Paul Krugman wrote a very interesting article earlier this week, A General Theory of Obamacare Fiction. Basically, he tries to given general advice to tell if any particular Obamacare horror story is true. But I think his article is a bit muddled, so I thought I would go through it here and try to make it plain.

There are two groups of people who one might say are losers with Obamacare. The biggest category are the rich. In general, they won’t lose out because of anything to do with their insurance. Obamacare is largely funded by a tax on very high income earning people. And as I’ve noted before, this is why conservatives hate Obamacare. So let’s not ever lose sight of this most important issue regarding the Republican Party and Obamacare. The reason they hate it is that it taxes the rich, but they understand that they can’t say that. People won’t be sympathetic to that cause.

The second group of people who might be said to be losers are young men. If they currently have catastrophic coverage—like something with a $10,000 deductible—they will now be forced to get a more reasonable policy and it will almost certainly cost more. But these kinds of policies are not generally the kind of things that poor people get. For poor young people, losing $5,000 in one year due to a medical problem would likely be enough to force them into bankruptcy. And extremely high deductibles are mostly only useful for people who are worried about protecting their assets, not their health.

Regardless, even this second group is not going to fly as a source of hard luck stories designed to vilify Obamacare. For one thing, healthcare policies for young men are now and will continue to be rather cheap. So even doubling the cost of insurance from $100 per month to $200 doesn’t have much shock value. You can see the reason why the Republican Party is not going to this well for their outrage stories.

What this all means is very simple. Suppose someone comes to you with a story, “Person A is being screwed by Obamacare!” Unless Person A is a young man or a very wealthy person, the story is nonsense. And thus far, the only story that falls into that category is Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ claim during her State of the Union response about Bette in Spokane. In that case, Bette seems to be rich. She is at least rich enough that she wouldn’t use the state exchanges to save at least hundreds of dollars per month on her health insurance, simply because of her ideological rigidity.

Or you could just wait a day or two after any Obamacare horror story comes out to see what is actually going on. Because the stories always collapse after the smallest amount of journalistic digging. But as Krugman notes, it isn’t necessary to wait for the facts. We know how Obamacare works. It harms the rich and healthy a small amount in order to help the poor and unhealthy a lot. So a poor middle-aged woman dying of cancer will be helped by Obamacare. If someone says otherwise, they are lying.

Dave Camp has a new federal budget reform proposal (pdf) that is making a lot of liberals weep with joy. This is simply the result of how the Republican Party has gamed the system. After decades of absolutely unreasonable proposals like the Paul Ryan budget, when someone comes along with a budget that isn’t completely delusional, liberals stand up and applaud.

Camp is a typical Republican piece of work. You can look at his positions and right down the list he is pure: anti-choicer, climate change denier, Social Security privatizer. And he’s been pushing for more welfare “reform” because he’s afraid single mothers aren’t working hard enough. Remember in Republicanland, it is only important for rich mothers to stay at home and raise the kids.

As noted, the budget is not all bad. It gets rid of the carried interest loophole. It also imposes a fee on big banks for the government’s implicit too-big-to-fail insurance. And after finding that he just could not make the numbers in his budget add up with his preferred top marginal tax rate of 25%, he changed it to 35%. So those things are okay, but I would hardly call them good. The carried interest loophole is a travesty, but it is not big: just $2 billion per year. We should charge the big banks for their safety net (however, breaking them up would be better), but as Dean Baker points out, Camp’s fee is an order of magnitude less than what the banks are getting in return. As for admitting that he couldn’t make the 25% tax rate work, that isn’t saying much on its face and as we will see, it doesn’t actually say anything at all.

Jared Bernstein has an excellent discussion on the Economix blog, The Promise and Pitfalls in a Tax Reform Plan. He focuses on Camp’s “timing gimmicks.” These are ways that Camp made his budget reform bill revenue neutral for ten years—the period over which budgets are scored. For example, “The corporate rate is phased in slowly, so revenue losses occur outside of the budget window.” This means that the federal budget would be okay for ten years and then the deficit would explode causing Republicans like Camp to scream for cuts to entitlements and welfare for the poor.

It has other aspects that I don’t like. He gets rid of our current seven tax brackets and replaces them with two: 10% and 35%. The truth is that we need more tax brackets, not less. Republicans always claim that they do this to “simplify the tax code.” But if you have ever done your taxes, you know the easy part is looking up your taxable income in the table. The hard part is determining your taxable income. So reducing the number of tax brackets isn’t about simplifying anything. It is rather about getting to a flat tax. And Republicans are for a flat tax because they want to shift the tax burden off the rich and onto the poor.

Camp’s proposal isn’t about budget reform at all. Instead, it is yet another Republican plan to “starve the beast.” Clearly, Dave Camp is smart enough to know that he had to throw in a couple of bones to the Democrats. But they aren’t great bones and they are supported by more reasonable conservatives anyway. Otherwise, the proposal is just an attempt to get what Republicans always want: lower taxes on the rich. The word is that Camp worked for years to try to make his budget work with a top tax bracket of 25%, so you can see what his actual priorities are. And he only managed to make the 35% number work with a bunch of tricks.

So don’t be fooled: Camp’s budget is just a proposal to lower taxes on the rich and starve the government of funds. It is a typical Republican proposal; it just doesn’t sound as crazy as usual.

I heard a bit of NPR’s On the Media over the weekend. In discussing Protests in Ukraine, Bob Garfield talked about Venezuela and how the reason Ukraine got so much more coverage was that it had good visuals in a way that Venezuela did not. He then went on to say how repressive the regime in Venezuela was and left it at that. While it is certainly true that the Venezuelan government is far from perfect, I thought it was shocking that a program dedicated to examining the media would push such a bit of propaganda. That is the US government line. And as a result, that is the line from the corporate media. But this is NPR media criticism?!

For those that haven’t been following, there have been anti-government protests in Venezuela the last two weeks. They have turned violent and a number of people have died. This has been reported in the United States as peaceful protesters and a repressive government reaction to them. Now, I’m not saying that the Venezuelan government is blameless in this. In particular, it seems that Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN) has been responsible for some of the deaths. But we know this because the government reported it (Spanish language) and has made arrests and is continuing to investigate the case.

What seems to be going on is that the same anti-government groups as always are protesting the government. Dan Beeton provides a good rundown of the history, Violent Protests in Venezuela Fit a Pattern. The most important part of this is that these are the same people who were responsible for the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez. And these are the same people who claimed that Nicolas Maduro’s election victory last year was a fraud. Then they claimed that the municipal elections in December would show that the people really were behind them. After they lost those elections by 10 percentage points, they didn’t even try to claim fraud.

I think we see much the same kind of thing there as we do here with the conservative movement. They know that their policies (basically to sell off the oil industry to corporate giants) are unpopular. So they can’t depend upon democracy. Instead, they try to take power by other means. But it looks now like the anti-government forces are fracturing and fighting among themselves. There is some evidence that factional fighting is responsible for some of the deaths in this struggle.

The opposition could try to craft policies that appeal to a larger part of the electorate. But instead, their plan is to overthrow the government. And this isn’t just speculation. During these protests (just as in the past), opposition leaders have explicitly argued that the people have the right to overthrow their democratically elected government. Let’s be clear here: that behavior would get anyone in the United States arrested for treason. But when opposition leaders say that in Venezuela, they are suddenly heroes?! It’s outrageous.

I’m none too thrilled with the way that the Venezuelan government has responded to all of this. But given the actions of anti-democratic opposition forces in the country’s recent history, it is hard to blame the government for their current actions and, frankly, quite a bit more.

Afterword

The best place to go for information about what’s going on in Venezuela right now is The Americas Blog. I’m not saying that they don’t have their own biases, but they at least look at the facts and put them into perspective. They are a whole lot more objective than the usual corporate media whose response is always that the Venezuelan government is wrong and needs to be overthrown.

It’s Monday, and that means Dean Baker is out with another article correcting the math of Very Serious Pundit Robert Samuelson. It is something I look forward to at the beginning of each week, and Baker rarely disappoints because Samuelson rarely knows what he’s talking about.

Go ahead and read the article if you are interested. What I want to discuss is a broader point. Samuelson is one of those typical pundits who is always talking about how we have to cut entitlements because we are leaving future generations with a huge bill because of the elderly living off the fat of the land with their $15,600 yearly stipends. But at the same time, Samuelson is a global warming denier. As I discussed before, there are three levels of global warming denial, and he is at the third level, “Humans are causing global warming, but there is nothing we can do about it!” It’s not as intellectually retarded as, “There is no global warming!” But it is every bit as dangerous. (Samuelson’s thinking has evolved slightly since 2006, but not by much.)

Baker notes the hypocrisy in this:

This is a really important point, because this doesn’t just apply to Samuelson. His thinking on the matter is standard among conservatives. And it makes absolutely no sense. First, the fact is that Social Security is not bankrupting us. Samuelson, like most conservatives, just hates Social Security and wants to see it destroyed. But even if it were a big financial problem, we could solve it at any time by simply raising taxes or cutting benefits. It has never been clear to me why we are supposed to get behind cutting benefits today in order to stop from cutting benefits in the future.

What’s really going on with conservatives is that they think if we don’t cut Social Security now, we may face a major funding shortfall in the future. Given that the elderly vote in large numbers, future politicians will not be able to cut the program for current retirees. So the only option will be to raise taxes—most likely focusing on the rich. When Samuelson discusses stealing from the young, what he actually means is stealing from the next generations’s rich. And given the abysmal level income mobility, that just means the kids of today’s rich.

While financial problems can be fixed quickly, global warming cannot. Samuelson is right that we don’t have practical ways to remediate carbon pollution. Once the atmosphere warms, we have to just wait for the extra carbon in the atmosphere to be removed by natural processes. But note the loony logic here, “We can’t do anything about pollutants in the environment, so let’s keep putting more pollutants in the environment!” The correct solution is to stop polluting and deal with the damage we’ve already done as best we can.

What Samuelson argues is what conservatives always argue: we should do everything we can to protect the rich from any pain. And anything done for the common good should only be done if it doesn’t cause the rich any pain. So cutting entitlements is a good thing because it will protect the rich from possible future tax increases. And cutting fossil fuel use is bad because it would cost the rich money today. Of course, Samuelson would never admit this. I’m sure in his mind, he does all of this for the common good. But you have to look at the results of his preferred policy, and it is always the same: help the rich, screw the poor.

Yesterday, the CBO came out with an estimate of the effects that a rise in the minimum wage would have on the economy. They determined that an increase of the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would cause a range of effects on the economy from the loss of as many one million jobs to a gain of a small number of jobs. Their “most likely” estimate is a loss of a half million jobs or roughly 0.35% of all jobs. The estimate for a $9.00 per hour minimum wage was a loss of 100,000 jobs, or roughly 0.07% of all jobs. Not surprising, the Republicans have run with this. Raising the minimum wage is a job killer!

There are a number of things to note about this. First is that this is a small number of lost jobs. Second, the purpose of raising the minimum wage is not to create jobs, even though there is a decent amount of evidence that it would do that. The idea is to allow those who work to get paid a reasonable wage. The Republican argument that we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage is the same as the argument for getting rid of the minimum wage altogether. I realize libertarians would make that argument, but very few mainstream Republicans would. And remember: according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 58% of Republican voters want the minimum wage increased.

Jonathan Chait brings up an excellent point about this, The Congressional Budget Office and the Bizarre, Partisan Jobs Debate. He takes a minor swipe at liberals, “[T]he party accustomed to heeding its findings has had to painfully spin.” I don’t think that’s right, but that’s all he has to say about that side. Quite rightly he focuses on the hypocrisy of the Republicans who are only ever interested in job losses when they come from programs for the poorer classes.

The Republicans were eager to end extended unemployment benefits. The CBO says that cost the country 200,000 jobs alone. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus”) that Republicans claim did no good has increased employment today by between 100,000 and 800,000 jobs. And the Sequester that Republicans see as their greatest recent accomplishment has destroyed almost a million jobs with a range from a quarter million to a million and a half.

Add on to this all of the things that Republicans are not willing to do to create jobs and you get what you always get: a party that is focused exclusively on the rich. What I find amazing is that anyone listens to the Republicans on these matters. They are clearly disingenuous on matters of job creation. They don’t care at all about creating jobs. It is just a cudgel to use to argue for policies they do like: tax cuts for the rich, military spending, and cutting programs for the poor.

Over the years, I have written a lot about the corpse under the bed. For those of you who do not know it, it is the story of motel guests who complain about a bad order that is determined to be a dead body rotting under the bed. What’s sad about the story is that it isn’t a legend. It happens all the time. Here’s one from just last year, Police Arrest 40-Year-Old Connected to Suspicious Death at Hickory Motel. And each and every story sounds pretty much the same, “One guest at the motel described smelling a foul odor Thursday, but it wasn’t until lunchtime Friday that police got the 911 call…”

To me, these stories are about a fundamental problem in our society. People don’t stuff dead Senators under motel room mattresses. They stuff people who they think no one will miss. It makes me think of Matthew 25:40, “To the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.” Generally, the people who stuff bodies under beds are desperate and frightened people, but they are also serial killers. There is a larger indictment of society here.

Gawker reported last night, University of Chicago Student’s Body Found Decomposing in Dorm. It seems that 20-year-old Nicholas Barnes died in his dorm room over a week ago and just like the classic story, no one noticed until the smell of his rotting flesh started seeping out into the hall. This is, of course, very sad. A young man has died. But as a society, we should be ashamed that it took a bad smell to notice.

According to CBS News, Barnes was a Germanic Studies major who spent last fall in Austria. It quotes Dean of Students Susan Art, “Nick will be painfully missed. He was an excellent student, admired by faculty and peers alike.” I don’t doubt that this is true. And that makes it all the worse.

In our society, someone can be well liked with lots of what passes for friends now days. But when they disappear for a week, no one notices. The modern world allows us to have social connections that are a mile wide and an inch deep.

I used to just worry that as a society we were dividing into the worthy and the unworthy. But the death of Nicholas Barnes reminds me that our problems are much deeper than even that. We are becoming a society of individuals who only know how to interact in the most facile ways. Oh, you were sick? I just thought he decided to leave Twitter! I really question whether these are the kinds of lives we want to lead. But habit is a powerful thing. And we have developed some very bad habits.

Thomas Frank is back with a great article at Salon, The Matter With Kansas Now: The Tea Party, the 1 Percent and Delusional Democrats. It is the angriest I have ever seen from Frank. He argues that the pseudo-populism of the Republican base did not come about in a vacuum. The base really is angry at the elites of the country, but while the Republicans appealed to that in the most disingenuous way, the Democrats did nothing.

The only word I disagree with is “nothing.” The Democrats actively pushed the social conservatives away by turning into a socially liberal but economically conservative party. As a result, the social conservatives had no choice but to go with the Republicans. They could either get social conservatism with economic elitism from the Republicans, or social liberalism with economic elitism from the Democrats. At the same time, economic liberals have been effectively demoralized. They will vote for the Democratic Party, but they are none too excited about it.

Frank sums up what happened pretty well:

The problem is that being wrong hasn’t changed them. After the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we needed up with yet another New Democrat who on economic issues is only distinguished from the Republicans in being slightly less eager to enact more neoliberal policies. It almost makes me think there was a conspiracy. The power elite took control of both parties so that we would have no real choice on economic issues. Then they made the Republicans so crazy on social issues that liberals dare not go to a third party for fear that it would cause a Republican to win. In this conspiracy theory, Ralph Nader would be key.

Of course, we need no conspiracy. It is simply that money is extremely important in politics. Politicians have to appeal to those who have money. They do it by giving them the rich policies that they want. Frank’s solution is for the Democratic Party to make a populist turn on economic issues. But the fundamentals of politics push against that. We see that right now in the jockeying for the Democratic presidential nomination. The reason that everyone thinks Clinton is unbeatable is only partly because of her poll numbers. The bigger issue is that she will be a fundraising juggernaut. And I don’t think anyone expects that as president she will be anything much different from her husband or Obama. Remember: Obama got lots of little donations, but he’s governed entirely in the interests of his big donors.

I expect for this to continue on for the rest of my life. As it is, in the mainstream press “liberalism” has been redefined to mean what I call “social liberalism.” But there is no doubt that the Democratic Party is better on economic issues than the Republican Party. The Republicans want to makes things far worse while the Democrats want to limit how fast things get far worse. But Thomas Frank is right: even on the level of electoral politics, it is likely that the Democrats will lose. There are too many people who are angry and if the Democrats don’t appeal to that on a rational level, the Republicans will on an irrational level.