Fred Hiatt is one of the Very Serious People (VSP) we so like to mock around here. And like all VSP, he is very concerned about the deficit. He is one of the cheer leaders for the Grand Bargain: Democrats cutting Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republicans raising taxes on the wealthy. What’s so terrible about people like Hiatt is that they always talk about shared sacrifice, but that sacrifice never seems to include themselves. Such people always want to cut social security benefits, never raise the payroll tax cap that would increase their taxes.

Yesterday, Hiatt published an editorial, How Obama’s Poll-Testing Misfires. It’s about how Obama should have shown “leadership” and tried to push through Congress that holy grail of VSP everywhere: the Simpson-Bowles plan. (Note: Haitt refers to it as the “Simpson-Bowles commission plan” but the commission could never agree on a plan, so it never released one.)

Jonathan Chait made a great point about these people today, America’s Most Powerful Conspiracy Theorists. His point is that people who believe in standard conspiracy theories like the 9/11 Truthers owe their beliefs to being estranged from establishment information sources. And the people who argue that the Grand Bargain is just a question of both sides compromising are similarly cut off from reality. He calls them Tax Truthers.

The problem is not the Grand Bargain itself. That’s a bad idea, but reasonable people could be for it. The thing about the Tax Truthers is that they believe that if only Obama and the Democrats offered up cuts to the entitlement programs, the Republicans would follow and match them with tax increases for the rich. The problem is that, much to the consternation of liberals like myself, Obama has been giddy for just such a deal. He’s been incredibly visible in his embrace of Social Security cuts. But the Tax Truthers refuse to accept this.

They are committed to the idea that the problem must be that neither side will compromise. This actually goes back to what I discussed yesterday, David Brooks Plays Centrist. It is this idea of the VSP and the professional centrists (who are mostly the same people) that what they believe is just The Truth or at very least the objectively correct policy. Therefore obviously the only reason it isn’t policy is just because of all those ideologues on both sides who, unlike the the VSP, don’t care about getting things done.

Chait noted that what it really all comes down to is the fact that this is the issue that is most important to the VSPs. It is no surprise that elite opinion just happens to be what they think is in the best interest of their own class:

There’s a very big difference here between being for a Grand Bargain and thinking that the reason we don’t have one is because both sides just won’t compromise. In the former case, it would just be elites looking out for what they think is their own interest. I have no problem with that. It strikes me as greedy and shortsighted, but there is nothing especially wrong with being guided by your own personal interests. But the latter case shows a group that just can’t see reality.

Of course, this is why I’ve long argued against all of Obama’s attempts to seem reasonable. It would be one thing if people like Fred Hiatt would write editorials proclaiming that Obama was being reasonable and the Republicans were not. But it never goes like that. All such attempts at reasonableness do is push the playing field further to the right. And that’s where we get all the calls for “leadership” from Obama. Hiatt must know that Obama has offered up entitlement cuts. I’m sure it has been pointed out to him many times. But when he is faced with such facts, he just retreats into his argument that while Obama may have offered up the compromise, he hasn’t done it with enough force or intelligence or panache. The fact that Obama put such cuts into his budget matters not at all. Both sides do it. Both sides always do it. That is the immutable truth for the VSP.

At Real Clear Politics today, Sean Trende published the most cheery piece of analysis I’ve read in months, Could Democrats Gain Senate Seats This Fall? But it’s important to stress the first word in that title. He’s not saying that Democrats are likely to gain seats in the Senate. In fact, he thinks the changes are really really slim. But I have never even considered that the Democrats could increase their majority in the Senate. I’ve just been hoping that we can can limit the damage and maintain the majority.

And there is a good reason why the “limited losses” scenario is cheerful to Democrats. As Trende noted, “[I]f Republicans only gained a seat or two it would be a disaster for them. The intra-party split would be the last thing the GOP needed heading into the 2016 presidential elections, especially since the playing field then is absolutely brutal for them.” So the fact that Trende sees the Democratic prospects improving marginally is very hopeful indeed.

What I find particularly compelling is that the hypothetical future that Trende posited for a Democratic surge strikes me as likely. He suggested that an improving economy and better Obamacare news could sweep many of the marginal Democratic Senate candidates to victory. To me, this isn’t so much a question of if this happens but of how much this will happen. And even today, the Republicans don’t have much to talk about. Their attacks on Obamacare are sounding increasingly shrill—only appealing to the true believers. And their economic arguments are a joke.

But even if things don’t improve much, the November election looks more positive than it did. Yesterday at FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten wrote, Early Senate Polls Have Plenty to Tell Us About November. In the article, he looked at how accurate early polling is compared to other factors like the popularity of the president. For example, in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes are even in the polls, even as President Obama has only a 30% approval rating. What are we to make of that?

Enten addressed that question of how reliable early polling is compared to other factors. He concluded, “I analyzed which measure is more indicative come November, and it turns out that polls are a more robust metric even though their numbers are still sparse and there’s still so much time remaining before the election.” But he stressed that presidential approval is still a major factor. So taking both factors into account gives Grimes only a 27% chance of beating McConnell. The situation is equally grim in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

But I still find this extremely positive news. That’s because I do think that Obama’s approval rating will rise over the next six months because of Obamacare and the economy. What’s more, I still hold out high hopes for get-out-the-vote efforts by the Democratic Party. But pretty much any glimmer of hope would encourage me, because I’ve been absolutely despondent the last few months.

As always: it is extremely important that you vote!

Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting article this morning about one of my obsessions, Why the New Data Journalism Really Is Partisan. Unfortunately, Chait doesn’t come right now and say what the truth is. So let me lay it out. Yes: liberals and conservatives both have their own base ideologies. Liberals believe that collective action ought to be used to improve society. Conservatives believe that every man is for himself. But since this goes against the beliefs of the vast majority of the population, conservatives have to feign interest in the practical social good of policy, even though they have no interest in it.

This gets to the heart of what always looks like hypocrisy on the part of conservatives. We often scratch our heads when conservatives seem to be resistant to facts. But the hypocrisy is not this, but rather their unwillingness to admit to what they actually believe. I say it all the time, but it can’t be said enough: conservatism is the ideology of the powerful. So it isn’t surprising that they don’t like Obamacare. It cuts government spend, insures poor people, and taxes the rich. Conservatives are ambivalent about the first, uninterested in the second, and despise the third.

This leads us to Stephen Colbert’s great comment, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” I’ve long been annoyed that the Brookings Institution, which is studiously non-partisan and non-ideological in the sense that science is non-ideological, is now referred to in the media as a liberal think tank. It is supposedly the liberal counter to the conservative Heritage Foundation. But I guess in a deeper sense, both groups provide justifications for the two ideologies.

But what’s important here is that conservative intellectuals are something other than what they claim. Liberal intellectuals are really intellectuals. They really are looking at and for the facts. Conservative intellectuals are engaged in apologetics. They do various things in this regard such as cherry picking and often outright distortion. I run into this with libertarians, who are by far the most honest of the conservatives. They almost always try to make practical claims for their beliefs. It is generally easy to show that the claims don’t hold up. And then they retreat to what they really think, which is that it is immoral for collectives to interfere with individual decisions. And that’s fine! We can argue about that. But most conservatives will never admit that their ideology has no interest in creating a better society as a practical matter.

Chait applies this notion of liberal ideology to say that Ezra Klein’s new Vox venture is rightly seen as ideological. And I accept that in the context of Chait’s article. But it is only ideological in a sense that conservatives won’t admit to: it is fact based. So I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to take Colbert’s comment as true as long as conservatives continue to argue that their preferred policies are based on real world results. If they want to have an honest debate, they can depend upon getting no more than 20% of the vote. After they do that, I’ll be more than willing to admit that all my facts are ideological in nature.

Otherwise Chait’s argument is simple relativism: NASA and the Flat Earth Society are equally ideological. And in a narrow sense, that’s true. But it isn’t that interesting. In the end, what matters is what works. The NASA mode leads to satellite communications and cancer treatments. The Flat Earth Society leads to witch burning. The partisan divide is clear enough. But I don’t think such distinctions mean all that much. And I think Chait would agree.

Afterword

I’ve been really impressed with the work that Vox has done so far. It is really worth checking out.

Over at Daily Kos last month, gjohnsit wrote, Libertarianism and What Adam Smith Actually Said. It doesn’t actually have that much to say about Adam Smith other than that libertarians have turned him into a kind of demigod who can’t be questioned. As I wrote before, “If Marx is the opium of the socialist, Smith is the opium of the capitalist.” There isn’t much grappling with the thinking of the old master, just acceptance as though God had been whispering in his ear.

The biggest problem with the modern day Adam Smith worshipers is that they don’t know what he actually wrote. In particular, the libertarians claim that markets are perfect when Smith never said they were. But even if he had, The Wealth of Nations was written almost 250 years ago. It represented an important advance on the state of economic knowledge. But here’s the key: the state of economic knowledge was abysmal at that time. Libertarians are very much like people who think that knowledge of mechanics stopped with Newton. Oh, wait: some libertarians do think that!

But I was struck with one thing that gjohnsit wrote:

Now, this is not really a contradiction. But it does get to the heart of libertarian demographics. The philosophy is one that is only embraced by the winners of society who see almost no chance of their becoming losers. They are very much third-basers: people who are blind to their own privilege. So in their minds, they are submitting to the same kind of social Darwinism as everyone else.

What they don’t realize is that even if the society were perfectly equitable in opportunity distribution, they have already tipped the playing field in their own favor. Libertarians tend to be young, (reasonably) intelligent, and energetic people. Libertarianism is not a philosophy that calls out to people with muscular dystrophy. So libertarians skirt John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance.” The question is: would you pick libertarianism as your philosophy if you didn’t know how smart and healthy you would be? My guess is: no.

The reason I guess that is because libertarianism is the philosophy of the winners. Look who embraces it: people who are already rich and people who think they are certain to be rich (or at least comfortable). Gjohnsit was quite correct when he wrote, “[Libertarianism] isn’t a political philosophy, it’s a personal one.” So the question is never, “What is best for everyone?” It is, “What is best for me?” And in this case, “me” is one of society’s winners who will be doing well regardless.

And just look at what happens to the libertarian champions when they become losers. During the 2008 financial crisis, the Masters of the Universe went begging to the government for a handout. I don’t blame them. Theory is all well and good, but when practical matters are going to bankrupt you, something needs to be done. But what is blameworthy is turning on the government the moment you get bailed out. And they use the same logic to do so, “I was just using the financial tools that were available to me. If there hadn’t been a government, there would have been some other way because I’m a smart guy. I’m a Master of the Universe!”

Economics is by its very nature a practical science. But libertarians aren’t interested in practical results except in as much as they affect the specific libertarian. This is why it is so aggravating to talk to libertarians. They will make all kinds of claims about the utopia that society would be if only everyone became a libertarian. But when you demonstrate that their ideas don’t work in practice, they retreat into theory. Not having a minimum wage would make life worse for everyone except the wealthy? Well, we should still do it because anyone should be allowed to make any contract they wish! And on and on.

So it doesn’t matter than libertarians don’t actually read Adam Smith. It isn’t about economics. It isn’t about politics. It is about freeing themselves from any limitations. And they don’t realize that their own status in life is dependent upon all kinds of limitations put on other people.

Carey Wedler is a young liberal who makes videos. She’s very good. But last month she made a video that really annoyed me, Why I’m Burning My Last Bridge With Obama. In it she talks about how disappointed she has been with the president. I’m all for that, even if I personally haven’t been disappointed. I had low expectation. I knew that he was a typical, cautious, centrist Democrat. And I also knew that like all presidents of either party, whatever he had said during the campaign about privacy and the farcical “war on terror,” it would vanish just as soon as the career spooks got at him. But as Democratic presidents go, he’s about par, and from an absolute standard, that’s pretty bad.

So I forgive Wedler for being young and idealistic, thinking that all that “Hope & Change” rhetoric was something more than the poetry of elections. And her complaints are valid. She does an excellent job of running down what’s wrong with Obama’s term in office:

I would disagree with a couple of these and I would go further on others, but it’s a good list. And it is a sad but true reality that part of growing up involves developing a certain amount of cynicism. But Obama didn’t perpetrate the kind of bait and switch she suggests. He was very clear during the campaign that he was no radical. And he certainly never claimed that liberals should just sit back and relax while he fixed the world. So her response to his election is totally unacceptable:

What’s more, it is simply wrong to say that Obama has become exactly like George Bush, but I will allow that he isn’t different enough. So as a protest, Wedler burns her “Obama Is My Homeboy” t-shirt. I’m all for protests. But she goes on with a rant that combines hippy free love with the looniest of libertarianism. And sadly, I don’t get the impression that she realizes that she’s doing this.

The “both parties are the same” argument is an argument for everything that I suspect Wedler hates. If there is no difference between the parties, then there is no point to voting. And if Wedler and her generation don’t vote, we can depend upon people like Ted Cruz getting elected. The hope of democracy is not that a great candidate will get elected and fix all of our problems. The hope is that enough decent people vote that we can make steps — every person, every policy, every day — to improve the country. If our political expectations are going to be “all or nothing,” then what we will get is nothing. Actually, we will get worse. The modern Republican Party isn’t for keeping things the same. They want to make things worse.

If I could talk to Wedler, I would tell her that her issue videos are great. But what we need right now, is a video to tell people to vote. Maybe she could run her Obama t-shirt burn video backwards. Because Obama is far from ideal, but he is much better than all the Republicans who will get elected in November if young people like her don’t vote.

Afterword

Also: people like Wedler should be out taking over their local Democratic Party operations. They should be running for local office. That’s where the world is changed!

The great economist Thomas Schelling is 93 today. At least I guess he’s an economist. He is definitely a mathematical modeler. But a lot of stuff he has done strikes me as more like political science. And he is definitely of the realpolitik tradition. I’m not at all convinced that his models necessarily relate to reality as much as many people seem to think. This is because all my scientific work was mathematical modeling. And as much as this work can be really helpful, it’s important to remember that they are just models. Usually scientists don’t forget this, but the people who follow them often do.

Schelling has been of some note recently because of his opinions about global warming. He has determined that mitigation would be most costly to the advanced economies and most beneficial to the developing economies. This is rather typical economic nonsense. And it is also entirely typical of his Machiavellian outlook on international relations. I think it is in our interest to do something because we have a lot to lose and we don’t know what global warming will bring. But one thing that is almost certain to happen is that the major farm areas of the United States will literally dry up. And if we don’t intend to invade Canada, we really need to do something about it.

I am especially interested in Schelling’s work on segregation. He created a model that I find quite compelling. It shows that small individual preferences for neighbors of the same race will lead to macro-scale segregation. It also happens to go right along with my experiences of humanity. Most people are somewhat ethnocentric and this leads to really big racial problems. It is one of many things that make me despair of humans ever advancing much past the culture of ancient Sumer, given that we haven’t managed to do it over the past 5,000 years. Although it is cool that we are better able to model it.

Happy birthday Thomas Schelling!

Conservatives are delusional. Really. The things I hear them say remind me of things one used to only hear from people in the militia movement or among the most extreme libertarians.

Today’s example comes from Mike Huckabee at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit. But before we get to that, just consider that name “freedom summit.” Who isn’t in favor of freedom? Listening to conservatives, you would think that freedom is something that they alone believe in. But just like everyone, conservatives have their own definition of freedom. The truth is that the word is a dog whistle. It means the freedom of large scale farmers to graze their cattle on public land without paying. It does not mean the freedom for minority group individuals to walk down the street without being searched by the police.

And that brings us to Huckabee’s comments. He said, “My gosh, I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States.” And what made the United States less free than North Korea? Airport screening. And not just that! He’s very unhappy that people have to show identification to get on an airplane. Oh, the horror! I can see what he means, though. As an ordinary person in North Korea, you would never even get to fly in a plane, so you would never have to deal with airport security. That’s freedom! Never mind the starvation and work camps. In the United States, you have to show ID to get on a plane!

While that line is the one that will get all the news, the broader point that Huckabee was making was even more troubling. He went on:

Since Huckabee doesn’t seem to understand why this is, I will provide a little history for him. At one time, people didn’t get searched when they got on airplanes. But then people started hijacking airplanes and so it was decided that the intrusions of searches were acceptable given that no one wanted to be hijacked and potentially murdered. As for voting, well, we’ve never had to have identification and no one had thought to change that because there was no upside. There is no voter identification fraud to speak of. People like Huckabee are interested in making ID required as a way of suppressing the vote of people who don’t agree with them. But that’s another thing altogether.

There is a very big issue here. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, “Congress shall make no law respecting security at airports.” But voting is a Constitutional right. So it isn’t really the same thing. Note also the classism here. Poor people don’t fly on planes all the much. But the rich do. So I’m sure that for Huckabee, those airport screenings seem like a major infringement on his liberty. And they are! But that’s just an indication of how great his life is. Other than a TSA pat-down, he can do whatever he wants. But like vile conservatives everywhere, he wants to make the very limited rights of the poor even more so.

This is why I say that conservatives are delusional.

Bernie Sanders (or more likely one of his staff members) decided to take a look at the platform of the Libertarian Party back in 1980. Why? Because David Koch ran that year as the vice-presidential candidate. And the platform is typically loony: we’ll only except everything! They want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare—those old people have it too good! They want to get rid of the EPA—we need more rivers on fire! They want to get rid of the Department of Transportation—we don’t need no stinking interstate highway system!

But some of the platform is kind of surprising. They are against compulsory health insurance, but apparently not auto insurance. And they make a point of saying that health insurance that covers abortion is double plus bad. They say that they are for the eventual repeal of all taxes, but right now they want an end to all income and corporate taxes. Get it? Taxes that hurt the rich must go now, but taxes that hurt the poor can wait. I’ve been long saying this, Libertarians Just Don’t Like the Poor. And that is only too clear if you look at the whole platform.

Most surprising was this line, “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence.” I share their concern for government surveillance, but the Postal Service ain’t what we got to fear! However, notice what a radical suggestion this is. Libertarians normally talk about the Constitution as though it were a holy document. But here they don’t seem to understand that the postal service is in the Constitution and would require an amendment.

It continues, “Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.” This is delicious. Conservatives always look at the post office and see it’s one special privilege: its monopoly. But they never mention its responsibility: it is required to provide mail service to everyone. UPS and Federal Express want to take away the profitable parts of the USPS but not its unprofitable parts. What’s more, these conservatives never mention all the limitations put on the post office. If allowed, the USPS could put all those bottom-feeding payday lenders out of business.

What’s most distressing with the libertarian platform is the basis for my initial disenchantment with the movement. None of the good things that would actually increase personal liberty have moved ahead. But all the pro-corporate and pro-rich policies have made remarkable progress. As I always say: vote for libertarian rhetoric, get conservative policy. But the best example of a 1980 libertarian wet dream has made remarkable progress, “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”

What’s interesting in this regard, is that the decimation of campaign finance reform has not been done with legislation. That might have upset the people. It was done by the courts. And if the conservative movement has been good at anything (and they have been good at many things), they have been good at getting people to accept “law and order” judges who were actually put in place because they were anti-individual and pro-corporate. Welcome to your new libertarian dystopia, America!

Paul Waldman at The American Prospect wrote a short article one of the reasons we have, The Most Expensive Health Care in the World. In it, he discusses charges to Medicare. He contrasts two drugs that are almost identical in the treatment of macular degeneration. One is Lucentis and the other is Avastin. But while Lucentis costs $2,000 per dose, Avastin only costs $50. So doctors prescribe the more expensive drug.

And why do they do this? Because it is to their advantage. Medicare pays doctors 6% of the cost of the drug for prescribing it. So they get $3 for prescribing Avastin and $120 for prescribing Lucentis. That’s not a hard decision for the doctor even though it is terrible for public policy. Waldman noted that the obvious fix to this situation is to give doctors a flat fee for writing prescriptions. If they got $10 whether they prescribed Lucentis or Avastin, there would be far less Lucentis prescribed.

But there is a problem. Waldman put it correctly, “Of course, the pharmaceutical lobby would pull out all the stops trying to keep that six percent fee in place.” This is a big part of the problem with allowing such an unequal society. I don’t think anyone really thinks that Congress is going to allow any policy changes that might hurt the pharmaceutical industry. As it is, Medicare Part D wasn’t about providing drugs to the elderly. It was about providing profits to the pharmaceutical industry.

The whole thing comes down to price control. I’m reminded of a remarkable conversation that Ezra Klein had with Avik Roy last year. Roy goes on and on about the Switzerland system and the Singapore system. This is strange since he hates Obamacare, which is quite similar to them. But Klein hit back on this and got to the core of what matters in healthcare reform:

Roy agrees with this, but he shouts “Rationing!” whenever the issue comes up. So even though Roy is willing to admit in theory that we must do something to contain costs, he is never willing to support such measures in practice. And this is true of the conservative movement itself—most especially the GOP. Ideologically, they are committed to the idea that the free market is perfect and if only we ignore it all will be well. Of course, the actual evidence shows anything but.

The problem with the conservative approach is that it leads to the usual libertarian “utopia” where everyone is completely free to do anything they want if they can afford it. But in this world, the group that can afford it includes almost no one. Of course, even for the extremely rich, this situation is bad. A robust middle class is the engine of innovation. And if the rich want to have the next decade’s great innovations, they would want more equality. But I guess the idea of relative wealth is just too compelling for the rich and their apologists.

The healthcare situation all comes down to us finding a way to contain costs. We already ration healthcare in this country, we just do it by wealth. We are looking for a way to do it more fairly. No one is suggesting that the rich shouldn’t be able to buy the best care available. But we are saying that a base level of care should be available to all. The current system doesn’t work for the rich or the poor. It is just a system designed to unfairly enrich a certain part of the economy: doctors and pharmaceutical companies. And they would be doing fine regardless.

I’m still not clear what exactly Ezra Klein’s project is, but he has now published a very interesting article, How Politics Makes Us Stupid. It focuses on the work of Dan Kahan, who has shown that political ideology and tribal identification affect how we perceive data. I have some problems with his work, but the general conclusions can’t really be denied because of work by others on this issue. My main response, however, is that this is actually a marginal issue. And even Kahan admits this. There is a much bigger issue: many people simply never see the data.

Let’s look at it from the perspective of global warming, because that is the issue that Klein focuses on. While it is true that Fox News viewers see their tribe as being in the denier camp, it was not always so. At one time, conservatives were very much accepting of global warming. It was only after a concentrated propaganda campaign that global warming denial became a litmus test for conservative identification.

For many people in my life, I am the person to come to in order to determine what smart opinion is on a subject. This is cultural identification in its best sense. After all, there is a whole lot of noise out there and they know me and they know that I am honest. Even on issues that I have very strong opinions, I provide the opposing position. Because I am a scientist by nature, I don’t just provide the information that confirms my side. That doesn’t mean that I’m objective—just that I try to provide a full, if ideologically colored, picture.

Compare this to Fox News. Their slogan “fair and balanced” is an outrage to all reasoning people. I have nothing against flaming rhetoric coming from any source. That is an art in and of itself—an art I proudly participate in. But to claim that such rhetoric is “just the facts” is disingenuous. More than any other television news sources, Fox News defines belief rather than reflects it.

So with global warming, the issue is not that we humans are so ideologically rigid that we can’t see the overwhelming weight of the evidence. It is that most of us never even see the evidence. People who watch Fox News think global warming is a hoax because the only people they see are people who say global warming is a hoax. This is the same as during the last election when Fox News viewers though that Mitt Romney was going to be the next president. But in that case, reality came crashing down on them on the night of 6 November 2012. Sadly, the global warming denial will last for years as our climate comes slowly (and perhaps catastrophically) down on us.

The problem with our society is that it is not equal enough. Some people and groups have enormous power. There’s no problem with people making ideologically driven decisions. But there is a very big problem when the ideology itself is defined by the power elite. That’s what we have to do something about. Democracy in America? I think it is an excellent idea!

Afterword

I was very pleased to see that Klein’s article ended with, “Editor: Eleanor Barkhorn.” I don’t expect it to last, because online, even paying writers is a big deal. Having a proper editorial staff is right out. But the writing was definitely tighter than Klein provided at Wonk Blog. A world without editors is chaos!

Update (7 April 2014 4:45 pm)

Paul Krugman raises a reasonable exception, Asymmetric Stupidity. He offers up two reasons why in the real world, liberals are not nearly as prone to this as conservatives. The second reason goes right along with what I argued above:

For roughly the last week, Paul Krugman has been focused on the recent International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook report and its suggestion that our current inflation target of 2% is too low. He talked about it in his column today, Oligarchs and Money. The point is that having such a low inflation target is currently keeping our economy depressed. Let me explain the basics here.

I remember reading a libertarian book many years ago. One chapter advocated the gold standard. It countered the idea that the economy needed more money as it grew, because if the money supply remained constant, the value of money would go up. There would be deflation rather than inflation that we are more familiar with. Problem solved! It is entirely typical of libertarian arguments because it is so neat and tidy while also being completely wrong.

Deflation is a bad thing for a number of reasons. The first is that it discourages economic growth. If you can make money by just stashing dollar bills in your mattress, there is a real disincentive to buy stuff. And that leads to much lower demand and fewer jobs. What’s more, it discourages investment and borrowing. Because of inflation, just by paying the interest on a loan, the principal is reduced over time. In an economy with deflation, you would owe more and more over time. It also makes it very hard for people who are in debt to get out of debt.

There is a group that loves deflation, and this is what Krugman is primarily on about. People who already have a lot of money like deflation because it effectively rigs the system in their favor. Their bonds and loans and cash just go up in value without doing anything. But they haven’t managed to get deflation as a stated policy, but they’ve been very good at getting super low inflation which is almost as good.

But here’s the thing. There is nothing especially different between low inflation and low deflation. Inflation is a statistical measure. So an inflation rate of 0.1% might indicate that 51% of goods are rising in price while 49% are falling. A deflation rate of 0.1% would be the reverse: 49% of good are rising in price while 51% are falling. So right now, Europe has an inflation rate of less than 1%. In the United States, it is less than 2%. These are both bad because they are stifling economic activity in the same ways I discussed above about deflation.

The situation is very clear, but don’t expect anything to be done about it. This is because we really don’t live in a democracy. The interest of the rich are pretty much all that matters. And in case you haven’t noticed: the last five years have been really good for the rich. It’s probably the main reason that I find politics so depressing. Humans are really smart and can generally figure out solutions to problems like global warming or a bad economy. But nothing is done because we can’t figure out how to equitably distribute power.

I caught a bit of 60 Minutes tonight. They did an interesting and even inspiring story, Affordable Care for Those Still Uninsured. It follows two nurse practitioners, Teresa Gardner and Paula Meade, who drive around in an RV providing free healthcare to the working poor of Appalachia. These women are doing God’s work, which is very good because not only is God not doing it, the local government isn’t much interested either.

But something about the story really bothered me. It tiptoed around the reason that “the health wagon” was necessary. It started with a voice-over by Scott Pelley saying, “For the sake of those [working poor] people, Obamacare told the states to expand Medicaid, the government insurance for the very poor. But 24 states declined.” He should have noted that Obamacare provided those states with 100% funding for the first three years and then 90% funding after that.

It was only later that Pelley added, “These patients would be taken care of in the 26 states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare. The federal government pays the extra cost to the states for three years but Virginia and the others that opted out fear that the cost in the future could bankrupt them.” This is a total distortion. This description gives the impression that the federal government pays for the program for three years and then drops it in the lap of the states. That just ain’t so.

Even worse, Pelley has no way of knowing that states have opted out of the Medicaid expansion because they fear it will bankrupt them. They have used that excuse for not expanding Medicaid and that is the most that you could say. The evidence, however, shows that this is all about politics. No blue states think Obamacare will bankrupt them.It’s only the red states. It’s clear to me that the real reason is that the Republicans want to kill the president’s signature achievement. But it would have been wrong to claim that that was what was really going on inside their heads. 60 Minutes doesn’t know what is going on inside their heads so it shouldn’t claim that it does.

I’m pretty sure if things were reversed, 60 Minutes would have provided some “he said, she said” coverage. They would have noted that Democrats were concerned about the costs but the administration noted that they were paying for almost all of the costs in perpetuity. They might have added something that I think would show the lie to the hypothetical Democratic position (and the real Republican position): the states could take the free funding for three years and if in the fourth year they found they just couldn’t afford it, they could stop doing it. But of course, things are not reversed, so 60 Minutes just pushed the idea that Republican controlled states aren’t just callously hurting the poor in the name of registering their dislike of the president. They pushed the Republican line that the states just can’t afford it. 60 Minutes has been really good recently pushing conservative issues.

The story of two medical professionals driving around Appalachia giving out healthcare to the working poor shouldn’t be inspiring. It should be embarrassing. It should be especially embarrassing to the 24 states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs. The old 60 Minutes—the one I watched as a kid—would have made that part of the story. Instead, we get a feelgood story about two heroic women. But no mention is made of the evil that makes their heroism necessary.