You may remember the 2010 documentary, Inside Job. It was about the 2008 financial crisis. It was a lot of fun. On the other hand, it gave the wrong idea about the crisis. It made it all about bad bankers. While that was true, if it hadn’t been for the bursting of the housing bubble, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. But one thing highlighted in the film was very true: Iceland was pounded by the financial crisis — worse than almost any other country. So why is it that we don’t hear much about Iceland anymore? Well, because they weathered the storm far better than pretty much any other country.

Matt Yglesias wrote about how all this came to be, Iceland Put Bankers in Jail Rather Than Bailing Them Out — and It Worked. Iceland managed to make its crisis relatively mild regarding its workers and then improved very quickly. He provided the classic comparison between Iceland and Ireland. The latter country is held up throughout Europe as an exemplar — as though it were the well behaved child in the kindergarten. Iceland is now almost back to its normal pre-crisis unemployment. Ireland — which did everything the plutocrats said was “right” — still have an unemployment rate that is almost six percent points above its pre-crisis level.

So how did Iceland manage this? Well, to be honest, it didn’t really have much to do with jailing bankers. But let’s not cast that off. Jailing bankers really will help prevent another crisis. In Iceland. In the rest of the advanced world, bankers were coddled and so have every reason to do the same thing again. But that whole thing about not bailing out the banks? That was big. Dean Baker has dealt with this issue, The Myth that Sold the Financial Bailout. But the main this is that the power elite who run our government cared about saving the bankers — not the banking system.

One of the ways that Iceland dealt with the fallout from the banking collapse was to use good old Keynesian style demand side policy. The government racked up loads of debt to get through the crisis. While all over America and Europe, people were shouting about the clearly wrong Reinhart and Rogoff 90% debt cliff, Iceland was calmly pushing its debt to GDP ratio over 100%. And then, as its economy got better, its debt started coming down. This year, it is in the mid-80%.

Iceland also did something that I’ve been screaming about for years: it allowed its inflation rate to go up. This was especially important for them, and inflation went up to a very troubling almost 20% annualized rate one month, and in the mid-teens for about a year. But it is back to about what ours is: 2%. The difference is that we’ve been laser focused on inflation. It has never been even as high as 4% annualized rate for a month since the crisis. And most of the time, it’s been less than 2%. This, of course, has been great for the rich. It’s been a catastrophe for workers.

Iceland also imposed capital controls: restricting the movement of money from the country. In fact, that’s the big news: Iceland is in the process of lifting its capital controls, which ought to give the economy another boost. I don’t think that capital controls were much of an option in the United States. But the takeaway from all this is that there were lots of options for how we dealt with the bursting of the housing bubble. We chose to do those things that kept the rich rich and did as little as possible for working Americans. Democracy in America!

I learned from Tierney Sneed this week at Talking Points Memo, Louisiana GOPers in Fiscal Mess Beg Grover Norquist to Relax No Tax Pledge. As you probably remember, Norquist is the man who is best known for the quote, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” It’s a curious thing to say. It’s supposed to be clever, but it misses the mark. He doesn’t want to abolish government, he wants to weaken it so that he can murder it? So he wants to abolish government! Whatever.

Anyway, Norquist’s great political idea was to get all the Republicans to sign a little pledge that says they will absolutely never raise taxes in any way. It’s part of a larger trend in Republican politics where every vote is “scored.” This leads to politicians being far more conservative than their constituencies. And there is also something fundamentally treasonous about the pledge. What if we suddenly got into World War III? I’m sure the Republicans would abandon Norquist if it ever came to it — just as they would if they ever got any backbone. But smart people don’t legislate by starting out with a long list of things they will never do. And that is a big reason why Republicans are such useless legislators.

But all over the country, there are state legislatures controlled by Republicans that would very much like to to have a little flexibility to deal with their budget problems. Currently, the state faces a $1.6 billion budget shortfall — about 5% of their total budget. Seven years ago, the state had a one billion dollar surplus. What happened? Well, after becoming governor, Bobby Jindal pushed through a huge tax cut. Just like in Kansas, this was supposed to spur growth. But it didn’t. It never does. But Jindal won’t budge. As Kevin Drum noted, “Bobby Jindal is still delusional enough to think he’s running for president.”

As you can see in the following graph, when Bobby Jindal took over control of Louisiana, unemployment was better than the country as a whole. When recession hit, it was not hit nearly as hard — because of the oil industry. But overall, it tracked along with the country pretty well. But since the beginning of 2014, it has taken a turn for the worse. And as of mid-2014, the country as a whole is doing better than Louisiana. Am I blaming this on Jindal? Not at all. But note that there is no reason to think that the tax cut helped to create jobs — not that Jindal and the rest of his Republican allies ever cared that it did.

So now, many Republicans in Louisiana would greatly appreciate it if they were allowed to fix the problem some other way than savaging their college system. In fact, they went whining to Norquist saying that they should be given credit for the previous tax cut. Norquist rightly noted that by such logic, Obama could claim to be a tax cutter. Just the same, I can’t help but remember that Norquist didn’t care about the payroll tax going back up. That’s consistent, however; Norquist doesn’t care about taxes that hurt the poor. No major Republican “thinker” does.

But the whole thing is quite the spectacle. Instead of dealing with each other, Louisiana Republicans are forced to go to Grover Norquist to get approval on how they are supposed to govern. Of course, he only has power because they give it to him. And, of course, because Bobby Jindal thinks he has a chance of becoming president. Some day, the people of Louisiana might consider voting for people who will do right by them and not outsource their thinking to a subgenius ideologue like Norquist.

See also: Swing State Voter Regret Is Killing Me.

As I’ve written about a few times, I live across the street from a very nice family. You really couldn’t have better neighbors, and I like them all as people. But I’ve always found it curious that they are Christian, yet the two boys who have left home have both gone into the military. What’s with that? I mean, when I think of Jesus, I just don’t think of the military — and for a lot of reasons beyond the standard “Prince of Peace” nonsense. For example, I understand that Judaism goes along with the command and control of the military. But Christianity is all about doing the right thing because the holy ghost is inside of you. It’s really a very liberating theology.

Of course, in America, it largely isn’t practiced that way. Christianity is more or less a cultural signifier. People use it as a shorthand for “patriotic American.” This is why we see states trying to make the Bible the official book. The level of theology in the Bible for most Christians is something less than what is taught to five-year-olds in Sunday school. And the one thing other than Christianity that is most tied to this form of “patriotism” is the military. Taxes for public libraries are tyranny, but taxes for almost half of the world’s military spending is somewhere there in the middle of the Ten Commandments.

But there is a great rhetorical ploy when such things are brought up. The Christian will claim that our military is not aggressive. This, of course, is the standard American line, discussed so well in, War Made Easy. Supposedly, the last thing that any president ever wants to do is go to war. To see how absurd that claim is, note that George W Bush said exactly that before the Iraq War — a war that he was most clearly determined to wage. But there is more.

The Christian military apologist will then mention “nation building” and all the great humanitarian work that the military does. Setting aside the fact that this is just ridiculous, it certainly isn’t the way that those in and around the military see it. Earlier this week, Sam Knight at The Intercept wrote a great article that relates to this, Navy Drops Humanitarian Ad Campaign, Looks for Something More Appropriate. It seems that for about five years from 2009 through 2014, the Navy has been pursuing an ad campaign, “America’s Navy: a global force for good.” They killed it last year and have now hired a firm to create ads that look more like something out of Call of Duty.

These earlier ads were about all the good things that the Navy does to help people all over the world. But check it out in the video below. It is filled with all the badass equipment anyone would want. What it doesn’t include is the usual bellicosity. In a word, it is: mature. It puts the best face possible on the dirty business of war. Thus, it isn’t at all surprising that it didn’t play well with the 17-year-olds it was supposed to attract. Sadly (but not surprisingly), it also didn’t appeal to veterans.

The point is that people can talk all they want about the need for the military and all the good work that the military does. But it means nothing. These are not the reasons people go into the military. These are the reasons people come up with to make joining the military seem noble. I’m with Father James in Calvary, “People join the army to find out what it’s like to kill someone.” And that’s okay, I suppose. I’ve made my peace with the need for a military (although ours is about ten times as large as it needs to be). But it is outrageous that people are allowed to go around claiming others join the army out of some sense of altruism. I’m not sure there is such an army that we could say that for. But certainly we can’t for our imperial army.

One of the biggest welfare programs in America is the mortgage interest deduction. People who are wealthy enough to purchase a house are given thousands of dollars every year to pay for that house. Of course, almost no one sees it as welfare because — like most welfare for the more affluent — it is designed to be invisible. We can’t have upper income people think they are getting welfare; that would be rude! So when I talk to people about the issue, they have a hard time seeing the reality of it. So let me provide a simple example.

Imagine you are I live next door to each other. We have identical lives: household size, income, the whole deal. But there is one difference: I own my home and you rent. As a result of this, I pay substantially less in taxes than you do. We both make $100,000 per year. My federal income tax bill is $20,000 and yours is $23,000. We have the same income and expenses. We should both be paying $23,000. So effectively, the government is sending me a check for $3,000. The mechanism by which this happens — giving me some of my tax money back as opposed decoupling it from the tax system — doesn’t matter in the least.

A couple of business professors, Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz, wrote a paper, Why the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction Should Disappear, but Won’t. They noted that economists don’t like the mortgage interest deduction. The main problem from an economic standpoint is that it distorts the natural flow of capital. By the government making home purchases cheaper, capital that would normally go to other parts of the economy gets diverted. But even more than that, the mortgage interest deduction increases inequality. Yet we are stuck with it for a number of reasons.

The biggest reason is that roughly 50 million households currently have mortgages and they are not keen to lose out on their welfare checks, even though they probably don’t think of them that way. But in addition to this, there are lots of people who feed on this: real estate agents, bankers, and home builders. And even more, getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction would cause house prices to fall — hurting every homeowner in the nation. According to Cecchetti and Schoenholtz, it would represent a loss of $4.1 trillion — comparable to the cost of the bursting of the housing bubble: $6.4 trillion.

But Cecchetti and Schoenholtz have a good idea for making the mortgage interest deduction less of a problem. They suggested putting a maximum mortgage value that one could deduct at $400,000. They noted that currently, 90% of US homes are worth less than $500,000. This would have the effect of reducing some of the bad economic signals with the deduction by not subsidizing vanity homes. But it would also make the deduction less inequality expanding by not allowing the government to subsidize more and more the richer the home buyer. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities also has an idea for making the system better, Fixing the Unfair Mortgage Interest Deduction.

The point of all this is that something can be done to make the mortgage interest deduction more fair and less disruptive in the economy. But I doubt we are going to see much. Eventually, the government may see that there is a bunch of money to be had. We’ll see if that leads to improved policy. For me, I would just appreciate recipient of the mortgage interest deduction understanding that they are getting welfare.