I want to express how I feel about Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress yesterday. The problem is that about a year ago, I decided to remove coarse language from blog posts (except when quoting someone). And it seems that most of what I want to say really needs to be laced with profanities to get across my anger. I want him to leave my country and never come back. I want Israel to do something about him. As far as I know, the people of Israel are not too fond of how partisan Netanyahu has made relations with the United States. During the 2012 election, he was pretty clear who his choice for president was. But it should be clear to everyone in the world that Israel desperately needs the support of the United States. And if one of the two main political parties begins thinking that Israel is more of a problem than it’s worth, that’s very bad news for Israel. The only way that I could be more angry at Netanyahu is if I were an Israeli.

Let me be clear: the argument that Netanyahu is making is the argument that people always make when they want to stop negotiations. I heard it made again and again about the Soviet Union: it was so bent on world domination that it absolutely couldn’t be trusted to act rationally. These arguments are always shown to be wrong. That doesn’t mean powers like the Soviet Union or Iran are teddy bears that just want to spread sunshine in the world. But as Matt Duss summed up Netanyahu’s argument, “Iran is run by crazy suicidal apocalyptic mullahs who will crack under greater economic pressure.” But the world is a complex place with competing interests. Netanyahu claims that he wants a better deal for the west, but it is clear that what he wants to do is kill the deal. I’m sure he sees this as the best situation. This is also the man who sees the best situation for Israel as more and more illegal settlements to the point where a two state solution is impossible. As a senior administration official said, “The logic of the prime minister’s speech is regime change.” That is: war with Iran.

I think that Nancy Pelosi summed up what I’m feeling, except that I’m not sad; I’m angry (although she followed it up with a bunch of nonsense):

It’s also interesting that the Republicans who rightly bristle at President Obama’s executive action on immigration, should stage a stunt like this. It’s almost treasonous. In their giddy rush to embarrass the president, they have allowed a foreign leader an official opportunity to undermine the nation’s foreign policy. This is not “power of the purse strings” here; this is blatant sabotage. And it doesn’t matter if it is done with the foreign leader of an ally. They are siding with a foreign leader. To embarrass the president. This is the Congress that was going to show the nation that it could govern. I suppose this is one definition of it.

On this particular issue, the interests of the United States and the world do not line up with what Netanyahu thinks are the interests of Israel. We already knew that. He’s been whining since the negotiations began. There is no deal that he ever would have been okay with. If the emerging deal were half as good for the P5+1, he would have said it wasn’t good enough. If it were twice as good, he would have said it wasn’t good enough. No deal is good enough because in his mind Iran is the Islamic State is Nazi Germany. He wants an invasion of Iran. And I can’t say if that’s in the interests of Israel or not — in the long term I suspect it isn’t. But I know it is not in the interests of the United States and the world.

H/T: Vox

Matt Yglesias brought my attention to some important but unsurprising recent data, Americans Are Making a Big Mistake About Healthcare. That mistake is that, overwhelmingly, they don’t think that the government subsidizes their healthcare. Overall, roughly 15% of Americans admit to getting their healthcare subsidized. I’ll get to why that is wrong in a moment, but first I want to point out the one thing in the poll that did shock me: only 7% of Americans over the age of 65 thought that they had their healthcare subsidized. How do you spell “Medicare”? D-E-L-U-S-I-O-N.

I suspect that this is due to the fact that people think they have “earned” their Social Security and Medicare. This is not true. You could just as easily say that everything that ever comes from the government has been earned because the people pay taxes and the government provides benefits to those who qualify. Of course, this is not what seniors mean they claim to have earned their Medicare. Almost to a person, the amount of money paid in isn’t even close to the amount paid out.

But these seniors who are convinced that the government ain’t given them free medical care are the ones most likely to vote for conservative candidates who want to cut welfare. So this Medicare delusion is serious business. But of course, it isn’t limited to this. There are all kinds of ways that the government gives out welfare. And the government does it in such a way that the richer you are, the less likely you are to see it as welfare. I discussed this a couple of years ago in an article, Hidden Welfare for the Rich. My favorite example is the mortgage interest deduction, which almost no one thinks of as welfare, but which clearly is. (Read the article!)

Yglesias explained in his article why it is that almost everyone has their healthcare subsidized. It is for pretty much the same reason that the mortgage interest deduction is welfare. Before Obamacare, you generally got your insurance from one of two places: government (Medicare, Medicare, VA) or employer. Clearly, getting it from the government is getting subsidized healthcare. But getting it from an employer is also getting subsidized healthcare. Your insurance is part of your compensation. But you don’t have to pay taxes on it. Thus: a subsidy! What Obamacare does in the healthcare exchanges is to provide people who don’t get their insurance through an employer the same benefit the government has long been giving to people who do get their insurance through an employer.

Ouch! Suddenly all those people complaining about freeloaders just sound like a bunch of privileged jackasses who have no idea that they too are freeloaders. That reminds me of something…

In the late 1970s, someone thought it was a good idea to turn The Paper Chase into a television series. (Actually, it isn’t a bad idea; but I don’t think it was well executed — at least during the first season.) In one episode, Hart was tutoring an African American woman. And he had a real attitude about it because, you know, Affirmative Action. So Kingsfield had him do a paper or something that caused Hart to have to read the Affirmative Action clause of Harvard, and Hart learned that he too might have been helped by the program because of growing up on a farm. And Hart improved his attitude in the way that only an hour long television drama can.

Unfortunately, all those Fox News watching freeloaders are never going to have their “road to Damascus” moment. They will remain convinced that welfare is just something that those people get. The good conservatives deserve everything that they get. This continues to be a huge problem in this country. The modern world is unbelievably complicated. We are all interconnected. But we have set up systems that allow the rich to pretend that they have done it all themselves and forces the poor to think that they are dependent — and that they are alone in their dependence. This is a delusion that we can ill afford.

Remember the good ol’ days when Orrin Hatch was considered a right wing loon? That was fun. Now, of course, he’s one of the more reasonable Republicans in Congress. Well, he and Lamar Alexander and John Barrasso took to The Washington Post on Sunday to trumpet the news, We Have a Plan for Fixing Healthcare. And contrary to the repeated claims of Jonathan Chait, these three establishment Republicans are cheering on the Supreme Court in King v Burwell. If the Supreme Court finds that “the administration acted illegally” and “[m]illions of Americans may lose these subsidies,” well never fear: “Republicans have a plan to protect Americans harmed by the administration’s actions”!

I hit back on the idea that Republicans were coming around to see that this case was toxic, It Is Still Best That King v Burwell Fail. This recent OpEd by the three amigos shows that the Republican Party thinks that in this case, as in all others, they can finesse their way through any problems that arise. Basically, they are just pushing Ben Sasse’s idea that Congress would pass a temporary funding bill until they replaced Obamacare with something that doesn’t turn the nation into North Korea. And they have a plan!

Just kidding! As Ezra Klein reported, Republicans Say They Have a Plan if the Supreme Court Rules Against Obamacare. They Don’t. But before I talk about that, let’s suppose that they did. This Congress is going to pass a temporary funding bill?! They can’t even manage to pass a bill to embarrass the president. Are we really supposed to believe that they could manage to get half of the Republican majority in the House to sign onto extending Obamacare? You’d have better luck getting them to pass a resolution that Satan is their lord and master. And I don’t use that comparison lightly, given that most of those Republicans think that Obama and “his” law are Satanic.

So what is this cunning plan? First, as mentioned, they will extend the existing subsidies for some length of time — Sasse mentioned 18 months, so let’s figure that, because the three elephants of the apocalypse didn’t tell us. Then, they will replace it with a new plan. Are you ready for it? Because this is it in its entirety:

The rest of the article is just the usual boilerplate about “Obamacare’s costly mandates and rules.” And there is this exciting news, “We have had many discussions with our Senate and House Republican colleagues on this issue, and there is a great deal of consensus on how to proceed.” There is apparently so much consensus that this is why they only mention one thing that Obamacare already allows! And that shows what the real point of the article is. It is meant to signal to the Supreme Court that it is okay to gut Obamacare with this silly lawsuit.

Remember, this isn’t Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert writing this OpEd. This is a trio of establishment figures. This is the Republican Party giving its okay to the conservative hacks on Supreme Court to screw over 11.5 million people (it’s only 6 million if you only look at those directly effected). I still think that the lawsuit will be defeated. In which case, The Washington Post has given the Republicans an opportunity to claim that they too want to help working Americans, even though they clearly could not care less.

Digby wrote an interesting article over at Slate yesterday, Attack of Radical “Moderates”: How Tea Party and Liberals Are Both Being Swindled. It focuses on an Ezra Klein article from last year that somehow I missed, No One’s Less Moderate Than Moderates. And this, in turn, involves some recent research by a couple of political scientists who demonstrated something that really should have been obvious: statistical techniques were grouping together as “moderate” people who actually had extreme views on both the left and the right.

I’ve been saying this for years. Digby calls the views incoherent, but I don’t think that’s generally true. In my experience, people are fairly conservative in their social beliefs and fairly liberal in their economic beliefs. There is nothing inconsistent about being virulently anti-immigrant and being in favor of taxing the rich more. And if you think about it, criticizing this viewpoint is kind of offensive. Rich business owners are pro-immigrant and anti-tax. In both cases, the people with those views think that these beliefs are in their best interests. (Working class people are probably wrong to be anti-immigrant, but the economics of the matter is certainly not obvious.)

But what neither Digby nor Klein talk about is what I see as the major disconnect: why is it that most people are of the social conservative and economic liberal type, while the standard “moderate” in the media is a social liberal and economic conservative? If you’ve been reading me these past many years, you know my answer: it is that the media we get is not a function of what consumers want; it is a function of the interests of upper class journalists.

Way back in 2012, I wrote, Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness. (I like alliteration too much sometimes.) My point was that William Saletan’s “centrism” (he actually self identifies as a “liberal Republican”) is just a function of what is best for the greater good… of William Saletan:

Of course, as Klein quoted one of the researchers as saying, “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want.” It’s more or less the same thing. For example, no one I know thinks that Thomas Friedman is anything but a joke. However, in the upper-middle and upper classes he has a reputation as a sage. And this is why his next book — “The World Is Shaped Like a Taxi Driver In Dubai”? — will have a media campaign with only slightly fewer resources than the invasion of Normandy.

Think about it this way: people don’t demand this or that person become a columnist. In the pre-web days, newspapers couldn’t even know who was popular with readers. (Although they could tell who was popular with other columnists and the elite!) Now it’s different. But not that much different. When Forbes listed the Top Liberal Pundits, many of the people on the list were not liberals: Andrew Sullivan, Maureen Dowd, Christopher Hitchens, Chris Matthews, Fareed Zakaria, Jon Stewart, Thomas Friedman, Fred Hiatt, Arianna Huffington. Some of these people are conservative — the rest of “moderates” — usually of Saletan mold. This is what Sullivan had to say about being on the list:

The “top” liberal was Paul Krugman and I rather wonder if Krugman would have developed his following and influence in a pre-web world. As I recall, he was brought to The New York Times to write about international economics. It was only because George W Bush was such a terrible president that Krugman turned to domestic matters. But even with all that, I really wonder how long he would have lasted under Fred Hiatt.

The main takeaway here is simple: “moderate” in the media environment is nothing more than code for “what is believed by the elites.” That’s not to say that there aren’t actual moderates. Jon Stewart is certainly one of those. The fact that he is generally seen as “liberal” is an indictment of our political system. But it is clear that we should be very careful in using the “moderate” label — especially as it applies to the American voter. Because very few of them are actually moderate. What they are is populist. And given that what they want is exactly the opposite of what the elites want, it is no wonder that reporting on them glosses over this important distinction.

Last week, I wrote, Chait Is Wrong — We should Fear King v Burwell. This was in reference to a Jonathan Chait article, Why the New Lawsuit Won’t Kill Obamacare. And then, as usual when Chait is pushing a controversial idea, he quickly came back with an “I’m right!” article, Republicans Realize Obamacare Lawsuit Would Destroy Them, Not Obamacare. Despite everything, I enjoy reading Chait. But I can’t do it without a lot of loud sighs. How many Republicans realize Obamacare would destroy them? Well, Chait only mentions two. And that’s one short for a standard college essay.

What’s more, one of his examples argued that the Republicans should create a temporary change until they could “repeal and replace” the law. Given that the Republicans have come up with precisely zero alternatives to Obamacare, I think we can count that Republican in the pro-King v Burwell camp. So really Chait only has one Republican who is concerned. But it doesn’t really matter. He could come up with a dozen Republicans who are concerned about this case succeeding. It wouldn’t mean anything. There are always Republicans around who think that the party ought to be a tad less crazy. Just ask Josh Barro.

The problem is that it is hard for the Republican Party to back away from its opposition to Obamacare when they’ve spent the last six years telling their base that it is worse than a Soviet takeover of the government. And what about the “death panels” that so many conservatives still believe in? Ben Sasse might be right in his OpEd, “Chemotherapy turned off for perhaps 12,000 people, dialysis going dark for 10,000. The horror stories will be real. What will happen next is predictable: A deluge of attacks on Republicans for supposedly having caused this.” What is this compared to the millions that the Republican base thinks Obamacare is actively killing? There are lots of things that many in the Republicans establishment would like to move on. But we don’t see much of that.

There is also just the politics of it. At the end of 2013, the Republicans shut down the government. The people didn’t like that. But did they come to the polls in 2014 and vote the fools out? No! They voted more of them in! (One was Ben Sasse.) It would be the same thing here. The people who died for lack of dialysis would be in the distant political past. And let’s not forget: if 11.5 million people lost their health insurance, it would really harm the economy. And that would happen just in time for the 2016 presidential election. King v Burwell may well be the Republicans’ best chance to take the White House in 2016.

Michael Hiltzik has a more nuanced take on the situation, Is GOP Finally Getting Nervous That the Supreme Court Might Gut Obamacare? He is certainly correct that we aren’t hearing Republicans crowing about the law as we were a couple of months ago. I think that they realize not that the law will be bad for them but rather that it is like Pandora’s box: it is going to make the situation unpredictable. And that is bad because the up side is nothing compared to the down side. (Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say; but that’s the way human psychology works.)

I actually think that the Republican Party itself is pretty much done with Obamacare anyway. They had their chance in 2012 with NFIB v Sebelius and they lost. The law is now in place. People have it. But much more important to Republicans, the healthcare and insurance industries are fully vested in the new system. It wouldn’t just be a big hassle to change, it would also rip billions of dollars in profit away from these industries. So I don’t think they like the double bind that King v Burwell would put them in. Does this mean that the bozos on the bench will get the message and decide to kill the challenge? I will believe that when I hear Rush Limbaugh talking about how bad this case will be for the Republican Party.

The bottom line is that we want King v Burwell to fail. Under the best of circumstances (the Chait case), it would cause a lot of harm to innocent Americans. And in the end, politics is about people. I care about good things happening a hell of a lot more than I care about winning an election. (And that is probably a big reason why I’m not a politician!)

Have you heard about those awful longshoremen? I have. And from people who ought to know better. The longshoremen have staged a work slowdown in their negotiations and USA Today calls foul, Longshoremen Hurt Blue-Collar Brethren. Do you know how much they make?! “The Pacific Maritime Association, manager of the ports, says an average full-time worker makes $147,000 a year, with very generous benefits on top of that.” But not to be one-sided, the article claims, “The ILWU says longshoremen aren’t always able to work as many hours as they’d like, putting a typical income at $83,000.” Who can say?

Well, according to Mark Brenner in that very same USA Today, “Longshore workers on the West Coast earn $26 to $41 an hour…” And that puts the ILWU quote at the very top of rate. Regardless, the $147,000 figure is ridiculous and USA Today should be ashamed of quoting it.

Basically, the entire argument of the USA Today editorial board is that the longshoremen should just get used to the way that it is with other workers where they don’t share in the economic gain. If profits rise, they should all go to the owners. Don’t these workers know that they don’t matter? Haven’t they been paying attention these last four decades?!

The editorial concludes:

It is good, if selfish, advice. It is taking this kind of advice that now has California Safeway clerks earning $10 per hour. Bear in mind that if the minimum wage had gone up with the rate of productivity growth since 1968 (and it always did before), it would now be almost $22 per hour. The lower rate for longshore workers — $26 per hour — is barely above what the minimum wage ought to be. And the upper value is not even double it. But our expectations for what workers should earn have been so lowered that now $83,000 per year sounds like a fortune. I mean, imagine that: you could buy a home, send your kids to school, retire comfortably. What a shocking vision of life!

Brenner sums up the situation well:

Of course, this is why the entire conservative movement has been out to kill off unions from the moment they appeared. Sadly, the Democratic Party’s position on unions has pretty much been that of the USA Today editorial board, “Don’t ask for anything! Be grateful you aren’t working at Walmart!” And that is the surest road to working at Walmart. I have to say, I respect the ILWU members because I doubt I would have the guts to do this. But it is going to take braver people than me to bring back labor unions.

What’s sad, though, is that workers are not just fighting against the owners. Non-unionized workers are, with relatively few exceptions, the worst enemies of unionized workers. And this is the reason that unions are so important. It isn’t primarily about negotiation and wages and so on. It is about solidarity. By destroying unions, the rich have managed to turn workers on each other.

So in discussing the work slowdown, all that is really necessary is for some manager to say “$147,000!” and 90% of the country is outraged. “Oh, you workers are never satisfied!” Imagine this. What if I told you that New York stock traders made $83,000 per year. Would you think that an outrageous amount of money? Of course you wouldn’t. You would think it was really low. Yet almost anyone would rather work on Wall Street than have a very difficult and dangerous longshoreman’s job. But somehow, they make too much money.

Divide and conquer. The rich have been doing this for centuries to the rest of us. And the only reason they are able is because we allow them to.

H/T: Michael Hiltzik

Last week, The Washington Post published an article by Jim Tankersley, The GOP is Debating Whether Reaganomics Needs an Update. It noted that many conservative economists are now admitting that faster economic growth probably will not do much to raise the living standards of the middle class. What an amazing observation! How could they possibly have come to that conclusion?! Could it have been the last four decades during which pretty much all the economic growth went to the richest people? Could it be that the fact that giving ever more money to the rich might only help, you know, the rich is now such an obvious thing that even conservative economists are starting to notice? Say it ain’t so!

But the article itself is disingenuous. It starts with this:

There are a couple of problems with this sentence. First, remember Reagan’s actual legacy: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest. Second, since when have Republicans ever made the government smaller? They’ve cut programs for the poor. But they’ve always more than offset this with spending on the kinds of programs they like: war and presents for the rich.

But what really bugs me are two words: “by themselves.” The implication is that “lower” taxes and “smaller” government have done something for the middle class. I don’t see this in the economic record since slightly before Reagan. The rest of the article is just a fiction about how Republicans are beginning to wake up to the fact that they need to try something else. There may be some grumbling, but that’s all. And that is all that there will ever be. As long as the Democrats’ economic ideas are only to do slightly more than nothing, the Republicans will not change a thing. Hell, they won big in 2010 and 2014. Why fix it if it ain’t broke?

Dean Baker noted an even bigger problem with the article, Conservative Economics Has Not Produced Rapid Growth. He provided the rate of growth during all the presidencies going back to Carter. I put it together in this handy graph:

I don’t especially like this statistic. It shows clearly that the economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans. I think this is a real thing and it is policy based. But I think that liberals use this as proof and it isn’t very good proof for that claim. However, it certainly shows that we don’t see great economic growth under the Republicans. If their policies were so great, we would see it here. And as far as we can say anything based upon these data, it is that the economy grows better when Democrats are in charge.

Of course, this graph also shows why the Republicans will change nothing about their economic policy. Of the last six presidents, three of them have been Republicans. What’s more, each party controlled the White House for a total of five terms. So the Republicans can continue on funneling cash to their friends and making the working class think government is useless. And there is no political price to pay. If we liberals wait for conservatives to start caring about the working class, we will die waiting. The only way to make the Republicans care about the working class is for the the Democrats to start doing something for the working class. Yes, economic growth has been better under Democrats. But except for a couple of years under Clinton, the working class itself hasn’t done better.