It seems that the FBI has found two top secret documents on Hillary Clinton’s email server. In the most fundamental sense, I don’t especially care. Our government does almost nothing but classify documents. At this point, I assume even top secret ones are nothing but embarrassing information. I’m sure that in a century historians will have a lot of fun going through them. They’re going to say, “This government really didn’t want it’s people to know what was going on!” Because that is what the vast majority of classification is all about: stopping the American people from knowing the things that their government is doing.

But the other side of this is that Clinton hasn’t exactly been a supporter of transparency. She is definitely behind the surveillance state. So it is hard to be too sympathetic to her. And there is the other issue of inequality in America. Clinton will almost certainly not be prosecuted for this. That isn’t because she’s Hillary Clinton. In fact, her being Hillary Clinton is probably the only thing that makes me hedge my bet slightly. She’s part of the power elite. She’s like David Petraeus, and we don’t go after people with actual power. There are always apologists around to explain how the law shouldn’t apply to them.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a typically excellent article about this divide, Hillary Clinton on the Sanctity of Protecting Classified Information. He mentioned a number of people who the administration moved heaven and earth to go after for the most minor of “crimes.” That includes people like Thomas Andrews Drake, who as is typical, had almost a dozen charges dumped on him, only to end up pleading to “one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer.”

The focus of Greenwald’s article is on Chelsea Manning. None of the documents she released were top secret. They were simply classified. And as Greenwald noted:

But Clinton wasn’t understanding of Manning’s actions. At the time she said, “I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so.” But that’s the irony. When someone like Manning releases classified documents as an act of what she (and I) think is the public good, it is seen as the worst possible thing. But when someone like Clinton releases them out of incompetence or laziness, well, we all make mistakes.

Of course, the Republicans are going to have a field day with this. But that’s just partisanship. If Clinton were a Republican, Fox News would spend the day spinning it as No Big Deal. Instead, it will spend the day spinning it as the Worst Thing Ever. And maybe this scandal will hurt Clinton in the presidential election. I don’t actually think anyone but the partisans care. Most people are with me in believing that classified documents are mostly a crock. In the end, the economy will trump all.

As for me, all this shows about Clinton is that she’s something of a hypocrite, which is not news. It’s much more important in what it says about our political system. We are not, as John Adams claimed, “A government of laws, and not of men.” Who you are is far more important than what you do with regards to the judicial system.

Last Friday, Dean Baker wrote, Job Growth Remains Strong in July. He actually wrote that the jobs report is “moderately positive,” which, if you know anything about Baker, is high praise. But it isn’t anything especially great. It is just that the economy is continuing to grow as it has been. And wage growth is poor. If we look at the last three months, wages are less than 2% higher than they were during the same period a year ago. Accounting for inflation, that’s an increase of about 1%. So we are hardly seeing liftoff with pay. And this is with over a decade and a half since the middle class has seen much of any increase in wages.

Most people know that the standard unemployment rate — 5.3% right now — doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t include people who want jobs but have simply given up looking. And it doesn’t include people who are working part time but want to work full time. The best way to look at employment is with the Employment-to-Population Ratio, which is bizarrely abbreviated EPOP. And it paints a very disturbing picture of the economy. The standard one uses all employees. But this one shows only prime age men (25-54), in order to cut out demographic factors (aging workforce).

What most disturbs me about this is that our peaks seem to be going down over time. And if you look at numbers dating back to the 1950s, it is even worse. The number stayed pretty constant until the late 1960s, and then it has been all down hill from there. This is largely due to women entering the work force. But this only makes the case that much more strongly. It used to be that families could better support themselves with a single paycheck. That’s just not so anymore. Regardless, the EPOP for all workers peaked at 81.5% in 2000 and is down to 76.7% as of last year. And it looks like we are headed for a new (lower) normal.

What’s so aggravating about this is that despite the data, there is still a constant push to slow down the economy. The claim is that inflation is about to take off. Well, let’s consider that for a moment. The Federal Reserve is supposed to have a 2% inflation target. The idea is that sometimes it will be a little above that and sometimes a little below, but overall: 2%. Now I think that is too low. I think our target should be more like 3% or 4%. The 2% target is just something that Alan Greenspan pulled out of the air. But it is certainly the case that a 2% inflation target is better for the rich and a 4% target is better for workers. So you decide what is really going on.

But the Fed can’t even manage to meet its 2% inflation target. The inflation rate of the last year was only 0.8%. The inflation rate of the first six months of this year has has been slightly negative. Now, I understand: what the Fed does is hard. It is not always possible to get the inflation where it ought to be. But the question on my mind is why the Fed has been making noises about raising interest rates for the last year. I would think they would be freaking out about the low inflation, not looking for ways to slow the economy down. If ever there was a time to push for increased wages and some inflation, it is now.

It doesn’t matter, apparently. The Federal Reserve is not just supposed to keep inflation low, it is supposed to keep unemployment low too. But as Matt Yglesias asked several years ago when Ben Bernanke was the Fed chair with unemployment at 8.2% and inflation less than 2%, “If the unemployment and inflation rates were reversed, would the Fed do something about it?” It’s a rhetorical question, because we all know it would have been working night and day on the problem. But the fact that poor people who no one on the Fed knows aren’t able to find jobs is never a pressing issue.

Last week was the end of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. I don’t think that I’ve missed an episode in the last six years. It was a good show — very funny and reasonably well informed. And we will see if The Daily Show With Trevor Noah manages to maintain the level of quality. But I don’t suspect that it much matters. I feel the same way about Jon Stewart that my father’s generation felt about Johnny Carson. It isn’t that I thought he was that great, but I liked hanging out with him and seeing his perspective.

On the last show, Stewart spent one segment actually talking about politics. But it was actually what I most dislike about him, Three Different Kinds of Bulls**t. He starts out, “Bullshit is everywhere.” But that’s not really true. Or if it is, then it is a totally pointless observation. If you really think that everyone lies, then it isn’t worth mentioning. It’s like saying, “Food is everywhere.” But I take his point: people pile it on to make unappetizing things seem appetizing. And when we don’t call it out, we allow ourselves to be manipulated. People were indeed more likely to support the “Patriot Act” than the “Security State Liberty Killing Act.”

But somehow, he gets from that to claiming that Dodd-Frank is nonsense because it could have just been, “Banks shouldn’t be able to bet on red.” This is the easiest kind of commentary, which is found all over Fox News. How many times have we heard that Obamacare is bad because it is 33,000 pages? As though complexity is necessarily a bad thing. Why are laws complex? Certainly part of the reason is corruption. But the main reason is simply that laws need to be clear so that they can be applied equally.

Dodd-Frank is not the law that I wanted. But noting that it is 2,300 pages long is not only a specious argument against it, it is also completely without content. No one becomes more informed by being told that bills in Congress are long. What’s more, it seems to give ignorant viewers a pass, “You don’t need to know what is in this bill, because they made it too long.” And The Daily Show was at its worst when it used this kind of contentless carping and easy “centrism” with its implication that if we all just chose to get along all would be well.

Just the same, I would never complain that Dennis Miller’s political comedy lacked substance. All he has to offer are jokes based upon pointed ignorance of what’s really going on in the world — the intent to see everything in the most simple minded way possible. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, was usually far better. When he encountered “bullshit,” he usually dug into it and presented at least a fair amount of the truth that it obscured. And that’s why the media ecosystem will be a lot worse off with him gone. I expect that Trevor Noah is going to be a lot like Larry Wilmore: funny but not terribly interested in digging down into the “bullshit,” except to find a joke or two.

Luckily, we still have John Oliver.

Robert Reich made a really good video about the Federal Reserve. I don’t pay that much attention to Reich anymore, because I fully understand everything he has to say. But he really is a great communicator. And unlike a lot of people, he doesn’t lose site of what most people — even politically engaged people — know. I know that I often take stuff for granted when writing about politics and economics. It’s easy enough to do when you spend so much time reading other writers who know as much or more than you do. But a lot of these issues are really important and not widely understood.

The Federal Reserve is an especially important and obscure topic. It’s important because it really does determine if you are going to get a raise — or even have a job. And it is obscure because very few people know what it does. There was the time during the 2004 Democratic debate when Al Sharpton totally blew a question about what the Fed does. So let me clear that up: the Fed controls the flow of money in the economy. Yeah, it does other things. But that’s the most important. And it is in this regard, that it has the power to decide if you have a job or not.

The two things that the Fed looks at are employment and inflation. But given whose interests the Fed actually looks after, it is far more focused on the latter issue. Everyone in the power elite seems constantly concerned that we are going to go back to the mid and late 1970s when inflation got almost as high as 15%. But the Fed was able to fix this by increasing unemployment. So it isn’t necessary now to “head off” inflation by killing jobs ahead of time.

The other thing about the economy of the 1970s is that the inflation problems were mostly the result of oil price shocks. So how is that an issue right now? It isn’t. What’s really going on is that the power elite think that it is much safer to allow American workers to continue to see their wages stagnate and to lose jobs rather than for the rich to see the slightest threat to their wealth. And that is what this is really all about. Like so much else in the United States, workers have accepted the world view of the power elite, even though it is not in the interests of workers.

What Reich talks about in this video is that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates until we clearly see inflation. It does seem to be the case that the Fed desperately wants to raise rates. They are just looking for an excuse to do it. But they haven’t raised rates because there is literally no indication of inflation. Worker wages are not going up. But to me, it is as simple as this: our unemployment rate is 5.3%. This is almost certainly artificially low because of involuntary part-time workers and others who have just given up looking for a job because they can’t find one. But even if that wasn’t the case, in 2000, the unemployment rate got down to below 4%, yet we didn’t have inflation. It makes no sense that the Fed can remember back 40 years, but can’t remember back 15 years.

Check out the video, it is very informative — and entertaining.

Almost a month ago, Noah Smith wrote an article that really struck me, Free-Market Ideology and the Burden of Proof. I’m kind of shocked that it took me this long to write about it, but I think I had to let it sit in my mind for a while. It’s one of those things where what he is saying is obvious in retrospect. Basically, he posits that the Reagan revolution was super keen. All that lowering of taxes and cutting of regulation worked great and it created a great economy. (This is not true, of course.) But even if that’s true, why should we think it is still true? If cutting taxes in half caused an economic boom, why would cutting them in half again do the same thing?

The thing is that we have had a history since Reagan. Both Democrats and Republicans have done the same things. Clinton deregulated the financial industry and it didn’t help, except in allowing a huge housing bubble to form that brought down the entire economy. And Bush’s big tax cuts created incredibly disappointing economic growth. As Smith put it, “Reagan probably picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit.” But as Paul Krugman put it last Friday in regard to a different Noah Smith article, “In terms of the economy, his record is trumped by Bill Clinton’s on every front: GDP growth, job creation, family incomes.”

What’s shocking is that the Republican Party is stuck at Ronald Reagan. I commonly hear Republican politicians claim that Democrats are stuck in the past and have no new ideas. Clearly, it is the Republicans who just refuse to listen and are still hearing what George McGovern ran on in 1972. As for what ideas the Republicans have, they are exactly what Reagan and Kemp were pushing. It’s still supply-side economics: if only we make it easier for the rich, it will help everyone.

In the meantime, the Democrats went through a revolution of thought. I’m not keen on it, and I’m glad to see it receding to some extent. But it is still true that Democrats are very open to neoliberal ideas. If they can solve a social problem through the private sector, they will. Just look at Obamacare. The only way that Republicans have changed is in that they are now simply against solving any social problem. They are more focused on trying to turn back time and destroy everything that was done in the New Deal and the Great Society.

So the question is why we continue to accept this rhetoric from conservatives. The economy was pretty good under Reagan. This was mostly due to the Federal Reserve, but I understand that most people give credit to Reagan and his policies. But Clinton raised taxes and had an even bigger boom. And then Bush ran the whole Reagan playbook and had mediocre results — even before the economic crisis. So why is it that Bush’s brother is considered a reasonable candidate, when he is pushing the same stuff? It seems like as voters, we are willing to let our political leaders do anything at all. It’s like we are playing a game of craps rather than electing people based upon policies.

Regular readers know that I hate Ted Nugent. It is mostly just that he has an easy partisanship that is pure tribal identity. But there are so many facets to what is vile about him. And one thing that really bugs me is that he can make death threats regarding the president and nothing happens to him. Back in 2007 he said, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” And then in 2012 he said, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” That is a clear threat. But nothing happens to him because he’s white and rich.

Let me be clear: I think he should be allowed to say such things. I don’t think they mean anything. I do think they coarsen political debate. And they do have bad effects on people who are even more unstable than Nugent. But I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist. Regardless, I don’t see that the state’s interest in protecting individuals comes anywhere near its interest in allowing for the free exchange of ideas. I certainly think that Nugent and others should be socially ostracized. The fact that Mike Huckabee is a friend of his should make Huckabee unqualified for the presidency. But we all know that the right wing of this country is crazy, so clearly, I am asking for too much.

The problem is that if Ted Nugent were a Muslim with the same statements, he would have spent years in jail — twice. And all that says is that America has free speech as long as the speech is popular enough. And that means that we don’t actually have free speech. I am in the situation where the things I want to say are clearly inside the range of acceptable speech. But that’s hardly surprising. I’m a white male who grew up in the middle class. I don’t stray too far from that. I am the kind of liberal that such a background creates. So the fact that I feel unconstrained, means absolutely nothing.

The issue isn’t confined to the United States, of course. It is a problem in the west generally. Everywhere that countries congratulate themselves on their embrace of free speech, you will actually find incredible hypocrisy. This was well on display early this year with all the “Je Suis Charlie” protests. At the same time people were marching in the streets for “free speech,” the French government was going after a comedian. It certainly wasn’t because he was offensive. After all, wasn’t that what everyone was marching for?! It was rather because he was offending the wrong people. You see, Charlie Hebdo was offending Muslims, and the comedian was a Muslim offending non-Muslims.

Now we have another example, in the UK this time, A Quiz for the West’s Great Free Speech Advocates and Supporters of Anjem Choudary’s Arrest. It does indeed seem that Anjem Choudary is a vile guy. But then so are Nazis and Klansmen. But I support their rights too. In the article, Glenn Greenwald points out the ridiculous double standard that we commonly use in the west. Choudary gives speeches saying that he supports the Islamic State. Thus, the UK government claims that this is inciting violence. Okay. But so is the following that never got anyone arrested:

Greenwald provides many other examples. But it’s clear. This is just a double standard. It’s like all the FBI “sting” operations where the FBI takes mentally unstable Muslims and gets them to pretend to start a jihad. I wonder what would happen if the FBI had similar “sting” operations with unstable Ted Nugent fans. But we’ll never know, because the FBI would never do that. Because Muslims are the enemy. Not Ted Nugent or Sarah Palin fans. And not Alex Jones, whose listeners have been incited to think that Jade Helm 15 is an existential threat to America. Because we are hypocrites. Because we do not have free speech.

Some conservative ideas are bad like raising the retirement age. It is just a way of cutting social security benefits without actually saying so. And given that the poor don’t live as long as the rich, it is an extremely regressive way of cutting social security. It would be far more fair to just cut how much money people get. But that would be admitting that it is a cut. Obviously, we need to call this sort of thing out. Delaying retirement by two years is what all the Republican candidates (except Trump) want to do. But at least it would save money.

But there is a whole other level of wrongness. I thought Chris Christie put out the proposal very well at last Thursday’s debate. After saying that we must “first” raise the retirement age because, hey, everyone’s doing it, he said, “Secondly, we would [means] test Social Security for those who are making over $200,000 dollars a year in retirement income, and have $4 to $5 million dollars in liquid assets saved.” This is what passes for hard nosed thinking in the Republican Party. It sounds good because obviously such people wouldn’t be hurt. And it seems to say, “See: I’m going after the rich!” But it really doesn’t.

Look at the numbers he’s proposed. Just making a quarter million dollars per year isn’t enough to make someone too rich to need Social Security. They must also have $4 million is liquid assets. So supposed you just bought Bill Gate’s $63 million mansion. So you are only left with three and a half million dollars in cash. And you only get about a million per year in retirement income. Then don’t worry, you are still going to get your $2,663 check every month. Because Chris Christie isn’t a monster! Clearly, Christie has put together his plan so it won’t actually apply to anyone, but it sounds like he’s coming down hard on the rich.

But the worst thing about this plan is that even if it were real, it is meaningless. Dean Baker has been writing about this for years. Unless we want to eliminate Social Security for everyone with retirement benefits of $40,000 per year and more, there really is no savings. All it would do is make the accounting more difficult (something that Republicans are supposedly against) and make people less inclined to support the program (something that Republicans are very keen for). Even if Christie set a single standard of $200,000, it would be meaningless.

There are two parts of Social Security. The “pay in” is highly regressive — mostly between the upper class (who make around $100,000) per year, and the truly rich who make many hundreds of thousands or more. But it is nonetheless true that the upper class pay a lot of money into social security. The “pay out” is far more egalitarian. So there is money to be gained by soaking the rich — but it isn’t on the “pay out” side; it is on the “pay in” side. Of course, no conservative is willing to eliminate the payroll tax cap — or even increase it. That actually would cause a little pain for the rich, so it is not even discussed.

I don’t think this is a conspiracy. For one thing, I don’t think that Chris Christie is smart enough to say to his people, “I want to propose increasing the retirement age, which is a regressive benefit cut; what can I come up with that makes it looks like I’m hurting the rich too, but which doesn’t actually hurt the rich?” But I do think that people like Christie have advisers who know that anything at all is okay as long as it doesn’t hurt the rich. So if Christie ever got it into his head to raise the payroll tax cap, there would be someone close by to explain that he can’t do that. The problem is more systemic: the Republicans are in the can for the rich. And that’s the only reason they exist.