Dean Baker posted something this morning, and I was planning to chastise him for faux naivete. But he was just waiting for the last line of his post. You see, the Washington Post published an article by Al Kamen, So Whatever Happened to the Deficit? That title is actually a bit misleading; the article is about how newspaper coverage of the federal deficit has decreased. The article is fatuous in the extreme.

According to Kamen, the main reason that the deficit isn’t in the news is because it has gone so far down. Well, that’s true, I suppose. But he finished the article by quoting conservative Douglas Holtz-Eakin as saying that the deficit has gone down thanks to the, “American workers, entrepreneurs and families for their work toward economic recovery.” And that, “Washington has done essentially nothing, unless you count stopping making it worse.” Um, no. The economy recovered because economies recover. There is nothing special that the bizarre melange of “workers, entrepreneurs, and families” did for the economic recovery. But it is certainly true that the recovery we’ve had (such as it is) has helped drive down the deficit. But it is also true that the disastrous 2011 budget deal and the 2013 fiscal cliff deals were huge in bringing down the deficit. So Washington has been hugely responsible for pushing the deficit down.

Baker responded, however, that the lower budget deficit is not a good thing. This, of course, is something I rant about all the time here. But he noted, The Washington Post Says it Doesn’t Miss Lower Unemployment and Rising Wages. Because that’s what has actually happened. That’s why the recovery has been so anemic. If federal spending had done what it has always done during recessions since at least Nixon, we would have a roaring recover and our deficit might be even lower than it now is. Baker snarkily noted, “If the deficit hawks at the Post think otherwise they could grab themselves a quick Nobel prize in economics by showing how.”

And what about the two parties? Well, Kamen quoted Bill Galston who rightly noted that Democrats weren’t ever too keen on the deficit obsession. But the Democratic elites certainly were. Obama had a lot of elite Democratic support for his sudden abandonment of jobs in 2011 and sudden obsession with the deficit. It was, of course, just another pathetic example of Obama trying to “reach across the isle.” But Kamen noted that as a result, Democrats haven’t been pushing for credit for the reduction of the deficit. That’s simply not true. What is true is that reporters haven’t been interested in giving them any credit. And example number one is Kamen’s article that ends by saying that Washington should get no credit for the lower deficit.

Meanwhile, he noted that the Tea Party has other things to scream about. But the truth is they are still screaming about the deficit. But that just sets up the same old false equivalence, “Democrats say they have cut the deficit, Republicans say they haven’t. Who can say?” As anyone who has watched politics knows, as soon as there is a Republican President, the Tea Party will lose all interest in deficits. Suddenly, all the real economic arguments for running deficits during recessions will make sense. Because it was never about deficits or any other policy; it was always simply that they hate President Obama.

What Kamen’s article is then, above all, is an example of Villager Thinking. Al Kamen is an upper class columnist. He’s not worried about the unemployed. He ended his article, “Well, we don’t miss the deficit.” Dean Baker explained the problem well:

Well, there was never any confusion. There are, after all, almost no “labor” reporters, but no big time newspaper is without a slew of “business” reporters. It doesn’t matter what is happening to the poorer classes. Low deficits mean when Republicans get power again, they can lower taxes on the rich even more. Hooray for the “objective” press!

Normally, I wouldn’t post something so quickly, but I just had to share this. I got it via Paul Krugman, Rick Santelli and Affinity Fraud. In the video below, Steve Liesman tells Rick Santelli that he’s been ranting about the same stuff for five years—Inflation! Weak Dollar! Greece!—and he’s been completely wrong. Liesman even says, “Every single bit of advice you gave would have lost people money, Rick.” Well, that’s true.

Of course, the whole time, Santelli is yelling in the background from his place on the trading floor. Krugman wondered why a number of them applauded Santelli and concluded that even though they would never listen to Santelli’s advice, they agree with Santelli’s outlook on life: help the rich, screw the poor. But it is always great to see anyone beat up on Rick Santelli:

This is nothing new. Over a year ago, Dean Baker made Rick Santelli look like a total idiot—not that Santelli needs any help. This one is notable because Dean Baker openly laughs at Santelli:

The thing about Santelli is that he seems like he’s going to have a heart attack. I wish he would. He is a hateful person. It is his hateful rant about tens of billions (it never worked out that way) to bail out homeowners, as opposed to the hundreds of billions to bail out the banks (where he was agnostic), that supposedly got the Tea Party all riled up. But the point is that Steve Liesman is right: Rick Santelli has been wrong about everything for the last five years, he continues to be wrong, and the only thing that changes is that his salary keeps going up.

There has been a lot of talk recently about how young Americans are going to turn against the Democratic Party because the economy is so bad under President Obama. Jonathan Chait provided a good rundown of it, Teenage Republicans Still Not Happening Yet. It all started with an analysis by The New York Times that found that how white people voted depended upon when they “came of age.” It only looked at white people, because all other groups skew Democratic regardless of when they came of age. Chait noted that this is interesting and all, but the Democratic advantage going forward is not about young people being liberal, but rather about the fact that young people are less white.

Let me add a couple of points. First, there is this idea that conservatives have that people who came of age during the Bush the Younger administration turned against Bush because of the bad economy. Actually, until the last year of Bush’s presidency, the economy was pretty good. What they didn’t like was that the administration was just dreadful at everything it did and it was dishonest and proudly committed crimes against humanity. And the idea that young people now look at Obama and think that the modern Republican Party is a good alternative is absolutely one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard.

But we don’t need to talk about age or even race. The issue here is income. The poor vote Democratic. And the Republicans—even the smart ones—push policies that make the rich richer by creating more poor people. The only reason that the Republican Party hasn’t been reduced to a regional power is because the poor don’t vote as much as the rich. And there’s a good reason for that: it is hard to find time to vote when you are working three part time jobs and have to pick up the kids from school.

The whole point of the Republican Party is to increase income inequality. Sadly, half the Democratic Party either doesn’t care about it or is actively hostile to doing anything about it. Children starving to death? Fine! Class warfare? Never! But as inequality gets worse and worse, the Democratic Party will be forced to tackle the issue. And income inequality is getting worse and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In fact, I believe that things will get so bad that even the Republican Party will be forced liberalize and come up with some ideas other than, “More tax cuts for the rich!”

The history of America has been one of competing interests of egalitarianism and individualism. As the economic plight of the lower classes gets better, the country tends to tilt individualistic. But when things get too far out of balance and there are too many people who are too poor, the country tilts to egalitarianism. We have been on a four decade bender to the make the rich ever richer at the expense of the poor. As long as we have a democracy, things will turn around. But increasingly, we do not have a democracy. And the more unequal we become the less democratic we become.

But this should not make the Republicans think they are going to win this fight with the Democrats. Because if we make the full trip to oligarchy, the parties won’t matter. We will just “elect” President whomever the richest man is, and that will be that. Meanwhile, the Republicans’ continued hindrance of any policies that will help the economy only create more people who will agree with the Democrats and will bother to show up to vote. The fault, dear Republicans, is not in demographics, but in your policies.

I have always thought of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a pro-Israel lobbying group. And that’s certainly not an unreasonable way to think of them. They are fiercely supportive of Israel, as I mentioned briefly a couple of days ago. But they are much more than that. I was pleased to come upon an article on their site this week, Longtime Anti-Immigrant Activists Behind Murrieta Protests. It is very interesting reading.

What appears to be happening is that a small group (in the thousands) of mostly children from a few Central American countries have come to the United States seeking asylum. These are not undocumented people and they have (most anyway) not broken any laws. They turned themselves over to the United States government and asked for asylum just as people do all the time. During the Cold War, Americans were proud that Soviet citizens did this. We even had a super-keen word for it: “defecting”! Well, that’s what these kids are doing.

So why the protests? Why is the conservative press presenting this as a huge increase in illegal immigration? What is actually happening should make Americans swell with pride. These mostly young people are in trouble not at all of their own causing and they have come to us for help. I say, “Welcome!” I say, “Thank you for the honor of thinking us so good.” We are supposed to say:

The reason for the protests comes down to what I wrote about a year ago, Conservatives Hate All Immigrants. It was after the Boston bombing and how it was causing people to complain about immigrants. I thought it was strange because the Tsarnaev brothers were here legally. And it was only then that I realized that all the talk of “illegal immigration” was really just a cover for the anti-immigration sentiment that has been here in the United States from its very beginning.

Still, I think most people are like me. In that article, I wrote, “I am proud that much of the world would like to come here.” And what I learned from the ADL article is that these protests didn’t just erupt spontaneously. They were a creation by a number of hateful people and groups. There’s conspiracy theorist Patrice Lynes, who thinks that the United Nations is going to destroy US sovereignty. This has long been a belief of the John Birch Society. The anti-immigration group We the People Rising seems to have done much of the organizing and provided most of the signs. The group is related to Lupe Morfin who was quoted by The Los Angeles Times charmingly saying, “They’ve completely taken over our areas and our neighborhoods, which have become Third World countries.” And it seems that the anti-immigration group San Diegans for Secure Borders Coalition has been involved in promoting the protests as well.

Now there is nothing wrong with people organizing events. But I’m afraid that it gives a bunch of marginal groups a lot of undeserved attention. Most Americans have confidence that the government can manage to apply its immigration and asylum laws correctly. But as the ADL concludes, “In Murrieta and Vassar, anti-immigrant activists closely tied to the largest anti-immigrant groups in the country such as FAIR[2] and NumbersUSA are helping to spread their message of bigotry and xenophobia in an attempt to create a climate of fear around this humanitarian crisis.”

Meanwhile, pro-immigration groups are fighting back. And it’s funny. When I look at pictures of the pro-immigrant side, I see America in all its variety. When I look at pictures of the anti-immigrant side, I just see a bunch of angry white people. Of course, this isn’t about skin color or culture. These same fights went on when the Irish came, when the Italians came, when the Chinese came—pretty much when anyone came. There will always be people who use fear and hatred to maintain the status quo. But American history is very clear on this: the immigrants always win.

[1] These are, of course, the words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty. It is the ending of the sonnet “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus. Here is the sonnet in its entirety:

[2] In this sentence, “FAIR” stands for the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform—a group that explicitly wants to reduce legal immigration as well as illegal immigration. It is not the really great group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which I talk about all the time.

Ed Kilgore wrote an article over at Talking Points Memo, Mississippi Is Just One Piece of the GOP’s African-American Problem. It’s remarkable for not being at the Washington Monthly, or as I like to think of it, “A megabyte of advertising for a kilobyte of content.” But given that I put up with the really miserable viewing experience at Washington Monthly to read Kilgore most days, I’m only to happy too read him at TPM.

In the article he goes over the history of the the African American community with the Republican Party. He notes, for example, that before the GOP decided they were going to be the conservative party, they got about 30% of the black vote. As I’ve noted before, Martin Luther King Sr was a Republican in those days. But in 1964, after Barry Goldwater voted against the Voting Rights Act, the African American community fled from the Republican Party. They only received 6% of the black vote that year, even though 32% had voted for Nixon in 1960.

This actually brings up something interesting that you hear from conservatives all the time. They say that blacks are just in the habit of voting for the Democrats and that the party doesn’t really do anything for them. The idea is that the Democrats promise them “goodies” but in the end, the inner cities just continue their destruction. But the truth is that black voters have been very responsive in their voting. When the Republican Party has become more reasonable, they’ve voted for it in higher percentages.

Of course, there is a contradiction in the way that Republicans look at the African American community anyway: they complain that blacks should just see that their best interests are with the Republican Party. As Kilgore concluded, “Perhaps it’s more accurate to say… that conservatives want African-Americans to change before they are worthy of outreach.” The problem is that politics doesn’t work that way. And Republicans know that. That’s why Romney and Ryan spent the whole 2012 election telling old people that Obama was taking away their Medicare.

Kilgore also quotes McDaniel’s campaign manager, Melanie Sojourner, “Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots of God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American families.”[1] This reminds me of a great quote from Ramesh Ponnuru. He was appealing to his fellow conservatives to stop saying, “Hispanics are natural conservatives because they’re hard working, family-oriented, and religious.” He noted that it was condescending to Hispanics and self-congratulatory to conservatives. He summed it up brilliantly, “I suspect most people throughout human history have been hard-working, family-oriented, and religious, without sharing conservative views about limited constitutional government.”

This perhaps more than anything gets to the heart of the Republican Party. The people who really matter—the Ramesh Ponnurus—know that the Republican Party is all about low taxes on the rich and no regulations on corporations. But Republicans themselves—even professional ones like Melanie Sojourner—think it is about cultural signifiers. These kind of people think that if you go to church, you should vote Republican; if you have a job, you should vote Republican; if you’re “independent,” you should vote Republican.

It shows what they think of Democrats: we all a bunch freeloading hedonist followers. But as I’ve noted before, the only real difference between conservative and liberal is how you think the resources of the world should be divided. I find it shocking that the conservative philosophy is that how ever the resources are divided up right now is the way they should be divided up. And ideologically, that’s incoherent because it changes from day to day. There is not acceptance that legal wealth today may be the result of theft and murder yesterday. All that is thrown aside. So it is little wonder that the poor vote Democratic and the rich vote Republican. Because ultimately, the people know which party is on which side. (Although sadly, the Republicans do a much better job for their side than the Democrats do theirs.)

[1] In the article, a couple of “[sic]” additions were added to the quote. My belief is that when it is clear what the writer means, it is better to just fix it. The addition of “[sic]” in this context just makes the person quoting seem small.

Yesterday, I picked up a book, America: What Went Wrong by Donald Barlett and James Steele. The amazing thing about the book is that it was published in 1992 and yet it could have been written this year. And in fact, it is kind of like a user friendly version of Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Except that it deals with a lot of other cool stuff. For example, it shows how deregulating the airline industry caused there to be fewer companies and the cost of travel actually went up.

I haven’t read the whole book and I don’t intend this to be a review of any kind. It is just that the book is 22 years old and it starts with an info-graphic to demonstrate how bad things had gotten. In 1959, the top 4% of Americans made as much as the bottom 35% of Americans. Actually, that number alone strikes me as ridiculously unequal, but of course, those were the “good ol’ days”! Thirty years later, in 1989, the top 4% of Americans made as much as the bottom 51% of Americans. Note also: this is just wage income. By this definition, Mitt Romney, who makes roughly $20 million per year, probably wouldn’t even make it in the top 4%. So this way of looking at inequality really understates the problem.

Well, I couldn’t see that info-graphic without wondering how things had changed. In fact, the authors even say, “If the trend continues, sometime early in the next century the top 4 percent of individuals and families drawing paychecks will earn as much on the job as 60 percent of the rest of American workers.” I love this kind of stuff and I wondered if I could find the current data. As it is, everyone does things about the 1% and the 0.01%. Well, it turns out that the IRS has a treasure trove of data for geeks like me.

It’s not easy, of course. They provide big spreadsheets with numbers that are not at all what I was looking for. So I had to do a bunch of calculating. What’s more, I had to make a few assumptions. But this is important: all the assumptions I made cause the inequality to be understated, not overstated. So I worked out the numbers for 1993. This was kind of a test to make sure that I was doing it correctly, since I already had the 1989 number: 51%. And indeed, my 1993 number looks about right: 53.0%. So I feel pretty confident in this.

The most recent data available from the IRS are back from 2011, and although I’m sure things are worse now, it gives us a good idea of where we’re at. My 2011 number was: 58.7%. Before the crash, it was 56.8%. I think what we are seeing here is the standard narrative. During the Clinton years, inequality kind of flatlined and then during the great leadership and tax cuts of the Bush the Younger administration, it started to increase again. And then, we got the housing bubble bursting and the financial crisis. The government, of course, took care of the financial crisis (the rich), but didn’t do much of anything about the housing bubble (homeowners and construction workers and pretty much everyone). So inequality again shot up.

It’s very interesting I think. Barlett and Steele were right on with their 60% number 22 years ago. It makes me think about the old joke, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything!” It’s almost exactly the same thing here. In the case of the weather we just can’t do anything about it; that’s the joke. Well, given that we pretty much live in an oligarchy, there is really nothing we can do about inequality. The top 4% of the country are the only ones who our leaders listen to. Half the country has managed to be so focused on fake scandals and a few thousand desperate children fleeing their countries, that they don’t notice that their birthrights have been stolen. And the other half of the nation is too busy just trying to survive to vote most of the time.

You have to ask yourself, “How bad can it get before the people really do rise up?” Well, the rich are figuring that as long as there aren’t bread lines, they are safe. And I think they are right. Still, if I were them, I’d invest in a little insurance by way of reducing inequality. But I’m a careful man. And the rich aren’t careful. The conservatives aren’t careful. So I don’t see change coming. If I live another 50 years, I certainly don’t see that number going below 58.7%. I think the American people will be willing to accept a number well into the 70s. And by then, it may be to late. Maybe it already is.