl Smith—who are clearly hummingbirds but by and large everyone in the dove camp would probably qualify as “hopeful turkeys.”

Let me explain where I’m at in this discussion. I’m as close to a turkey as one can get. Control of interest rates are at least 90% of the power of the Federal Reserve. Those rates are now effectively at 0%. I don’t think there is much the Fed can do. But I don’t know this for sure. So the Fed should be doing everything it can do. There is a way this can work. It’s all about expectations. If people saw the Fed acting aggressively to stimulate the economy, it might convince people that things really would get better and so inflation would increase. The point is that I don’t think turkeys can fly but they might. (A better analogy would be chickens which can get off the ground but can’t really fly.)

I think it would be more correct to say that there are three types of people when it comes to monetary policy. First, there are hawks who just know that inflation is already terrible or will soon be. Second, there are turkeys who think inflation cannot be affected by the Fed. And third, there are hummingbirds who think that the Fed can get the economy back on track all by itself. As far as I’m concerned, hawks and hummingbirds are faith based communities. Meanwhile, the poor continue to suffer and the Fed does as little as it possibly can.

The video below is from the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It makes fun of Darrell Issa and his minions for all their hysterical (and untrue) allegations that the White House had requested the IRS to go after Obama’s political enemies. Of course, there was nothing to this.

The video shows very clearly what Issa and others were saying and how it all came to nothing. Remember Fox News claiming that the IRS scandal was worst than Watergate? That was pretty typical. The video very smartly starts with a clip showing Darrell Issa saying that the IRS was targeting Obama’s “enemies.” Then it ends with Issa making what I guess is a technically true point that he never said it reached the White House. But it is clearly disingenuous because he couldn’t have meant anything else. Anyway, the video made me laugh:

What I think is important is that from the very beginning it was clear that this wasn’t a White House scandal. All that seemed to be going on at first is that some overworked IRS employees tried to simplify their work by targeting Tea Party groups because they were, after all, political groups that really shouldn’t have been granted 501(c)(4) status. But even that allegation fell apart quickly.

Here’s the thing. Liberals should not be focused on protecting the president. The IRS is a far more important liberal institution, and it needs to be protected. This whole scandal has made the IRS look really bad even as it is now clear that no wrongdoing occurred. The IRS was dragged through the mud for months but most liberals don’t even want to try to fix some of the damage. Now we know that Lois Lerner—the head of the tax-exempt organizations division of the IRS—had done nothing wrong when she took the 5th Amendment. Most likely she figured that she could count on the same level of support as the White House gave to IRS chief Steven T. Miller. That is: none.

This is more of the same from the Democratic Party. As a group, we are not loyal. And as members of that group, we know it. The IRS is always an easy target for the conservatives, even though they depend upon it even more than liberals, because the things conservatives want the government to do are expensive. As a result, the IRS continues to be under funded. And scandals like this just add ammunition against an institution that does a thankless job as well as it can possibly be done. The president doesn’t need any more liberal defenders; he has an army of them. The IRS does need defenders because there are damned few of them. And there are apparently none at all in the White House or Democratic caucus on the House Oversight Committee.

H/T: Steve Benen (Who is one of the Obama defender army.)