The House Democrats put out a report on how bad the looming Sequestration is likely to be. It is actually quite frightening. We will see major cuts to air traffic controllers and food safety inspectors and border patrol and Coast Guard. We’ll see big cuts to Head Start and nutrition programs. Less medical research. Less disaster aid. Less embassy security. And all those military cuts. These cuts ought to bother Republicans at least as much as they bother Democrats. But that isn’t even the main reason that Republicans should stop Sequestration.

The Sequester is going to be bad for our economy. But it won’t be really bad. It won’t be, “helps the Republicans” bad. Instead, it will cause the recovery to continue to sputter along. The next year will be bad. But after a year and a half, the economy will likely be doing better—just in time for the midterm elections. And by the time the 2016 presidential elections come along, it is very likely the economy will be booming. And that is the last thing that Marco Rubio wants.

The Republicans are just not being smart about their scorched earth strategy. Regardless of how badly the government acts, the economy will eventually heal itself. The Republicans can’t depend upon the economy being bad forever. So they need to plan. If they do things to hurt the economy now, it is going to bite them later, because they can only sabotage the economy for so long. Now is not the time. If they were smart, they would convince the Democrats to delay the Sequester for one year. That would allow them to tank the economy just in time for the 2014 midterms.

Frankly, I don’t believe that they are capable of thinking this way. They’ve drunk their own tea. They don’t even know how the economy works anymore. If they did, they’d been dealing with the Sequester better than they are.

H/T: Greg Sargent

You’ve probably read about Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle getting murdered by a comrade at a shooting range. It became a bit of a dust up due to libertarian wackjob Ron Paul tweeting out, “Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.” I don’t see what the big deal is; Paul is showing his usual level of tact and discretion. And there is real wisdom in the second part of that tweet. Maybe part of the problem is the whole culture of guns and manly back slapping. But no one is really interested in that.

They are, however, interested in grandstanding about how Ron Paul could be so rude. (This, from a man who thinks anyone careless enough not to have insurance should just be allowed to die. The Hippocratic Oath can bite Dr. Paul!) One such person is his pretend libertarian wackjob son, Rand Paul. He told that bastion of ethics in news, breitbart.com: “Chris Kyle was a hero like all Americans who don the uniform to defend our country.”

Really? All Americans who don the uniform to defend our country are heroes? That surprises me, because so many serial killers have donned the uniform to defend our country. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, did so. I don’t think of him as a hero. Nor do I think of the guy who killed 16 civilians last year in Kandahar as a hero. I tend to think that most of the people in the military would agree with me. That is why they have court-martials; people in the military dishonor the traditions of the military—all the time.

I don’t understand the fetishization of the military. But I can see that it is a very bad thing for our society. Of course, I’m not that keen on the word “hero” anyway. I think it is best to use only the adjectival form of the word. Acts are heroic. People are not. The same person who is heroic in one situation can easily be cowardly (Or worse!) in another. But the idea that simply putting on a uniform makes you a hero, is ridiculous. And it leaves us without a word that describes truly heroic acts. The military, whose people are placed in far more positions to act heroically than is normal, should hate this kind of easy definition. Because such definitions just make people like Rand Paul bask in the glow of those who did don a uniform, without having to do so themselves.

After all of the brouhaha, Rand’s daddy provided a statement that puts to shame all the pretenders:

That’s what I call supporting the troops.

Last week, Neil Irwin over at Wonk Blog wrote an article that sounded really fun, Joe Scarborough, Paul Krugman and the Economist-Pundit Divide on Debt and Deficits. But I really hated it. I like what he is trying to do: explain why these pundits are so focused on the deficit even though the facts all say it is stupid. Unfortunately, it all comes off like apologetics.

It all follows from an appearance Paul Krugman made on Morning Joe earlier last week. Joe Scarborough just could not believe (during the segment and then in print after it) that Krugman was right when everyone Scarborough talks to disagrees. As any number of people have pointed out (including Krugman), this isn’t about economics or even politics; it is about sociology. Most of the people I talk to each day have very little knowledge of economics, but I don’t assume they are right just because there are a lot of them. This kind of polling approach to science just manages to allow people to not think seriously about things.

In the afternoon, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones kicked back a bit, (Almost) Nobody Is Serious About the Deficit. He notes that everyone knows that the long term deficit must be dealt with. So why is there disagreement about the short term deficit? His answer:

Okay, I accept that for the conservatives, but it is only partly true. I think conservatives and liberals alike have the same kind of moralistic idea about borrowing. They just think it is wrong. The reason that conservatives don’t mind deficits when they are in power is that by and large they aren’t reminded of it. The conservatives are very good constraining information flow.

The problem with all of this is that no one seems to understand that our sense of morality is not absolute: we have moral codes because they help the society. There is no point in applying personal morality to the society generally. And note: we don’t do it about anything else. If another nation steals our oil field, that is cause to go to war. The same does not apply to individuals. You would be punished if you killed someone because they stole your car.

In the case of economics, it is even more bizarre. A government budget is not the same as a family budget. It does not make sense to apply that morality to the government, but that is what most people do. At least the conservatives use it in the cause of what they want to do anyway. Liberals use it like they are 5-year-old girls who just learned the difference between right and wrong.

This morning, Greg Sargent writes, We all agree that spending cuts hurt the economy. Right? Right. Right now, the Republicans are claiming that spending cuts will help the economy. Of course, six months ago, they were saying the opposite. But this is nothing new. The truth is that Republicans are incoherent on economic issues.

They will always claim that tax cuts help the economy. This is true. As long as those cuts are not offset with spending cuts. But that’s getting too complex for Republican thinking. Why do they think that tax cuts spur the economy? Because they give people more money that they can spend and this feeds back in the economy. The obvious question is then: doesn’t government spending do exactly the same thing?

That’s when we move into Republican incoherence: spending is bad because we can’t afford it, blah, blah, blah. But a dollar of spending costs exactly the same as a dollar of tax cuts. So I don’t even know how we are supposed to deal the Republicans on economic matters. They are either incoherent or they are disingenuous.

Actually: I think they are both. I think they don’t understand the economics at the same time that they will use any argument to justify what they want to do. Right now what they want to do is hurt the economy. But if they controlled the White House they would favor policies that helped the economy: Keynesian policies.

It isn’t just politicians who act this way. Harvard University economist Greg Mankiw, widely respected in his field, was against the 2009 stimulus package. But when he worked for Bush Jr, he was all for stimulus. If that isn’t an indictment of the economics profession, I don’t know what is. I don’t think we see this on the left, but on the right the first step in determining what to do to help the economy is to find out which party is in the White House.

We may be past the time when the Republicans will explicitly hold the US economy hostage over things like the Debt Ceiling. But they are still doing it implicitly by countering any good policies whenever they aren’t in power. This is a new level of cynicism. And there is no choice but to do what John Boehner claims Obama wants to do to the Republican Party: annihilate it.

Who’s with me?!

Scott Bland has provided an amazing graph over at National Journal in an article, Why Immigration Reform Could Die in the House. The article itself shows that getting immigration reform through the House of Representatives could be harder than many people imagine. Of the Republicans in the House, 112 of them (almost 50%) are in districts that are more than 80% white. Fully 74% of Republicans are in districts that are at least 70% white. What’s more, the Republicans in this House represent even more predominantly white districts than they did in the last House.

Bland argues that a large fraction of the House Republicans have no incentive at all to be in favor of immigration reform that does anymore than deport more people and spend more for border enforcement. In fact, many of them have an incentive to block real reform. This reminds me of something that I read in Michelle Alexander’s excellent The New Jim Crow. I can’t find the reference, but it turns out that people who live in low crime areas are more punitive in their attitudes to criminals than people in high crime areas. The same thing happens with undocumented immigrants. And it all comes down to community: if you don’t know people, it is easy to vilify them like the retractable horned Jews of Borat’s imagination.

Here is the graph; click on it to see it at full resolution:

The first thing to notice about this graph is how gerrymandered the districts are by race. Of all the districts 54% of them are more than 30% white. It seems to me that with the settled law about districts not being too gerrymandered and the Voting Rights Act, that a court case could be made against the current districts. We really do need to do something about gerrymandering, but unfortunately, it benefits both parties at different times and that seems to stop any movement on reform.

The second thing to notice is that the Democratic districts are fairly evenly distributed. In contrast, the Republican districts look like a Poisson distribution. You can really see the demographic catastrophe awaiting them in this graph. They simply do not appeal to anyone other than white people.

As a Democrat, I’m very pleased with this graph. As an American, I’m appalled.

Daniel Larison wrote a short article last week, Bobby Jindal and the “Party of Growth.” As I read it, I found that I was very much in agreement. But how could that be? It was published in The American Conservative.

It was not that the ideas were solid. I often agree with sensible conservatives. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review Online is often very good. But I don’t think he’s much fun. He’s a National Review guy, and though he may be no older than I am, he seems so.

This isn’t to say there aren’t conservatives who strike me as more part of my generation. Tucker Carlson, for example, has a style I appreciate. The problem is that he’s an idiot. And that is very true of the Republican “young guns” generally.

But check out Larison on Jindal’s big speech:

I love that italicized “even more.” That’s really what made me think this was a new kind of conservative. Larison goes on to explain how Jindal and most Republicans misunderstand the idea of “American Exceptionalism.”

As a result of Larison’s brief article, I did a little research on The American Conservative. All right! I looked on Wikipedia! It said:

And that made me think even more highly of them. Most people who claim such interests call themselves libertarians, even though they are not up to the challenges of individualist anarchism. (Really: who is?) But these people put on no such airs. They’re just conservative, in the way that the word used to be defined. And that probably means they want a small government, but they aren’t against the very idea of government. What’s more, they are clearly against the government’s most pernicious powers—just the opposite of the modern Republican Party.

I’m sure I would disagree with a lot of the gang at The American Conservative. But we could definitely work together. And the stronger their voice gets the better it will be for the country.

Afterword

When I talk to people with very different political beliefs, I normally find that we agree on results, just not means. The problem I have with the modern Republican Party is that they claim to agree with me on results, but I just don’t see that. They seem to want to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor. Their insistence that we reward “risk taking” undermines their argument. It implies that we should just accept the fact of inequality because some people win the lottery and others don’t. We know that really is the way the world works, but it shouldn’t be what we aspire to. Out of the mouths of Republicans, it is just an apologia for the way things are.

I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason and explanation for everything… To try to find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable. 1

We ourselves have suffered greatly. Our son Bertie has been a great disappointment. As we have said before: handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.2 We were of the belief that the distillation of royal qualities, ensured by the marriage of first cousins, would have produced a truly fine specimen. We choose not to wonder why we have been so abused by fate. Questions unasked need not be answered.

And so, by strength of character and a discerning mind, we are quite content. In truth, we are consummately giddy with our lack of curiosity.

[1] From a letter to her granddaughter in 1883.
[2] An excerpt from Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, found on BBC News.

Ezra Klein wrote another one of those “chart” articles that he’s so fond of, Two Charts That Should Be in Every Health-Care Discussion. (What is it with everyone thinking “healthcare” is not a word?) The second graph is not very interesting. It shows how much more the United States pays for private healthcare. But of course, everyone knows that. That’s our system. But the first chart? Oh my!

Chart #1: We Pay More Than Anyone!

The first chart shows home much the government spends on healthcare per person and compares it to other similarly rich countries. As with pretty much every chart you can create about healthcare, the United States looks really bad:

Bottom line: the government spends more on healthcare than any other country even though most of the people don’t get their healthcare from the government and 16% of the people don’t get healthcare at all!

Best Healthcare in the Word! If You Can Afford It…

“But!” the conservative will say, “The United States has the best healthcare in the world!” Well, that might be true if you are Dick Cheney. Of course, he isn’t a Medicare patient, and could have bought great healthcare elsewhere.

But for the regular guy? He doesn’t get the best healthcare in the world. Let’s take a look at the countries on the graph.

The WHO has ranked all the countries in the world. Let’s see where they stack up:

The number in parentheses is where each country ranks in how much it spends on healthcare. So we’re number one! We’re number one!

One interesting thing here: taken all together (public and private healthcare), the United States pays 70% more than the next closest country, Canada.

We pay roughly 250% more than Israel pays. All while getting much worse healthcare! We’re number one!

Afterword

There have been a lot of attacks on the WHO healthcare rankings. But they aren’t that compelling.

If you question me, check out Wikipedia. Basically, it is claimed that such rankings aren’t that accurate. This is true, but one thing is certain: the United States healthcare system isn’t head and shoulders better than other systems. And it doesn’t insure 50 million people. [At that time. –FM 25 Jan 2018] And it does this by being by far the most expensive system in the world.

And What About the Guns?!

Fox News mustache stand John Stossel has noted that our life expectancy is artificially lowered because we have so many homicides.

He says that when you take this into account, our life expectancy is higher than in “nearly every other industrialized nation.” But he just claims it, he doesn’t produce any numbers or studies or anything. But consider this: rough 2.5 million people die in the US every year. There are roughly 10,000 homicides each year. That adds 0.4 percent to our death toll. So it’s hard to see how this is going to make a huge change in our life expectancy.

Also, it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. It is just more apologetics for our failed system. I’m sure there are all kinds of special circumstances you could use for every country that would change its life expectancy. It’s also funny that Fox News would use what is primarily gun homicides to justify our terrible healthcare system.

What About Economic Inequality?

It’s possible that our homicide rate is so high because we have so much economic inequality. Would Fox News be in favor of making our economic system more fair in the name of justifying our terrible healthcare system?

Does the United States really have a worse healthcare system than Costa Rica (ranked 38 in quality and 50 in cost)? For most people, probably not. For people in the bottom half of the economy, almost certainly.

Conservatives are so cute! At least when they try to figure out why no one likes their party. It just never occurs to them that it might be, you know, their policies. Look: conservatives like their policies. It is the party of the rich that does the work of the rich. And a bunch of Christians and racists. Conservatives don’t talk about the racists for a couple of reasons. One is that it is who they are. Another is that they don’t believe in racism. Except reverse racism, where the powerless make the powerful cry. But that’s just part of doing the work of the rich. Let us say no more about racism!

But Christians? There’s something there. And Jonah Goldberg thinks he understands why Asians are not voting for the Republican Party. Back in December he wrote, The GOP: Not a Club for Christians. That’s an aspirational title, because Goldberg fully admits that the Republican Party really does act like a Christian group:

Now Goldberg doesn’t take offense to this, because he understand that he is one of them. After all, he’s the speaker. But what about a Jew or a Buddhist or a Muslim who just happened to be in the audience? He might feel like an outsider.

There is something to this, but again, this is just tinkering around the edges. The real problem is policy. But even on this issue, Goldberg shows the biggest problem the conservative movement has going forward: rigidity. He writes, “The challenge now is to figure out how to talk in a way that doesn’t cause decent and dedicated Christians to pull in like a turtle, while also appealing to non-Judeo-Christians and the nonreligious.” Even apart from the fact that all he’s talking about is “appearance,” this just isn’t going to happen. As I’ve argued before, Christians in the United States do not want equality. “Happy Holidays!” is not good enough because it doesn’t explicitly claim that Christianity (unlike all those other religions) is the Truth.

But its even worse than this. The Republican commitment to evangelical Christians dates back to Ronald Reagan. There has never been a good marriage between the libertarian and social conservative wings of the party. In fact, they, more than any other groups, ought to belong to different parties. And the Republican Party really can’t move forward in a meaningful way until they resolve this conflict. That requires offending a fair percentage of “decent and dedicated Christians.”

And that’s what I started with. There are three major categories of people who vote for Republicans: rich, social conservative, and racist. I think the third category is quickly fading—or at least I want to think that. The social conservatives still dominate who votes for the Republicans. This is why the Tea Party started in opposition to corporate welfare and the bank bailout but ended as a bunch of deficit scolds who get abortion absolutists elected.

But I repeat: conservatives really are adorable as they scurry around looking for something easy they can do to fix their demographic problems. To misquote Churchill: “Republicans can always be counted on to do the right thing… After they have exhausted all other possibilities.” I’m thinking 4-6 years, but even longer if the Democrats screw up and hand them the White House in 2016. Until then, it will be more attempts to game the electoral college, pretend to be “compassionate,” and welcome other faiths.

Scurry along, little party!

I happened upon a page for the TED Talks where they try to answer the question, Is TED Elitist? The thing about elitism is that those who suffer from it don’t normally understand what the issue is. And TED is no exception. Here is their answer to the question: “Is TED elitist? In a nutshell, no. It certainly attracts people who are regarded as elite in their area of expertise. But the word ‘elitist’ implies exclusionary, and we’ve taken many steps in recent years to open up the live conferences to as broad an audience as possible.”

No one is arguing that TED (or any other group) should grab people off the street and put them on stage. “And now Homeless Bob will tell us what he thinks about recent advances in radiation therapy.” Nor is anyone saying that the talks are not widely available. Although it is worth remembering that in notable cases, TED has refused to release talks, and that does have to do with TED’s elitism.

What makes TED elitist is how they push ideas that comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. My favorite example of this is Mike Rowe of the show Dirty Jobs talking about how kids would be happier if they just accepted crummy jobs. You see, Rowe has been around a bunch of people doing crummy jobs and they were all happy. I might point out that he is around them only when the film crew is and people are actively paying attention and caring about the work they do. But the issue is deeper than that. In the one example he gave, the man owned his own farm or business (it wasn’t clear); he wasn’t some day laborer or someone working at McDonald’s. So the fact of the matter is that a young person is no more likely to succeed at these dirty jobs than are at anything else. To top it all off, should a celebrity worth $35 million really be telling kids to forsake their dreams?

This is what I wrote back in August:

TED Talks are geared toward the elites and what their interests are. Basically, it is a series by, for, and of Michael Bloomberg. And there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is the implication that these talks don’t funnel the truth into a very narrow Overton Window: that occupied by the mainstream media—socially liberal but economically quite conservative.

Of course, the ultimate example of TED elitism is how the group tried to censor Nick Hanauer’s talk on income inequality. I’m sure that TED felt very comfortable booking Hanauer. He’s a billionaire, after all. But then he talked about how the rich are not job creators. The horror! Eventually TED was forced to release the video. But if Hanauer’s video had been how the rich create jobs, the video would have been released with no thought at all. And that is why TED is an elitist group. It isn’t because they feature elite speakers. It isn’t because they don’t distribute video of their talks to the prols. It is because they provide a megaphone for the interests of the elite.

Afterword

If you haven’t seen it, check out Hanauer’s excellent speech. Only an elitist could have thought this talk was controversial:

TED Talk images used under Fair Use.