Dan Balz is the very definition of a Villager. The only time I’ve written about him was last year when he was making the same old, tired argument that the Republicans needed to pass immigration reform in order to reach out to the Latino community. I’ve long argued that it makes no sense for the Republicans to pass immigration reform, given that their attitude is, “Once we do this for you, it’s over! Don’t expect anything else!” But people like Balz think that immigration reform is critical for the same reason that all other Villagers do: because its what “everyone else” thinks.

Well, over the weekend, I saw a new Balz article, GOP Debate Contenders Give Democrats Reason to Worry. His main claim is that Democrats are hoping that Trump becomes the nominee so they will have an easy election. While it is true that few Democrats would mind that outcome, I do not know of a single Democrat who thinks that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. What’s more, have we heard Clinton or Sanders attacking Trump? Not at all. Everyone still thinks the eventual nominee will be Bush or Walker or maybe Rubio. But that’s the think with Villagers: they don’t let facts stand in the way of whatever narrative they’ve decided to push.

According to Blaz, in private, Democrats don’t feel as good about running against Rubio as they do about running against Trump. Oh, what a surprise! Does that mean that any Democrats are seriously worried about running against Marco Rubio? But Blaz says that Rubio “declared forcefully early in the debate that he would present the starkest future-vs.-past contrast to Clinton.” This is just repeating Rubio’s own claims. In truth, Rubio is pushing exactly the same supply side policies that every Republican since Reagan has. There is nothing new about what Rubio is pushing.

He also went on to talk about Scott Walker. But it was curious. Check this out, “He has been a divisive leader in Wisconsin, but he has the potential to unite the establishment and tea party wings of the Republican Party…” All that means is that Walker could get the Republican presidential nomination. It says nothing at all about how that might make him a particularly impressive general election candidate. So Democrats should worry why, exactly? There really is nothing behind the claim. The article reads like it was based on a press release from Reince Priebus.

But I fear the article also comes from the Clinton haters. Democrats are “nervous about Clinton.” Republicans could “mount a stiff challenge” to “a vulnerable” Clinton. Why are people nervous? How exactly is she vulnerable? Is she having an affair with her videographer? Balz doesn’t say, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have any reasons at all. Partisans are always worried that the person who runs is going to turn out to be a problem. But in Clinton’s case, we have two advantages. First, her life has been so picked over that it’s hard to believe that there is any major scandal lurking. Second, we know that she will fight back at least as hard as her husband did.

It boggles my mind that people like Dan Balz get paid large amounts of money to peddle this nonsense. It’s not just that it’s wrong. It is that it is predictable. Of course some Villager was going to write a story about how Thursday’s debate spelled trouble for Hillary Clinton specifically and the Democratic Party generally. That was a given long before the debate.

If you listen to economists and politicians — especially those on the right — you will hear them talk excessively about economic growth. Jeb Bush recently got a lot of attention by claiming that he would increase growth to 4% — partly by making people work longer hours. That was silly, but not any more so than the standard argument about economic growth. When Republicans are asked how they will reduce inequality, they cast aside things like the minimum wage and labor unions. Instead, they push one thing and one thing only, “We need to increase economic growth so that everyone does better!” The problem is that this just isn’t the way the economy has worked for the past 40 years.

I wrote about this issue quite explicitly recently, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. From the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, wages increased right along with productivity. But since that time, the two things have become uncoupled. Wages have been basically stagnant, while productivity has continued upward. My point was and still is that productivity doesn’t matter in the least so long as we have an economy in which all the gains go to the people at the top. But the truth is that conservatives refuse to engage with this fact.

Last week at The Fiscal Times, David Dayen wrote about another side of this issue, Why Conservatives Are So Desperate to Debunk One Hillary Clinton Chart. What he is talking about is a concerted effort among conservative economists to claim that, “If only you look at the data correctly, you will see that workers have done great!” But they haven’t. And many mainstream economists have been all over this. Mark Thoma has highlighted a lot of them over at his blog, Economist’s View. But here is the chart — it ain’t complicated:

A good example of how conservatives are trying to deny this reality comes from Harvard economist Robert Lawrence. He argued that you couldn’t just look at workers. So they threw in the management class. Obviously, this is begging the question. Why not throw in every person? Then, by definition, there would be no inequality. What Lawrence has done is to get rid of the median income and replace it with an average income. The difference is huge. And as Dayen pointed out: the fact that the average and median are so different is itself an indication of a large amount of inequality, “Using average rather than median compensation is like taking the average salary of five workers in a room when one of them is Bill Gates. The average salary will look pretty robust even if the other four workers in that room are struggling.”

But even with that adjustment, Lawrence only managed to make up part of the difference. So he was forced to look at total compensation and fiddle with different inflation indices — all in a totally disingenuous way. This is just what Christian apologist William Lane Craig does: start with the conclusion and work backwards. I’ve written about this a lot. Lawrence started with the idea that workers are doing just great and he cobbled together an argument to prove it.

Dayen’s article started with a anecdote, that I thought was very telling:

Pretty much everything that was wrong with Clinton economics was the result of Robert Rubin. Still, he was ostensibly a liberal economist. But he “didn’t know” that wages and productivity had been decoupled. Economists are lost in their own models. American workers don’t need the chart to know that their lives as workers are not turning out the same as their parents’. But economists are locked into assumptions like “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Well, maybe in the mythical free market — but not in our political environment where the rich can buy special privileges. Luckily, a lot of economists are waking up. But the conservatives will hold onto this ideology forever — or at least until the economy falls apart.

John Whitehead wrote a very interesting article, Are All Tax Increases a Bad Thing? He started by quoting conservative economist Greg Mankiw who had written that he’s in favor of Pigovian taxes. These are taxes designed to correct for economic externalities. So, for example, a tax on lead pollution would deal with the fact that lead is toxic but that this fact is not included in its market price. But Mankiw claims that such tax increases can only be acceptable if they are revenue neutral. So if the lead tax raised a million dollars, other taxes would have to be reduced by a million dollars.

I have a major problem with this. (So does Whitehead, but that isn’t the focus of his article.) Is it the case that we should still have lead in gas, but that gas should be more expensive? Isn’t the remaining gas still spewing lead into the air and stunting the brain development of children? Doesn’t it make sense to use that money to keep children away from lead filled air? Or to encourage development of non-lead alternatives? Why is it that taxes must stay exactly the same other than the fact that Mankiw ultimately believes that taxes can only ever go in one direction: down?

One reason, I think, is that this is all part of a cunning conservative plan. Taxes on consumer products fall most harshly on the poor. The rich don’t use proportionally more gas than the poor. So the poor will end up paying a far higher percentage of their incomes on any new Pigovian taxes. But given that our existing tax system is barely progressive, we can depend upon the offsetting tax cuts going mostly to the rich. Thus: what Mankiw is advocating is for taxes to go down on the rich and up on the poor. What a surprise!

But Mankiw wasn’t happy with just proposing a tax system that does exactly what he is always in favor of. He had to use it to attack liberals. It’s funny that he provides a value judgement that he thinks is some kind of law of physics: increasing taxes must be offset with decreasing taxes. Therefore, the liberals who don’t want to do this are irrational or providing a “stalking horse for a broader, big-government agenda.” But given that the taxes will not be increased on the same people that the taxes will be decreased on, this is not valid. If it is the case that the poor (as usual) are going to get screwed, then a truly fair system would be to give some of the tax savings to them — or design the tax such that it doesn’t shift income from one class to another.

Whitehead brought up another aspect of this. Conservatives might be concerned that liberals just want to increase tax revenues. (But it is ridiculous to say that liberals want big government.) Just the same, liberals are very right to be concerned that conservatives will make this deal, and then later eliminate the tax increase. But is that really what Mankiw has in mind? Well, he’s a very smart guy. And given he’s pushing a system that clearly shifts the tax burden down the economic ladder, I can only assume that he doesn’t mind the idea that the conservatives might be able to get rid of the Pigovian tax, and end up with lower overall taxes that fall more heavily on the poor. That’s pretty much the history of the modern conservative movement.

Afterword

I know in this article that I am very harsh on Mankiw. The problem is that this is not the first time I’ve written about him. This is the main thing that I associate with him:

This is what we are dealing with. In the economics profession, he has a great reputation. But I don’t care about that. He’s put himself out as a public intellectual. And as such, he talks about politics and uses his economics expertise in a very slippery way. I don’t doubt that he’s self-deluded. I’m sure that he thinks if only we did as he wishes, all would be well. But who cares? He’s still just an apologist for the power elite.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. That was the name that actual long-time military and intelligence people gave the thinking of the Bush administration’s neophytes. After 9/11, these people wanted to be “hard” in their fight against terrorism. And we definitely saw that once the documents about the torture program were released. It wasn’t about being effective and getting intelligence. It was about showing the chickenhawks of the Bush White House than they were “strong” and willing to do whatever was required. It’s pathetic. But it is entirely in keeping with what the Republican Party is all about.

Jonathan Chait made a good point recently, Donald Trump, Affect, and the Conservative Mind. In the article, he pointed out that there are two parts to the conservative mind: ideological and emotional. That can be said about liberals too, of course. The critical issue is what the emotions are. And for conservatives it is mostly anger about their loss of privilege. This is a result of conservatism being backward looking. You can’t stand athwart history yelling stop without resenting the fact that history is, in fact, moving along quite well without you.

Chait argued that Donald Trump appeals to this emotional aspect of conservatism. He noted that the Republican Party has constantly appeased the base with ever and ever greater ideological purity. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. A large part of the base doesn’t actually care about ideology. They are just mad as hell and they don’t want to take it anymore. But they aren’t mad at the power elite, who are the ones who have actually hurt them. They are mad at the minorities and the Muslims. And the Republican Party is the one that is best at demagoguing these issues. But Chait nailed the effect of Trump’s current popularity, “It must be galling for the party regulars to prostrate themselves helplessly before the base, purging any hint of independent thought, only to watch a formerly pro-choice, libertine if not liberal, Democratic donor waltz into the lead.”

I’m not at all interested in Donald Trump as a candidate. I certainly expect him to flame out. It reminds me of the 1988 Democratic presidential election. Early on (in 1987), I decided that there were two candidates I could support: Joe Biden and Michael Dukakis. I picked Biden. But after he flamed out, I looked at Dukakis and found that he was an excellent substitute and that I could easily have supported him from the beginning. That’s what I expect to happen with Trump supporters. They will find that they don’t like some of his positions and they will move from him to Ted Cruz and eventually to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker. Because that’s the thing: in the end, there isn’t any difference with regard to general outlook.

But early decisions are based more on the gut. You “like” a particular candidate. And the Republican base really likes Donald Trump. He is everything that they want in a candidate: he’s rich, belligerent, and not terribly bright. I suspect that the elite opinion against him is mostly just because they don’t think that he can win the general election. That is to say: they too like his style. And why not? He is “hard” in the sense of Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. If you listen to Republicans on the Iran nuclear deal, you will hear this. The deal is not bad because of any specifics, but rather because of some gauzy idea that a “stronger” or “harder” president would get a better deal.

I hope that the Republicans do nominate Trump. If he happened to win the general election, he would be a far less frightening president than all the “establishment” Republicans — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker — who we are supposed to think would be just fine.

This last week, there were two episodes of someone shooting at soldiers involved in the Jade Helm 15 war games that many people have worked into a conspiracy theory that claims it is designed to take over Texas and initiate martial law so that the government can take all the guns away from all the real Americans who have been stockpiling them for the last several decades. You would think that some idiot who is taking this all much too seriously and is starting to use violence would cause people to rethink their conspiracy theories. But I’m sure they won’t. I’m sure instead, they will use the old standby of the “false flag” attack.[1] You know, “It’s just the government using violence as an excuse to call for martial law!”

For the kind of people who read Frankly Curious, this is probably bizarre. After all, Jade Helm 15 is hardly a big subject of discussion in the normal world. But in a particular subculture, it’s huge. That subculture is most associated with Alex Jones and his related media. It seems to also be getting some play on RT, but that outlet generally maintains a certain level of responsibility. On the plus side (I guess), Alex Jones actually seems to believe all the nonsense that he pushes. I know Jones and his followers just think that I’m a stooge, so let me address that for a moment.

I know you are, but what am I?! Really. Because the worst thing about the conspiracy theorists is that they totally miss the very real dangers that the power elite pose to us in their fanciful ideas about black helicopters and martial law. Really, what do these people think is going on? Do they really think that their guns have to be taken away or that the “patriots” have to be sent away to FEMA camps for the power elite to get everything it wants?! I have no idea how they can think that given that those in the power elite already have what they want. Why cage people when they are willing to do it themselves? And the InfoWarriors are caging themselves in a network of nonsense. The power elite don’t have a thing to fear from them!

At Salon Bob Cesca put the whole Jade Helm 15 conspiracy into the context the Alex Jones’ longtime prediction of a civil war between the US military (and police) and the “patriots” with their little gun stockpiles. Check out this little bit that Jones was ranting about a year ago:

God, do I ever know where this guy is coming from — and the people who listen to him. These are people who think it would be fun to have a nice little guerrilla war against the forces that are destroying America. In this case, these forces are, well, America itself. But wouldn’t that give these guys a feeling of purpose in the world? In decades past, they would have been members of a union — they would have felt part of something. Now, they are just adrift. You can hardly blame them. But this is a pathetic way to express it. It’s a kind of virtual treason — hoping that your country will turn fascist so that you can fight against it. How about doing a little political organizing?

But no. That’s because the vast majority of the people who listen to Alex Jones are conservatives. So the last thing they want to do is counter the powerful. Instead, they plays these games, just like they played war when they were children. And that’s the problem: they haven’t matured. They probably also fantasize about capturing Bigfoot and becoming Carl Kolchak — two things I was very keen on when I was 10 years old.

[1] I wrote that before learning from Bob Cesca about this InfoWars article, Marines Fired on Near Jade Helm Training Site: Training Exercise Gone Awry? Or as Planned? Because, you know, it couldn’t be some InfoWars loon doing it.

Greg Sargent tried to get to the bottom of an important political question, What Does the American Public Really Think of the Iran Deal? He took on two recent polls. One, by Quinnipiac, found that by a 57%-28% margin, Americans disagree with the Iran nuclear deal. But an NBC News poll came out the same day that found that by 35%-33% margin, Americans agree with the deal. Is one poll an outlier? Not really. As Sargent pointed out, in the NBC News poll, respondents were allowed a third choice: “don’t know enough.” Another 32% chose that option.

This goes along with an article that Zack Beauchamp wrote that I discussed last week, Public Opinion and the Iranian Nuclear Deal. In that case, the difference was priming. If respondents were give a little information about what the deal was, they were much more likely to support it. Conservatives have cried foul in both cases. They claim that Americans must be polled in their natural state of ignorance and must not be allowed to admit that they do not know enough.

I think that’s hooey. Polls are supposed to tell us something. Snapshots are all fine. But when one-third of the population is fine with admitting they don’t know enough to form an opinion, it tells us that it isn’t an issue that they care much about. Are we supposed to base our policy about what Americans think regarding a subject on which they will only give an opinion if forced? Clearly, the Iran deal is not going to be an issue in the presidential race for a third of the people. And I doubt it will an important issue for the other two-thirds.

Let’s face it: any deal with “Iran” in the title is going to sound bad to Americans. After the deal came out, my father told me that he did not like it. After a heavy sigh, I asked him why. He said, “I just don’t trust those people.” I immediately thought that American media had been completely successful in their propaganda campaign. My father had fully absorbed the idea that the Iranians were some kind of nefarious “other.” So I pointed out that we had made deals with the Soviet Union when we didn’t trust them. And that what is currently said about Iran — “They aren’t rational!” — was said about the Soviet Union.

The big argument against the Iran deal is based on a flat out lie. It took almost two years of intensive negotiations to make this deal. What do opponents think? That everyone was just enjoying the expense account? The P5+1 just came in and gave Iran everything it wanted and then they spent the rest of the time sipping drinks by the pool? The deal itself is actually rather clever, with a mechanism for automatically reinstating the sanctions. All any of the involved countries has to do is accuse Iran. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Iran accepted that. It shows an amazing amount of trust in the other countries.

I think Sargent sums up what is really going on regarding public opinion:

I believe in democracy. But this is not democracy. Clearly, democracy is more than voting. But even just looking at voting, there is a lead up to the vote. People hear from both sides. And in this case, I believe the pro-deal side has a much more compelling argument. But there is also a question of why we have a republican and not a straight democracy. And that is because of issues like this. I know infinitely more about the Iran deal than most Americans. But I haven’t read it. I’m no expert. To a large extent, my support for it is based on broader issues: the fact that war mongers always claim that the enemy can’t be trusted; that we have a long history of these kinds of deals working out; and so on. But I think this deal deserves to be tried. And in a decade, no one will know what the big deal was.

I guess the big news from last night’s debate is that there isn’t any big news. Ed Kilgore provided a great overview of the whole thing in six parts: one, two, three, four, five, and six. But at the end of the second part, he wrote, “Hard to believe there’s another hour of this!” That was just what I thought at the end of the first hour of the Monday forum. And you can see the effect. The later live blogging is less dense, because it all becomes so exhausting. The main thing that comes out of it is that nothing big happened. In fact, reading it, the most consequential moment seems to be one of the few things I saw in passing.

The only real question for the debate was whether Trump was going to do something that really damaged his standing. As I see it, that could have happened in two ways. He could have been caught flat footed and said something that was stupid even by the standards of the Republican Party base. Or he could have been too staid and non-Trump like. Well, he seemed to avoid that. What’s more, The Toronto Star reported, Donald Trump Hogs Airtime at GOP Debate. They noted that, “No clear winner in debate of top 10 Republican candidates for US presidential election, but front-runner Trump kept focus on himself.” Indeed. The Washington Post provided the times. Trump got ten and a half minutes. Bush got less than nine. And the rest all got less than seven — Rand Paul only five!

If you read this blog with any frequency, you cannot be surprised to learn that I think this is all hooey. Regardless of who the Republicans nominate, he will win the general election if the economy tanks. And regardless of who they nominate, he will lose if the economy stays strong. But that’s just an overview. The candidates do matter on the margins. And Democrats have a built in advantage. All else equal, they will win presidential elections. And the worse the Republican candidates, the better it is for the Democrats. So I am interested in what the Republicans are doing to themselves. And I think that it is great for the country — but awful for themselves.

Just after the debate, Brian Beutler wrote, The Republican Party Can’t Escape Its Past. In the article, he noted that the fundamental problem is that the Republican Party has not gotten over Romney’s infamous 47% video. That was where he said that 47% of the people took no responsibility for their lives. This was based upon the fact that they didn’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes. It was an extremely vile thing to say. The problem with it is that the Republican Party believes that it’s true: 47% of the country are “takers.”

This isn’t just the politicians or even the base. The conservative media is totally behind the idea. This is ironic given that the listenership of conservative media is mostly angry people on Social Security and disability. They are the biggest single part of the 47%, but they don’t see it that way. It’s basically just a racist dog whistle: “those people” get it and they don’t deserve it. So is it any wonder that Donald “I’m very rich” Trump is so popular with the base?

But the rest of the party has a hard time countering him, given that what he says in blunt ways is all that they say more carefully. They can’t say, “Donald Trump is wrong about immigration!” They have to say, “Donald Trump is wrong to talk about immigration in that way.” It isn’t the same. In fact, it sounds bad to base voters who think that the only thing wrong with politics is that politicians won’t “tell it like it is.” So it doesn’t look like the debate changed much of anything. And that’s great for the Democrats.