Previously, I’ve been concerned about what the Republicans were doing to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It has long been known that they wanted to turn the nonpartisan organization into something akin to the Heritage Foundation — something that would simply parrot back to them whatever they wanted to hear. And mostly what they wanted to hear was that if you cut taxes on the rich, they will act like the Great Pumpkin and reward the economy with loads of jobs. So in December, I wrote, How Republicans Intend to Destroy Congress. That was in reference to the effective firing of the CBO chief Doug Elmendorf.

Now, Jonathan Chait sounds the next alarm, Why the Republican Congress’s First Act Was to Declare War on Math. The Republicans changed the rules of CBO analysis so that “dynamic scoring” must be used in the analysis of budgetary proposals that are larger than one quarter of a percent of the size of the GDP. Chait is correct that the Republicans are just turning the CBO into a partisan organization. Its good reputation for nonpartisan analysis will be destroyed. And who then will Congress and the rest of the country look to for “the straight dope” on matters economic?

But is it really such a big deal? I’ve really been questioning that. Chait is right that the CBO analyses are “necessarily imperfect” but “arrived at fairly.” But he downplays just now imperfect the CBO is. Here’s an example from his own article:

So with dynamic scoring, the CBO would have been even further off. But given that it was off by 27%, does it really matter? Would being off by 35% have been significantly worse? I think what this illustrates is that the CBO already has a conservative bias — a much bigger one than dynamic scoring. So the status quo has been that Democrats have dutifully followed the conservative analyses of the CBO, which has forced them to create worse legislation than they normally would have. I’m thinking specifically of the stimulus. If the Democrats had changed the way the CBO operated, we would have gotten a bill with more infrastructure spending and less tax cutting. But because of the way the “objective” CBO scores things, tax cuts for the rich and highway building improve the economy equally. And that’s dead wrong.

The problem with the very notion of anything “nonpartisan” is that people think it means that it is objective. But clearly that is never the case. The CBO is biased in ways that I think are demonstrably wrong. This change by the Republican Congress will make the work of the CBO even worse. But at least everyone will recognize that. People won’t talk about the CBO as though it were some hallowed organization. And it means when the Democrats have control of the CBO, they can change it to something that does a better job of analyzing than it did in the “good old days” when it simply assumed (against all evidence) that infrastructure spending didn’t stimulate growth.

Meet Kirby Delauter. He’s a Republican Councilman from District 5 in Frederick County, Maryland. It’s a decent sized place with a population density slightly larger than my own home of Sonoma County, California. I mention this because I don’t want you to get the idea that Delauter is representing some tiny county with a thousand people. His position is one with a fair amount of power. And he could certainly go onto state government directly from this post. Or at least he could if he were smarter than he seems to be.

Meet Bethany Rodgers. She’s a reporter for The Frederick News-Post. She had apparently written an article about Delauter last year that he didn’t like. So, according to a recent post on his Facebook page, “I had let her know after her hit piece during the election where she embellished, twisted and downright lied about what we discussed for that article, that she was never to contact me again since she has absolutely no morals or journalistic ability.” I assumed he also un-friended her and refused to eat lunch at the same table as Rodgers and the other mean girls.

Things got very bad last Saturday when Rodgers wrote, Shreve Raises Staffing, Parking Concerns. The article is about parking for the new council members. It has two references to Delauter in an 1,100 word article. Other than the fact Shreve and Delauter come off as self-important, there isn’t much to complain about. After all, it’s about how various people in the local government will share parking!

But Delauter was hopping mad. On his Facebook post he continued (suddenly addressing Rodgers directly):

If only Nixon had come up with this idea, he could have shut down all those Watergate articles. It’s brilliant! “I’m a councilman, but you can’t mention my name anymore!” I have to wonder if it would be okay to describe him, “The silly and petulant Republican Councilman from District 5 in Frederick County”? Rodgers doubtless loves this. She replied:

Not to be outdone, Delauter threatened legal action, “Use my name again unauthorized and you’ll be paying for an Attorney. Your rights stop where mine start.” The managing editor of the newspaper, Terry Headlee, said, “[T]o threaten to sue a reporter for publishing his name is so ridiculously stupid that I’m speechless.” But apparently, she didn’t remain speechless.

Yesterday, The Frederick News-Post editorial board published, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter. Mostly, it is just an exercise in not using a pronoun when talking about the councilman:

You should read the whole thing. It includes a discussion of how they might refer to this nitwit. My favorite was, “The Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter.” There is also quite a bit of serious discussion about the issue. A good picture of Kirby Delauter — and the American conservative movement generally — comes through in this whole episode.

Update (8 January 2015 10:22 am)

From The Frederick News-Post, Delauter: Statement to The News-Post Threatening Legal Action Was “Wrong and Inappropriate”:

Mr Delauter, that was a fine apology. I’m impressed.

Over at Hullabaloo this morning, Tom Sullivan wrote, Thank You for Not Voting Your Best Interests. He made a excellent and important point, but I think there is quite a bit more to it. His primary argument is that we liberals should stop saying that the working class “vote against their best interests.” He noted that this is an Ayn Randian, social Darwinian framing of voting. He asked, “Is that who we are? Is that the kind of country we want? Does that reflect our values?”

I have to admit to being guilty of occasionally using this language. And it has long bothered me that it goes against what I believe. I actually have a certain fondness for the fact that many Christians vote against their best economic interests in the name of what they think is their religious faith. That’s noble. And I often vote against my own best interests. But the statement doesn’t mean we are talking about the best interests of the working class — as in low skilled workers as opposed to its literal meaning of roughly 99% of the population that makes most of its money for work.

If we are talking about non-college educated whites, then he is most definitely right that “You’re voting against your best interests” is just a dog whistle for, “You’re a stupid hick.” But let’s remember: in general, it is not the poor who are voting for the Republicans. I discussed this in, It’s the Poor, Stupid. Poor voters in every state in the deep south voted for Kerry in 2004. The middle income voters are more inclined toward the Republicans and upper income voters go with the Republicans everywhere but California, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

The issue is that the poorer voters tend not to vote at all — not that they vote against their interests. But I’ve always been careful not to blame them for this. There are a few things going on. The first is that our country goes out of its way to make voting hard. For example: why is it is necessary to register to vote? We all have social security numbers. Why isn’t that enough? Then, when you move, you must register again. And who moves a lot? The poor. But the problem is far deeper than that. Consider a working class family where both parents work — perhaps even multiple jobs. They are paid by the hour. They have children they must care for. People in that situation have to be very dedicated to vote. Compare that to a family where just the man works at a salaried job where his boss will be just fine that he comes in an hour late because, “The line to vote was terrible!” (Of course, the line to vote will not be terrible — that is reserved for where the poor vote.)

When it comes to what I care most about — economics — almost everyone who votes for the Republicans is voting against their best interests. The only people who are not are those people who get special benefits from the Republican Party. Otherwise, everyone does better under the Democrats — and that most definitely includes the owning class. And why do they vote against their own best interests? Well, Sullivan nails that:

This is why Wall Street turned against Obama in such a big way. He’s surrounded himself with Wall Street hacks. He’s done everything that Wall Street could hope for. But they hate him for one reason: he called them fat cats. Those people probably would have done worse under a McCain administration, but at least he would have played along and never countered their self-images as the brilliant and beneficent Masters of the Universe that they see themselves as.

So the question really is why so many people — rich people mostly — vote against the best interests of the country. There are lots of reasons for this. The one that seems primary to me is the Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman idea that making as much money as possible is doing what is in the best interests of your country. As a result, the rich have come to think that just by being rich they are being patriotic. And the rest of the nation has largely gone along with it, even though it really doesn’t have much of a historical legacy. In the past, the rich at least gave lip service to noblesse oblige; now they act like gods — deserving of both their privilege and worship.

We as liberals do need to be careful about the language we use. The “own interests” lament does sound like we are calling for selfishness. But I think it is deeper than this. A more accurate question would be, “We do they vote against our best interests?” But it is not a question for the lower classes. It is a question for the upper classes. And we shouldn’t be asking ourselves the question. We should be asking them, “Why do you vote against our shared interests?” I don’t think they have an answer for that.

Jonathan Chait is back, which is good news because I still look forward to reading him every day. And his first article of the new year is a good one, Harvard, Obamacare, and the Conservative Information Bubble. What it is about is the conservatives’ newest claim that Obamacare is failing. This time it refers to a Robert Pear article in The New York Times, Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard. I believe the original title was, “Healthcare fixes backed by Harvard’s experts now roil its faculty.” Apparently, they decided that maybe that was too provocative a title.

The main “fix” that is roiling the Harvard faculty is the idea that healthcare consumers should have “skin in the game.” This means higher co-pays and deductibles. It is thought that if people have to pay $25 to see the doctor, they will only go to the doctor when they really need to. I’ve always found this a questionable contention because (1) most people avoid going to the doctor just because it is time consuming and painful; and (2) this is throwing a lot of pressure on the consumer to know when is the “right” time to go to the doctor. But maybe it works.

In the past, Harvard has provided 100% coverage of faculty. (I’m sure that Harvard is like most colleges in using a lot of adjunct faculty who are paid almost nothing and given no benefits — but that’s another issue.) Now the college is paying only 90% and the faculty are not pleased. Conservatives have pounced. Chait quoted Red State, “One imagines how all these pampered academics would feel if they were forced to use a silver (70% covered) Obamacare plan.” I love that: “pampered academics”; these intellectual elites who fly coach to conferences are so pampered but the financial elites in their private jets and the gated mansions are not pampered. Regardless, it is clearly a reduction in compensation, even if a fairly minor one.

But as Chait noted, conservatives have no cause to feel good about this development. This idea of having “skin in the game” is their own conservative idea. In fact, about the only healthcare reform idea that conservatives have that is not totally ridiculous is their health savings accounts. This is the idea that people put tax-free money in a savings account that they use for medical expenses. This goes along with some catastrophic insurance policy — with maybe a $10,000 (Or more!) deductible. Since the money in the savings account is yours if you don’t use it, you have a real incentive to chew Advil all year long and not have the doctor look at that pain in your lower right abdomen. Incentives!

That’s all that is going on at Harvard. The only thing that conservatives should complain about is that the school is paying too much of the faculty’s healthcare costs. Of course, this is just the conservative way. Anything that people don’t like in Obamacare proves that it is hopeless and must be repealed. And this is even true when what people don’t like is their conservative policy idea, “You hate having to pay 30% of your healthcare costs, but you are going to love it when you have to pay 70%!”

It is important to remember where conservatives are in terms of knowledge about Obamacare. The only information that they get is negative. This is why they truly believe that the law is on the verge of collapse. It is very much like conservatives in the 2012 election where they were just sure that they were going to win. Contrast that with liberals during the 2014 election who might have grasped on to any hopeful bit of evidence, but who were completely prepared for the slaughter that came last November.

There are lots of things to not like about Obamacare. Steven Brill is out with a new book that highlights many of the problems, America’s Bitter Pill. But those problems are the conservative aspects of the law. And it is embarrassing for conservatives to throw rocks at the law while showing a complete lack of knowledge about their own “plans.”

Optional musical accompaniment, Isn’t It Romantic:

Isn’t it pathetic?
Journalistic hacks
Just following the herd!

That’s what I thought when I saw this at The New York Times last night, Two New York Police Officers Are Shot in the Bronx. It came in my email and that’s why I think it is pathetic. Obviously, this is a real news story. But The Times on average sends me maybe two notices per day. So this is Big News™ because, “Cops’ lives matter!” Of course, no one ever questioned that the lives of police officers mattered.

This is all a response to the murders of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. After that, apparently, the senseless shooting of kids by police officers don’t matter. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote yesterday, “If the public appetite for police reform can be soured by the mad acts of a man living on the edge of society, then the appetite was probably never really there to begin with.” The recent rallying around the police is business as usual — we’ve been seeing it for years and it is in no sense any different from the tired demands for conformity found in, “Support the troops!”

But this recent bit of voluntary government propaganda is really a bit too much. The two officers — Aliro Pellerano and Andrew Dossi — were not killed. That’s good news, even though they were seriously injured. Like I said: this is a perfectly acceptable news story, but not one that the paper of record should be sending out to its email subscribers. The headline implies that this was another ambush attack as had happened to Liu and Ramos. But it wasn’t. The officers simply got into an altercation when approaching two men who were suspected of a robbery. Also: the suspects are Latinos.

What is particularly troubling about this is that it is pushing a false narrative. Police officers are not under assault. Police work has done nothing but become safer over the last twenty years. The facts are clear. Back in 2011, after a rash of shootings of police officers caused a similar outbreak of deceptive reporting, Radley Balko wrote, The “War on Cops” That Isn’t. And late last year, he followed it up with, Once Again: Police Work Is NOT Getting More Dangerous. Just in terms of raw numbers, there were fewer police officers killed in 2013 than there had been since World War II. And that is with a population that is 2.25 times the size.

I don’t think the problem is primarily that the public is deceived about this. The problem is that police officers are deceived about this. It causes them to use excessive force because they live on a knife’s edge — constantly thinking that they are in danger. Another factoid from Balko’s work is that it is more dangerous to simply live in one of the 50 highest crime cities than it is to be a police officer. Yet no one ever says, “When a waitress in Oakland drops off her kids at school in the morning, she doesn’t know if she’ll ever see them again!” But this kind of nonsense is constantly thrown out about the police.

One thing I’ve focused on in my writing is that the police have become a bunch of pussies. They aren’t willing to subject themselves to even the slightest danger. For example, there is the 2003 case of a woman who was fatally shot by police offers because of her threatening gestures with a vegetable peeler. But I seem to be about the only person willing to call the police pussies. And this is because the police have convinced themselves and the nation that their jobs are so dangerous it makes sense for them to constantly be on guard so that occasionally overreaching is understandable.

It isn’t. Because police officers do not have terribly dangerous jobs. I mean, they aren’t cabbies — who are four times as likely to die on the job!

Update (6 January 2015 6:10 pm)

Unbelievable: Cop Wounded in Shootout Not Happy About de Blasio’s Visit.

While doing research about the decreasing dangers of police work, I came upon some good work by libertarians. Unfortunately, this also brought too much of the typical brain dead libertarian economic analysis. In particular, at The Freeman, I found an article by Corey Iacono, 5 Economic Myths That Just Won’t Die. It was apparently the cover story of the December issue. It’s an excellent example of conservative affirmative action. If only I could spout this kind of nonsense, I too could be published in a seemingly popular magazine.

A big part of the problem is that the myths are no such thing. No one, for example, goes around saying, “Capitalism isn’t economically superior to socialism.” There literally is no such thing as a pure capitalism or a pure socialism. The libertarians are the only ones who claim that there can exist some kind of perfect capitalism. And even they fall to pieces when you bring up tort law or almost any other practical matter. But even if we grant Mr Iacono his myth, he doesn’t counter it. He only argues that liberalizing socialist countries increases economic growth. That is not the same as showing that capitalism is economically superior to socialism. There is a balance and going too far either way makes things worse.

Typical of the article is its argument against, “Countries like Sweden and Denmark prove that high taxes don’t harm economic growth.” He avoids the subject altogether. He does mention one paper regarding the Danish economy that is not based upon data but on a non-standard economic model. Otherwise, his argument is that in a general sense lower taxation leads to higher economic growth. Again, no one really argues with this. The argument has been that taxes of the rich do not hurt the economy — in a recession at least — because they don’t spend most of their money and so it is just added to the piles of cash rushing around the economy hopelessly looking for places where it can be used. But such economic complexity is anathema in libertarian thought.

The article isn’t without some actual claims that are made, “The government ended child labor. In a free market, child labor would still exist.” But I hardly think it is a myth. He quoted an article by the Economic History Association that stated that child labor ended primarily due to improved incomes of working people from 1880 to 1940. The problem here is that incomes improved due to the rise of labor unions and various government activities. Given that the United States has been seeing little to no increase in real wages for the working classes over the last four decades, we ought to see a rise in child labor if it weren’t for laws. The same argument that Iacono made has been made for a century and a half for how the Civil War was unnecessary because the free market was just about to destroy slavery. In this case, Iacono is apparently fine with generations of children working in coal mines because the bright light of the libertarian utopia is only a few generations away!

His next myth was, “Free trade doesn’t lead to better economic outcomes in the real world.” Free trade is mostly a scam to keep rich countries rich and poor countries poor. There is no way that a banana republic becomes anything else if it can’t protect its infant industries from destruction by powerful foreign corporations. Let me outsource the rebuttal to Ha-Joon Chang’s excellent Bad Samaritans:

But by far the worst of the “myths” was, “The idea that economic growth helps the poor is trickle-down economics — it doesn’t actually help them.” No one says that economic growth doesn’t help the poor. No one. But he doesn’t address this anyway. He actually goes on to argue in favor of trickle-down economics. He wants growth, which he claims that we get “through methods such as limiting the size of government and lowering barriers to international trade.” The size of the government is generally irrelevant, but it is unquestionably actively harmful in the middle of the worst economic period since the Great Depression. There is no “crowding out.” Corporations are already sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars because they don’t see any point in investing. And what possible barriers to international trade is he talking about? As I’ve discussed, our big new “free” trade agreements are more about making countries less democratic and making it easier for owners to collect their rents.

All of this is just the same old libertarian hokum. This isn’t economics; it is theology. It is worship of the free market and the idea that any interference with it will make it angry and turn against us. Economics started as a part of moral philosophy. But amongst libertarians, it has lost all its moral context. It is no longer about the best way to facilitate the sharing of resources. It is about feeding an ideology that can never fail and only be failed. Unfortunately, Corey Iacono isn’t even a priest in the cult of the free market; he’s just one of the true believers sitting in the pews.

Afterword

Iacono wrote a followup article, 5 More Economic Myths That Just Won’t Die. It is an improvement in that it actually contains a widely believed claim that is, in fact, false, “Immigrants take American jobs and reduce American wages.” But three of the remain four myths are all the same: government can’t create jobs. It’s pathetic. But it has 464 shares, because there are scads of people out there who just can’t get enough hokum when it tells them what they want to hear.

There is a laugh-out-loud funny article by Colin Dueck and Roger Zakheim at The Wall Street Journal this morning, Toward a Reform-Conservative Foreign Policy. These “reform conservatives on national-security issues” want to change the state of our foreign policy. And they want to do it by — Wait for it! — doing exactly what conservatives have always wanted to do. I have major problems with the reform conservatives generally — all they are willing to do is nibble around the edges because they cannot be seen as taking a big bite out of conservative ideology. But at least they do nibble. Dueck and Zakheim don’t even do that.

The argument in the article consists of two points. First, it complains about Obama’s foreign policy. This isn’t serious at all. It just recycles the same tired claims of the conservatives that Obama looks week (generally because he doesn’t act like an authoritarian, but really just because he isn’t a Republican). The second part of the argument is a vague disclaimer that they aren’t like Bush in 2003. And this leads up to their great “reform” conclusion: we need to spend more money on the military.

It is curious that conservatives constantly call for government to be more efficient — except when it comes to the military. Education can be infinitely more efficient. One teacher can manage a thousand students! But the military couldn’t possibly do more with less! One less bomber would destroy our military or at least send the message to the evildoers that it is time to strike! It’s sad but tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the priorities of conservatives. No wonder they hold authoritarians like Putin in such high regard.

Ed Kilgore summed up what they are pushing, The Long-Awaited Reformicon Foreign Policy Initiative: Throw Money at the Pentagon:

But it is more than that. The military cuts that we have seen came from the Sequester. The Republicans allowed cuts to military spending and Democrats allowed cuts to social spending. What these guys are really saying is that now that the deal is made, they want to keep the half of it that they like and jettison the half they don’t like. They even mention in the article how important cutting the budget is, “It is indeed imperative to reduce the national debt, but defense spending has already taken more than its share of cuts since Obama took office…” So the idea of just getting rid of the Sequester is off the table. As usual with conservatives, they want everything and are not willing to give anything in return.

They also mention Rand Paul as the leader of the faction of the party that wants to reduce the military. This is critical to their argument. By not being Rand Paul on the left and Bush in 2003 on the right, they are in the “reasonable” center. But it isn’t true. Rand Paul has shown himself to be very slippery when it comes to the military. By the time he gets the presidential nomination, he will be as much a hawk as any of them. And they provide an apologia for Bush in 2003, by noting the special circumstances. But there is nothing that they are proposing that is any different from Bush in 2003, except that they wouldn’t go to war with Saddam Hussein because he’s dead.

But maybe I’m wrong about these guys. In a way, they are right smack in the middle of the reform conservative movement. No one in that movement wants to change anything. They just want to rebrand the Republican Party. And that’s what their article is: a bunch of gobbledygook designed to look like they are dealing with the constant failures of their ideology, without actually doing it. Welcome to the party boys, the money is fine!