There is an issue that makes a lot of people think that I don’t understand economics. It is this idea that we are so much better off now than we used to be. This is used as a justification for things as diverse as excessive and ever growing inequality and deforestation. The theory goes: well, there may be bad things about our economic system, but everyone has so much higher a standard of living, it’s worth it. But do we really have a higher standard of living? In one way: yes. Sugar used to be a luxury; now it is cheap. But in another way, we don’t. Now we have sugar in all our foods devaluing the extra sugar we get.

But I accept that increases in food availability are important. But there haven’t been major improvements in this regard in my lifetime. When it comes to the technological innovations that people think of, I am unimpressed. Remember the great Peter Thiel quote, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I always think of music distribution. When I was very young, I had a transistor radio and we used to walk around listening to it. Later there were Walkmans. Then MP3 players. And now Pandora. Each of these are marginal improvements, but hardly revolutionary. None of it is any better than wandering around a used record store and finding Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat and having a religious experience.

I was very pleased to read a recent Dean Baker article, Is the Middle Class Better Off? Economists’ Poor Logic on New Goods. The article is in reference to the hypothetical, “Would you be willing to trade an income of $50,000 in 2015 for an inflation adjusted $100,000 income in 1980, knowing that you can only buy the goods and services available in 1980?” The answer is supposed to be, “Of course not! How would I ever live without Netflix?!”

This falls right into what I was talking about before. At that time, we had VHS players. What’s more, there were actual good local rental companies where you could get what you wanted. I’m not saying that things aren’t better now. But they aren’t substantially different. And if you are interested in things that are a little out of the ordinary — little films like Medicine River — you may not be able to find them at all now. Of course, you could instead go to your satellite television where you will find half the stations running paid advertisements, reruns of Pawn Stars, and other content that is in no way better than the reruns of Gilligan’s Island that I grew up watching.

Baker noted that this question is a false one. “Ask someone who lived in the suburbs in the 1960s how they would feel living without a car. It would be pretty awful, but just 30 years earlier most middle class families did not have a car or think they needed one.” I’ve lived without a car for many years now. Overall, I think my life is better for it. Sometimes it’s a pain, but that is due to the way society is now organized around the car. Or consider the cell phone. I now feel freaked out if I leave home without my phone. But that’s ridiculous and I quickly realize that it is no big deal. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would gladly give up their cell phones if it would mean that their free time was unmolested.

But the biggest issue with this hypothetical is that a $100,000 income would provide something exceptional that no amount of consumer gadgets will ever compensate for: economic security. The biggest thing that limits happiness in modern America is economic uncertainty. Along with that better income at that time comes certainty that you will maintain that job and retire with a pension. It means allowing you to do what you want with your time. Sure, you wouldn’t have your movies streamed by Netflix. But if you lose your job tomorrow, you are going to lose you your Nixflix account anyway.

Technological progress is a great thing. But it comes at a cost. More and more, I don’t think that cost is worth it. But regardless of where anyone comes down on the question, everyone should agree that there are very real costs we pay for our constant marginal improvements in the “goods and services” that we can buy.

We should not be happy about this, Brownback to Sign Historic Sales Tax Hike After Bruising Budget Battle. As I’ve written about a lot around here, Kansas is in big trouble. Governor Sam Brownback wanted to cut taxes in his state. So he did what conservatives always do when they want to do something insane: he went out and found himself a heterodox economist who would tell him what he wanted to hear. It wasn’t hard. He went to Art Laffer who has been saying that tax cuts pay for themselves since the 1970s. He’s always been wrong, but that hardly matters.

So in the case of the recent tax cuts in Kansas, Laffer was wrong again, and the state has found itself with a huge budget deficit — 12% short in the fiscal year starting next month. They’ve already savagely cut their spending so now they are to the point where they have no choice but to raise taxes. Now the logical thing to do would be to raise the taxes that they lowered. But that is not acceptable. You see, those taxes were lowered on rich people. And despite what conservatives say, they don’t care about low taxes in a general sense; they care about low taxes on the rich.

You know Grover Norquist — the guy who all the Republicans rush to so they can sign his pledge to never raise taxes. Well, that pledge isn’t actually about all taxes. It’s just a pledge to stand against increasing “the marginal income tax rates.” That’s because the federal income tax is the only federal tax that is progressive. Richer people really do pay more. (Extremely rich people don’t, because they make “unearned” income.) When Congress was set to raise the payroll tax — an extremely regressive tax that hits the poor hard — Norquist was all for it. So just remember that: conservatives are for lowering the taxes of the wealthy; they don’t care about the taxes of anyone else.

The Kansas legislature came up with two tax increases to make up for the corporate giveaways of the last couple of years. The first is an almost 6% (0.35 percentage point) increase in the sales tax. Sales taxes are great from the standpoint of conservatives. They screw the poor, but inch by inch, so that it isn’t really noticed. Are you really going to notice that your laundry soap costs two cents more? Sure, the hundred bucks you lose for the year will be noticeable, but you won’t know who to blame; you’ll just have a vague feeling that you are falling behind — because you are.

The second tax increase is going to be noticed. And it is going to make people mad. Kansas currently taxes a pack of cigarettes 79 cents. The new law will increase that by $1.29 — that’s a total of $2.08 tax on a pack of cigarettes. Now you might say, “Great! We should discourage smoking!” And I agree to some extent. But poor people are more likely to smoke. And if we are doing this for public health reasons, the tax should go toward helping people get off cigarettes and toward treating cigarette related illnesses. This Kansas tax is just meant to grab some money from the most vulnerable people in our society.

Remember: Sam Brownback was just re-elected governor. And what he is doing now is going to make a lot of people really angry. Yet this is no bait-and-switch. Brownback is doing what he’s always done. This is more of what I wrote about recently, Swing State Voter Regret Is Killing Me. When the price of a pack of cigarettes jumps up to $7.00, there will be a lot of Kansans who will think they’ve been screwed by Brownback and his cronies. But they’ll be wrong. A lot of poor and middle class people vote for people like Brownback thinking that he would never hurt them. They are deeply confused. Maybe some day they will learn.

Afterword

I know a surprising number of people who are on disability who are Fox News addicts who consistently vote Republican. When I ask them why they vote for politicians who will, if they get the opportunity, cut their support, they brush it off. The Republicans, they claim, just want to get “those” people — the scammers — not good deserving people like themselves. It’s pure delusion.

Matt Yglesias reminds us of something important, Hillary Clinton Has Always Been to Obama’s Left on Economics. This is part of Clinton’s branding campaign. And I have always accepted this. One of the narratives to come out of Bill Clinton’s presidential tenure that I think is actually true is that Hillary was the more liberal of the two. Of course, it was generally presented as, “Bill Clinton is extremely liberal but Hillary is a radical.” Neither of those statements were true, but I think they got the ordering right. I don’t think that Hillary Clinton would ever have ended welfare as we know it.

Now I understand that Hillary has always come off as something of a war hawk. But is she any worse than her husband or Barack Obama or George W Bush? More to the point, could she possibly be as bad as the Republicans running for president? The only candidate for whom a case could be made would be Rand Paul. And he has shown himself to be easily pushed towards a more arrogant and belligerent stance. And let’s not forget that George W Bush ran on an isolationist policy — he wasn’t going to get involved in any “nation building.”

But the truth is that I don’t care. Regardless of what presidential candidates say about foreign affairs and the national security state, the moment they get into office, all the generals and spooks take the new presidents aside and explain that if they don’t continue on with business as usual, there will be a terrorist attack and the president will be blamed. I’m not sure if this is done out of actual concern or in a coercive way, “Nice country you got here; it’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.” But the end result is the same.

None of this really matters to me. I am liberal right down the line, but the truth is that without economic justice, pretty much everything else is worthless. Racism wouldn’t have a tenth of its power if the nation had relative economic equality. Racism is fed by rich people convincing poor white people that their problems are due to poor black people. That doesn’t mean that I don’t fight against racism — including my own — but it does mean that I am focused on economic issues. If there were actual populists in this country — economically liberal and socially conservative — I might have some trouble knowing who to vote for. But as it is, the people who are terrible on social issues are also terrible on economic issues. When it comes to the Democrats, they tend to be good on social issues and okay on economic issues.

Yglesias noted:

Yglesias went on to note that Clinton ran to Obama’s left on economic issues in 2008 and that she was the head of the leftist wing in the Bill Clinton White House. None of this makes me want to abandon my support for Bernie Sanders. I was just going over his page at On the Issue, and there is remarkably little that I disagree with. But the bottom line is that Hillary Clinton is a perfectly acceptable Democrat. And she has potential to be a great president. People should stop saying that she’s just pretending to be liberal to get the nomination. She really is a liberal.