Matt Bruenig wrote, The Story of Eric Harwood. It’s a very sympathetic telling of the story of a 47-year-old working class man who now finds himself disabled with difficulty getting SSI because of some understandable mistakes. It’s very sad and I do hope the whole thing works out for him. He deserves to get disability insurance and live a dignified life.

I’ve written a lot about this kind of thing in the past. Every time some politician starts going on about fraud in government programs, I know what the net result will be: loads of people who clearly deserve help won’t get it just so we can stop a handful of people who probably don’t. But this is the conservative way, is it not? It’s better to let children starve than allow an able bodied surfer to eat lobster at government expense. Or, in another area, it is better to stop millions of people from voting rather than allow one ineligible person to vote.

It turns out that Eric Harwood is an ultra-conservative. He’s hoping that the Republicans will nominate Ted Cruz and Donald Trump; he doesn’t care which one of them is on the top of the ticket. Now I am very tired of hearing liberals complain that conservatives don’t vote in their own best interests. They do vote in their own best interests — as they see them. And Harwood is an entirely typical conservative. I run into them all the time.

Let’s suppose that Eric Harwood gets his SSI — as he clearly should. He will then almost certainly spend a great deal of time watching Fox News and listening to hate radio. He will continue to rail against all those undeserving people sucking off the tit of the American tax payer. The fact that he is doing exactly the same thing will cause no cognitive dissonance in him. And that’s because he is one of the deserving ones. He isn’t some libertarian who thinks the government shouldn’t exist. He just thinks that it should take care of the people who deserve it.

If you look at Harwood’s life story, you can see how the government has helped him along the way. He went to trade school to become a locksmith. That’s great, but it almost certainly involved government programs that made it more affordable if not paying for it straight out. He apparently lost $30,000 in wealth when his condo was foreclosed on. Let’s consider that. I assume a condo in Nevada would cost about $150,000. So let’s say his mortgage was $120,000. In 2005, mortgage rates were around 6%. That comes out to roughly $7,000 per year that he got to write off. He only had the place for three years, so we can figure that roughly $7,000 of that $30,000 that he lost was a direct payment from the government. (Also, it is almost certain that the $30,000 is just what he paid over the three year, so it wasn’t wasted money; he would have had to pay that amount in rent if he hadn’t purchased the condo.)

I know that people don’t think about things like this. But when you slice and dice the world up into the worthy and the unworthy, you are going to find that other people place you in the unworthy category. So now he’s going to vote for Trump or Cruz, thinking that they will fix the nation in such a way that he gets everything he thinks he deserves and other people don’t get anything because he doesn’t think they are deserving. That’s what he’s voting for. He is very much voting in his own interest. It’s just that he’s foolish in thinking that the Republican Party’s platform puts him in the deserving camp.

But I hope liberal policy wins the day and Eric Harwood gets the help that he needs and deserves.

Noah Smith is one of those super smart guys who also often annoys me. On Tuesday, he wrote, Don’t Blame Uncertainty for the Slow Recovery. Now, I am in complete agreement with him on this issue. But it bugs me when people take clearly silly ideas far too seriously. And this is one of those cases, although I’m glad that Smith is out there setting the record straight for all the fools who believe such hogwash.

The “uncertainty” hypothesis is that businesses have not invested since the financial crisis because they are afraid of the uncertainty of government policy. By this silly idea, businesses were frozen in terror, not knowing if they should buy new equipment for fear that the top marginal tax rate might go up. So companies were just sitting on piles of case waiting until they were absolutely certain what the future would be. If this sounds absurd, that’s because it is.

There are a lot of economists who I greatly admire. And even the ones I disagree with are brilliant in their way. But most of them don’t have much of a clue what it is like to run an actual business. Growing up, my parents owned a gas stations then a convenience store and finally a construction company. In addition, I’ve had micro-businesses all my life. And I spent a year working a business at the San Jose full-time flea market — the closest you will ever come to a perfectly free market. All of these experiences have colored the way I see business.

Rule number one in business is that it is all about uncertainty. Running a business is a matter of dealing with uncertainty. If you are fretting about how quickly you will be able to depreciate a piece of equipment that you buy next year, you have too much time on your hands. Actual business people generally won’t buy anything or hire anyone unless they absolutely, positively have no other choice. And they certainly don’t think in terms of the taxes they will pay on profits they haven’t made yet. And it isn’t just little old me saying this. I’ve heard the same things from Nick Hanauer and Warren Buffett.

If business were about certainty, then wouldn’t everyone have a business? And it doesn’t get any less absurd if you focus on political uncertainty. We live in a democracy. Because of the way elections are staggered, we get changes every year. Even at the federal level, we get different congresses every two years and potentially new presidents every four years. Change is a given. What those who have spent the last seven years run around complaining about uncertainty are really talking about is that they don’t like the policies on offer. It wasn’t uncertainty that they were unhappy about. Obamacare was gradually put into place and it was very clear exactly what was going to happen and when. The real complaint was that the policy was going to destroy business, because they didn’t like that policy.

We all know why this recovery has been so slow. Paul Krugman put together the following graph that explains everything we need to know. It compares the number of government jobs that were created after the last two recessions: one under George W Bush and the other under Obama. Every other recession looks just like Bush, but under Obama — because of Republican intransigence — the government has made the recession worse. This is really an amazing graph. (Note: the spike is temporary workers for the Constitutionally required 2010 census.)

So I’m glad to see that there is actual data that shows that uncertainty is the hogwash it always obviously was. But the original work was only taken seriously because there were people who wanted to push the idea for ideological reasons. And this new paper won’t stop those people from continuing to claim that the problem is Obama and all his newfangled ideas.