I wasn’t going to write about it. And the truth is, I’m going to try to make this short. When Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, A Note on the Soda Tax Controversy, I figured I’d let it slide. After all, at this point, I do a search for “Sanders” on anything Krugman writes, and if I find it, I don’t read the article. Or at least I try to. I usually manage to read at least half the article and it is usually nonsense. It’s what I always say, and what neuroscience proves: we make up our minds and then we come up with arguments to justify ideas that might as well have come from our guts.

But then I noted this morning that Jonathan Chait (who might as well be Paul Krugman when it comes to any discussion of Sanders) wrote, Why Is Bernie Sanders Making Right-Wing Arguments Against Taxing Soda? Right-wing arguments? What could they be?! Well, it turns out it is only one argument and that it is only “right-wing.” That is to say, it’s right-wing in Chait-land where everything is either right-wing or communism if Jonathan Chait doesn’t agree with it.

For those of you not following it, Hillary Clinton wants a soda tax on these sugary drink so that America gets healthier. It’s not a bad idea. I’m not necessarily against it. Call me agnostic. And call me agnostic because there is another side to the issue. Bernie Sanders is against this tax because it is regressive. You can see what a right-wing argument he’s making there. That is: you can see it if you have Jonathan Chait’s eyes that allow him to throw out pejoratives for anything that he doesn’t happen to agree with. It’s interesting that when Michael Bloomberg wanted to ban soda in anything larger than 16 ounce containers, Jonathan Chait ridiculed it.

As Chait noted, the fact that such a tax would hit the poor hardest would probably make the tax most effective, since the rich spend more of their money on pricey Gamay Beaujolais. But it occurs to me, a liberal, that are ways to make everyone more healthy that don’t require doing it on the backs of the poor. It is only because Chait and Krugman and Clinton are all wedded to neoliberal approaches to social problems. Global warming?! How about a carbon tax! Obesity?! How about a soda tax! Both of these are regressive, but neoliberals don’t care because they aren’t poor.

And would it surprise anyone to know that the poor actually consume less junk food than their richer counterparts? But it seems that the modern Democrat has but one tool to deal with problem. So when Bernie Sanders isn’t for a neoliberal “solution” to a problem he acknowledges, then he’s “right-wing.”

I happen to know that Sanders is for a far better solution to the problem of bad eating by the poor: more food stamps. Am I the only one who remembers the article in Mother Jones two years ago, People on Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us? The issue is poverty, not “incentives.” And people like Chait, Krugman, and Clinton think the issue is training the poor, because it’s their own damned fault.

But why listen to me? I am apparently “right-wing”!

I’ve written too many articles about how ridiculous the Clinton campaign has been with regard to Bernie Sanders. Apparently, I have a super power that allows me to read a poll — a power that is apparently unavailable to the Clinton campaign. Another of my super powers is the ability to remember all the way back to 2008. My take away from that primary was that the Democratic base really didn’t like having to choose between any of the three main candidates, but most especially between Obama and Clinton. So 2016 has represented a great opportunity for these people to have the best of all worlds.

So it’s been really annoying to watch the Clinton campaign never take the high road and always act as though it was in a very close match. But maybe it’s just me and my age. I find Sanders supporters very silly much of the time too. The other day, I saw a short video from The Young Turks, and they were discussing how it was a good thing that the Republicans looked set to nominate Trump, because he was the only one that Clinton could beat. What do you even say to such nonsense?! That’s the kind of thing I expect from Fox News where it is taken as a certainty that Hillary Clinton will be in prison by June.

But the implication of the complaints coming from the Clinton campaign seems to be that Sanders should just know that he’s an issue candidate and that he should therefore not hurt the obvious eventual nominee. Now, I called this race back in February — because of my super powers of poll reading and history remembering. But the truth is that the race is rather tight nationally. Real Clear Politics has Clinton ahead by just 4 percentage points. But there are a few things to keep in mind with this.

First, 4 percentage points is really quite a lot. That’s what Obama beat Romney by. What’s more, in all the polls during the last month, Clinton has been right at 50%. And if you assume that she would get roughly 50% of the undecided vote (And you should!) she is well above 50%. This is a race between two figures in the Democratic Party that are both well liked. It isn’t a surprise that the race would tighten over time.

The other issue is that the national figures don’t matter at all. I don’t know if anyone remembers the obscure presidential election back in 2000. During that there was all kinds of controversy about who had won in Florida, even though one of the men had clearly won the majority of votes nationwide. I still get the question, “Can Sanders win the nomination?” In the sense that anything could happen (a humanity destroying asteroid hitting the Earth this calendar year), then yes, Sanders can win the nomination. But reasonably: no, Sanders cannot win the nomination.

Now I keep hearing that Sanders is hurting Clinton by staying in the race. Of course, the same people have been calling for him to step down for months. But the Clinton campaign thinks that Sanders is hurting Clinton in the general election. That might be the case. But I have a hard time taking it seriously for two reasons.

First, Sanders being in the race has made Hillary Clinton a far better candidate. If she had just floated through this campaign with only Martin O’Malley to fight with, she would have been a much worse candidate once the general election started. So the Clinton campaign really ought to balance out the good things that Sanders has done for them compared to the minor damage he has done. And it is minor damage. Who thinks that the Republicans wouldn’t have tried to attack her on her Wall Street connections?

The second reason is demonstrated very well in an article by Brian Beutler yesterday, Democrats Should Stop Sweating Sanders’ Attacks on Clinton. He notes how Clinton was far more vicious toward Obama when she was losing in 2008. For example:

But again, I think the issue is that the Clinton campaign just takes it as granted that Sanders could never win the primary. So it was totally okay for her to say she should stay in the race because who knows what information might come out about Obama. But it isn’t okay for Sanders to do the same thing because the Clinton campaign doesn’t think he’s a viable candidate.

Just to be clear: Clinton will win the nomination. Sanders will stay in the race. Clinton is not going to be noticeably harmed by Sanders’ attacks. Once Clinton is the nominee, Sanders will support and campaign for her. There’s nothing special about this campaign. Except for all the whining.

The graph above is taken from Jared Bernstein’s article in The Washington Post, A Graphical Assault on Supply-Side Tax Cuts. I had to change it quite a lot to make it fit the format of this site, but the original graph included the text, “Note: The data in this chart are not real.” That’s important to remember. This is what we would see in economic data if supply-side economics worked.

The graph shows that as you decrease the top marginal tax rate, the growth of the economy increases. And on the other side of things, as you increase the tax rate, the growth of the economy decreases. This is really very simple. And we hear almost nothing but this kind of supply-side economics from conservative politicians. They claim that their tax cuts for the rich are going to stimulate the economy.

This is the argument of the supposedly reasonable Republican, John Kasich. His vague tax plan is supposed to create a 3.9% growth rate. The last time we saw this kind of sustained growth rate was during the dot-com bubble. But it is amusing that Kasich offers such an exact number. Jonathan Chait mocked it perfectly, it is “way more responsible than those crazy 4 percent growth promises made by Jeb Bush!”

But there’s a larger issue that I’ve been talking about for a while. Who cares what happens to GDP? We are all aware of the following graph from Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel. My question continues to be: why do we still pretend that we are living in that 1948-1973 period? Productivity does not help out workers, so why should workers continue to care that GDP is going up?

Jared Bernstein provided a counter to the first supply-side economics fantasy graph. He did it with six graphs of actual data. He looked at: employment, investment, productivity, real per capita GDP, real median income, and real per capita revenue. In all cases, the graphs show the same thing: a small correlation in the opposite direction. That is to say that in as much as the data indicate anything, it indicates that higher top marginal tax rates are good for the economy.

Here is the data for real per capita GDP growth — pretty much what the fake data above was supposed to represent:

Bernstein is clear that this doesn’t prove that raising top tax rates will improve the economy, “But the fact that the simple empirical record is uniformly hostile to the supply-side story should put the burden of proof squarely on those arguing that supply-side tax cuts will be pro-growth.” And he ends with a nice comparison of the employment growth in Kansas versus that in the surrounding states since Kansas got on board the supply-side train and provided massive tax cuts to the rich. The result: Kansas has seen 0.8% growth while the nearby states have seen 1.7% growth — over twice as much.

Like most conservative policy, supply-side economics lives on because conservatives want it to live on. Every even remotely good idea that conservatives have had has been co-opted by the Democratic Party. So the Republicans really are left with nothing but bad ideas — at least when it comes to the economy. But supply-side economics is just comical. But as long as the media continue to allow politicians to get by with these outrageous claims, we will continue to hear the claims.

Even after his ridiculous claims about 3.9% growth due to tax cuts to the rich and unstated deregulation to The Washington Post, they wrote, Republicans Don’t Like Kasich Because he Sounds Like Obama. As Dean Baker noted, the paper was making a claim about Kasich’s tone, not his policies. Of course, reporters don’t actually know what kind of temperament that politicians have. “They should be sharing this information with readers so that they will understand that Mr Kasich is making promises that are out of touch with reality.” Instead, we hear about how calm he is.

Meanwhile, he’s allowed to use supply-side economics to say that he will growth the economy at 3.9% per year based on no evidence at all.

Brian Beutler wrote an interesting article yesterday, Anti-Trump Conservatives Are Embracing the Liberal Critique of the Right. But you get a better idea about what it is about from the subtitle, “And they will disavow every word of it on the first day of the general election.” This, of course, is one of the most entertaining reasons for wanting Donald Trump to win the nomination: it’s going to be great to watch Republicans tie themselves in knots explaining why it is that the demagogue who was totally unacceptable is still the better general election choice than Hillary Clinton.

Of course, as Beutler noted, there aren’t that many Republicans making a real argument against Trump because to do so would be to make an argument against themselves. How is it that Donald Trump is so different from the other Republicans? For a while, I did think that Trump was a real populist. And then he came out with his tax plan. And what do you know?! It was just like Jeb Bush’s tax plan and Marco Rubio’s tax plan — except more so. It was a big giveaway to the rich. There is nothing that more defines a modern Republican.

So what are Republicans going to say against Donald Trump? Almost none of them are willing to say that his tax plan is unreasonable because there is nothing in it that is qualitatively different than what is Republican orthodoxy. In fact, the worst things in it are what Republicans love most. It gets rid of the estate tax and lowers the capital gains tax. The estate tax cut doesn’t just help the rich, it helps only the super rich. The capital gains tax cut isn’t as bad, but it would be a highly regressive cut.

So instead of substantive attacks on him, we mostly get stuff like this:

Now this is a liberal critique. And as Beutler noted, “But if and when the Republican campaign against Hillary Clinton descends into misogyny, you will hear these same conservatives dismiss accusations of sexism as unfounded liberal intimidation.” Indeed, Frances Langum over at Crooks & Liars brought my attention to a hilarious letter sent out by a pro-Cruz group to Reince Priebus. The letter itself is about how he better not allow anyone but Ted Cruz to be nominated if Donald Trump doesn’t get the necessary votes. But it included this bit of delusion:

Other than Trump being more vulgar (and we always knew this about him), he’s no different from Cruz. At least Donald Trump has some amount of charisma. Compare that to the fact that, Ted Cruz Doesn’t Believe You Have the Right to Masturbate. And then, I like Steve M’s analysis of Cruz’s notion about states and marriage, Ted Cruz: States Should Be Able to Ban Interracial Marriages. Ted Cruz: moderate!

Let’s look at one of the vaunted reformocons: Reihan Salam. Yesterday at Slate, he wrote, Why I’m Voting for Ted Cruz. And his only substantive policy point is that he is just as much of a xenophobe as Donald Trump, but that he doesn’t think that Trump is up to the challenge. That is: Ted Cruz would be a more effective xenophobe. (Obviously, Salam doesn’t put it that way.)

But Salam’s other big reason for voting for Cruz is that it would be good for the Republican Party. Fair enough. But do you think that Reihan Salam — who is, again, a reformocon who Ryan Cooper gave a 7/10 on his reformish scale — will sit out the general election if Donald Trump is nominated? No, like pretty much every Republican everywhere, he will get behind him. Sure, Trump’s an authoritarian who doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s better than anyone from the other side.

I’ve only ever seen two reasons why the Republican establishment dislikes Donald Trump. The first is that he’s too blunt: he says things that are only supposed to be implied. The second is that they think he can’t win. Neither of those things will make them abandon him in the general election.