It is the way of my people. We are not barbecuers. We do not like the Monday holidays. But if it is for a good cause, we bear it. The labor struggle is a good cause. The civil rights struggle is a good cause. And today is Memorial Day, and remembering the men and women we sent to their deaths, is a good cause. I like to think of Memorial Day as a day of remembrance of all who have died pointlessly. And before people jump on me, war is a pointless activity. It doesn’t matter that there are times when good people are forced to fight wars. World War II was a righteous war because of the Nazis and others, but certainly it would have been better if the Nazis had not risen and forced the world into war.

Let’s think about the “Good War” for a moment. As many as 25 million soldiers died during it. Of those, 5 million died while in POW camps. As many as 55 million civilians died, roughly half of them from disease and famine. What a waste. I can’t help but think of us as two colonies of ants, because the individuals on either side are pretty much indistinguishable. The treatment of Jews and other “undesirables” by the Nazis was inhuman, but other than being more concentrated it was no different than what we did to the native peoples of America. The Japanese treatment of the Chinese was terrible, but did it really justify our systematic destruction of the Japanese civilian population? Did it justify dropping two atomic bombs on them?

Again and again, I come back to 95/5 principle: 95% of the population just wants to live their lives and have their Memorial Day barbecues (or in the case of my people, write maudlin essays about the tragedy of war); and 5% of the people want something else—I don’t even know what it is anymore. It’s mostly power, I suppose. But once these things are set in motion, there seems no way to stop it. Everyone has pitchforks and torches, and in the end no one is quite sure why.

Unlike Memorial Day that I rather like, I really dislike Veteran’s Day. The whole thing reminds me of the bumper sticker, “If You Like Your Freedom Thank a Vet.” Sadly, the military is necessary. But the last even remotely existential threat we faced was 75 years ago. And sure, we should thank those vets. But just as much, we should thank the vets of the Soviet Union—over 11 million of whom died to protect our freedom.

But if people want to see Memorial Day as a nationalist holiday, I’m against that. The last thing we need is to expand the holiday—to make it about even more dead soldiers. The sacrifice that these men and women gave is not “cool.” It is not something to be celebrated. It is something to be honored, because as a species, we are extremely flawed. Above all, it should be a day that we, as a species, ask forgiveness from those we’ve murdered in what were almost always fights over natural resources. Very much like this:

On this Memorial Day, let’s try to be better than the chimpanzees.

When people think of Ronald Reagan, they normally think of him as a big tax cutter. And there’s a good reason for that: when he came into office, he cut federal income taxes across the board by 25% over three years. As I’ve discussed many times elsewhere, this is not as evenhanded a thing to do as it sounds. The truth is that the only kind of tax in the United States that is truly progressive is the federal income tax. This is the reason that conservatives focus on it. It is what was behind Romney’s 47% comment, “These are people who pay no income tax…” Note that what he said wasn’t even accurate: state income taxes are far more regressive. But Reagan did cut everyone’s federal income taxes, so I’ll give him that.

But a funny thing happened. Since he was also determined to greatly increase military spending, the federal debt, which had been decreasing for decades suddenly increased at an alarming rate. So after those initial tax cuts, and without nearly as much fanfare, Reagan raised taxes again and again. But he kept those federal income tax rates low and and made them even lower. He started with a top tax rate of 70% in 1981, dropped it to 50% in 1982, and dropped it again to 28% in 1988. He also lowered effective capital gains taxes (before being forced to raise them later) and effective inheritance taxes—two forms of taxes that don’t much affect the poorer classes.

So what was the result of all this? You might think that it was to lower the federal taxes that Americans pay, but that’s not so much true. The total federal income taxes that came in his first year in office were 19.1% of GDP and they were 17.8% the year he left. But at the same time, the other major federal tax—payroll tax, that hits the poorer classes hardest—went up from 5.8% of GDP in 1981 to 6.5% in 1989. That is an overall decrease in taxes, but it was not equitably shared.

Will Bunch explains what this means to individuals in his book, Tear Down This Myth:

Let’s be clear here: when Reagan came into office, middle-income Americans were paying 17.7% of their income in federal taxes; when Reagan left office, middle-income Americans were paying 18.1% of their income in federal taxes. That’s a 0.4 percentage point increase in taxes. Assuming a median income of $30,000 per year, they were paying an extra $1,200 $120 in taxes.

I don’t have the exact numbers for the rich, but let’s just do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Let’s forget the capital gains (which went up slightly) and estate taxes (which stayed constant but the deduction went way up). Let’s take a typical rich person who made $500,000 in all earned income. Further, let’s look only at the taxes paid that was in the top tax bracket. In 1981, it was income over $212,000, but in 1989, it was income over $29,750. Note just how regressive that top marginal level is there at the end: for a lot of middle class people, there was a flat tax, and probably a regressive tax because the rich are better able to take advantages of deductions and hide income. Anyway, based on this, our rich person’s federal taxes went from $201,600 in 1981 to $131,670 in 1989. That’s a decrease in taxes of 35%.

For some reason, I have not been able to find the data for the the payroll tax cap over time. I know I’ve seen it in the past. Right now it is just over $100,000. That means that people don’t pay any payroll tax on the money they make over that amount. It also means that the payroll tax is the most regressive tax we have. Now this number goes up a bit each year to keep up with inflation. So I figure it was about $75,000 in the 1980s, but I’m going to be cautious and just assume it was $100,000, which we know it wasn’t. That means that the rich person’s payroll taxes went up from $9,500 to $11,500. An increase of 21%, given that the rich person never paid much in payroll taxes, it doesn’t mean much.

So let’s put all of it together. In 1981, the rich person was paying $201,600 + $9,500 = $211,100 in total federal taxes. In 1989, the rich person was paying $131,670 + $11,500 = $143,170 in total federal taxes. That’s a decrease of 32% in their total federal tax bill.

That’s the Reagan tax legacy. He raised taxes on the poorer classes by a small amount. And he greatly lowered them on the rich. Now the idea (Supply Side Economics) was that this would make the economy boom because it would encourage people to produce. But what it actually did was encourage the already wealthy to pay themselves as much as they possibly could. So while in the past, workers got a cut of productivity gains, they didn’t anymore. All those productivity gains went to the rich because they had an incentive: they could keep more of it. That’s how “supply side economics” really worked. Democrats are only starting to realize this (both Clinton and Obama have been effusive in their praise of Reagan) and the Republicans are completely ignorant of it. Reagan was the most elitist president in modern times. He was the anti-Robin Hood. We should be toppling statues of him all over the nation.

Chris Giles at the Financial Times posted, Data problems with Capital in the 21st Century. It is a long and numbers-oriented article. And among economics wonks, it has created a flurry of activity, “You mean Thomas Piketty is wrong?!” Needless to say, there are a lot of people who want to think just that. For a good overview of what you need to know about Giles’ work and the problems in Piketty’s book, read Justin Wolfers, A New Critique of Piketty Has Its Own Shortcomings. Or just keep reading here.

I’ve seen this film before. It turns out that most of the data are correct, there are some minor data errors here are there, and some large but not ridiculous errors in the recent wealth inequality numbers in the United Kingdom. These large errors are on the order of 10%. Giles work is important. It should be done. But the bottom line is clear: nothing he’s found changes the argument that Piketty is making. What’s more, some or more of the errors may be on Giles part. Or they might be differences of opinion in how the data should be analyzed. And most of all, this is work on wealth inequality; it isn’t about the more important issue of income inequality.

But what will happen now is that conservatives and others who simply don’t want to think about it will take Giles’ article as proof that there is nothing to Capital in the 21st Century. And this will be true even if it turns out that Giles is completely wrong. Remember the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, commonly known as “Climategate”? As Wikipedia notes, “Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.” Yet to this day I hear conservatives say global warming is a hoax because of that supposed scandal. (If anyone wants me to explain why it was always clear this was no scandal, just ask; but I admit: it is exhausting discussing global warming in these contexts.)

I’m sure that The Wall Street Journal and Washington Times (it’s a bit highbrow for Fox News) will pick up on this. It will be the liberal equivalent of Reinhart-Rogoff. You may remember that they put out a paper that said that once countries reached debt loads of more than 90% of their GDP, their growth slowed way down. Then, last year, a graduate student found a spreadsheet error in their work that demolished their claim. But I didn’t report it that way; I reported, Reinhart and Rogoff Shown to Be Wrong—Again. Because it was always clear that there was no mechanism by which high debt hurt the economy; there was, however, a mechanism that went the other way: governments with bad economies go into debt because they are getting less in tax revenue and spending more on welfare.

But watch, because the conservatives (who have mostly just ignored Piketty’s book until now) will pounce on this as the ultimately refutation. They will say that nothing needs to be done, except more of what got us to this terrible state. Data and accuracy only matter to conservatives as talking points. I imagine watching This Week in two years. Paul Krugman will be on it and say, “Thomas Piketty showed that income inequality is getting worse.” And Peggy Noonan will scoff, “Oh, the Financial Times proved that was rubbish years ago!” And George Stephanopoulos will just shrug. “Who can say?”

This morning, Paul Krugman posted, Questions About Student Writing. These are questions that I feel confident that I can school the Nobel laureate on. This last term, he has been doing something that I suspect he does not often get a chance to do: teach a great big class. And now he is grading papers at the end of the term. I feel for him (a little): I used to teach classes of a couple hundred physics students and my tests were quite involved and never multiple choice. (Actually, when I first started, I gave multiple choice tests—an act of educational malpractice that I greatly regret.)

Krugman’s first question is, “How can we incentivize students to stop using ‘impact’ as a verb?” Krugman is setting up a joke, but I’ll leave that until he gets to his punchline. It is very easy to get students to stop using “impact” as a verb: don’t allow them to read economic and business books. That’s where this usage comes from. Elizabeth Bennet never tried to impact Mr Darcy’s behavior, even though she had a profound impact on it. But interestingly, “impact” as a verb is actually older than “impact” as a noun. But in the 1960s, its became something of a vogue word in the business world, and stopped meaning “to make contact” and began meaning “to have an effect.” May I humbly submit to Professor Krugman that he is part of the problem. I do, however, have an answer for him: teach them about the word “affect,” which can almost always be used instead without annoying readers.

Krugman’s second question pays off his first in good George Orwell style, “How can we impact their writing in a way that stops them from using the word ‘incentivize’?” Get it? He broke both his rules. But okay, the word is overused. Again though, what does Krugman expect? He’s teaching a bunch of business and economics students. But I don’t have a huge problem with the word “incentivize.” It is a very useful word. There are two reasons people have a problem with it. First, grammar pedants don’t like to change nouns into verbs by adding “ize” to them. Check out this amusing passage from the Grammar Cops blog:

The second reason is that “incentivize” is a young word—first sliding into our vocabulary in 1970, and from the business community that grammar snobs, like all normal people, hate.

My answer to Krugman is to give it up. There is nothing especially wrong with incentivize. But if we must, we could incentivize the use of the words “encourage” and “motivate.”

Finally, we get to the crux of the matter for Krugman, and his third question, “Can we make it a principal principle of writing that ‘principle’ and ‘principal’ mean different things, and you have to know which is which?” Well, it had to come out sometime: Paul Krugman the pedant. Homophones are just the worst thing about the English language. And in defense of the professor’s students, misspelling one does not necessarily mean that the writer is unclear about about the distinction. Speaking is fairly natural for our brains, but writing is not. My first drafts are not only filled with homophone mistakes, they are filled with assonance and rhyme errors. Words that simply sound similar cause my fingers to type them. It doesn’t mean I don’t know the difference between “fat” and “that.”

As to the issue at hand, it’s very easy. “Principle” is a rule or similar. “Principal” is the main or dominant whatever. And thus, you have a high school principal, because he is the dominant administrator. Apart from Krugman’s cute “principal principle,” I don’t see a situation where anyone is confused by misspelling either of these words. And in fact, if you heard Krugman’s sentence, you wouldn’t be at all confused.

Here I have a very good answer to Krugman: stop the world. Everything happens so fast. Not only are blog posts filled with errors because we are all so determined to get things done fast, the level of copy editing in printed books is abysmal. It takes time to copy edit. And no one feels like they have it to spare. But of course, we are not going to stop the world or even slow it down. So the proper response is to assume that people (Especially students at Princeton!) know the basics of grammar, and stop bitching.

The principal means to incentivize a principle that impacts the error rate in student papers is to relax.

It’s rare that I read an article that really changes my way of thinking about a subject, but such was the case over the weekend at Political Animal where Chad Stanton wrote, Self Destruction, We’re Headed For Self Destruction. It’s a compare and contrast kind of article. He reminded me of how people said what a big deal it was in the 1980s that “urban decay” was the result of some kind of social pathology. Basically, it is a nice way of saying, “The reason blacks are doing so poorly in our society is that there’s something wrong with the black man!”

And what was number one on the list of the black man’s wrongs: poor impulse control. Rather than saving his money to pay his future tuition to Harvard, he was buying Air Jordans! No wonder the black man wasn’t getting ahead. It had nothing to do with racist attitudes and poor schools and white privilege. Nope: Air Jordans! Impulse control! The black people in the ghettos didn’t think long term. It was all now now now!

Stanton noticed that there’s another kind of “impulse control” problem in the United States. It’s a much bigger problem, even if you yield the point that there is an impulse control problem with impoverished people (which you shouldn’t). The impulse control problem he notices is with our approach to global warming. Remember recently when Marco Rubio said that sure maybe we are destroying the nice climate that we and the rest of the biosphere evolved to thrive in? But we couldn’t do anything about it because it might hurt the economy now. I already noted that he has the economics all wrong, A Depressed Economy Is the Time to Address Global Warming. But Stanton’s argument is clear: the global warming deniers (or hedgers) have an impulse control problem: they want good things now now now; they aren’t willing to forego them for our long-term benefit.

He is absolutely right. But this is the way things work in the United States. When a young surfer uses the tools available to him to support his lifestyle, the conservatives go crazy. But when rich men use every tax loophole to pay as little as possible, well, that’s to be applauded! That’s because the same behavior that is noble for the rich is despicable for the poor. That’s why no one at HSBC went to jail while casual cannabis smokers can spend decades in prison.

What really angers me is that in forty years when things really are bad, the children and the grandchildren of the rich people who today lack impulse control will be living high in the best areas. And the huge numbers of displaced poor will still have their poverty blamed on their lack of impulse control.

Afterwrod

I think that Chad Stanton is a young pundit to watch out for. You can find him on Twitter; Instagram (which I don’t really understand); And Very Very Urban on Tumblr. Check him out!

You may have noticed that I’m not writing quite as many articles as I usually do. This is because I am experimenting with taking an anti-anxiety drug. Most people think of me as a depressive, but this is not at all true. Or at least, it is not that important. I definitely have a manic-depressive cycle. And it seems I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. Most of this too seems unimportant, although the past few years I have this problem of imagining my fingers being slammed in a door (and much worse). This takes a far amount of effort to not think about it and I have been told this is known as “unwanted thoughts.” On the plus side, other people have unwanted thoughts related to harming other people. On the minus side, these thoughts come into my mind ten to twenty times per day and can last for a long time.

Since taking the anti-anxiety drugs, I don’t have these thoughts as much and they don’t bother me as much. In fact, nothing bothers me as much. I am filled with a sense that I hope is common among other people: everything is going to be okay. Now, I’m not a stupid man. Even at my worst, I know that somehow tomorrow will come and I will manage to find food and stay warm enough. But that doesn’t mean that normally I don’t freak out about just such things. Well, actually, I’m more of a planner, so I’m usually more concerned about next week rather than tomorrow, but you get the idea.

What I find interesting about this new reduced-anxiety experiment is how it has changed my writing. The most obvious thing is that I just don’t find as many topics as interesting as I once did. That’s especially true of political stories. There is so much of the “who cares” in these stories. After all, we know that nothing any of us thinks or says is going to change anything. I don’t have a million dollars to donate to any candidates. And if you do, I have no idea why you’re reading this article! So I would have thought that what I wrote would have been more laid back. But it’s been just the opposite.

I think that reducing the emotional thrust of my writing, I can get more deeply to the intellectual thrust. Emotionally, I care very deeply about equality and justice. But intellectually I am completely disgusted with the world. Think about Obama. Most of the time, I have warm feelings toward him. I think that his preferred policies are the same as mine. That makes me feel good about him. The same for Bill Clinton: he only destroyed the welfare system to get other liberal policies enacted. But in my clear-headed, non-anxious thinking, I can’t escape the truth: they’re just liars. They’re both millionaires. They aren’t total bastards, but the first thing they think about in the morning and the last thing they think about as they fall off to sleep is what they must do to keep their wealth and power.

So if you think I’m being awfully harsh these days, you’ll know what’s going on. And I think think it is a net positive. For you, there is greater clarity about what is really going on in the world. And for me, there is a far lower chance that I will just kill myself. Although I must admit: the thought doesn’t sound especially tragic.

I think I’ll go watch Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.

Yesterday, I made a brief mention of Steven Taylor’s excellent article, The Anti-Federalist Impulse. It deals with Cliven Bundy and the militia people and more generally the “constitutional conservatives” and the Tea Party folk. They all claim to be the protectors of the Constitution, but if you listen to them, they are just the opposite. They are making the same arguments that those who stood with the Articles of Confederation and against the Constitution.

I am not the first person to note that a large part if not a majority of the people in these groups are neo-confederates. This also goes for libertarians. One of the reasons I fell out with the libertarian movement was that most people in it wanted to get rid of the federal government. Indeed, if you listen to libertarians argue, they will always come to states’ rights at some time. They will claim that the more local a government is, the better it represents its people. That was never what I saw. It was state and local governments who prevented blacks from voting under Jim Crow and allowed lynchings. When it came to protecting the most basic liberties a human can have, it is the federal government, not the states that have walked the walk.

All of this came up for me when I heard about Operation American Spring. The leader of this movement, Retired Army Col Harry Riley had some pretty amazing things to say. For example, he is calling for the ouster of pretty much everyone, including the Republican leadership. “They have all abandoned the US Constitution, are unworthy to be retained in a position that calls for servant status.” He went on to say that he hoped it would all be peaceful, but thus far, that tactic hadn’t worked. “For more than five years, ‘we the people’ have been writing, calling, faxing Congress, the media, screaming in town halls, marching, rallying, demonstrating, petitioning, all to no avail.”

I’m the first to admit that this is hilarious. But it’s also dangerous. And just plain sad. Democracy is not a system where you just get what you want or you take up arms and start killing people. All the while that Riley was “writing, calling, faxing” his elected officials, so have I. And guess what: I’ve been telling them to do the opposite of what Riley’s been telling them. It isn’t as though in a fundamental sense Riley’s wrong. The truth of the matter is that our elected officials don’t actually listen to either of us. But rather than looking at the real problem—money in politics—he’s more of an “ACORN stole the election!” guy. He said, “We have no faith in the ballot box any longer, as many believe this sacred secret box has been compromised.” Translation: the darkies are voting!

Well the day has come! It is 16 May 2014, and the “10 to 30 million” people have converged on Washington. Well, they didn’t quite reach their target. Think Progress had the best headline I’ve seen today, Tens of People Descend Upon the Capitol to Drive the Obama Administration Out of Office. They had a whole lot of fun with the story:

When Col Harry Riley announced his plan for an Operation American Spring, he sought to evoke the same kind of populist uprising that toppled regimes in the Middle East, protests that were collectively given the moniker Arab Spring.

And while the photos that poured in from Tahrir Square were incredible, depicting tens of thousands of people in the streets, the pictures from American Spring were…less so:

It does rather look like a failed church picnic, but the weather looks fine. You couldn’t ask for a better day for armed insurrection!

Most of the coverage was like that. Gawker went with much the same, writing, “Compared to the Tea Party, Operation American Spring is… nothing, in truth. Like, literally tens of people sitting around being crazy.” But for pure derision, no one compares to Abby Ohlheiser’s article yesterday in The Wire, How to Manage Expectations for Your Rally to Overthrow the American Government:

She offers some tips like: look at past events. She goes into Glenn Beck’s rather successful rally, that I managed to have a really nice flame war about four years ago. She points out that the million man march had only 837,000 people, and that was fine. It was close enough. But if you say ten million, you are probably setting yourself up for a fall. She also suggests a backup plan. You know: if you are planning to overthrow the government, it would be a good idea to have something else to do when that doesn’t happen. My suggestion: puppet theater!

But Ohlheiser brings up one really important point, “Look at Some Polls.” This is what I find so exasperating about conservatives generally but the far right especially. I used to always say that the difference between MSNBC and Fox News is that the people who watch Fox News think they are getting neutral reporting. I have some pretty radical opinions like my belief in a guaranteed minimum income. But I’m not under the illusion that this is a widely shared belief or that the only reason Congress hasn’t passed this bit of legislation is because they aren’t following the Constitution.

These people are neo-confederates. And I don’t mean that they are racists, although I think a great many of them are. Mostly, they have no idea just how much the federal government does from them. But they are very aware of how much money they pay in taxes and they fret over every federal dollar spent on people and things they find unworthy. They are living in a fantasy land. That’s all fine; there is no law against being delusional—nor should there be. But it really bugs me that these people claim to be the defenders of the Constitution. Because they are the opposite. They want to destroy the Constitution. They want to do more than that. They want to destroy democracy at the federal level, and you can bet if they managed that, they’d set about destroying democracy at the state level too.

The “Constitutional Conservatives” are a great danger to the United States and the Constitution. I do think they’re funny. I do laugh at them. But I am more than a little wary.

On Monday, Paul Krugman wrote an interesting article, Crazy Climate Economics. And today, he’s written another global warming related article, Points of No Return. They are both worth reading, but I wanted to bring up something that Krugman doesn’t: environmental remediation as economic stimulus.

Marco Rubio has gotten a lot of attention recently for saying that doing anything about global warming would have a “devastating impact on our economy.” Krugman mocked him for this by noting:

But there is a deeper issue here. Our economy is depressed. Corporations are not investing because they see no demand. Corporations are notorious for their lack of long-term planning. The government forcing the business community to clean up its act and move to green energy would be great for their long-term prospects. But there’s more.

Forcing companies to make these necessary environmental changes would create jobs. It would act as a stimulus program and that in turn would increase demand and so company profits would go up. So Rubio’s claim that addressing climate change would hurt the economy is backwards. What’s more, every day that we wait to deal with global warming makes fixing problems that much more expensive. It is one thing to invest in windmills that will more than pay for themselves in the long run; it is quite another to build a ten foot tall sea wall all around Miami.

Conservatives will tell you that if we are going to deal with our environmental problems, we must do it when the economy is good. This is exactly backwards. Now is the time that corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars. Now is the time when banks are desperate to loan money. When the economy is roaring along, environmental mitigation will take resources away from other uses. Now, mitigation uses resources (human and capital) that are going unused.

Now is the time to act! People like Marco Rubio know as little about economics as they do about climate science.