I really like Brian Beutler’s writing and analysis. But I don’t remember him ever filling me with awe as he did on Monday, Obamacare Is More Popular Than It Seems — If You Discount These People’s Opinions. He is not pulling punches. Put simply, he argued that we shouldn’t listen to old people when it comes to Obamacare because it has nothing to do with them. “Presumably we’d have no problem ignoring old people if they objected to child tax credits financed by working-age people. We should ignore them in this instance, too.” The polling that shows that people don’t care for Obamacare is tilted negative because old people are so against it, even though they are neither beneficiaries nor tax payers (except the very wealthy ones) for it.

As an example of this, he quoted the following from a detailed Bloomberg poll:

This goes along with a lot of literature that indicates that people mostly haven’t a clue about what Obamacare actually is. And that’s especially true of conservatives. Let’s just think about this for a moment. She’s on Medicare, so Obamacare has nothing to do with any limits on her coverage. I question her complaints anyway, but as much as they are indicative of real problems, they are problems with Medicare. Right now, only 36% of senior citizens have a favorable view of Obamacare. But the last time Gallup asked (last January), only 37% were satisfied with Social Security and Medicare. So maybe it is just the case that only about a third of senior citizens are happy about anything at all.

But look at Ms Stone in the quote above. I’m sure she would be appalled at the suggestion that Medicare be repealed. But she is more than willing to take healthcare away from millions of people, for the sole reason that she thinks it would improve the care that she gets under Medicare. It is a truly villainous attitude to have. And narcissistic. Beutler is right, but I will put it more bluntly: we shouldn’t listen to people like this because they are amazingly ignorant and selfish.

There is one substantive bit in the article that we really need to think about: the people who are for full repeal of Obamacare are the same as those who favor “repeal and replace.” So roughly 35% of the people want to repeal and roughly the same amount want to “repeal and replace.” As Beutler put it: “tacking ‘replace’ on to ‘repeal’ doesn’t widen the appeal of the conservative position at all.” I think this shows that Americans are a bit more savvy than they often appear. They understand that when Republicans talk about “repeal and replace,” that they aren’t serious. So what we actually get is roughly 65% of the people wanting to keep Obamacare pretty much the way it is. This is not something you will see reported on Fox News:

My image of elderly people is the nice folks at the Unitary church who hold candlelight vigils for world peach. But that is apparently the wrong image. The more typical image is Ms Stone who is of the “Off my lawn you kids” variety. This is not to say that I would take anything away from them. I feel very much that we must respect our elders. And I’ve been tested for subconscious bias and been found to be — contrary to most of this nation — biased somewhat toward the elderly. But Beutler is right: we shouldn’t listen to them on this issue. As it is, most of them probably think Obamacare is bad because Fox News and Mitt Romney told them that Obamacare was stealing from Medicare. The question we need to ask is why people like the thoroughly confused Ms Stone vote so reliably while we youngsters don’t. We can ignore their incoherent arguments, but we can’t ignore their votes.

I’ve written a bit about the religious scholar Robert M Price’s conservative politics in the past. But it has always been in passing. While listening to a podcast or interview, he will say something ignorant. It always stands out — but not because I disagree with it. His religious scholarship is very smart and learned. His political views have always evidenced a total lack of seriousness. It really sounds like he listens to Rush Limbaugh and that is not only the extent of his opinion, but also of his knowledge of the subject. For example, there was the time that he claimed Congressional Democrats were being hypocritical for not applying Obamacare to themselves. That’s a total mischaracterization of the healthcare law — and one that people would be unlikely to come up with independently.

So I was excited to see that he had recently decided to write a whole blog post on his conservatism, Atheists for Huckabee. And it is laugh out loud funny. When it comes to politics, Price is apparently devoid of any thought except for common conservative talking points. For example, the article contained the above image of Obama. Back in 2008 and 2009, the presentation of Obama as a saint would be totally appropriate. I was as annoyed as anyone at the way that Obama was treated by many Democrats. But that’s been over for a long time — except in the minds of conservatives who don’t get out much.

Of course, the far worse thing is The Book of Marx that he’s holding. Really?! The claims that Obama is a socialist are only made by people who don’t know what socialism is. But Marx?! It’s just ridiculous. Obama is a neoliberal — a very conservative person when it comes to the economy. And the fact that Price doesn’t know that shows that he indeed doesn’t pay attention to politics. He lives in his world of religion and science fiction and all the rest. And that’s great! But his claims to being misunderstood are ridiculous. He doesn’t take politics seriously enough to have a well formed opinion about it nor for the rest of us to misunderstand him.

But forget economics. Price’s conservatism is not about economics. It is about foreign affairs. It is about the fact that he has bought the neoconservative line on the world completely. He uses the term “Islamo-fascism” carelessly. Apparently Obama isn’t against the Islamo-fascists, which must be whatever governments Price has been told to hate. And he refers to Obama as “President Neville Chamberlain II.” As I have discussed in the past, Neville Chamberlain Was Right. I am sick to death of conservatives using Chamberlain as a shorthand argument against any foreign policy but war. Although I will admit, Price doubles his power with that one: showing total ignorance of two important western leaders.

But the main thing is that Price’s article is, in fact, an apologia for supporting Mike Huckabee. He brushes aside all of Huckabee’s radical, theocratic agenda. And to offset it, there really is not anything else other than that he would “stand against PC and Islamo-fascism.” Note: PC! Yes, that’s oh so important: all those liberals with their PC; they are just bringing down America! Oh, and there’s this other benefit of a Huckabee presidency, “Huckabee would shelve Global Warming fears, which is certainly okay with me, since I strongly suspect the whole thing is yet another Progressivist scheme to control, ie, screw up, the economy.” So he’s a global warming denier too. Not that he knows enough to be one. He’s just reads George Will.

People can have whatever opinions they like. But if they are going to start ranting about them in public, the least they could do is learn a little bit. The only mentions of the economy in Price’s article is that Obama is a Marxist and that “Progressivists” want to screw up the economy by controlling it. I can’t say that Price is not a deep thinker, because he clearly is a deep thinker about some things. But when it comes to politics, he doesn’t even try. He just lets his prejudices fly. We can only hope that he won’t make a habit of writing about politics.

Economist Dean Baker is the best source for information about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it’s problems, and how the power elite of this country are trying to cram it down our throats before anyone can really check it out. For example, a couple of weeks ago, over at FAIR, he wrote, Three Fake Myths — and Two Actual Ones — About TPP Trade Pact. But today, he wrote about something that is always much on people’s minds when we aren’t discussing trade deals, but somehow just can’t be dealt with when we are: currency manipulation. Baker framed it regarding how his favorite newspaper is covering it, Washington Post Tells Readers the Elite Will Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Pass Their Trade Deals.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article, National Income Accounting. In it, I show that there is a basic contradiction among most people who simultaneously want a balanced federal budget and a strong dollar. This is a simple matter of arithmetic. So when it comes to trade deals, the number one most important issue for us should be getting the value of our dollar down compared to other currancies — especially the Chinese renminbi. The Chinese government keeps the renminbi artificially depressed, which means that it can export more to the United States than it could in a fair system. So Americans get cheap Chinese goods, but they don’t have jobs.

The TPP does not include China, of course. But the idea has always been that eventually China would sign on to the deal. Baker asked rhetorically, “If currency rules are not included now, is The Post’s argument that it will be easier to get them included after China has joined?” But of course, we know why currency rules are not included. It is the same reason that so much effort on this supposed free trade agreement is spent on making intellectual property laws stronger. None of this deal is about helping the American (or any other country’s) worker. It is about allowing people who already have a lot of money to make even more. If you want to know more, read my article, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed.

Defenders of the TPP claim that the agreement can’t do anything about currency manipulation because it is hard. The Washington Pose opined, “The problem is that it’s very difficult to establish precisely, much less in a legally binding multinational agreement, ‘correct’ valuations of major currencies or the precise intent behind any particular policy that affects currency values.” Before we get to the substance of that, consider how typical this is. I hear this same argument in the education “reform” movement. It is always the case that doing something that is actually productive would be “hard” or “politically impossible.” So instead, we do things that are easy, which just so happen to help the people least in need of help — usually making things worse for everyone else.

But regarding the substance of the claim that it is “difficult” to establish correct valuations, this is just absurd. Of course, The Post used weasel words — most especially “precise.” But we don’t have to know precisely. We can tell simply by looking at the fact that the United States has a huge trade surplus with China. We know this from the National Income Accounting I discussed above. If things were reversed, it would be different, because developed countries are supposed to be flooding developing countries with capital. But it isn’t that way and so we know.

Regardless, we are left with the great apologists’ war cry, “We must do something!” And that something just happens to make Walmart’s supply chains that much more profitable. And it makes Sony’s copyrights that much more profitable. But American workers? They are supposed to shut-up and accept their subsistence service jobs. Go team!

I’m not sure what to make of Rebecca Leber’s article in New Republic, Republicans Understand Climate Change, but Only Behind Closed Doors. The story doesn’t especially back up that headline. There are only two examples given in the article. The first is regarding a trip to Greenland that some Senators took seven years ago. Well, as you may remember: seven years ago, even John McCain was talking about a cap and trade deal. The issue simply wasn’t toxic the way it is now. The second example was from 2012, but even there, all that happened was that some unnamed 2016 presidential candidate (I’m assuming Marco Rubio) admitted that there did indeed seem to be some warming — not that humans are causing it and that it will continue.

But I agree with the contention, even without the data. Republican politicians (Especially in the Senate!) are educated and sophisticated people. They at least have grave concerns about their global warming denial. And I would expect that at least half of them know that global warming is real, man made, and a big threat. These are the most vile of people: public officials putting their own personal political careers ahead of the interests of the nation and the world itself. They are traitors.

I don’t expect politicians to be altruistic. But as I said: seven years ago, this wasn’t an issue. Global warming denial has become a conservative third rail in exactly the same way that Obamacare became one: because the Republicans saw it to their advantage. It’s interesting, actually. In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin argues that conservatism can be defined as a reaction against liberation movements. That is certainly true historically. But the modern Republican Party seems primarily to be defined simply as being against whatever the Democrats — Obama most especially — are for. And thus, we can do nothing about global warming because liberals do what to do something about it.

One example from the article is very telling. As you may remember, about two years ago, Republicans came up with a perfect way to not talk about global warming. If a journalist asked them, they would say, “Well, I’m not a scientist.” I always thought this was curious, because it makes no sense. They may not be scientists, but that doesn’t stop them have having a scientific opinion: global warming isn’t happening. But while Rick Scott ran for re-election as governor of Florida, he used that dodge. So after he won his election (Would it be too much to ask for Democrats to run people other than ex-Republicans?!) Scott was pressured into attending a half hour meeting with people who were scientists. “Eckerd College’s David Hastings described the governor’s face as showing ‘no expression of his interest or concern,’ giving the session the air of a chore.” I think that says a lot. He knows that the data are convincing, so he just has to avoid it. The new Republican global warming dodge should be, “Well, I’m not a scientist and I don’t care to listen to what scientists know.”

For a long time, I’ve been saying that there will never come a time that will convince conservatives that global warming is real. But that may not be the case. Miami is not even two meters above sea level. If it floods, I think we might find that Rick Scott expresses some interest and concern when scientists talk. But the real problem isn’t Rick Scott. It is the voters. Rick Scott will just give a heartfelt Rick Perry, “Oops!” And the people will forgive him and elect him to whatever job he’s running for at that time.

Ultimately, all of our problems are of our own making. No one forced Fox News viewers to keep the station tuned in 24 hours a day so that the network had to animate its logo so as not to damage their television sets. No one forced the voters of California to turn against a GMO labeling proposition because Monsanto and friends dumped $50 million in advertising. The power elite have more tools than it has ever had to maintain its position and the keep the people down. They are evil. But we are stupid.

War with Iran? You fly over, drop a few hundred bombs, problem solved. Am I right?! That’s worked out so well for us in the past, why wouldn’t it work well now? Lots of reasons, actually — as I will get to in a moment. But Tom Cotton thinks that a bombing campaign against Iran would take only “several days.” Ted Cruz begs to differ. According to him, it might take a whole week. But John Bolton is on board. He says that Cotton is “exactly right.” You see, as military historian and geopolitical expert Mike Huckabee said, this nuclear deal with Iran would “put the whole world in a very, very dangerous place.” Yes, negotiated deals make the world dangerous. Starting World War III just makes us safe.

Wait a minute! Who said anything about World War III? These guys just told us that it would be nothing but sending in aircraft to drop some bombs. Clean and simple. Over and out. And we know from experience that such rosy predictions always turn out great. Remember all the rose petals that our troops were greeted with? Remember how right Dick Cheney was when he said, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators”? Remember when he said the same thing that Tom Cotton and company are saying now, “I think it will go relatively quickly. Weeks rather than months”? How could anything go wrong this time?

We all know about white privilege. What we have here is America privilege. It is the delusion that America can do whatever it wants and no one will do anything about it. The idea that Iran would counter-attack just doesn’t occur to them. They don’t imagine that both Russia and China might be drawn in to defend Iran. Think that’s reaching? Consider this: Iran has already agreed on a negotiation framework that all the world is thrilled with except the American and Israeli right. So an attack on Iran would not be seen as an act of protection. It would be seen as what it would be: an act of aggression — and a worse one than the invasion of Iraq.

The National Interest has been writing a lot of good stuff about a potential attack on Iran. This is not some liberal rag. It focuses on realism — think Machiavelli — in international relations. It was founded by neoconservative Irving Kristol. The main thing is that it is not naive and it is not stupid. Last month, I discussed an article by Robert Farley, We Need to Think Before Bombing Iran. His major point was that we simply aren’t going to be able to bomb away Iran’s nuclear program. My point was that the unintended consequences were great.

Back in 2013 (and republished late last year, for obvious reasons), Geoffrey Kemp and John Allen Gay wrote, The High Cost of War With Iran. They brought up one point that has an interesting irony. One of the big claims about Iran is that it is the “biggest supporter of terrorism in the world.” Well, in the event of an American attack, Iran could step that up. As they noted, “[T]his will create uncertainty for any attacker—too violent to be peace, but not fully war. This state of affairs will put Iran on a more level footing with the United States…” Oh, and the massive America air campaign would only knock out the big parts of the nuclear program that we know about. And this would — Quelle surprise! — require further bombing campaigns in the future. Eventually, there would have to be a diplomatic solution — the kind of thing we are on the verge of now and that the hardliners in the US and Israel will never accept.

The authors also talk about how there is no actual evidence that Iran has a weapons program and getting a weapon wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. They would use it the way all other countries do: as a deterrent; they wouldn’t give it to terrorists (the idea that they would has always been ridiculous). But the meat of the article is how even a minor and short war with Iran would have enormous economic costs, “A $10 increase in the price per barrel of oil would take a billion dollars from American consumers in about five days.” For a Republican Party determined to cut food stamps, you would think they would care about such a major threat to the economy. What’s more, the hit to the Middle East oil supply would help out two other hated regimes of the conservatives: Russia and Venezuela. No mention is made of this, but that would provide Russia with all the more incentive to help out Iran in a war with the United States.

But these are just what military experts — backed up by actual military leaders — think. Despite what they say, people like Cotton and Cruz and Bolton and Huckabee don’t care about what the actual military says — unless it agrees with what they already want to do. But there are some conservatives who are being more reasonable. Shockingly, Bobby Jindal was more reasonable — claiming that he would want to hear from the military as to just how fast we could take down Iran. I don’t give him too much credit, because (1) he should already know; and (2) I’m sure he will change his position once he hears that the military isn’t keen on the strategy.

Carly Fiorina and John Kasich were both pretty gloomy on the prospect — more proof that they will never get the Republican nomination for president. The most sensible thing was said by Lindsey Graham, “I think a military attack on Iran opens up pandora’s box. You’ve got to assume the worst, not the best.” Is it possible?! Can a Republican actually learn? Well add Graham’s name to the list of Republican presidential nominees who are not serious. Of course, even the best of the Republicans just want to do nothing: no negotiations but no bombing. That’s a very bad solution. It only looks good compared to what most Republicans want.

Paul Krugman wrote about some research by the IMF that he finds very exciting, Crowding In and the Paradox of Thrift. What the research shows is that since the bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis, government borrowing has not “crowed out” private sector investment. In fact, it is just the opposite. When governments cut their spending, so did businesses. This does not come as a surprise to me, and despite Krugman’s excitement, it certainly doesn’t come as a surprise to him. This is, after all, exactly what Keynes showed was happening in the economy eighty years ago.

This is why economics isn’t a science — or at least a very good science. There is a major part of the field that seems to think that Keynes was proven wrong by Friedman and Lucas and all the rest. Apparently, that’s how they think science works. Someone has a theory that seems to work and then something goes wrong and shows the theory doesn’t work. So a whole new theory is developed and the old one is just discarded. This is not, not, not how science works. Let me try to explain with the help of the ideal gas law.

If you’ve ever taken a chemistry course, you’ve been introduced to the ideal gas law: PV = nRT. Put in more or less English: the pressure times the volume of a gas is equal to the total number of atoms times a constant times the temperature. This is only a theoretical law that applies to a perfect gas that doesn’t exist in the real world. But it still works remarkably well for real gases as long as the system isn’t changed too quickly. Regardless, if you’ve learned about the ideal gas law, you were doubtless first taught about Boyle’s law, which says that pressure times volume is a constant — that as volume increases, pressure decreases. And you were also taught about Charles’ law, which says that volume divided by temperature is a constant — that as temperature increases, so does volume.

When I was learning this stuff, I thought Boyle’s law and Charles’ law were stupid. They we built into the ideal gas law. Who needed them? Well, we need them because we need to understand how science works. Boyle’s law was discovered by Richard Towneley and Henry Power in 1661. Charles’ law was discovered in 1802 by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. The ideal gas law was first formalized in 1834 by Émile Clapeyron. The ideal gas law incorporates the two earlier laws. If you use the ideal gas law and hold temperature constant, you get Boyle’s law. If you use the ideal gas law and hold the volume constant, you get Charles’ law. If you did not, then the ideal gas law would be wrong.

Similarly, quantum mechanics and relativity reduce to classical mechanics under normal conditions. Statistical mechanics reduces to thermodynamics on the macro scale. This second example is particularly relevant to economics because the idea of microfoundations is so important to the field. But did the models with their microfoundations reduce to a regular old Keynesian model when a clear demand shock hit the economy? Well, some did. But if the field as a whole isn’t able to dismiss theories that don’t duplicate previous — correct but incomplete — models, what is the field doing? The real business cycle models seem to have been designed to explain the oil shocks of the 1970s. Good for them! But if a field comes up with a radical new theory for every new bit of data, it isn’t doing science.

So we find ourselves in an economic situation that Keynes would have found very familiar. Yet even a true Keynesian like Paul Krugman has to continue to go around and push research that shows what all the economic models should show. The economy is not performing up to its potential. There is already too much savings for the amount of investment that people want to do. If the government cuts spending, all it will do is reduce demand in the economy. This isn’t hard — I know because even I understand it. But a good part of the economics profession wants to discount this for ideological reasons. This isn’t science. I would call it theology, but that would be an insult to theologians who mostly do a better job than economists.

Martin “Felonious Frog” Longman wrote a bit of a scattered but very insightful article yesterday, Republicans and Reality. He started by quoting a bit of troubling polling data for the Republicans. According to Republican pollster Whit Ayres, only 18% of Americans want to repeal Obamacare and replace it with the great Republican alternative: nothing. Similarly, 60% of Republicans under the age of 30 are in favor of same sex marriage. (Don’t applaud too much; the number is roughly 90% young Democrats.) The problem is that the early primaries don’t exactly provide a lot of room for the Republican candidates to be moderate.

The first race in the 2016 primary will be in the reasonable state of Iowa (28 delegates). But that’s just an average. It is reasonable overall, but the Republicans there are crazy. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum won the state in 2012. New Hampshire (12 delegates) provides a reasonable opportunity for moderation, and Mitt “Self Deportation” Romney did win there. But then comes Colorado (36 delegates) and Minnesota (40 delegates) — both won by Santorum. That same day will be the primary in New York (95 delegates) — doubtless an effort on the part of Republicans to inject some sanity in the primary. That primary was at the very end of the race and Romney won big because he was the only one still running. Just the same, he would have won regardless. And finally, there’s Utah (40) — which Romney won but I don’t think that means anything for obvious reasons.

For those not keeping count, that’s 107 “moderate” delegates and 144 crazy conservative delegates during the first three days of voting. A week and a half later, South Carolina gets to vote. And who did they vote for last time? Newt “Yay, child labor!” Gingrich! It does create a bit of a problem for the Republican Party. It isn’t that the candidates hold truly vile opinions — which they all do. It is that as long as they don’t make a big deal out of those vile opinions, the mainstream media will give them a pass. But people like Steve King in Iowa is not going to want to let them get away with that.

I’m still of the opinion that the economy trumps all else. But that doesn’t mean that candidates don’t matter at all. Even during a total economic meltdown in 2008, John McCain still managed to get 173 electoral votes. And I’m fairly convinced about what Jonathan Chait wrote last week, How “Negative Partisanship” Has Transformed American Politics. More and more, people decide which party they will not vote for. And in the south, we’ve seen this for a while — because of bigotry. But now this same thing is affecting other states — now to the advantage of the Democrats — because of the bigotry of the Republican Party.

As I noted regarding the move of the New York primary, the Republicans (and the Democrats) are trying to front load the election to get the most “electable” candidates for the general election. But the schedule doesn’t create any problems for the Democrats. The Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, and Utah are not going to push the candidates heavily to the left. I wish they would. But the Republicans are going to have to pander in a big way — even with New York’s 95 delegates. And even there, I suspect they will appeal to the electorate there primarily by talking about how we really need to start bombing Iran.