I hate writing about the game aspect of politics. I don’t really care who is winning in the polls — at least not at this point. I don’t even much care who is running for office. The truth of the matter is that if the Democrats win the presidency next year, it will be a good thing — no matter who it is. And if the Republicans win, I think it will be a catastrophe. But at this point there really is nothing to talk about. And the fact that the mainstream press is obsessed with the “horse race” is just an indication that it can’t be bothered to care about actual policy.

But over the past week, I’ve been hearing a lot about Joe Biden. And it seems to have reached a peak. According to many, Joe Biden is going to jump in the race and beat Hillary Clinton. Or something. Yesterday, Bloomberg published, Biden More Competitive Than Clinton Against Leading Republicans: Poll. One poll means nothing. One poll at this point in the race shouldn’t even be reported. And one poll that compares one actual candidate with someone who is not running should send the reporter to a very central level of hell.

Has everyone forgotten how great Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings were when she wasn’t running for president? The mechanism here is so simple that even Washington reporters should be able to understand it. While someone is not a candidate, no one goes around bashing them. Reporters aren’t following them around and looking for any possible scandal. I assure if Hillary Clinton were having an affair with her videographer, we would know about it. But Joe Biden could be doing the same thing and we wouldn’t know, because no one is looking.

None of this is to say that Joe Biden isn’t secretly running for president. But I think the odds of him running without Clinton dropping out are between zero and a number slightly higher than zero. Even the Bloomberg article was subtitled, “A solid majority of Democrats still want Clinton to be their nominee.” So what is this all about? Well, I can tell you this: my father came to me today and told me he thought that Joe Biden was going to be the Democratic nominee. I knew where that was coming from, Krauthammer: A Biden-Warren Ticket Would Be Perfect For Democrats, Ensure 12 Years Of Liberal Rule. Because if there is one thing that Charles Krauthammer cares about, it is what is best for the Democratic Party.

And that’s what I think this is all about. This is the Republican Party machine pushing articles to lazy Washington reporters (a redundant phrase, I know) about how Clinton is going down. And it is possible if the Republicans got to choose the Democratic presidential nominee, Clinton would go down. Just the same, if the Democrats got to choose the Republican presidential nominee, Trump would win big. And what does any of this mean for the presidential primaries? Nothing.

There are a number of liberals who I read who seem to like the idea of Biden being the nominee. I like Biden. I like Clinton. I really like Sanders. And I’d vote for any of them running against any of the possible Republican nominees. But what exactly does Biden bring to the general election that Clinton does not? All I can think is that he isn’t plagued by fake scandals. But of course, if he did become the nominee, he too would be plagued by fake scandals. The draft-Biden campaign is really more like the draft-anyone-but-Clinton campaign. And we saw this with Romney in 2012. In that case it was Republicans doing it, but this time it is — Oh, wait! — Republicans doing it again.

I don’t understand the Federal Reserve. For at least the last year, economists everywhere have been wondering if the Fed is going to raise interest rates. You see, there are many people who are concerned about inflation. And they think that the Fed’s “easy money” policy is going to cause inflation. Now, most of these people are the kind who have been hiding double eagle gold coins under their floorboards ever since Obama was elected president. But the people at the Fed — who seem to be smart and reasonable people — go along with this kind of thing. And it makes no sense.

Let’s assume that inflation in the United States really got out of control and shot up to 5%. There are a couple of things about that. First, a 5% inflation rate for a year or two might actually be good for the economy. But if the people at the Fed didn’t accept this, they could bring that inflation down quite fast by raising interest rates. The only reason there is so much concern about inflation is that it might take a few months to get back down, and that money that the rich would be losing! Can’t have that. What we can, however, have is millions of extra people out of work, because they just don’t matter.

The Federal Reserve’s inflation target is 2%. That means that it should be around 2% — sometimes above and sometimes below. Wanna know what it has been for the first six months of this year: -0.1%, 0.0%, -0.1%, -0.2%, 0.0%, 0.1%, and 0.2%. So the inflation rate for the first half of 2015 is -0.02%. That is far below the Fed’s target. People should be screaming about the inflation rate being too low because it discourages purchases and keeps the dollar too strong against other currencies, thus making our exports less competitive. Some people are concerned about that. But mostly, the concern is that the we are going to turn into Zimbabwe with hyperinflation!

Mark Thoma — a great economist who is not prone to hyperbole — has an idea as to why the Fed might raise interest rates even though it is clearly the wrong thing to do, As Stocks Lurch, Fed Ponders Twist of the Dial. As I’ve said, I’d be very happy if inflation went up — even as high as 5%, although 3% to 4% would be better. But if inflation does go up — even to the supposed proper rate of 2% — the power elite of this country will scream and blame the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, if the Fed raises rates and millions of people lose their jobs, well, that isn’t necessarily the Fed’s fault. There are a lot of reasons that the economy fluctuates.

Do you get that? We may see the Federal Reserve raise interest rates. This will have the effect of putting many people out of work and lowering the wages of many more. And this will all be done because the people on the Federal Reserve are cowards. Of course, the Very Serious people — people like William Saletan — will applaud them and claim that they are being “brave.” That’s because there is nothing more brave to the power elite and their apologists than to make the weak suffer.

This graph comes via Kevin Drum, Here’s Why the Recovery Has Been So Weak. As he points out, it isn’t new. I have written about this many times myself. But it is really really annoying.

Part of this is Obama’s fault. I remember in 2010, he was spouting the same conservative nonsense as the Republicans, “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” No! No! No! That’s not how macroeconomics works. The entire economy is not like a household. In the entire economy, one person’s reduced spending is another person’s reduced revenue. It was not the right time to tighten the federal budget when the unemployment rate was 9.8% and the inflation rate was 2.6% and heading down.

But the bigger issue is that Republicans always decide that we just can’t spend any money when a Democrat is in the White House. They have been determined to harm the country until a Republican is elected president. And you can count on them racking up huge deficits the moment that happens. And then the economy will quickly improve and everyone will say, “The Republicans saved the economy!” This is all so predictable that it makes me want to do physical harm to myself — like bang my head against a stone wall.

What the graph above shows is that even since World War II, we have all agreed that the government must spend more money during a recession. That’s certainly what we did under George W Bush during the 2001 recession. But we don’t do it now. And it makes me angry. I don’t really blame the Republicans. They are traitors, but I understand that they are just looking out for themselves and they’ve never claimed to be anything else. They are really awful — but honest.

What makes me angry is that the American people keep voting for them. How low does the Republican Party have to sink before the American people will say, “Enough!” Sadly, I think the answer is that there is no level. If the Republicans created a debt crisis by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, it would throw the global economy into recession. But as long as it was done more than six months before an election, the American people would not punish them.

In fact, we’ve already seen this. The world economy is still struggling because of the economic policies forced on us by the Republicans over the last six years. Of course, there are two sides to this. First, there is the ignorant, hateful conservative base that comes out to vote because the only thing that they have to stop them is the fact that they might miss one of their favorite Fox News shows. Second, there are the liberals like Carey Wedler who can’t manage to show up to vote when it isn’t a presidential election.

I wonder if the American people realize just how close we are to fascism? Or even if they care? The Nazis didn’t come to power in Germany because a majority of the people wanted them. If the people of a country can’t be bothered to care for their democracy, they will see it go away very quickly. And if you don’t have a job right now or if you haven’t received a raise in 8 years, all you need to know is in that graph above. And it is mostly thanks to a political party that cares only about getting power and doesn’t care if it has to destroy the nation and its people to get it.

Vote, damn it!

I found this table on a vile but (unsurprisingly) popular blog called The Religion of Peace. Get it?! The Muslims killed 2,996 Americans on 9/11, but only 1 Muslim-American was killed in response. I don’t know about these statistics. There have been other terrorist attacks, so I suspect we could up that number of Americans killed (some of which were Muslims). (Actually, they do increase the number: 3,106 currently.) And it seems to me that there were more Muslim-Americans killed in response. But the numbers don’t matter. I’ll grant them. The point is that this is an incredibly skewed way of looking at the results of 9/11.

George W Bush would never have had the political support to invade Iraq without the 9/11 attacks. As we know from Richard Clarke, in the first 24 hours after the attack — and for months afterwards — senior administration officials wanted to use the attacks as a pretense to invade Iraq. The Iraq War is a direct result of the 9/11 attacks, even though Iraq had nothing to do with those attacks. So we can’t even say that the Iraq War was a response to the 9/11 attacks. It was just an excuse. So if we want to look at Muslim vs anti-Muslim violence, we’ve got to look at the Iraq War.

The Iraq Body Count project found that between 112,000 and 123,000 Iraqi civilians were killed during the Iraq War. So that’s at least 36 times as many Muslims killed as Americans. When you put it that way, it doesn’t look so good for the Americans. But I get it: there are lots of ways to do the accounting. But I’m pretty sure that the United States — with just slightly less in military spending than the rest of the world combined — will turn out to look pretty bad regardless of how you look at it. Or at least it will unless you decide to present data in an absurdly skewed way as The Religion of Peace has.

If you read the “About Us” page on their website, you will find out that it “is a pluralistic, non-partisan site concerned with Islam’s true political and religious teachings according to its own texts.” This goes back to the article I wrote the other day, Religions Reflect Not Define. Anti-Muslims just love to pick through the Quran and find whatever passages they can to make their case that Islam is a horrendous religion. The same thing can be done to pretty much any religion, and I’ll admit, that Quran has lots of great blood thirsty garbage in it. But just as very few Christians believe that homosexuals should be stoned to death, very few Muslims believe similar passages in the Quran.

None of this means much of anything except that there are a lot of bigots out there. It works the same way regardless of who is doing it or who it is being done to. The violence that we perpetrate is excused as defensive and thus justified; the violence that they perpetrate is unacceptable because it is aggressive. A handful of impotent guerrilla fighters is justification for a hundred thousand uniformed troops to kill thousands of civilians.

So the narrative that our friends at The Religion of Peace are offering is that the US was just minding its own business and we were attacked on 9/11. That’s a simplistic but acceptable claim. But then, we start two wars as a result — killing many tens of thousands of civilians. But we are the good guys! The people we killed were not in response to 9/11. They were just unfortunate casualties of war. The score is 2,996 Muslim murders and just one American murder. When people can’t take responsibility for their actions, they don’t grow. When countries can’t take responsibility for their actions, they die. It isn’t hard to see America dying.

At The New York Times, Frank Bruni was scratching his head, Trump-ward, Christian Soldiers? He wants to know how it is that such an un-Christian man as Donald Trump can be doing so well with evangelical voters. After all, “He just about runs the table on the seven deadly sins. He personifies greed, embodies pride, radiates lust. Wrath is covered by his anti-immigrant, anti-‘losers’ rants, and if we interpret gluttony to include big buildings and not just Big Macs, he’s a glutton through and through. That leaves envy and sloth. I’m betting that he harbors plenty of the former, though I’ll concede that he exhibits none of the latter.” By Christian dogma, you really only need one of the deadly sins and Trump gets at least six. (I’m not as inclined as Bruni to give him a pass on sloth.)

Bruni isn’t just talking about Trump. He also discussed Ted Cruz who spoke publicly about the “misery, stagnation, and malaise” of the Carter presidency the day Carter’s health problems were made public. Before discussing this, remember that what Cruz said is factually wrong. The economy did better under Carter than it did under Reagan’s first term. But thinking that everything was terrible under Carter is just something that all Republicans “know.” Regardless, Bruni contrasted Cruz’s and Trump’s public un-Christian behavior with Carter’s humble Christianity, “His own Christianity is not a bludgeon but a bridge.”

But is it the case that evangelicals support Trump (and to a lesser extent Cruz and Huckabee) because he makes a big public deal about his supposed faith? Certainly Paul Krugman doesn’t think so. He wrote a great, short blog post, The Reactionary Soul. He noted, “Conservative religiosity… [was] never about living a godly life.” He also talks about the conservatives who believe in the “free market” supporting a mercantilist like Trump. Conservatives don’t support these things that they claim to. Krugman quoted Corey Robin:

Although this is certainly true, what really defines conservatives is their authoritarianism. And Krugman even gets at this. “Trump is admired for putting women and workers in their place, and it doesn’t matter if he covets his neighbor’s wife or demands trade wars.” Conservatives like Trump and their other heroes because they are “strong.” I talk a lot about the Republican Party being proto-fascist. But the truth is that the Republican voters are full out fascists. They are looking for exactly what the German, Italian, and Spanish fascists offered.

Let us not forget the love affair that conservative had with Vladimir Putin. Last year, Ishaan Tharoor posted a number of comments from conservatives as to why they liked Putin and it is illuminating. This was following the Syrian crisis. It’s all the same: Putin is “strong” and a “leader.” And what that mean is that Putin is an authoritarian. It reminds me of an episode of This American Life, Swing Set. It was during the 2004 election, and Ira Glass had a series of conversations with a conservative doctor James Hackett. Hackett hated everything that Bush had done. But he kept coming back to the same idea: he hated what Bush did, but at least Bush did what he thought was right. (This is a ridiculous contention — Bush was one of the most fake politicians ever — but let’s go with it.) So it was worse to vote for a politician who panders to the wishes of the people than to vote for a man who went against them. So “strength” is more important than being right — or even democracy itself.

Trump is the ultimate conservative politician. It doesn’t matter what his policies are. It doesn’t matter what his character is. Whether the conservative is a Christian evangelical or a libertarian “free” marketeer, Trump is what really matters to these voters: he’s an authoritarian leader. The conservative base is made up of authoritarian followers. And there are enough of them to elect just about anyone under the right conditions. And if that makes you think of Germany in the early 1930s, it should. It’s terrifying.

Afterword

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the reason that the Republican establishment is against Trump is not because of his policies. And it certainly isn’t because he’s an authoritarian. It is because they think he can’t win the general election. So don’t be fooled by the fact that Charles Krauthammer is against Trump. It’s purely tactical.

So it seems that some guy killed a couple of television news employees while they were broadcasting. It’s interesting that here in the US this kind of thing has become a “dog bites man” story. Steve M linked to an old story in The Onion, “No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. That was in reference to a mass shooting. And let’s be honest: in today’s tragedy, there wouldn’t be much coverage of it. After all, it only involved two murders. According to the FBI, mass shootings happen about one every two weeks. But that doesn’t include all the data. And even more important: a “mass shooting” must involve four or more people. So two deaths doesn’t even count.

But I’m not going to talk about gun control or any of that here. This is because I’ve learned that now is not the time to talk about these things. I used to think that “now” meant the time right after one of these horrific crimes. But since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that “now” means literally “now”: at the current time. We cannot talk about the easy access to guns and our over supply of guns unless it is not now. And since it is always now, we can never talk about it. Thus, I won’t talk about it, because as it turns out, it is now right now.

But I was struck by this bit of reporting by CBS News, Gunman in Deadly On-Air Attack Dies After Manhunt:

Thank God for that! It would be terrible if it were terrorism. If it had been some Indonesian Muslim we would have been required to talk about terrorism and immigration. But we aren’t. It’s strange though. There are roughly 10,000 gun homicides per year in the United States — 25 per day — one per hour. There are more than double that many suicides. Since 9/11, there have been 26 jihadist murders in the United States. There have been 48 (generally right-wing) terrorist murders. That’s a total of 74. For those arithmetic fans out there, in 14 years, we’ve had as many terrorist murders as we do on a typical three day weekend due to all causes.

I only mean to compare these numbers because people get so freaked out about terrorism while we can’t talk about gun violence in a general sense. If this attack in Virginia had been about Islamic terrorism, we would get nonstop coverage of how we must do something about the terrorists and how the Iran nuclear deal is to blame and all kinds of other nonsense. On the other hand, if it had been right-wing terrorism, we would be hearing about how terrible it is that there are still pockets of racism in our country — and that it wasn’t terrorism. But as it is, this will just be about a disgruntled employee or a mentally unstable man. One thing it will not be about is guns, because after all, he could have used a knife or a pipe bomb.

I say we should either care about the causes of senseless killing or we shouldn’t. We could go with not: “Adam Ward and Alison Parker and twenty odd other people were killed with guns today — no story there.” Or we could go with caring: “Adam Ward and Alison Parker were tragically murdered and we must do something about it.” I think the former approach is the better one, because we all know what we are actually going to do about this horrible crime: the same thing we always do: nothing.

Afterword

Despite the tone of this article, it is a tragedy that Adam Ward and Alison Parker were murdered, and my condolences go our to their friends and families.

Not surprisingly, Jonathan Chait wrote a big article swatting at the teachers unions, How New Orleans Proved Urban-Education Reform Can Work. It is based upon a recent Tulane University study that found that children in New Orleans are doing better since Hurricane Katrina was used to destroy teachers unions and rev up those charter schools that Chait’s wife gets paid to push. I’ve written about this before, Jonathan Chait Should Stop Writing About Education Reform. The truth is that Chait has no objectivity when it comes to this issue.

In contrast, Andrea Gabor wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover. There are a few aspect to it. But the bottom line is that the system is not working for the children that most need it. They are allowed to fall through the cracks via “tools” such as “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, [and] counseling out.” So hooray! The statistics on this are pretty clear: if you exclude the students who are doing most poorly, test scores will go up. That’s basic arithmetic that I suspect even the charter school cheerleaders understand.

In addition, there’s this, “A key part of the New Orleans narrative is that firing the unionized, mostly black teachers after Katrina cleared the way for young, idealistic (mostly white) educators who are willing to work 12- to 14-hour days.” There are a couple of things to think about here. First, this is the modern corporate world’s approach to cutting costs: get rid of experienced middle aged workers who cost more and replace them with inexperienced young workers who cost less. But if they are willing to work 14-hour days, isn’t that a good thing? No, it isn’t. First, we shouldn’t expect that of any workers. But more important is that as those young teachers get older, they will not be willing to kill themselves for the job. Now it may be that the schools will just replace them with a new round of young inexperienced teachers who will work 14-hour days. But this brings up a related issue: teacher shortages.

I have been flummoxed over the past few years to see two parallel things happening in public education. First, we have the education “reform” movement doing everything it can to make teaching a worse profession. Jonathan Chait is a great example. He simply lies when he claims that the current system “gives teachers high, and virtually absolute, levels of job security.” This is the old hysteria about not being able to fire bad teachers. Instead, Chait wants teaching to be the way it is for fast food workers where teachers can simply be fired without cause. He also has a problem with the system that “pays them based on years of tenure.” Because, you know, paying older, more experienced, and loyal workers is something that only applies to teachers.

But even while the education “reformers” are doing everything they can to make teaching a worse career move, we find that it is getting harder and harder to find qualified teachers. Carol Burris wrote, When it Comes to the Teacher Shortage, The New York Times Got it Wrong. She’s referencing an article that I discussed a couple of weeks ago, Schizophrenia of Education “Reform” Movement. The Times article claims that there are teacher shortages because the economy is improving and teachers have other options. That’s a nice story, and probably has a small amount of truth in it. But as usual when discussing education “reform,” the obvious cause is ignored.

Burris quoted a shocking statistic: over the last decade in California, there has been a 74% drop in students entering teacher education programs. A much bigger issue is that, “Common Core and its battles, high-stakes testing, the erosion of tenure, and the evaluation of teachers by test scores, have all contributed to the crisis.” In other words, being a teacher is not a compelling profession. We are turning teaching into exactly the kind of job that will not appeal to the kinds of people who would make the best teachers. We could still get teachers the old fashioned way — by paying them more — but, of course, that isn’t on the table either. The education “reform” movement wants miserable students who are great at taking tests and thinks that this should be facilitated by miserable teachers with low pay and no job security.

Everyone agrees that our educational system can be improved. But what we are doing is not designed to better educate our children. In as much as it is about the children at all, it is designed to create a better trained workforce so that our corporations don’t have to invest in worker training. But primarily what we are doing is making teaching a worse job and then whining that not enough young people are choosing it as a profession.

Over at The Fiscal Times, Mark Thoma wrote a really interesting article, The Politics of Income Inequality. He noted that, “The calls to cut government spending to avoid disastrous, though largely imagined consequences, and the push to cut taxes to avoid harmful economic distortions that supposedly lower economic growth are, in the end, about the desire to reclaim income lost to taxes.” In other words, all the claims about improving the economy and balancing the budget are just about the rich wanting to lower their taxes. That should come as no surprise to anyone around here. By and large, the rich are rich because they don’t care about anyone but themselves.

But a really big question remains, “Why do so many non-rich people go along with this?” After all, there are very few people who are rich. Clearly they are not supporting these policies out of a sense of greed. One big way that we are seeing in the Republican presidential nomination is immigration. More immigration is certainly to the benefit of the rich. But it isn’t that big a deal. They can easily bypass it if they can use immigrants as the reason why this generation of American workers is not doing as well as the last. “It’s not that the rich are taking all the productivity gains; it’s that immigrants are mowing laws for cheap!”

Thoma put it well:

So people blame the poor and the immigrants. Of course, it is nonsense. The truth is that the middle class and the rich get huge largess from the government. It is just, as I have discussed many, many times before, that our system is set up so that the richer you are, the less the help you get looks like welfare. The poor get special cards that they use in public so that their government assistance comes with a big dose shaming. The rich get billions in bank bailouts, set up so that they can say they were forced to take them and didn’t actually need them. The middle class, of course, don’t see the thousands of dollars they get from the government to pay their mortgages as welfare — it is just a tax deduction! (Uber-conservative Milton Friedman would disagree.)

The question is whether conservative policy would actually improve the lots of the working class. “Republicans will close the borders, slash spending that requires the redistribution of income to the undeserving, and when all is said and done the belief is that there will be more income and opportunity available to hard-working, upstanding, moral households.” I think the answer to that should be obvious. This isn’t an ideological conclusion of mine. It is empirical. The Republicans made this claim under Reagan, and not only did the working class do no better — they ended up paying higher taxes. The same policies were pushed under George W Bush and again, the working class got nothing. It’s kind of funny, actually, because the Republicans run around saying the Democrats have no new ideas, but the Republicans are pushing the exact same policies they’ve been pushing for 40 years. But there is an extra irony: those policies clearly haven’t worked, but they still push them.

Thoma’s argument is that we must do something about income inequality. Currently, it is just getting worse. And the worse it gets, the more pressure builds to do something about it. It would be nice to think that the economists are busy working on solutions. And I know that the so called liberal economists are working on it. The conservative economists are too busy giving well paid talks to groups of hedge fund managers. But ultimately, I think we will need to reevaluate the entire idea of capitalism.