It seems that Republican presidential candidates are very unhappy with the debate questions. It’s indicative of the insular nature of the conservative movement in this country that they think any non-laudatory questions from the press are a clear example of the bias of the “liberal media.” I was especially struck by Ted Cruz’s question during the debate, “How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?” And what would those substantive issues be? As Brian Beutler made clear, the moderators at CNBC asked very substantive questions. By and large, the Republicans dodged them.

Let’s think about this for a moment. CNBC is a conservative network. During the whole debate, the only question about inequality was given to Mike Huckabee, because he claims to want to do something about it. Trump, Bush, and Rubio were never asked about the huge increase in inequality that their budget proposals would increase. There were no hard or “gotcha” questions for these candidates. What’s more, they were allowed to not answer the questions they were asked. So if they wanted more “substantive issues” to talk about, they could have talked about them and no one would have minded.

Well, one group would have been unhappy: the people who Cruz claimed wanted to hear about the substantive issues. The main things that got the audience excited were attacks on the media. They weren’t interested in hearing about economics or foreign affairs or much of anything. And that’s nothing new. They love Trump and Carson because they are bigots. And they love it when the media is attacked. But that’s the extent of it. It comes back to Corey Robin’s idea that conservatism isn’t so much a positive movement as a negative movement: it is defined by what it is against, not what it is for.

Being aggrieved is the primary motivator for conservative voters. This is why it is so frustrating to argue with conservatives. I’ve talked a lot about this, and I have come to think that this aggrieve mentality is the basis of it. I can usually convince a conservative of anything about economics — and most things regarding social issues. (Exceptions: death penalty, Islam.) But when it comes to voting, they always run back to the Republican Party because they know that it represents their anger at the world. The GOP may push policy that they don’t like, but they know that it will do everything to hurt the right people.

So all this business of pretending to be hurt by elites is just pandering to the base. The Republican Party has a dual constituency. They have the angry base that must be pandered to — but not in a substantive way. So they need to complain that the media are not asking about “substantive issues” even though no one involved is interested in that. And then they have the rich base that must be pandered to in a very substantive way: with policy meant to line the pockets of the rich. So now we have to listen to the Republicans whining about how badly they are treated and how well the Democrats are treated. If I hadn’t been raised on American politics, I would consider it unbelievable.

Martin Longman had the right reaction to last week’s Republican debate, Why We Can’t Have Sanity. It’s not about the crazies at the debate; it’s about the one guy there who seems to hearken back to the Republican Party when it wasn’t totally crazy: John Kasich. He did indeed come out of the gate strong with his (implicit) attack on Ben Carson with his absurd notion that a 10% tithe is all that we need to find the government. But as Longman pointed out, “There’s a bigger problem than the one that Kasich outlines. And that problem is that even Kasich is out of his fucking mind…”

The issue at hand is the “balanced budget amendment” that is so loved by the economically illiterate. The fundamental problem with it is that it is a recipe for making the business cycle even worse than it is. But people like the idea of it. In 2009, even Obama used this incredibly stupid analogy, “All across America, families are tightening their belts and making hard choices. Now, Washington must show that same sense of responsibility.” It’s a moral argument not an economic one. And it isn’t just wrong; it is evil. It does exactly the opposite of what should be done.

Paul Krugman puts the issue this way: my spending is your income. So in the macro-economy, my not spending money causes you to have less money to pay down your debts. This is the paradox of thrift. And it has only be understood since about the time that we’ve had economies. So consider what would have happened in 2009 if the government had indeed balanced its budget. That would have meant a huge reduction in spending because so many people were out of work that tax receipts were low. The reduction in spending would have thrown even more people out of work. This, of course, would have required that the government spend even less money, throwing more people out of work.

Conservatives and libertarians will claim that this is okay. The money that the government is not borrowing would be available to the private sector to borrow. In a depressed economy, the private sector does not want to invest. This is more or less the definition of a depressed economy. But you don’t have to think about it this way. Ever since 2009, the government has been able to borrow at incredibly low rates — often at lower rates than the inflation rate. (That right: investors were paying the government to hold on to their money!) Right now, the US government can borrow money for 30 years for just 2.86%.

What all this means is that the private sector is not borrowing money. If it were, then interest rates would go up. And because of the paradox of thrift, if the government cut its spending in a depressed economy, there would almost certainly be less private sector demand for money, and interest rates would go down even further. The only argument that conservatives have in this case is that the private sector would be so encouraged by what the government had done that they would have “confidence” and start spending. But this just doesn’t happen. Look at Europe over the last five years.

The other side of this is that when the economy was doing well, the government could spend more. Obviously, this is a recipe for disaster in terms of what things would be spent upon. Clearly, there are more needy people during a bust. During a boom, there isn’t. So what would the spending go to? I’m thinking ExxonMobile. Regardless, more government spending during a boom would just accelerate the boom and probably be inflationary.

So the balanced budget amendment would do exactly the opposite of what the government should do from an economic standpoint. But people like John Kasich push it because it sounds good. So he can come off as the reasonable candidate, even though, as Longman pointed out: “a constitutional amendment to compel Congress to pass a balanced budget is the stupidest goddamned idea in existence.” Of course, it is an idea that all the other Republicans are in favor of. And one that New Democrats like Bill Clinton also love. But this is an idea that the press will never counter because all the right kinds of people are for it.

On this day in 1896, National Geographic printed its first ever image of a bare female breast. That’s of some interest because when I was young, that seemed to be the whole point of the magazine: to provide boys with the opportunity to see what breasts looked like. It was only later that I realized that it actually did some of the best photojournalism ever. The last time I checked, it was still a great magazine.

But I do find the disconnect strange. It is certain that the people at National Geographic understood this. There is no question but that most societies don’t have the breast phobia that we do. So breasts are not usually hidden away. And it would be deceptive to present these women covered up. But I suspect that the reason that the society was okay with it was almost entirely racist. It was all right to have partly naked people because they were somehow less than human — in the sense that the apex of humanity was Victorian dress and behavior and mores.

For the record, the image is of a Zulu bride and groom on their wedding day. They don’t look any more happy than people getting married today. I really do think that people should get rid of photographers in their weddings. I don’t think I’ve been to a wedding where a photographer was not staging reality rather than chronicling it. At least this couple was made miserable for a good cause.

Early this month, I wrote, Global Warming and the Insanity of the GOP. In it, I discussed this recent series of articles from Inside Climate News that documented how Exxon’s own scientists had been warning the company about global warming 40 years ago. What did they do? “Exxon and the other oil companies responded in exactly the same way that the tobacco companies had responded to the research that showed it caused cancer: denial.” That’s not hard to understand. But even I have a tendency to forget just how big the incentives are in this regard.

If you are my age, you remember back to the 1970s and the gas lines. That had nothing to do with actual physical gas shortages. The government had simply implemented price floors. But it didn’t stop people from talking about oil shortages and so on. The truth is that we are not looking at physical oil shortages any time in the near future. We are still discovering huge oil fields. For example, in 2000, the Kashagan Field in Kazakhstan was discovered. It contains an estimated 38 billion barrels of oil — 13 billion recoverable. That represents upwards of a trillion dollars. And that’s one oil field, discovered quite recently.

Similarly, the Lula Field off the coast of Brazil was discovered in 2006. It has almost 8 billion recoverable barrels of oil. That’s roughly half a trillion dollars. This is not just a tremendous amount of money. This is a tremendous amount of money that no one even knew about a decade ago. There is no way the people who work in the oil industry are going to stand aside and say, “We’ll pass on this money for the sake of the world.” They are going to use all the tools available to them to manipulate science, public opinion, and politics to keep this money flowing out of the ground.

This all takes me back to Chad Stanton and his idea of Impulse Control and Global Warming. We are constantly told that the problem with poor people in this country is that they lack impulse control. But global warming is a perfect example of how the rich have no impulse control. The idea of doing something for the long term is anathema to the capitalist way of looking at things. What’s the overall sustainability of the planet compared to a small number of people making a lot of money over the next quarter or year? This is the equivalent of eating your seed corn, except in this case, it is one or two people who eat it, so there isn’t even widely shared short term benefit for the long term tragedy.

It’s easy enough to focus on things like the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, which was discovered in 1948. It remains the largest oil field in the world with production of 5 million barrels per day — roughly $100 billion per year. It’s just oil that is sitting around. But ExxonMobile and the rest are not just waiting to extract the oil that we know about. They are pushing forward to find ever more oil. And it is there to be found! And I fear that as long as there is big money to be made, they will continue to do so.