Ed Kilgore discussed The 35-Year GOP Budget Dilemma. He claimed that the Republicans have been struggling with four ideological goals: “lowering top-end tax rates; boosting defense spending; going after New Deal/Great Society spending; and reducing budget deficits.” But I think this is giving Republican rhetoric rather too much credit. Just because Republicans claim that they care about budget deficits doesn’t mean that they do. And I just haven’t seen any evidence that Republicans have ever cared about the deficit — except as a rhetorical stick that they can use to call for the policies that they really want.

Let us return briefly to Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president in 1980. A big part of his pitch was that the national debt was out of control and he was going to get rid of it! Also: he was going to cut taxes, increase military spending, and get those welfare queens. So there are Kilgore’s four Republican ideological goals. Now, Reagan was lying about government debt. The truth is that we had been reducing debt (as a percentage of GDP) pretty much from the end of World War II onward. The debt went down under the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. And it has gone up during every Republican presidency since then — most of all under Reagan:

So Reagan did not balance the budget as he said he would. He did, however, manage to make the poorer classes pay a lot more for their New Deal programs. He did manage to greatly increase military spending (and wrongly get credit for destroying the Soviet Union). And most of all, he did manage to lower the top tax rate from 70% all the way down to 28%. Since him, Bush the Elder did raise the top tax rate to a whopping 31%. But he was widely criticized for it and is now used by Republicans as an example of why no one can ever raise taxes on the rich (even though that wasn’t why Bush lost his re-election bid). Bush the Younger also lowered taxes. None of these men cared much about the deficit.

For more recent history, we need to return to the heady days of the 2012 presidential election. Romney — like all Republicans when a Democrat is in the White House — claimed to care a great deal about the deficit and debt. That’s why he put out a budget. And that budget: gave massive tax cuts to the rich; increased military spending; cut benefits to the poorer classes; and made the budget deficit much, much worse. So clearly, Romney wasn’t interested in the deficit. And remember: he was supposedly a “reasonable Republican” — not a firebrand who would destroy the country.

For the last year, Jonathan Chait has been making arguments like, I Have Seen the Future of the Republican Party, and It Is George W Bush. He claims that the only way forward for the Republicans is for them to forget about all this nonsense about balanced budgets and just do what Bush did: lower taxes, make war, and most of all, stop worrying and love the debt. It isn’t exactly a shockingly insightful point. But it is one that most political writers don’t want to accept. It seems to be rude to accuse the Republicans of not really believing what they claim. But we have 35 years of history that shows that Republicans only care about the deficit when they aren’t in power. And that means they don’t ever care about deficits.

So I see Ed Kilgore and lower him an ideology. The Republicans have three ideological goals: lowering top-end tax rates; boosting defense spending; going after New Deal/Great Society spending; and…” nothing.

I’m getting to this a bit late, since it was resolved back in December. But I’m pleased to report that all charges against Debra Milke have been dropped. I’ll list all the articles I’ve written about her below. But the basic story is that 26 years ago, two guys murdered her son. Those two guys are on death row in Arizona right now. But the officer running the investigation was convinced that she was in on it. And based only on the fact that he said she confessed, she was put on death row and spent 23 years in prison. This is, all you death penalty advocates, the way it works; perhaps it is time to stop assuming the justice system works the way you think it ought to and deal with the system the way it actually is. But I digress.

Even after the Court of Appeals demanded a retrial, the state refused to give up. The officer who claimed that she had confessed had a long history of lying on the stand and pressuring people into false confessions. You can well imagine how a mother who’s child was just murdered might feel guilty about it. And any kind of statement of that guilt would easily be used to claim that she had “confessed.” There was no recording and not even written notes. The whole thing is an outrage.

For the two years since she was released from prison on bail, the main question has been whether the state could force the officer to testify. Although he claims that he absolutely did nothing wrong and that he knows Milke is guilty, he’s been pleading the Fifth. Finally, the court decided that he had a right not to get up on the stand and commit perjury. (Eventually, the Court of Appeals decided he didn’t have such a right.) But still the county continued in its efforts to get Milke. But on 11 December 2014, the Court of Appeals decided that the county couldn’t even try Milke again — that it would effectively be double jeopardy.

The county, of course, is determined to take the case to a higher level. County Attorney Bill Montgomery said, “This office today bears the burden for trying to get justice for Christopher Milke.” So let’s see. They have two men on death row, who have been there for decades. And Debra Milke herself spent 23 years in prison. I’m kind of thinking that in the context of justice as people like Montgomery see it, the boy has received justice. And let’s just assume for a moment that Debra Milke was not responsible: does it increase Christopher’s justice to wrongly jail and even kill his mother? And what about justice for Debra Milke?

Sad to say, Debra Milke is lucky. I know, it seems ridiculous: she spent 23 years in prison. But there are so many people who simply think she should have been killed long ago. And lest you think she will now be able to sue to the state of Arizona, think again. She hasn’t been proven not guilty. The Court of Appeals only decided that the behavior of the prosecutors was so bad that the state does not have a right to retrial. It’s a usual thing: the state totally abuses its power and the remedy is to stop the state from abusing its power any more in that one particular case. The original prosecutor will not be held accountable. The lying police officer will not be held accountable. And perhaps most telling of all, the media who pretty much found her guilty before she ever went to trial, will not be held accountable. But one active injustice has been reversed. That’s not nearly good enough, but it is something.

See Also

Debra Milke and the Injustice System
Attorney General to Appeal Milke Case
More Background on Debra Milke
Media Bias and 22 Years on Death Row
Debra Milke Released on Bond
Second Guessing the Falsely Accused

If the TPP gets approved, it will not really change the way that I think about the state of my country. After five decades, I have far too much data indicating that we live in a faux democracy where the rich get whatever policies they want. But it will still be a blow. And I find it curious that we are starting to get liberal-ish commentators coming to defend the trade deal. The first person I saw was Larry Summers, A Trade Deal Must Work for America’s Middle Class. Don’t let the title fool you, he argued that the TPP will work for the middle class. Dean Baker gave him too much credit, even while destroying him, Larry Summers Gets It Largely Right on Trade.

And wherever Larry Summers goes, Brad DeLong is sure to follow, The Debate Over the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Focus. It started, “It is foolish to debate whether a trade agreement that has not yet been negotiated is a good idea and should be ratified.” That’s an interesting bit of apologetics. If we are really supposed to look closely at this deal, why is it so critical that it get fast-track authority? I understand that the Congressional Republicans are crazy, but they will mostly be for this deal. I don’t think fast-track is about slipping this one past the conservatives.

Regardless, Dean Baker shot back at him, Fun With Brad DeLong on TPP. (Have I mentioned recently that Dean Baker Is Must Reading?) DeLong asked to see evidence from detractors that the trade deal would hurt American workers more than it would benefit them. Baker accepted the challenge and, I think, showed very clearly that it would. But notice how ridiculous DeLong’s challenge is. Why is it up to detractors to show that the deal isn’t good? Isn’t the onus on proponents to show that it is good?

Now Ezra Klein has entered the fray in his usual “just asking questions” manner, Why the Obama Administration Is Fighting for a Trade Deal Its Liberal Allies Hate. In all, he presents eight reasons that the administration wants to do this based upon talking to “officials intimately involved in crafting the deal.” And guess what? Seven of them are just nonsense. Let’s see: (1) it’s a good deal because we say so; (2) people only think its bad because we’ve been doing this in the dark; (3) it’s not a perfect deal, just better than some other possible deal; (4) this deal is better than past deals; (5) if we don’t agree to this deal we will somehow be forced into a terrible deal of China’s; (6) It’s a trade deal and a dessert topping foreign policy; (7) we have to prove that we can push around the rest of the world with this deal that is so great for America that it has to be negotiated in private and passed before it can be seriously analyzed.

Note that most of these are duplicates. Numbers one through five are pretty much the same things, even though they also contradict each other: trust us! Six and seven are the same things: America must lead! So basically, the administration is saying that it wants the TPP because it is really good and people like me just don’t realize it, and because it gives the administration more tools to manipulate other countries. What’s shocking here is that none of these reasons has anything to do with the deal itself. Nowhere does anyone say something like, “This is a good deal because it will stop China from suppressing the value of its currency and make American exports more competitive.” For anything like that, we have to turn to the eighth reason, which I believe is 90% of the reason the administration wants to do this deal.

Dean Baker wrote about this canard over the weekend, Getting It Wrong on Trade: TPP Is Not Good for Workers. This isn’t going to improve trade. It will just allow film and pharmaceutical companies to charge more money overseas for their products. Thus, the people overseas will not have as much money to buy other things we export. In other words, this is a way to take even more money away from workers and give it to owners. I discussed this problem last week, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. To me, it is simple: I don’t care how much “trade” will be increased by a deal when I know all the gains will go to the top of the income chain.

But another thing that Baker noted is that it is ridiculous to think of corporations are “American”:

Ezra Klein claims, “I’m currently in the undecided camp — until there’s a final text I can run by experts, it’s hard to say anything definitive…” But he must know that the whole idea with this agreement is to ram it through Congress before anyone can consider it rationally. The debate really hasn’t been about the agreement itself. It has all been about fast-track authority. He’s right that at this point, we don’t know. But the burden of proof should be on those who claim it is a great deal. And proponents don’t seem keen to make that argument. It’s very much like NAFTA before it, “Trust us!” That hasn’t worked out too well.

The great David Cay Johnston published a really useful article last week, Don’t Be Duped by Misleading Economic Terms. It even includes a helpful glossary. One thing I learned from my time as an actual scientist was that nothing is all that hard to understand. Scientists love to make their work seem very impressive with a lot of mathematical jargon, but the concepts are always simple. The complicated stuff is usually important to the scientists themselves, however; and that’s how it is distinct from politics and the non-science of economics. When people are making these these things sound complicated, it is usually because they are hiding something.

I want to focus on the issue that Johnston did in the first half of his article: compensation. There is an overwhelming tendency on the part of politicians and journalists to talk about compensation as though it were charity. And this is especially true when it comes to people who work for the government. I’ve never been too clear on why this is, but people seem to think that when the government hires someone to do a job, it isn’t real and the worker shouldn’t be paid the same as if she were hired by a private institution. When stated explicitly, people claim government workers shouldn’t make as much as comparable workers elsewhere. That’s bad enough.

But as Johnston noted, the bigger issue is on benefits. There is a constant war on the retirement benefits of public employees. And by referring to them “government contributions,” it is implied that they are some kind of charity rather than part of the compensation package the government and the employees worked out long ago. Dean Baker has written about this a lot by contrasting it to bond holders. When a state is having financial problems, the CNBC crowd is all about reneging on these work related promises to pay. The idea that bond holders would get screwed is outrageous to these people. But they are exactly the same things. If I work for you in exchange for money to be paid to me in the future, you owe me money just as surely as if I loan you money to be paid back to me in the future. This isn’t hard to understand, but the use of words like “contributions” are designed to obscure the truth.

Related to this is the payroll tax. Most people think that they pay 7.65% of their income toward their future Social Security and Medicare benefits. But that’s not true. The employer also pays 7.65% toward this. But this is simply part of workers’ pay that is taken away. So why don’t our checks just have 15.3% in payroll taxes removed? Johnston has a good answer for that, “The other half of the tax does not show up on paychecks because it is part of a deception by Congress to make the tax seem less onerous than it is.” You can see why this is so. If everyone saw 15.3% come out of every paycheck they got, they might wonder why it is that they are paying more in that one tax than Mitt Romney pays in total federal taxes on the tens of millions he “earns” every year.

This is just one example of how the language is distorted to keep us from seeing the truth. And I suspect that even having written this, a lot of readers are still confused about how they are actually paying 15.3% (actually, it’s 14.2%[1]) when it doesn’t say that on their check. But do you know who isn’t confused about this kind of thing? The rich. They know what they are doing, and they love the fact the vast majority of people just accept the linguistic frame that allows them to stay rich at our expense.

[1] If your employer didn’t have to make its “contribution,” your pay would be 107.65% of what it is now. You would then pay 15.3% of your income: 15.3/107.65 = 14.2%.

A few weeks ago, Ian Ayres brought my attention to some amazing but unsurprising research, When Whites Get a Free Pass. The title is a literal description of a recent study out of Australia. Researchers looked at how often bus drivers would allow people free rides when their passes had run out of money. Not surprisingly, they were much more likely to let whites ride for free. In fact, whites road free twice as much: 72% versus only 36% for blacks. They did it in a lot of different ways too. In some cases they dressed the riders in business suits and army uniforms. It was always the same. For example, 97% of whites in army uniforms got free rides but only 77% of blacks did.

What’s critical here, is that the bus drivers don’t think of themselves as racist. They aren’t intending to disproportionately help whites. In fact, although the numbers weren’t as skewed, black bus drivers also helped out white riders more than blacks. That’s actually quite a well known effect. When tested for subconscious bias, blacks in America tend to be somewhat more positive toward whites. It puts a whole different spin on the conservatives’ great canard “reverse racism.” But the point here is that racial bias is something that is in the society itself and it infects all of us.

This is why I think we ought to calm down on all the freaking out about the explicit racism like we saw at Sigma Alpha Epsilon. We should use such incidents to highlight the broad nature of racism and what we can do about — not use it to feel good that we don’t sing songs about lynching African Americans. A much bigger issue than segregated fraternities is the fact that most Americans don’t understand white privilege and how affirmative action is one tool to fight it. George Will has spent the last several decades claiming that affirmative action is racist, and he’s held up as an exemplar of respectability.

What the Australian bus study shows is the ways that whites get a clear and tangible benefit from being white. And like so much else that has to do with privilege, it is done in a way that is invisible. If we wanted to create a policy to offset this, we would allow blacks to ride the bus for slightly less than we do whites. And just as with affirmative action, this would do two things. First, it would tell blacks in a very forceful way, “We’re helping you!” Second, it would allow whites to claim that they were treated unfairly because they don’t see their privilege. So even the efforts to fight racism would add to racism. It’s frustrating.

What I think needs to be done is that we white people have to get over ourselves. We need to have our noses rubbed in our privilege. And this is something that we are very reluctant to do here in the United States. And this goes way past race. We are supposed to believe that the rich white child going to private schools has the same chance of getting into Harvard as the poor black child going to a struggling public school. I understand that when it is put that way, it’s pretty obvious it isn’t the case. But that is the reality of America where most people absurdly claim that there is “equality of opportunity” (when they aren’t defining it out of existence).

I’m almost to the point of thinking that we will always have racism as long as we accept capitalism. The two seem to be related because capitalism wants to monetize humans. At this point, to really look at why African Americans own and earn so much less than white Americans — as Ta-Nehisi Coates has — is to question the justice of the whole system. I do know that a lot of it is government policy. But I just don’t see how you separate our economic and political systems. They feed each other. And any economic system that allows people to get really rich will also allow them to distort the political system to their advantage.

In the absence of fundamental change, the least we white people can do is to be aware of our privilege. Being a white person in a white community, I’m constantly assaulted with other whites whining about all the special “gifts” that black and brown people get. That’s the thing about white privilege: the more we have, the more we whine. And they both stop us from moving forward.