Perhaps I am stuck in the middle of the 20th century in terms of intellectual thought. But when I look at the great big world, I see most people involved in the process of defining themselves. In its most pernicious form, it is the good “us” versus the bad “them.” But even when it is not done for such negative purposes, it is extremely wasteful. And what’s more, those who have power in a society can easily use this natural tendency to get people behind policies that are quite bad. This is what I see going on in Europe with regard to Greece. Especially in Germany, the prevailing narrative is that the Greek people are corrupt and lazy and if only they acted more like the Germans (By invading Poland?) everything would be okay.

Last week, Simon Wren-Lewis call bunk to all this, The Eurozone’s Cover-Up Over Greece. Over the last five years, the Eurozone has given an enormous amount of money that was nominally for Greece in exchange for austerity policies. But all that money did was hold off default. The money didn’t go to Greece but rather its creditors. If Greece had simply been left to default on its debt in 2010, it would have suffered under roughly the same austerity because it wouldn’t have been able to borrow money. The only difference would be that the banks who had lent money to Greece would have lost it.

The Greek bailout was not a bailout of the country at all, but rather the (mostly) German bankers. I’ve never been able to get my head around this disconnect. After the financial crisis of 2008, everywhere you looked, people were pointing fingers at borrowers. Here in the US it was homeowners who couldn’t afford their mortgages; in southern Europe, it was governments (actually just Greece) who borrowed more than they should have. But anyone who has ever even tried to get a bank loan knows that this is not how it works. The banks are supposed to be the adults who only give out loans to worthy borrowers.

But somehow, the idea that it takes two to tango, has been lost in this discussion. And it is worse than that because we expect borrowers to want more money than they can afford. So it’s pretty amazing that €42 billion have been given away to bankers who were clearly reckless, yet they are never mentioned. They are seen as good and pure — taken advantage of by the evil Greek government, which should have known that it couldn’t afford the loans it was taking.

I pine for the days when people were more class conscious. I blame mass media. If it wasn’t for the constant assault of “respectable” news outlets repeating lies about poor deceived bankers, people would see things more clearly. Remember the founding of the Tea Party: millionaire Rick Santelli surrounded by other millionaires on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, ranting about a law designed to help homeowners. And millions of middle class Americans — most of whom were too old to have been caught up in the housing bubble — jumped on board. There was instant common cause between the bankers and middle class homeowners who just had the good luck of being born at a better time. Or in Germany, there are working stiffs who align with the poor bankers. “Us” and “them” have been sliced and diced by the power elite for the benefit of themselves, so they will never be held accountable and so the money will keep moving from the poor to them.

Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”

A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”

A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.

Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.

—Alfie Kohn
Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”

There has been much talk about Dylann Roof who apparently killed nine people at a Bible study being held at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Many on the left want to call it terrorism and think that it is a sign of hypocrisy that it isn’t. I am highly sympathetic to that complaint. But I find myself coming at it from the other side. “Terrorism” is one of those words that describes nothing. Its use only serves to separate the world into the good people (us) and the bad people (them).

In the 1980s, I remember that the US press had no problem referring to those fighting against the government in the Salvadoran Civil War as “terrorists.” Meanwhile, those fighting against the far more legitimate Sandinista government in Nicaragua were “freedom fighters.” We see the same kind of thing today with countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The former is an ally, so the best gloss is put on everything it does. The former is nominally an enemy, so the worst gloss is put on everything it does. This isn’t surprising coming from the US government. Why it is that our “free” press goes right along with it has always been something of a mystery to me.

It may be just an extension of what Alexis De Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” We believe in the freedom to dissent — as long as no one really exercises it. I have long wondered if we don’t continue to have a nominally free press only because our press is in fact as compliant as Pravda. And that takes us back to the word “terrorism” and its magical properties.

Since I was a little kid, I’ve thought that terrorism was the use of violence to keep people in a constant state of terror and thus make them compliant to the political will of those using the terrorism. I looked up the word on Merriam-Webster, and that is more or less what it says: “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.” But this definition is extremely problematic because by it, the United States is the biggest terrorist group in the world. The people in Afghanistan who have drones constantly flying over them are indeed — and very explicitly — being terrorized.

And it isn’t just the United States. Modern warfare has changed. Look at the following table from the documentary War Made Easy.

Civilians have always been killed in war. But now, war is not even primarily about two armies fighting against each other; it is about two countries (groups, whatever) fighting against each other. Most people just want to live their little lives, but if they live in the wrong place, war comes to them. And that is terrorism — pure and simple.

I don’t really think that Dylann Roof walking into that church and killing people is an act of terrorism — as horrific as it was. But I also don’t think that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s shooting spree in Ottawa was terrorism either. And I certainly don’t think all these FBI created “crimes” are terrorism. They all just seem to be disturbed people doing the kinds of things that disturbed people do. But that doesn’t mean that I’m complaining about calling Dylann Roof a terrorist — because he certainly qualifies better thant Zehaf-Bibeau, who no one in the mainstream media had trouble calling a terrorist.

I’d like to get rid of the word “terrorist.” All it does is clarify what side we think any criminal is on. And in the current American context, it is patently racist. If Dylann Roof were a Muslim, people would be calling his murders terrorism. Maybe in the final analysis, people would change their minds. But the calculus is clear enough: a violent Muslim is by default a terrorist, even if he is really just a confused crazy person. Labeling something “terrorism” doesn’t tell us anything about it — except that a Muslim was involved.

Carola Conces Binder wrote a very interesting article over at her blog Quantitative Ease, Another Four Percent. The reference is to Jeb Bush’s claim that he’s gonna rev up the economy to 4% growth. He got this number from a brainstorming session at his big brother’s “institute.” Brainstorming is a nice word for it. A more accurate word would be BS session. It’s the kind of number that is pulled out of the anus of one animal or another. But why 4%? Why not 6%? Or 40%? Or a Googolplex — if we are just making it up?

Well, there is a reason for it. The economic growth rate under Obama has been 2%. So why not double it? It isn’t totally out of the question. Certainly we saw growth near that level during Clinton’s presidency. But that was largely fueled by the stock bubble. Matt Yglesias, for one, is not impressed, Jeb Bush’s 4% Growth Promise Is 104% Nonsense. He pointed out a few things. First, since 1980, the average GDP growth rate has only been 2.7%. And it has never been as high as 4% for an entire president’s term. And perhaps most disturbing for Jeb Bush is that under his brother and father, the growth rate was only a bit more than 2%.

I’m personally fed up with GDP growth as a measure worth caring about. Our economy works very well at growing. But it does a terrible job of distributing the rewards. And the power elite understand this. When John Cochrane discussed whether 4% growth was reasonable, he brought up the 11 million undocumented workers. Why? Because that would increase GDP. We aren’t talking per capita GDP here. The idea is just to get more wealth in the economy overall. The power elite know that this means they will get a cut of it. The median income can slip further and further down, but their incomes will go up and up.

Binder noted the real reason that 4% was picked, “Let’s face it, we have a thing for nice, round, kind of arbitrary numbers.” In fact, Jeb Bush himself said, “It’s a nice round number.” And this seems to be the state of economic analysis at this point. She mentioned another “nice round number” that has no basis in reality: the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target. This is a number that Alan Greenspan apparently just pulled out his (or some other convenient) anus. But it is now taken as though it were brought down off Mount Sinai on clay tablets. Yet in the late 1960s, we had a great economy with inflation in the 4% to 5% range. But the economy was only good for workers, so I guess it doesn’t count.

Economists have a lot of complicated and elegant theories about the way the economy works. And some of those theories have the benefit of even being correct. But when it comes to economic policies, all these theories are used for is to justify wild guesses that the power elite grab hold of. I’m sure that Jeb Bush can find an economist who will build him a model that shows that if he just cuts taxes by the right amount, we will get GDP growth of 4% per year for a decade. But it’s all just done for the personal gain of the powerful. It’s religion — faith based policy. And heretics like me who think our inflation target ought to be double what it is aren’t burned at the stake. We are just ignored. Because obviously we are wrong. All the smart and knowledgeable people know that the inflation target must be 2% — that’s what defines who is smart and knowledgeable.

So why shouldn’t Jeb Bush pull out 4% growth as what will happen if he becomes president? It’s no less grounded in reality than any of our other economic policy.

Lydia DePillis tried to get to the bottom of a question, Why NAFTA Passed and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Failed. She noted that nothing had really changed in terms of the arguments for and against the two deals. The only real answer she comes up with is that there was a procedural difference: the fast-track authority was long done on NAFTA — before it was negotiated. So it was just a matter of voting for it or against it. I think it is simpler than that.

The 1992 election was widely misinterpreted by both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are to this day convinced that they lost because Bush raised taxes. The Democrats were for a time — and to some extent still — under the delusion that Clinton won because he turned right and had his “Sister Souljah moment.” So there was a feeling that conservative policy was the right way to go — or at least the wave of the future. That just isn’t true anymore. I think that even the Democratic Party establishment is waking up to the fact that the New Democratic movement was bad for the nation and ultimately bad for the party.

Here’s the question that people are starting to ask: why vote for the Democratic Party when its unofficial slogan is, “Not as bad as the Republicans!”? If the Republican Party hadn’t become so horrible, the Democratic Party would be doing major soul searching right now. And even as it is, a whole lot of Democrats are wondering what it matters to win elections when the playing field is so shifted to the right that even a conservative measure like Obamacare required herculean effort and passed only with Democratic votes. The American voter is pretty messed up, but almost no one is in favor of having two political parties as fully owned corporate subsidiaries.

I think most people are where I am regarding these matters, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. Are trade agreements good for the economy? They appear to be. But they aren’t that good for the economy. They create modest growth. But this is nothing compared to the enormous disruption that they create. And the kicker is that people see no correlation because economic growth and job or wage growth. That’s because there is none. Over the last 40 years, we’ve seen the economy manipulated so that it exists for the benefit of the rich — and the rich alone. What do trade deals have to do with the lives of workers — other than making them even more insecure?

The only thing that is surprising is that our elected officials listened. But it makes sense. They too have been worn down by ever more trade deals. Trade deals are for centrist Democrats what tax cuts are for Republicans: things that are done because they will supposedly create jobs but never really do. A lot of people have wondered why Obama is so all fired up about the TPP. I think this is why. It isn’t rational. He just “knows” that this trade deal is good for the economy in the same way that George W Bush just knew his tax cuts were good for the economy.

The difference now is that Democrats are capable of learning. And they saw that this was not just — or even primarily — a trade deal. The thing is larded up with special deals for industries that are going to increase profits but not jobs. No one thinks that if Lionsgate can sell The Expendables for he next 70 years in Vietnam that more films will get made. At a time when the Democratic Party is finally waking up from its long neoliberal nightmare, yet another trade deal just doesn’t make sense. If NAFTA seemed like the future to the Democrats in 1993, TPP definitely is the past in 2015.

For liberals, there is a long history of thinking that surely the Republicans will have to change their ways. They have a very unpopular platform and seem only interested in funneling money to the rich. There is almost no rational basis for their policies, so they have cast aside science for a kind of postmodern mentality where reality is whatever they want it to be. And this has morphed into a proto-fascist belief in “might makes right.” Remember the Bush administration idea that 50% plus one vote gave them legitimacy to do whatever they wanted? Surely, we liberals have thought, they cannot continue on like this and win elections!

Now we are hearing rumblings within the conservative moment that if the Republicans don’t win the presidency in 2016, the party is dead. There will be a civil war in the GOP that will tear it apart. Liberals tend to be more cautious. We’ve watched this before. For one thing, if the Republican Party came out in favor of torturing kittens, it would still manage to get 40% of the vote. That just seems to be built in. Still, Brian Beutler seems cautiously optimistic that the Republicans might change if they lose in 2016. I’m not.

The problem is that there is a disconnect between the micro-scale and the macro-scale. What is good for any one politician is not necessarily what is good for the party that she represents. It is interesting that the divide between these goals should be so much greater in the Republican Party than it is in the Democratic Party. But I don’t think it is hard to construct a narrative about why it is so. The conservative movement went through a long period of defeat. For four decades, the closest it came to the presidency was Dwight Eisenhower who wasn’t much more conservative than Adlai Stevenson who the Democrats ran against him. It bears repeating: Republican economic policy is not popular.

With the Democratic Party’s turn toward civil rights in the mid-1960s, the Republicans saw their chance. This is the basis of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy: get people to vote against economic policy that, all else being equal, they would hate — all in the name of saving their culture. The Democrats have never done anything comparable. It’s ironic that identity politics is a label placed on the Democratic Party, but the party has never used identity to get people to vote against their own class interests. It is the Republican Party that pushes the “real America” — incidentally, the places where very few people live — as an identity to policies that these people don’t generally agree with.

Brad DeLong wrote an amazing essay at his site, What About Today’s Republican Party? He highlighted the way that former California governor Pete Wilson got a second term by demagoguing against Latinos in the state. He did this, even while knowing that demographic changes in the state would soon make that position toxic. And now we have a state that in 1988 voted for George HW Bush by over 3.5 percentage points is now at just about a super-majority of Democrats and the idea that the state would vote for a Republican president is outrageous.

DeLong thinks the turning point was Newt Gingrich, who thought that he could demagogue his way to power and then govern the normal way but for the interests of the rich and powerful. Of course, that didn’t work. Once you set up that kind of situation, others are going to use it against you. As DeLong put it, “But then he found that his allies who did not care about governing could use his willingness to strike bipartisan deals — and his problems with his zipper — to bounce him out as well.” Now I think this all goes back a lot further, but the idea is the same.

After the 2012 election, there were many Republicans who thought that the party needed to reform. If the party loses in 2016, we will hear the same voices. But the party will have the same problem in 2016 as it did in 2012. If it becomes a “reasonable” pro-business party, it will have no base of voters. So it will continue to push forward with its white resentment strategy. At some point, it will find a winning coalition. But I suspect that will have more to do with the Democrats making a mistake rather than the Republicans suddenly getting creative.

There is an issue that makes a lot of people think that I don’t understand economics. It is this idea that we are so much better off now than we used to be. This is used as a justification for things as diverse as excessive and ever growing inequality and deforestation. The theory goes: well, there may be bad things about our economic system, but everyone has so much higher a standard of living, it’s worth it. But do we really have a higher standard of living? In one way: yes. Sugar used to be a luxury; now it is cheap. But in another way, we don’t. Now we have sugar in all our foods devaluing the extra sugar we get.

But I accept that increases in food availability are important. But there haven’t been major improvements in this regard in my lifetime. When it comes to the technological innovations that people think of, I am unimpressed. Remember the great Peter Thiel quote, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I always think of music distribution. When I was very young, I had a transistor radio and we used to walk around listening to it. Later there were Walkmans. Then MP3 players. And now Pandora. Each of these are marginal improvements, but hardly revolutionary. None of it is any better than wandering around a used record store and finding Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat and having a religious experience.

I was very pleased to read a recent Dean Baker article, Is the Middle Class Better Off? Economists’ Poor Logic on New Goods. The article is in reference to the hypothetical, “Would you be willing to trade an income of $50,000 in 2015 for an inflation adjusted $100,000 income in 1980, knowing that you can only buy the goods and services available in 1980?” The answer is supposed to be, “Of course not! How would I ever live without Netflix?!”

This falls right into what I was talking about before. At that time, we had VHS players. What’s more, there were actual good local rental companies where you could get what you wanted. I’m not saying that things aren’t better now. But they aren’t substantially different. And if you are interested in things that are a little out of the ordinary — little films like Medicine River — you may not be able to find them at all now. Of course, you could instead go to your satellite television where you will find half the stations running paid advertisements, reruns of Pawn Stars, and other content that is in no way better than the reruns of Gilligan’s Island that I grew up watching.

Baker noted that this question is a false one. “Ask someone who lived in the suburbs in the 1960s how they would feel living without a car. It would be pretty awful, but just 30 years earlier most middle class families did not have a car or think they needed one.” I’ve lived without a car for many years now. Overall, I think my life is better for it. Sometimes it’s a pain, but that is due to the way society is now organized around the car. Or consider the cell phone. I now feel freaked out if I leave home without my phone. But that’s ridiculous and I quickly realize that it is no big deal. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would gladly give up their cell phones if it would mean that their free time was unmolested.

But the biggest issue with this hypothetical is that a $100,000 income would provide something exceptional that no amount of consumer gadgets will ever compensate for: economic security. The biggest thing that limits happiness in modern America is economic uncertainty. Along with that better income at that time comes certainty that you will maintain that job and retire with a pension. It means allowing you to do what you want with your time. Sure, you wouldn’t have your movies streamed by Netflix. But if you lose your job tomorrow, you are going to lose you your Nixflix account anyway.

Technological progress is a great thing. But it comes at a cost. More and more, I don’t think that cost is worth it. But regardless of where anyone comes down on the question, everyone should agree that there are very real costs we pay for our constant marginal improvements in the “goods and services” that we can buy.

We should not be happy about this, Brownback to Sign Historic Sales Tax Hike After Bruising Budget Battle. As I’ve written about a lot around here, Kansas is in big trouble. Governor Sam Brownback wanted to cut taxes in his state. So he did what conservatives always do when they want to do something insane: he went out and found himself a heterodox economist who would tell him what he wanted to hear. It wasn’t hard. He went to Art Laffer who has been saying that tax cuts pay for themselves since the 1970s. He’s always been wrong, but that hardly matters.

So in the case of the recent tax cuts in Kansas, Laffer was wrong again, and the state has found itself with a huge budget deficit — 12% short in the fiscal year starting next month. They’ve already savagely cut their spending so now they are to the point where they have no choice but to raise taxes. Now the logical thing to do would be to raise the taxes that they lowered. But that is not acceptable. You see, those taxes were lowered on rich people. And despite what conservatives say, they don’t care about low taxes in a general sense; they care about low taxes on the rich.

You know Grover Norquist — the guy who all the Republicans rush to so they can sign his pledge to never raise taxes. Well, that pledge isn’t actually about all taxes. It’s just a pledge to stand against increasing “the marginal income tax rates.” That’s because the federal income tax is the only federal tax that is progressive. Richer people really do pay more. (Extremely rich people don’t, because they make “unearned” income.) When Congress was set to raise the payroll tax — an extremely regressive tax that hits the poor hard — Norquist was all for it. So just remember that: conservatives are for lowering the taxes of the wealthy; they don’t care about the taxes of anyone else.

The Kansas legislature came up with two tax increases to make up for the corporate giveaways of the last couple of years. The first is an almost 6% (0.35 percentage point) increase in the sales tax. Sales taxes are great from the standpoint of conservatives. They screw the poor, but inch by inch, so that it isn’t really noticed. Are you really going to notice that your laundry soap costs two cents more? Sure, the hundred bucks you lose for the year will be noticeable, but you won’t know who to blame; you’ll just have a vague feeling that you are falling behind — because you are.

The second tax increase is going to be noticed. And it is going to make people mad. Kansas currently taxes a pack of cigarettes 79 cents. The new law will increase that by $1.29 — that’s a total of $2.08 tax on a pack of cigarettes. Now you might say, “Great! We should discourage smoking!” And I agree to some extent. But poor people are more likely to smoke. And if we are doing this for public health reasons, the tax should go toward helping people get off cigarettes and toward treating cigarette related illnesses. This Kansas tax is just meant to grab some money from the most vulnerable people in our society.

Remember: Sam Brownback was just re-elected governor. And what he is doing now is going to make a lot of people really angry. Yet this is no bait-and-switch. Brownback is doing what he’s always done. This is more of what I wrote about recently, Swing State Voter Regret Is Killing Me. When the price of a pack of cigarettes jumps up to $7.00, there will be a lot of Kansans who will think they’ve been screwed by Brownback and his cronies. But they’ll be wrong. A lot of poor and middle class people vote for people like Brownback thinking that he would never hurt them. They are deeply confused. Maybe some day they will learn.

Afterword

I know a surprising number of people who are on disability who are Fox News addicts who consistently vote Republican. When I ask them why they vote for politicians who will, if they get the opportunity, cut their support, they brush it off. The Republicans, they claim, just want to get “those” people — the scammers — not good deserving people like themselves. It’s pure delusion.