I’ve already written an overview about all this nonsense, Trump’s Huge Tax Cut for the Rich — of Course. It turns out that Trump’s tax plan is just a bigger version of Jeb Bush’s. And Marco Rubio’s. Basically, Trump’s tax plan is just another Republican tax cut for the rich. And look: Grover Norquist Blesses Trump Tax Plan. I had read somewhere that Norquist had seen the plan before it was announced, and that he had given his blessing then. So there is nothing surprising in any of this. Donald Trump is just another Republican loud mouth with absolutely nothing to offer.

But Dean Baker wrote a really insightful article on Tuesday, Trump World and the Fed. He focused on one aspect of the plan: the supply side voodoo. When Jeb Bush announced his plan, he claimed that it was going to increase economic growth to a 4% rate. No economists took that number seriously. Even the conservative economists who Bush has on the payroll distanced themselves from that. We haven’t seen much over 3% since the 1960s. But since Trump has to do everything bigger, he said his tax cuts would produce 6% growth. And why not? If Jeb Bush can get away with pulling a number out of the air, why can’t they all?

Baker’s point is that the Federal Reserve would never allow that kind of growth. As it is, we have anemic growth, low employment-to-population rate, and no real wage growth — and the Fed is just itching to raise interest rates. Baker noted, “In this case, we would expect to see the Fed raise interest rates sharply as they saw the Trump tax cuts boosting growth. Higher interest rates would slow house buying and new construction, discourage car sales, and put a crimp in both public and private investment.” And that, of course, is assuming that Trump’s plan worked as he claims (which of course it wouldn’t).

There is a broader point here. The Fed now sees its job as making sure that millions of Americans are involuntarily unemployed and that all Americans are stuck with stagnant wages. That’s not how they would put it, of course. They would say they are heading off inflation — despite the fact that they haven’t manage to even meet their 2% inflation target since the financial crisis. But regardless of their reasons, they point remains that whatever the economic policy, the Fed is determined to stop it if it actually works.

The last two economic booms were due to the Federal Reserve. The Fed destroyed the economy in the late 1970s to head off what was actually high inflation. And then when it lowered rates, it brought on the boom of the 1980s, which people wrongly give Reagan credit for. And then in the 1990s, Clinton’s economic policies were mostly fine, but it was only because Alan Greenspan was an iconoclast and allowed unemployment to get below 4% that the boom happened. It’s interesting to note that one of the big dissenting voices at that time — calling for him to raise interest rates — was current Fed Chair Janet Yellen. (Did you hear that Yellen just announced that the Fed will, in fact, raise rates by the end of the year? Way to go! Keep the rich happy! Screw the poor!)

So we are in this situation where we need two things to happen if the economy is really to start working for all Americans in the usual liberal, market oriented, way. First, we need good (or lucky) economic policy. Second, we need the Fed to allow it. So we have to break through two plutocratic barriers. This is why I am more and more convinced that we have to give up on the capitalist system as we now find it. It is self-corrupting. The more money people have, the more influence they buy. That isn’t the only problem with capitalism, but it is one of the biggest we now face. And it is one with no solution.

You can’t be connected enough to read this blog and not have heard about the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College. I don’t think I’m at all alone in feeling like I’m suffering from learned helplessness. It’s not this particular shooting, which mightn’t have been changed by anything. But clearly, our guns laws do need to be changed. Yet we don’t do anything. Or rather, the political environment is such that the most reasonable steps to making guns less of a threat in our society are met with hysteria by the pro-gun nuts.

I know people who are gun fanciers. Most of them do not have any problem with any of the gun regulations that have been proposed in the last ten years. Yet when it comes to voting, they don’t dive into the policies. They just see who the NRA says is “evil” and who is “good,” and they vote based upon that. It doesn’t matter in the least that the “evil” candidate probably agrees with them more than the “good” candidate.

And, of course, there is the problem of voters. I’ve been seeing the “I’m NRA and I Vote!” bumper stickers since I was a kid, and it’s very true. The same thing can be said of conservatives generally. There are a lot of people who are outraged by these kinds of attacks. They answer the pollsters’ questions about common sense gun regulations. And then on election day, they don’t show up to the polls. During the Colorado recall, state senator John Morse was recalled by just 319 votes for the crime of passing hugely popular legislation.

Again: this is not about mass shootings. The mass shootings are just a reminder. There are roughly 11,000 gun homicides each year in the US. That’s 30 per day. Suicides are even worse. Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp put together, Deaths From Gun Violence vs Deaths From Terrorism, in One Chart. It’s a boring chart. In 2001, there were four times as many Americans murdered with guns as were murdered by terrorism. But the rest of the years since have been pretty much like the last year of data (2011): 653 times as many people murdered with guns as by terrorism. Maybe that’s not a fair comparison. But if you look at firearm related death rates, the only countries worse than the US are places like Colombia and Swaziland. The closest advanced economy is Finland, with a rate of one-third ours. Ours is almost five times that of the most obvious comparison, Canada.

The question remains the same: what are we going to do about this? And, sadly, the answer is the same: nothing. There are lots of problems in America. Far more people die because of economic inequality and all the things that go along with it. People die in wars — and many other things that conservatives are far more keen on. The answer to all these things is the same: voting. If people voted as much in off-year (and off off-year) elections as they do in presidential elections, this country would be in far better shape. And it would make the Republican Party far more reasonable. We can’t be like the people in The Daily Show segment: non-voters who are slightly embarrassed with a self-deprecating chuckle. Those people should have been crimson in their public shame. (In fairness, the one guy got pretty close to crimson.)

You may have heard about CJ Pearson. He’s the 13 year old African American who spouts right wing talking points on YouTube. Conservatives love that: kids who are able to parrot the arguments they hear on Rush Limbaugh. And the fact that this was coming from an African America, well, that was just too delicious to turn down. In fact, Ted Cruz made him his youth-outreach chairman. But the conservative movement has turned on the poor young man. It turns out that he’s been involved in a number of scams — and I’m not even referring to Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

I suspect that he was outed by the conservative movement itself because he’s black. It’s not that conservative journalists don’t trust African Americans. It’s just that they were on the alert for being punked. It’s the same way that I was when I heard that long-time abortion rights opponent Claire Conner had changed her political orientation. As with Conner, usually when someone says that she has had a change of heart, she’s being honest. But you want to be sure. And when you are talking about a young man who comes from a group that the Republicans have treated so badly, you’d be extra cautious.

Just the same, what is it that Pearson has done wrong? He pulled a hoax trying to show that the Obama Twitter account blocked him. He staged a Twitter argument between himself and someone who was supposedly a racist Obama supporter, but was, in fact, Pearson himself. These are all totally in the tradition of James O’Keefe, who is not only still a hero in the conservative movement, but taken seriously by the mainstream media. I suspect the only difference is that Pearson’s scams were too easy to figure out. It took a little time to unmask O’Keefe’s tricks, and by that time, they had been hugely successful.

Brian Beutler noted another uncomfortable comparison, Carly Fiorina Abuses the Truth Just Like a Teenage Conservative Hoaxer. Fiorina either lied or was spectacularly misinformed at the last Republican debate when she claimed to have seen a particularly gruesome video where Planned Parenthood was keeping a fetus outside the womb alive so they could harvest its brain. As Beutler said, “In fact, basically every factual claim… is untrue.” Yet far from abandoning her, the conservative movement has circled the wagons for her. Why would that be?

Beutler’s answer is just that the stakes are high for Fiorina and they aren’t for Pearson. But I have a feeling, they wouldn’t go to the mat for Ben Carson. But don’t get the wrong idea: I don’t think that has anything at all to do with race. Rather, I think a lot of conservatives have it in mind that Fiorina is going to be the vice-presidential candidate. They think of her as their secret anti-Hillary weapon, because everyone knows that women just want to vote for another woman, and they don’t care who the woman is or what the position is. Nominating a clearly unqualified anti-feminist woman for vice-president will be just as good as nominating an extremely qualified feminist woman for president.

Ultimately, like all things with Republicans these days, it is all about power. Truth doesn’t matter; power does. If Carly Fiorina says “2 + 2 = 5,” well, it does — as long as she is part of the Republican strategy to take control of the White House. And the fact that the Republican Party has gotten to this point is very troubling. I no longer think that having responsibility will actually make them responsible. And they know from experience that as badly as they may screw up, it will only cost them one election cycle — if that.

David Brooks wrote an astounding column last Friday, The American Idea and Today’s GOP. He’s either incredibly ignorant or deeply deceptive. His argument is that Donald Trump and others are destroying the conservative tradition in America because it has always been forward looking. He noted that in this way it is different from conservatism in other places where it is all about holding on to the history of the place. But if that’s what American conservatives are, then what have the American liberals been doing? Have the last 250 years been a battle about how we are going to rush to the future?

There’s no way of saying, because Brooks never mentioned Democrats in that context — or liberals at all. Apparently, America is the conservative movement. That’s how he can write something like this, “From Lincoln to Reagan to Bush, the market has been embraced for being dynamic and progressive.” Yes, there’s a real continuum there from the man who headed an abolitionist party to the man who gave his first speech as the Republican nominee for president about “states’ rights” at the site of where three civil rights workers were lynched. And really, is that what the Republican Party is? Lincoln — a 120 years — Reagan — 20 yeas — Bush?!

But the big question is who exactly were the people who thought they could just take the land of native peoples because they had the power too? The ones who later committed genocide against them? And who were the ones who practiced and defended slavery? I’m not talking parties here, because obviously, over time, things get mixed up. But what movement was John Calhoun part of? Was he a liberal? A conservative? Or just someone we have to throw aside as an outlier? That last option seems to be Brooks’ choice, because he certainly doesn’t engage with it.

If we assume that modern conservatives are not the descendants of Calhoun, who are? Who are the people who fight against every change? Who are the people who think that things are just fine the way they are? Who are the people who think that it is God’s will that the poor are poor and the weak are weak? Because these are the things that Calhoun stood for — the things that he believed. Today, it would be hard to find someone who would make the same arguments for slavery. But the same arguments are being made to preserve less outrageous injustices. And unless I’m just really dense, the answer is very obviously found in the majority of the Republican Party.

I get so tired of hearing people like Brooks complaining that the conservative movement has gone off track. There are two strains of American thought that currently find themselves wedded in the Republican Party. One is the Alexander Hamilton strain of business and profits before people. Brooks mentioned him, because that’s the part that isn’t embarrassing — the part that history hasn’t completely repudiated. But the other strain is very much John Calhoun. And Brooks knows that. What’s more, he knows that without the fearful bigots, there’s no way the Republican Party would ever win an election anywhere. And if he doesn’t know that, he has no right to be printed in WorldNetDaily, much less The New York Times.