Meet Greg Walden, the Republican representative from Ogegon. He is an idiot. But he has lots of company. Like our “liberal” president. Do you remember when Obama said, “After all, small businesses and families are tightening their belts. Their government should, too.” Well, Greg Walden is using the same flawed argument in his new bill to eliminate the “trillion dollar platinum coin” loophole.

He writes, “My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air. We sat down and figured out how to balance the books. That’s what Washington needs to do as well.”

That does sound reasonable, doesn’t it? The problem is that it is totally wrong. People make the mistake of assuming a whole economy is like its pieces. But it isn’t. Consider for a moment the paradox of thrift. In a family, you can balance your budget by spending less. This does not work in the economy as a whole. This is because my spending is your income. If everyone decides they are going to spend 10% less than they have been, then everyone will find that they are making 10% less than they have been. A family or business is not like the economy as a whole.

The same is true of the government. But it is a bit more complicated. If the government lays off an employee, they will save that money. But they will gain extra costs like unemployment insurance and other welfare programs. Plus, the employee will no longer being paying taxes to the government. And most of all, that person will not have as much money and so there will be less money in the economy to be earned and spent. Of course, this isn’t the only or even the main reason that Walden’s analogy is nonsensical.

Jonathan Chait notes this morning that businesses come and go, but governments are supposed to last. A small business that goes bankrupt does little harm to the economy as a whole. A government that goes bankrupt (or simply defaults on its debts) does an immense amount of damage. Chait goes on to take Walden’s example at face value:

This all boils down to something very simple: silly for silly. Everyone knows that the trillion dollar coin is a silly idea based upon a loophole in the law. But it is being used to counter a silly abuse of the debt ceiling. Paul Krugman put it very well. Obama, he said, “will, after all, be faced with a choice between two alternatives: one that’s silly but benign, the other that’s equally silly but both vile and disastrous.”

Ezra Klein, last night on The Last Word, asked if doing this wouldn’t be admitting that we now live in a banana republic where we were incapable of governing intelligently. I don’t know that I would use the term “banana republic,” but as long as our elected officials believe that the federal budget should be treated the same as a household budget, we will indeed be incapable of governing intelligently.

Matt Yglesias ended his reporting from American Economics Association conference yesterday with a discussion of, Romer and Romer on Monetary Policy Complacency. It is really important work, but I think that Yglesias is being a little too cool for school. I guess he just figures that anyone who knows anything of what is going on should understand the subtext of his article. I will make it plain.

The paper looked primarily at the two cases where the Federal Reserve did a bad job of managing the economy: the Great Depression of the 1930s and the stagflation of the 1970s. In both these cases, the people at the Fed understood what was wrong with the economy. The problem is that they convinced themselves that nothing could be done. As David Romer put it, “Fear of impotence is bad for performance.”

The reason this is important is that this is a good description of the Federal Reserve these past four years. It has been particularly telling, because the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spent most of the 1990s complaining about the lack of action by the Bank of Japan. He proposed a number of non-standard monetary policies that could have helped. But once he was in the position to do something about it in his own country, he did nothing—or as close to it as he could get without widespread criticism. Paul Krugman has long complained about this.

Some economists like Karl Smith believe that only using the Fed we could have gotten out of this recession. I don’t generally agree. I don’t think that Yglesias does either. But it is clear that the Fed could do a whole lot more to help the economy. David Romner’s comment seems particularly to apply to Bernanke: his fear of impotence (of his ideas over the years) is bad for his performance.

Yesterday, I saw the following graph that shows cumulative public and private job losses and additions. What it shows is that the there was a big loss in private sector jobs, but we’ve gained them all back. This doesn’t take into account the people who have been added to the workforce, but it does indicate that the private sector is on the mend.

Public sector jobs, however, have just seen a steady decline. That little spike was for the census, so don’t even consider that. This shows the lie of the Republican talking point that we have seen explosive government spending under Obama. Just to stay even, the government should have been steadily adding jobs because the country is growing.

You would never know this given the reporting on conservative media. You would never know it listening to conservative politicians. And this is one of the reasons our policy is so screwed up. We do not have an honest discussion because one side of the political spectrum doesn’t even concede the basics facts. Of course, if they did concede them they would say they it was a good thing, because they just know the government is too damned big!

Okay. This is interesting. Alex Jones started a petition to “deport Piers Morgan.” This is because Morgan has spoken about banning some guns. So Morgan invited Jones onto his show. The results are below:

So Alex Jones is insane and should certainly not be allowed ever to have a gun. But the bigger problem is that Alex Jones has a radio show. You can tell what his show is like. There is no thought. He just has a perpetual rage-on. And I have no doubt that the (mostly) men who listen get very worked up. It is very bad for society.

Here is the second part of the interview. Jones finally answers some questions. But not about guns. About his belief that 9/11 was an inside job. It is amazing stuff:

Afterword

For the record, I am all for deporting Piers Morgan. I just don’t think his stance on guns is cause. American Idol is, though.

Update (8 January 2013 9:01 am)

Alexandra Petri writes in the Washington Post:

I watched the short interview below with Isabelle Carre from the promotion of Romantics Anonymous, that I’ve already written about. I was really struck by something she said in the interview. She was talking about going to an actual RA meeting and how she didn’t want to go. Even though she is also shy, she felt that she was only going to the meeting as a kind of preparation for the role. She said,”I did not want to go because I was thinking that I did not want to use the fragility of the people at the meetings because they suffer. To use this felt wrong to me, or manipulative.”

This really struck me, because I remember hearing an interview with Sidney Lumet about Serpico. He talked about how Al Pacino had hung out with the real Frank Serpico. Apparently, Serpico had thought that he and Pacino had become friends, when it was just work for Pacino. Lumet told this story in a prideful way. Sort of: we in Hollywood really are American royalty. He told the story even while admitting that Frank Serpico was a really interesting, knowledgeable, and funny guy. I was horrified by both Al Pacino’s behavior and Sidney Lumet’s telling of the story.

I have a great love of art. (Of course, I’m not sure if what they do in Hollywood should be considered art.) But to place art above humanity strikes me as one of the vilest things imaginable. It was nice to hear one of the stars of one of the sweetest films I have ever seen confirm this. Carre goes on to explain that once she did go to the meeting, she found that she fit right in. These two facts may be related. Anyway, I’ve always thought that to become a Hollywood star, you kind of have to be a dick. If humanity is to survive, it is no surprise to find that it does so primarily outside the United States.

Here is the interview, which is just over 4 minutes long:

Yesterday, I came upon a filmed version of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. It was made way back in 1992, which surprised me. Marlowe’s works are rarely even performed on stages and almost never filmed. But it makes sense. Edward II has a clear five-act structure that lends itself well to screen. What’s more, all of the implicit homosexuality can now be laid bare.

In this adaptation, Derek Jarman lays it very bare. This is not only the case in explicit homoerotic scenes but in Edward’s repeated spurning of advances by the beautiful Tilda Swinton as Queen Isabella. In fact, the film, like the play is quite interested in all kinds of sex, as Isabella pairs up with one of the few straight men in her circle, Lord Mortimer.

The film looks really good. And it does it with the cheapest of sets. I think this comes from Jarman and his crew and their background in the theater. The film is almost a master class in how to take a couple of props and create an interesting set. But it’s more than that. The framing and lighting of shots adds an equal amount to the effect, thanks in no small part to the work of cinematographer Ian Wilson.

But lest you get the idea that Jarman and co-writer Ken Butler had removed all of Marlowe, there is still much of the play on screen. It is fascinating how Marlowe’s dialog compares to Shakespeare’s better known plays. There is no doubt that as time went on, iambic pentameter became less structured. Shakespeare’s verse sounds more like everyday speech than Marlowe’s, just as Beaumont & Fletcher’s sounds more normal than Shakespeare’s. Listening to the characters speak Marlowe’s dialog, I hear the poetry. That is rarely the case with Shakespeare. With his dialog, it just sounds odd. Really, I often have a hard time deconstructing Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. Too much of it uses 11 syllables and the accents seem almost random. Thus I am left wondering why Shakespeare’s verse is held so highly: it is too structured to sound normal but not structured enough to sound poetic. In Edward II, I really enjoyed listening to the dialog in a way I rarely do with Shakespeare.

I highly recommend this film. I think Christopher Marlowe would have been delighted. It brings his play to life in a way that is rare for any writer other than Shakespeare. There is a filmed version of The Jew of Malta coming out in February. I hope it is anything close to as good.

Afterword

The story of Edward II is pretty much the same as in this skit from That Mitchell and Web Look, except, of course, that in Edward II, everyone ends up dead:

This came from Dylan Matthews at Wonk Blog in an article that says it all, The Saddest Graph You’ll See Today. The main thing to notice are the two little men in the lower left hand corner. Those represent the falsely accused men. Notice also that even in the very small number of cases that go to court do the defendants face jail.

This morning, Jonathan Chait metaphorically scratches his head, Nominating Hagel Most Un-Obama Thing Ever. He can’t understand this nomination given that (1) Hagel will be a hard sell and (2) Obama doesn’t much listen to his advisers anyway. It is interesting speculation, but I wouldn’t have even thought about it had he not written, “Why waste political capital picking a fight that isn’t essential to any policy goals?”

This brought to mind something that has been on my mind for a while, as in articles like, Bipartisan Consensus Can Bite Me. I’m afraid that just like Santa Claus and most conceptions of God, “Political Capital” is a myth. I think it is just an idea that Villagers find comforting. It is a neat narrative in which one can straightjacket a political fight. Otherwise, it is just bullshit.

Let’s go back to late 2004, after Bush Jr was re-elected. He said, “I earned capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it.” What was this thing that Bush intended to spend? It is usually said that political capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor and kill the gays. But he used his political capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this proves the point, but does anyone really think if Bush had decided to use his political capital destroying food stamps and Medicaid that he would have succeeded any better? The truth was that Bush’s political capital didn’t exist.

Let’s look at more recent events: the Fiscal Cliff. Obama didn’t win that fight because the people who voted for him demanded it. He won it because everyone knew that in the new year he would still be president. Tax rates were going up. Boehner took the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was the best deal that he felt he could get. He didn’t fold because of some magic political capital that Obama could wave over him.

There is no doubt that public opinion does affect how politicians act. Even politicians in small safe districts have to worry that larger political trends may end up making them look stupid, out of touch, or just cruel. But beyond that, they really don’t care. If they did, then everyone in the House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate and the associated political capital. But they don’t, because presidential elections have consequences—for who’s in the White House. They don’t have much consequence for the Representative from the Third District of California.

My colleague Michael J.W. Stickings over at The Reaction makes what I think is the strongest case against Obama’s pick of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, Obama Misses Opportunity With Hagel Nomination. Basically, the optics are all wrong on this. Why is our Democratic president yet again picking a Republican as defense secretary? I think I know: Obama cares more about his legacy than he does the legacy of his party.

Despite decades of shrill and incompetent military policy from Republicans, the American people still consider them strong on national security. Of course, one could use this to argue that it doesn’t matter who Obama nominates. If 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan weren’t enough to change perceptions, what difference would a Republican defense secretary nomination make? But I think it does matter. The ineptitude of the Bush Jr years have made the Republican footing on national security much less firm.

Glenn Greenwald has been boosting for Hagel for a long time. In his most recent writing on the subject he deals with liberal displeasure with the (then) upcoming nomination, Chuck Hagel and Liberals: What Are the Priorities? He argues that there are two liberal complaints and that neither is very strong. First, there is the claim that Hagel is anti-gay. Greenwald rightly points out that this is long in the past and that he has apologized for it. The second is the optics concern of Michael and me. To this Greenwald points out that the current defense secretary, Leon Panetta, is a strong Democrat.

I don’t think this is a terribly good argument. With Hagel’s appointment, Obama will have had two of three Republican secretaries of defense. With the lessening appeal of the Republican claim to be strong on national defense, people can now point to the Democrats, “See: even they know they’re weak!” Most likely, Obama would claim that he just wants to get things done. And if there were any real hope of streamlining the pentagon, I might accept that argument. But with the Republican House, it looks like military cuts are going to be things Democrats have to trade away in return for not savaging social programs.

Regardless, I believe that the president deserves to get the cabinet that he wants. If Romney had been elected president, I would not have opposed even the pick of Glenn Hubbard as treasury secretary. But it’s too bad that our president doesn’t do a better job of supporting his own party.

Afterword

There is an up side to Hagel: it drives Fox on 15th Street crazy.

Actually, there is more than that. Greenwald puts it well:

I was listening to the NPR show Says You! today. I quite like the show, but I don’t go out of my way to listen to it. This is a little strange, because it is the perfect show for literary wannabes and pedants everywhere. The centerpiece of the show has one team try to guess which of the three definitions of an obscure word the other team offers. Today, the word was “phrop.”

The first definition was that it is the stage on which a flea circus is performed. The second was that it is a bill introduced to kill another bill. We had an example of this in the recent California election. Proposition 38 was put on the ballot to kill Proposition 30. So such things exist. The third definition was an insincere comment like, “We must do lunch!”

One member of the guessing team asked if flea circuses were real. When she learned that indeed they were, she was sold. And I have to admit, it does sound reasonable: there probably is a word for the flea circus stage. I thought the insincere comment seemed most likely. And so did the rest of her team. But she said something that was very true of the verbally clever group that plays this game, “Don’t you think if ‘phrop’ meant an insincere comment we would all know it?” Everyone laughed—me too. But it also sold them: they are all quite used to such insincere comments (Aren’t we all?!) and they would certainly have heard from a similarly minded person about such a word.

I thought that was a very good observation, but it didn’t change my mind. Words used for these segments are by definition not things that have caught on. They are normally specialty words or relatively recent words. Regardless, they are words now or once used by a small subset of the English speaking world. And indeed, “phrop” is not in most dictionaries. It was coined rather recently by Arnold Lunn, inventor of slalom ski racing. Wikipedia defines it thusly:

I have a feeling now that it’s been on Says You! it will become popular with literary wannabes and pedants everywhere.

Afterword

Here is (apparently) a real flea circus from 1949 France:

There was a big fight in San Diego this weekend, but it wasn’t even on pay-per-view. It was on the effects of government stimulus between Paul Krugman and UC San Diego professor Valerie Ramey at the American Economics Association conference. Unfortunately, the only coverage I’ve read of it comes from Matt Yglesias in the article whose title demonstrates its problems, The Frustrating Fiscal Stimulus Debate. In as much as Yglesias presents a blow by blow account, it seems that Krugman scored a technical knock out. But Yglesias’ commentary is classic false equivalence.

The argument he makes is that the economics profession pretty much agrees when you get right down to it. Ramey was arguing that stimulus wasn’t very effective throughout the 20th century. But, Yglesias notes, Krugman agrees: there are very few times when government stimulus is high effective. It is just that right now is one of those times. And that, I fear, is where Yglesias goes off the rails.

The problem is that conservative economists are ideologically constrained. Krugman is a liberal. But you don’t see him claiming that there wasn’t stagflation in the 1970s. He doesn’t claim that stimulus is always the answer. But conservative economists certainly do claim that stimulus is never the answer—at least as long as a Democrat is in the White House. What’s more, Ramey wouldn’t be arguing as she is if she thought that stimulus worked now. And we have plenty of examples of conservative economists this last four years claiming that the recession was due to some supply shock.

Yglesias ends his article by speculating what is driving conservative and liberal economists. “I get the overwhelming impression that with a few exceptions the issue is basically that right-of-center economists generally think the existing level of government spending is too high and that additional government spending is likely to be wasteful.” He says the reverse can be said about the liberals.

There are a couple of problems here. First, the issue of stimulus is not about money being well spent or not. The idea is to get the government started. World War II was not useful spending. But apart from this, the claim that stimulus money is wasted is just an excuse for not doing anything. It is like oil company funded politicians who claim to be for tighter regulation, but there are somehow always minor problems with any bill that comes for a vote. If the multiplier of a stimulus bill was thought to be 2.2 instead of 1.2, the conservatives would claim that any multiplier under 2.5 was wasteful. So Yglesias is treating these economists as though they are honest players. Certain the behavior of Kevin Hassett, Glenn Hubbard, Gregory Mankiw, and John Taylor this last year should have put such nonsense to rest.

What’s more, Yglesias’ claim that conservatives think government spending is too high was dealt with in a recent Krugman article. He was talking about politicians, but I don’t see how it is any different with economists. Conservatives think the the government is too big. But they don’t have a clue what about the government is too big. I don’t know what Valerie Ramey would say on this issue. But I doubt she could say any more than conservatives will generally say in private: kill Social Security; kill Medicare; kill Medicaid. But the people see things differently—making these the most popular of government spending.

The whole push of conservative economists to show that stimulus is just never quite effective enough to be done is nothing but apologetics. And apologetics is not about science. The very fact that these conservatives are feverishly hunting around for some information—Any information!—that will justify their favored policies shows they have a real problem. They are not engaged in science. And thus, they are doomed to failure, even if some of their favored policies turn out to be right.