There has been much talk about how the Boston Marathon bombing changes the calculus of immigration reform. At first that surprised me. The Tsarnaev brothers were here legally. How does that have anything to do with illegal immigration. But then only last night it hit me: I’ve been dumb, naive, or both.

I’m very pro-immigration. I think diversity makes us better. With all the problems that our country has, I am proud that much of the world would like to come here. And that makes me highly sympathetic toward people who come to this country illegally. Many of them have risked death to come here. Many have died trying to come here. These are not criminals. Everyone should celebrate the fact that these people risk so much just to join us.

Just the same, I’ve often been confused by the arguments that immigrant rights opponents make. It seemed to me that they conflated legal and illegal immigration. Surely this was an error. The people who were complaining about immigration were only concerned about the illegal kind. Everyone was for legal immigration, right?

That’s where last night’s epiphany comes in. These conservatives who claim that the Tsarnaev brothers change the immigration debate mean that their concern is not just illegal immigration. These people have a problem with immigration itself. In fact, this is just a continuation of the centuries old problem of hatred and discrimination toward immigrants.

Most of my readers probably think that I’m fairly cynical. In fact, it is one of the better aspects of my writing. But I remain, deep down, optimistic and positive. I really do want to think the best of people. And sometimes that means I miss what people are really thinking unless they come right out and say, “I’m a bigot! I’m a bigot!”

Because let’s be clear: the Boston Marathon bombing and the Tsarnaev brothers have nothing to do with the underclass of undocumented residents who our system implicitly creates. And anyone who conflates them just doesn’t like immigrants. And frankly, unless you are 100% Native American, you’re on flimsy ground.

Let me tell you about Larry Summers. He’s an economist and was the Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. Before him, Robert Rubin was Treasure Secretary, and Summers, being an acolyte of his, continued his strong dollar policies. Now I know that a strong dollar sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t. Politicians love a strong dollar because it makes them feel powerful. But even more important, all of the rich people who are the true constituents of the politicians love a strong dollar. If you have a lot of dollars, a strong dollar is great. If you have to work for a living, a strong dollar is bad.

The economics of this is very simple: if the dollar is strong, imports will be cheap and exports will be uncompetitive. If markets truly were the magical entities that conservatives claim, we would have no trade deficit; instead, our dollar would be worth less and trade would adjust accordingly. But anyway, if you want to decimate American manufacturing, then keep the dollar strong.

Now Larry Summers is a good, even a great economist. So why did he believe in a strong dollar? I don’t know. I guess because he thought it was more important to protect the wealth of the rich than the jobs of the poor. But since the financial crisis of 2008, he has been making lots of sense. So I’m divided in my thinking about him.

Last week, he did a little political science over at the Washington Post, Sometimes, Gridlock Is Good for America. I agree with the title. When Republicans are in the White House, we could use a good deal more gridlock. He even said so when it comes to the Bush Jr years. Of course, Summers is a New Democrat so he thinks the Reagan and Bush Sr years were a-okay! Whatever. But mostly, his point was that we’ve had gridlock in the past as if blanket Republican opposition in the 1960s is the same as blanket Republican filibusters today.

The great Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann took him to task late last week, Gridlock Is No Way to Govern. They come right out swinging:

Then they go onto argue more or less the same thing that is in their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Check it out.

The point is not so much that Summers is wrong. It just bugs me how much all of these elite people prove that we do not live in a meritocracy. Once you get to the level of Larry Summers or Robert Rubin, it doesn’t matter how wrong you are about anything. There is still great demand for your thinking. Meanwhile, an 18 year who old gets arrested for cannabis possession sees his life effectively over.

The nobodies are never given a second chance. The somebodies are never given a last chance. Don’t talk to me about equality of opportunity and don’t mention “meritocracy” except to say that it doesn’t exist—in America anyway.

Afterword

Last year, I wrote about a tax reform proposal by Larry Summers that I really liked. So I don’t mean to be too hard on him.

A lot of people in the United States want terrorism to be a major problem—it seems to define us as a people. But apparently, terrorism is an extremely minor problem. How else can we explain the fact that almost every time I read about a foiled terror plot, it turns out that all the tools for the act and very often even the idea came from the FBI? Michael Tarm over at the Associated Press reported yesterday on two such cases, FBI: Ill. Man Tried to Join Al-Qaida-Linked Group. In it, he wrote about Abdella Ahmad Tounisi who tried to board a flight to Syria to join a group that is fighting against the Bashar Assad regime. The article didn’t say, but I wouldn’t doubt that the FBI even provided the plane ticket.

Tounisi was a allegedly a friend of Adel Daoud who, like most “terrorists” in America tried to detonate a fake bomb that the FBI had given him. I question how valid these prosecutions are. Would these people have actually gone through with these acts if the FBI hadn’t made it so easy? We’ll never know. And the bombing at the Boston Marathon shows how ridiculous these investigations are: we spend enormous resources setting up fake terrorist acts to foil while real ones go unnoticed. I understand that plotters like the Tsarnaev brothers as almost impossible to detect beforehand, but certainly resources could be used that now go to people likely couldn’t commit a terrorist act without government help.

There was something else in the article that caught my eye:

This goes along with a common meme in conservative media right now: the Boston Marathon bombers were part of some large terror network. Now certainly, I don’t know. But that sounds really unlikely and there is certainly no indication of it. But people really want to believe in some vast conspiracy that isn’t there. From what we know, al-Qaida is not that organized a group. Many acts that are supposedly by al-Qaida are really only by people who align themselves with al-Qaida. And that makes them harder to detect. But as “public enemy number one,” al-Qaida is a pathetic group—like a mouse who keeps attacking your feet: annoying and even painful at times but certainly not an existential threat.

I just read the title essay in Umberto Eco’s Inventing the Enemy. He explains what is going on perfectly:

That’s about right. What Eco is getting at is the fact that we only have identity to the extent that we are not “the enemy” or more generally “the other.” That’s a much more profound discussion, which I may write about later. For now, it is enough to say that we need to fight against this. The barbarians are not at the gates and there are much more edifying ways to define ourselves than as “not those pathetic religious fundamentalists who think God wants them to kill other people.”

When I was doing research in global warming, it was very annoying. The theory was all laid out. And that was most of what we had. At that time, the evidence for global warming was weak. So an iconoclast like me naturally looked for ways that the theory was wrong: negative feedbacks and stuff like that. Because here’s the thing: the basic theory was right. It is simple energy transfer, and thus about as controversial gravitation theory. If it was wrong, it was because there was some other energy forcing that we just didn’t see.

Over time, the data got better. Now, the data alone indicate that the earth is warming, although you need some theory to explain that humans are causing it. But note what the global warming deniers do: they attack the data and the data alone. They can do that because there is a lot of data. But the process is clear: first they decide global warming is bunk, then they search the data trying to disprove it.

The situation is little different when it comes to economics. Mike Konczal wrote an excellent article over at Wonk Blog today, Reinhart/Rogoff-Gate Isn’t the First Time Austerians Have Used Bad Data. In it, he provided a history of conservative efforts to justify the idea of expansionary austerity. This is the idea that if the government cuts its budget to the bone, the private sector will have “confidence” that will get the economy booming. If this sounds like magical thinking, you’re right.

The story Konczal tells is of economists running from data set to data set looking for something that would reinforce their kooky theory. And in each case, the data they seized on turned out to be wrong. But that isn’t because they had bad luck. It is because only bad data would have made the case for expansionary austerity because expansionary austerity is wrong.

In any scientific pursuit, you have to start with a theory. But it can’t just be any old theory; you need to start with the basics of your field. In global warming you need to start with energy transfer and so on. In expansionary austerity you need to start with demand and all that jazz. But in each case (global warming denial and expansionary austerity advocacy), those involved didn’t start with a theory. They just rejected the default, sensible, traditional theory. Then they went out in search of data to confirm—data that didn’t exist because their “theories” were wrong. And that’s not science, it’s politics.

People involved in these pseudo-scientific political campaigns are not honest brokers. They use one of the best aspects of science against itself: the ability of a new theory to destroy an existing paradigm. So they point to Einstein and note how he, for example, revolutionized Galilean relativity. But they never mention that Einsteinian relativity is Galilean relativity at slow speeds. They never mention that Einstein was solving problems that were well known at the time. They never mention that Einstein had a theory whereas they have only “not what everyone in the field believes.”

Whether in global warming or economics, it is shameful.

There are fundamental differences between MSNBC and Fox News, but most of them have to do with degrees. For example, to some extent, MSNBC has become a media arm of the Democratic Party; Fox News is nothing but a media arm of the Republican Party. The biggest and most consequential difference has nothing to do with degrees. MSNBC viewers know that they are getting partisan news and Fox News viewers don’t. They think they are just getting The Truth™, and this is no accident: it is what Fox News tells them before and after every commercial break.

I thought about this earlier when I came upon an ad on (of all places) Crooks & Liars. It asked the question, “Is Obama the Worst President in History?” As always, when I see an ad that really offends me, I clicked over. I want these people to pay for the privilege of offending me. And I came upon this page for TeaParty.org. It is basically just an opportunity to sign up for their newsletter. But I was really struck by their two question form.

It starts with a wholly prejudicial introduction:

But then they ask the question: do you believe Obama is the Worst President in History? The choices are: (1) yes, Obamacare put him there; (2) yes, his handling of the economy was devastating; (3) yes, his increases in the welfare state are tragic; and (4) no, he is not worse than Jimmy Carter. The assumption is that the worst president in history is either Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. I’m not sure how I would answer that question but there is a decent chance I would say that Obama is worse than Carter but not nearly the worst president in history. (For the record, the second question is just whether liberals or conservatives are better solving our nation’s problems.)

What I find interesting about this is not its utter cluelessness. Rather, I’ll bet that the people who wrote this questionnaire think it is totally reasonable. They ran it by all of the people they know and no one suggested any changes. I doubt that they giggled to themselves, “See how we put Obama in a no win situation!” Rather, it is just self-evident that Obama or Carter is the worst president ever. And that is a big problem.

In a normal political environment, we need to understand that both sides of the political spectrum are honest brokers and have good ideas. The problem in modern American, however, is that clueless people like those at TeaParty.org have taken over most of the Republican Party. And now serious conservative thinkers like Ross Douthat, David Frum, and Josh Barro come off as moderates. A right wing that offers two of the last three Democratic presidents as the only answer to the question of who is the worst president in history is not an honest broker and does not have much in the way of good ideas. We need to confront this fact head on.

Afterword

Note also that in 10-15 years, these same people will claim, “When I look back, Obama wasn’t a bad president!” Of course, they will be screaming about some new Democrat who they claim is worse than Stalin.

You may remember earlier this week, I referenced an article by Mike Konczal and his excellent summary of the problems in the famous Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) paper. The original paper claimed that high government debt led to slow economic growth. The primary argument against this work was that R&R had the causation backwards: in reality, slow economic growth leads to high government debt. Well, yesterday, Konczal published an article by a young economist at Amherst, Arindrajit Dube. In it, he shows, using their own data, that R&R do indeed have the causation backwards.

Dube asked the simplest of questions, “Does a high debt-to-GDP ratio better predict future growth rates, or past ones?” Put another way: does the high debt come before an economic slump or after it? If it comes before, that would indicate that R&R are right: debt causes the economy to tank. But if debt comes after the economy tanks, then R&R are wrong: a poor economy leads to high government debt.

To answer this question, Dube looked at the economic growth in the three years before high government debt. And then he looked at the economic growth in the three years after high government debt. The results: the economic growth is low before the high debt, not after. In other words, slow economic growth causes high government debt, not the other way around. In still other words, R&R are wrong.

What is most amazing to me about this is how slipshod the work of R&R is turning out to be. When I did this kind of work for a living, I took great care. We were always looking for trends and correlations. But in doing so, we would test the data from every imaginable angle. What Dr. Dube has done is this kind of standard work. But it is all the more striking because it is exactly the kind of work you would do if you were arguing (which R&R did outside their paper) that high debt was causing slow growth. The fact that they did no such tests, indicates to me that their work is more political apologia than it is economics.

Three cheers for Arindrajit Dube and his incisive debunking of an important conservative economic canard.

Afterword

If the name Arindrajit Dube sounds familiar, it may be because a couple of months ago, I wrote about his thinking on the minimum wage and the EITC. He’s a brilliant guy.

It’s difficult being a first world woman. I don’t worry about where my next meal will come from, but I am concerned about it’s probable effect on my waistline. I don’t worry about dying at 60, but I dread what I may look like when I get there. We pick ourselves apart from the inside out, with an insatiable insecurity that marketing companies force feel like a foie gras goose. The boys of That Mitchell and Webb Look summed it up nicely.

So I appreciate any counter balance to our culture’s constant, insidious criticism. Remember when Jamie Lee Curtis did that photo shoot for More magazine? Seeing her with no make-up, no airbrushing and looking like an average woman was refreshing. It made me feel better about myself for about three minutes.

Dove®, purveyor of hygiene and beauty necessities, has been trying to lift its head out of the advertising swill of by appealing to women’s self-esteem; not by crushing it, but by bolstering it. Their Campaign for Real Beauty is aimed at the same market of dissatisfied women, but tries to curry favor with compliments rather than implied disappointment. Unfortunately, I am far too cynical to believe this manoeuvre isn’t a bit disingenuous; like every other advertiser, Dove is still using kind lighting and probably a little photoshopping. What we end up with are Illusions of empowerment that manipulate even as they encourage.

Regardless, having been slowly crushed by advertising since I was a child (remember those Breck girls?), Dove’s approach does make me feel better. So when I read about Dove’s most recent attempt to rescue the alienated consumer, I was intrigued.

Impressive, right? Not really. First of all, the women seem to have been hand-picked from a Build Your Self-esteem workshop. This could just as easily have been an ad for antidepressants.

Then there’s the “objective” opinions of strangers. No decent person is going to chat with a newly introduced, amiable person and then, immediately afterwards on camera, describe that person’s appearance in anything but a kind light. I can only imagine that the entire process of choosing subjects and observers was carried out much like a jury selection.

Dove’s tactics, while still somewhat Machiavellian, are at least not so subtly disparaging as their competitors and that’s a good thing. When it comes to a woman’s self-image, even lip-service is comforting.

My real problem with the whole thing is the terrible police sketches. It’s no wonder rapists and murderers so often elude capture.

After a string of clueless attempts to be iconoclastic, Jonathan Chait managed to write something that is both iconoclastic and right, Senate Democrats Wise to Block Background Checks. His argument is very simple: red state Democrats have to make some non-liberal votes to maintain credibility with their voters; this bill was almost completely useless, or as Chait puts it, “a compromise of a compromise”; therefore this was a good bill to vote against. And as I noted on Monday, the final law could have been much worse than nothing at all.

One thing that Chait doesn’t mention is that as much as these red state Democrats may annoy us from time to time, they are very strong members of the team. In fact, currently the Democratic Party has more disciple in the Senate than the Republican Party. So the calls I’m hearing from certain corners that we should primary these red state Democrats are just crazy.

There is a related issue that I think is really important. Democratic politicians from blue states are often quite conservative, especially on economic issues. Dianne Feinstein, from my own great state of California, comes to mind. When it comes to red state Democrats, a primary would probably end in a Republican winning the general election. But why aren’t we primarying Democrats in blue states?

One of our biggest political problems is that the Republican Party is too extreme and the Democratic Party is not extreme enough. One way to fix this would be to enforce a little ideological purity on our representatives from liberal areas. After all, what makes the Republican Party unacceptable is not that Orrin Hatch of Utah is an extremist. He’s from an extremist state; he should be extremist. But why do the people of the very liberal state of New York have an economic conservative as governor?

So we need to stop this nonsense about primarying red state Democrats and start talking about primarying their blue state counterparts who have no good reason for being as conservative as they are.

There is a bit of economic news today that is wonderfully fun and I dare say it would be a shame for you all to miss out on it just because you don’t follow the economics blogs. What’s more, in terms of truth, it really matters, even if, in terms of politics, it probably won’t.

In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two economists at Harvard, published a hugely influential paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt” (pdf). In it, they purported to show that if the total government debt equaled more than 90% of the country’s GDP, then there would be a big slowdown in economic growth. This paper was used more than any other to justify economic austerity all over the world, but especially in Europe and the United States. In fact, Paul Ryan, in his The Path to Prosperity (pdf) budget, claimed, “The study found conclusive empirical evidence that gross debt exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth.”

That sounds bad, right? In fact, if you look at the paper, it is even worse. Countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of less than 30% see a growth of 4.1% whereas those with a ratio of more than 90% see a contraction of 0.1%. Of course, long ago, I had dismissed the paper for two reasons. (But the fact that I even knew about the paper should give you some idea of just how important it has been.) First, correlation is not cause. And in this case, the cause is probably the opposite of what Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) suggest. When economies are bad, governments have to borrow money. The case is much stronger that bad economies lead to large debts rather than the other way around.

The second reason I didn’t accept this paper comes from an idea that Dean Baker has been drilling into my brain the last few years: debt-to-GDP ratios are meaningless. What matters is the interest burden of the debt. A government will have no more difficulty managing a 50% debt-to-GDP ratio at 4% than it will a 100% dbt-to-GDP ratio at 2%. Or let me personalize it: would owing $2,000 on a credit card really matter if the bank only charged you $5 per year in interest?

There were other problems with the paper. Paul Krugman, as I recall, questioned the study on the fact that its entire case depended on two periods of contraction in the United States and (especially) New Zealand. But now, all the wheels seem to be falling off the R&R cart. Three researches, Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst have published a paper that finds major problems with this earlier research. And the best part: the biggest finding of R&R—the 90% threshold—went away when HAP corrected a spreadsheet error R&R had made. They accidentally cut 25% of the countries in their database out of their calculations. And looking at it, they should have known. But I think when they saw what they wanted to see, they didn’t probe. And that’s pretty funny when you consider all the policy makers who did the same thing with their paper.

If you are interested, Mike Konczal over at The Next New Deal wrote an excellent overview of all that’s going on. But the truth is, the fact that the R&R paper was build on feet of clay won’t matter at all. Paul Ryan and the other conservatives who pushed austerity didn’t do so because they were convinced that R&R were right. Rather, they already had their agendas, and just quoted R&R to justify it. In Europe, austerity proponents will probably stop quoting it—but it won’t change their minds. In America, they will just keep quoting it. Because: hey, facts have a well-know liberal bias.

You gotta love Greg Sargent: he really seems to think that it will matter that Republicans are showing themselves to be intransigent when it comes to Obama’s new Social Security cutting budget. In an article earlier today, he noted that John Boehner and Eric Cantor immediately came out with statement saying, more or less, “Well since we all agree to cut entitlements, why let the president’s wish for tax cuts stand in the way?” He also noted that Obama’s offer of entitlement cuts will probably hurt him politically.

But then he added that this doesn’t put the Republicans in the best situation, “The GOP position—revealed with fresh clarity today—is that we should only cut entitlements but not raise a penny in new revenues by getting rid of any loophole enjoyed by millionaires.” God bless Sargent, but he is being a fool.

Imagine that you are a five year old and your brother is intentionally peeing on the carpet—right in front of your parents. Whenever it happens, they punish you both equally. So you come up with a cunning plan: you’re going to get your brother to pee on the couch instead. Ah, that’ll work!Your parents never cared which of you two was peeing on the carpet. But the couch: that’s a whole new surface! Surely they’ve got to differentiate now!

Really, I think I’m going to have an aneurysm.

President Obama screwed up twice in the last day or so. The most recent will probably get the most press. I also don’t think it is nearly as important. He said that Kamala Harris from California was brilliant and hard working and all that stuff. And then he added, “She also happens to be, by far the best-looking attorney general.” Ouch. Not good. Not appropriate. And all that.

But Obama is, after all, a man, and we are like that. Certainly, he needs to apologize and move on. And as Jonathan Bernstein notes, “A jovial ‘Michelle says I screwed up’ won’t do it.” Indeed.

But Obama did something else recently that he can’t so easily take away, because it reflects who he is. Reuters reported, Obama Cutting Own Pay in Solidarity with Federal Workers. How much is he cutting his pay? A whopping 5%! How will he ever survive?

Token gestures like this really bug me. My understanding is that federal workers getting furloughed will be losing 20% of their pay. And they make a lot less than Obama makes. Most of their money is not discretionary. So Obama will not be suffering at all and yet he wants credit for suffering along with the prols?!

I have an idea: why doesn’t he donate all the money he’s made from his books to charity. That would hurt and then maybe he would feel just a little of the pain that federal employees (and many others) are feeling.