Timothy Taylor wrote an article that answers a question that I’ve wondered about for a while, What Share Work for Large Employers? If we define a large employer as a company that has 500 or more employees, then there has been a shift in recent years toward large employers. In 2003, 49.3% of all American workers were at large employers; in 2012, it was 51.6%. All of the smaller employers have lost market share, but the biggest loser has been the smallest companies — those with fewer than 20 employees. This is very interesting, but hardly surprising.

Americans fetishizes the “small business.” It’s very much like the “family farm.” I’m not sure why this is. Having grown up in a small business family, I can tell you the myth is nothing like the reality. It reminds me of a second season episode of Bob’s Burgers, “Bob Day Afternoon.” In it, Mickey notes that it’s cool that Bob has his kids work at the restaurant, and Bob replies that it’s only because he doesn’t have to pay them. When I saw that, I figured that one of the writers had a childhood like mine.

The other part of this is that I saw my parents treat the actual employees they had fairly badly. And they were not at all exceptional — I’ve seen it countless times with employers I’ve had as well as ones I’ve observed from the outside. They live in constant fear of bankruptcy. They never feel secure, even when things are going really well. And they expect their employees to care as deeply about the business as they do. Sadly, employees often do feel deeply committed to the business. But they are rewarded with bad pay and treatment until they finally have enough.

Taylor presented data that indicates this — at least as regard to pay. The average pay for workers at small employers is $36,912. It goes up the larger the firm. For firms with over 500 employees, the average pay is $52,554. That’s a 42% higher pay rate. Of course, this is average and not median. Also, one might think that companies with more employees are more successful and therefore can pay more. But I suspect it is just that if you have a thousand employees, you need them to stick around. It is costly to replace people. If you have five employees, well, there’s always some guy straight out of prison or rehab or a homeless shelter who is desperate for job.

Over the last couple of days, Paul Krugman and Arindrajit Dube have been discussing this issue of why it is that Walmart is seeing benefits from raising its wages. And what they propose is that rather than increased wages just being a cost, it actually has a feedback. When people are being paid less than the value of their work, giving them a raise will increase productivity. In other words: poor workers will reward their companies for being treated reasonably.

Compare this to the rich. I’m constantly amazed at this ridiculous conservative canard that if we raise taxes on the rich then they will stop working so much. I remember seeing a cartoon that summed this up. There were two corpulent rich guys laying by a swimming pool. One of them said, “I’ll tell you this: if they raise the capital gains tax, this is one coolie who won’t be breaking his back!” The truth is if a CEO is getting paid a million dollars per year, he isn’t going to be better at his job if you pay him ten million. In fact, such outrageous salaries are likely to make people complacent. I know if someone paid me $10 million per year, I’d quit after the first year and start a repertory company.

But it is always the best paid people who are the focus of company larges. And despite recent moves by Walmart and Target, I doubt that this is changing. It would be nice to think that these companies are starting to realize that having a strong middle class is actually good for them. It certainly would be good for the economy as a whole. But there is always money to be made next quarter for the CEO who keeps wages down, even if it is terrible in the long term. So I’m not keen about the economy’s move toward bigger employers. Even if they are better to their employees than the little companies are.

We Democrats all admire Obama. But unlike the stereotype, we don’t worship him. We’ve had a lot of problems with many of his policies. And I do mean “we.” Obviously, as a functional Democrat — I’m a member of the party because it is the more liberal of the two major parties, not because I agree with it — I have even bigger problems with President Obama. But he has never been so clearly outside the current thinking of the Democratic Party as he is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). So now was a really good time for the Democrats in the House of Representatives to say what needed to be said, “Suck. On. This.”

Here’s what’s happened. There aren’t enough Republicans in the House who are willing to give fast track authority for the TPP. So in order to win over Democrats, the House has tried to pass the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). This is a program that is supposed to help workers who are displaced by the TPP. Now you have to wonder, if the TPP is going to be so great, why does it need a special program to help workers who will be laid off. What’s more, we’ve seen this same thing in previous trade deals. And as much as it works, it only ends up in allowing workers to find worse jobs. From my perspective, it is just a matter of providing political cover to politicians.

When the House voted on the TAA today, it went down to a stunning defeat: 126-302. The House plans to try voting on it again next week, but clearly Obama has a very big hill to climb. Assuming that the Republicans stay where they are, Obama will have to win over 92 of the 144 Democrats who voted no today. It’s curious because TAA is something that Democrats agree on. In theory, it is a good program. So the vote against it is a vote to stop the TPP. It’s interesting to note the other bill today, the TPA (Trade Promotion Authority — fast track) was passed by a very small minority. The Republicans are eager to screw over the American worker with TPP, but don’t want to provide even the lame TAA to make it slightly less painful.

The TPA still has a very good chance of going through. And a big part of the problem can be found in Greg Sargent’s article on the vote Friday morning, Liberals Plot New Way to Blow Up Obama’s Trade Deal. Apart from the obvious bias in the headline, Sargent consistently refers to proponents of TPP as “pro-trade” — implying that opponents are “anti-trade.” This is absolutely untrue. In fact, an argument can be made that exactly the opposite is true. But this has been the line from The Washington Post all along: nonstop TPP apologetics. It’s sad to see it coming from a reasonable guy like Sargent.

I’m sure that Obama will continue to push the TPP along. Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be anything during his presidency that he’s felt so strongly about. I don’t remember him working so hard on Obamacare or the Public Option. Then it always seemed that whatever would be, would be. He was the zen president. But this, he thinks, will be totally fantastic. And for him it might be. But if he gets it, he may end up with a Johnson legacy: Obamacare was good, but unfortunately, he saddled us with that horrible TPP that Scott Walker eventually tweaked to make even worse.

But I could be wrong! Just because the TPP is being sold with the exact same arguments — often in the exact same words — doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to be totally different than those. If Obama weren’t just the second coming of Bill “we will no longer accept uneven trading relationships” Clinton, I might be inclined to rethink it. But TPP will be the same as all the trade deals that went before. It will be hugely successful at making the rich richer and poor poorer. That will be your legacy Mr President. You must be so proud.

You may remember the 2010 documentary, Inside Job. It was about the 2008 financial crisis. It was a lot of fun. On the other hand, it gave the wrong idea about the crisis. It made it all about bad bankers. While that was true, if it hadn’t been for the bursting of the housing bubble, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. But one thing highlighted in the film was very true: Iceland was pounded by the financial crisis — worse than almost any other country. So why is it that we don’t hear much about Iceland anymore? Well, because they weathered the storm far better than pretty much any other country.

Matt Yglesias wrote about how all this came to be, Iceland Put Bankers in Jail Rather Than Bailing Them Out — and It Worked. Iceland managed to make its crisis relatively mild regarding its workers and then improved very quickly. He provided the classic comparison between Iceland and Ireland. The latter country is held up throughout Europe as an exemplar — as though it were the well behaved child in the kindergarten. Iceland is now almost back to its normal pre-crisis unemployment. Ireland — which did everything the plutocrats said was “right” — still have an unemployment rate that is almost six percent points above its pre-crisis level.

So how did Iceland manage this? Well, to be honest, it didn’t really have much to do with jailing bankers. But let’s not cast that off. Jailing bankers really will help prevent another crisis. In Iceland. In the rest of the advanced world, bankers were coddled and so have every reason to do the same thing again. But that whole thing about not bailing out the banks? That was big. Dean Baker has dealt with this issue, The Myth that Sold the Financial Bailout. But the main this is that the power elite who run our government cared about saving the bankers — not the banking system.

One of the ways that Iceland dealt with the fallout from the banking collapse was to use good old Keynesian style demand side policy. The government racked up loads of debt to get through the crisis. While all over America and Europe, people were shouting about the clearly wrong Reinhart and Rogoff 90% debt cliff, Iceland was calmly pushing its debt to GDP ratio over 100%. And then, as its economy got better, its debt started coming down. This year, it is in the mid-80%.

Iceland also did something that I’ve been screaming about for years: it allowed its inflation rate to go up. This was especially important for them, and inflation went up to a very troubling almost 20% annualized rate one month, and in the mid-teens for about a year. But it is back to about what ours is: 2%. The difference is that we’ve been laser focused on inflation. It has never been even as high as 4% annualized rate for a month since the crisis. And most of the time, it’s been less than 2%. This, of course, has been great for the rich. It’s been a catastrophe for workers.

Iceland also imposed capital controls: restricting the movement of money from the country. In fact, that’s the big news: Iceland is in the process of lifting its capital controls, which ought to give the economy another boost. I don’t think that capital controls were much of an option in the United States. But the takeaway from all this is that there were lots of options for how we dealt with the bursting of the housing bubble. We chose to do those things that kept the rich rich and did as little as possible for working Americans. Democracy in America!

I learned from Tierney Sneed this week at Talking Points Memo, Louisiana GOPers in Fiscal Mess Beg Grover Norquist to Relax No Tax Pledge. As you probably remember, Norquist is the man who is best known for the quote, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” It’s a curious thing to say. It’s supposed to be clever, but it misses the mark. He doesn’t want to abolish government, he wants to weaken it so that he can murder it? So he wants to abolish government! Whatever.

Anyway, Norquist’s great political idea was to get all the Republicans to sign a little pledge that says they will absolutely never raise taxes in any way. It’s part of a larger trend in Republican politics where every vote is “scored.” This leads to politicians being far more conservative than their constituencies. And there is also something fundamentally treasonous about the pledge. What if we suddenly got into World War III? I’m sure the Republicans would abandon Norquist if it ever came to it — just as they would if they ever got any backbone. But smart people don’t legislate by starting out with a long list of things they will never do. And that is a big reason why Republicans are such useless legislators.

But all over the country, there are state legislatures controlled by Republicans that would very much like to to have a little flexibility to deal with their budget problems. Currently, the state faces a $1.6 billion budget shortfall — about 5% of their total budget. Seven years ago, the state had a one billion dollar surplus. What happened? Well, after becoming governor, Bobby Jindal pushed through a huge tax cut. Just like in Kansas, this was supposed to spur growth. But it didn’t. It never does. But Jindal won’t budge. As Kevin Drum noted, “Bobby Jindal is still delusional enough to think he’s running for president.”

As you can see in the following graph, when Bobby Jindal took over control of Louisiana, unemployment was better than the country as a whole. When recession hit, it was not hit nearly as hard — because of the oil industry. But overall, it tracked along with the country pretty well. But since the beginning of 2014, it has taken a turn for the worse. And as of mid-2014, the country as a whole is doing better than Louisiana. Am I blaming this on Jindal? Not at all. But note that there is no reason to think that the tax cut helped to create jobs — not that Jindal and the rest of his Republican allies ever cared that it did.

So now, many Republicans in Louisiana would greatly appreciate it if they were allowed to fix the problem some other way than savaging their college system. In fact, they went whining to Norquist saying that they should be given credit for the previous tax cut. Norquist rightly noted that by such logic, Obama could claim to be a tax cutter. Just the same, I can’t help but remember that Norquist didn’t care about the payroll tax going back up. That’s consistent, however; Norquist doesn’t care about taxes that hurt the poor. No major Republican “thinker” does.

But the whole thing is quite the spectacle. Instead of dealing with each other, Louisiana Republicans are forced to go to Grover Norquist to get approval on how they are supposed to govern. Of course, he only has power because they give it to him. And, of course, because Bobby Jindal thinks he has a chance of becoming president. Some day, the people of Louisiana might consider voting for people who will do right by them and not outsource their thinking to a subgenius ideologue like Norquist.

See also: Swing State Voter Regret Is Killing Me.

As I’ve written about a few times, I live across the street from a very nice family. You really couldn’t have better neighbors, and I like them all as people. But I’ve always found it curious that they are Christian, yet the two boys who have left home have both gone into the military. What’s with that? I mean, when I think of Jesus, I just don’t think of the military — and for a lot of reasons beyond the standard “Prince of Peace” nonsense. For example, I understand that Judaism goes along with the command and control of the military. But Christianity is all about doing the right thing because the holy ghost is inside of you. It’s really a very liberating theology.

Of course, in America, it largely isn’t practiced that way. Christianity is more or less a cultural signifier. People use it as a shorthand for “patriotic American.” This is why we see states trying to make the Bible the official book. The level of theology in the Bible for most Christians is something less than what is taught to five-year-olds in Sunday school. And the one thing other than Christianity that is most tied to this form of “patriotism” is the military. Taxes for public libraries are tyranny, but taxes for almost half of the world’s military spending is somewhere there in the middle of the Ten Commandments.

But there is a great rhetorical ploy when such things are brought up. The Christian will claim that our military is not aggressive. This, of course, is the standard American line, discussed so well in, War Made Easy. Supposedly, the last thing that any president ever wants to do is go to war. To see how absurd that claim is, note that George W Bush said exactly that before the Iraq War — a war that he was most clearly determined to wage. But there is more.

The Christian military apologist will then mention “nation building” and all the great humanitarian work that the military does. Setting aside the fact that this is just ridiculous, it certainly isn’t the way that those in and around the military see it. Earlier this week, Sam Knight at The Intercept wrote a great article that relates to this, Navy Drops Humanitarian Ad Campaign, Looks for Something More Appropriate. It seems that for about five years from 2009 through 2014, the Navy has been pursuing an ad campaign, “America’s Navy: a global force for good.” They killed it last year and have now hired a firm to create ads that look more like something out of Call of Duty.

These earlier ads were about all the good things that the Navy does to help people all over the world. But check it out in the video below. It is filled with all the badass equipment anyone would want. What it doesn’t include is the usual bellicosity. In a word, it is: mature. It puts the best face possible on the dirty business of war. Thus, it isn’t at all surprising that it didn’t play well with the 17-year-olds it was supposed to attract. Sadly (but not surprisingly), it also didn’t appeal to veterans.

The point is that people can talk all they want about the need for the military and all the good work that the military does. But it means nothing. These are not the reasons people go into the military. These are the reasons people come up with to make joining the military seem noble. I’m with Father James in Calvary, “People join the army to find out what it’s like to kill someone.” And that’s okay, I suppose. I’ve made my peace with the need for a military (although ours is about ten times as large as it needs to be). But it is outrageous that people are allowed to go around claiming others join the army out of some sense of altruism. I’m not sure there is such an army that we could say that for. But certainly we can’t for our imperial army.