We liberals have got to find a better way to point out the nonsense of Republican economic policy. Last night, Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times wrote, Obama’s Plans for Deficit and Taxes Are Detailed on Eve of Budget Proposal. In it, he quoted Paul Ryan repeating what is the most annoying Republican talking point in a decade, “The Obamanomics that we’re practicing now have exacerbated inequality. They’ve exacerbated stagnation. They’re made things worse.”

This is the same argument that Republicans have been making for decades, although in different words. Since the Democrats — just thirty years late — have decided to talk about income inequality, the Republicans have decided to grab the issue themselves. Certainly, this is at its base just more, “I’m rubber and you’re glue.” But at a minimum, it muddies the water. It now seems to be the case that everyone “cares” about economic inequality. At Davos this year, even the billionaires were stroking their chins in its direction.

Of course, the folks at Davos were not talking about food stamps and low income housing. Those kinds of programs would require that the rich sacrifice something — at least temporarily. That’s unacceptable. The Republicans are exactly the same way. For example, Ryan said, “It’s hard to imagine the president is going to want to work with Congress on entitlement reform.” Entitlement reform?! That’s the great idea to mitigate economic inequality?

This shows that the Republicans don’t care about income inequality. Just as with healthcare reform, their answer for income inequality is a collection of policies they always want. It’s like that old cartoon: income inequality will be fixed by some special feature of the free market, even though all the free market “reforms” enacted over the last four decades are what have made inequality so much worse.

So how should liberals counter these claims by the Republicans? What we can’t do is what Jonathan Chait did, Paul Ryan’s Most Shameless Lie Ever. He argued that Obama’s policies have reduced inequality — they just haven’t reduced it enough to overcome the structural forces that are causing more inequality. He’s right. But I wouldn’t give Obama too much credit there. Like the whole New Democratic movement, Obama is very much in favor of those very same structural forces. Just look at his continued support of TTIP and TPP. But even if we do give Obama credit, Chait’s argument is still incredibly weak.

Chait claimed that Obama has pushed against income inequality by raising taxes on the rich. But Ryan is still a supply-sider. He would simply counter that raising taxes on the rich just slows economic growth. And that’s true in the current situation where those higher taxes were simply used to pay down the debt in a depressed economy. And let’s fact it: Obama barely raised taxes. Chait provided a table that showed that even for the top 1%, Obama’s policy lowered taxes. It was only for the top 0.1% that taxes actually went up — and only by six percentage points.

What’s more, he presented a graph that shows that Obamacare is going to substantially increase the incomes of the bottom 20% of the country. That’s great! But it also shows that the lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle classes are all paying more than the upper class is. In addition, the lower one’s income (other than for the bottom 20%), the more one is negatively affected. In terms of economic inequality, harming the middle 60% of the nation is counterproductive.

At this point, I think that most people understand that supply side economics — trickle down — is hogwash. If Republicans want to claim that they care about economic inequality, let them. But don’t counter it with talk of transfer programs — especially when those transfers are usually very small. Talk about what Republicans want to do. And what they want to do is to give more money to the rich because even after 34 years of failure, they think it will trickle down to the rest of us.

See also: Why Conservatives Think Government Doesn’t Create Jobs.

I’ve been feeling reasonably good about the economy. A big part of this is just theoretical. The government — partly because of the Democrats, but mostly because of the Republicans — has done an enormous amount of harm to the economy. But that’s now baked into the economic cake. It would seem that the economy ought to be improving simply because the government isn’t actively harming it through spending cuts. And on the empirical side, the last few jobs reports have looked pretty good. But on Friday, the Department of Commerce (pdf) put out its estimate of GDP growth in the fourth quarter of last year. And the news ain’t good.

The growth rate for the year was 2.5% with the annualized fourth quarter growth rate of 2.6%. To give you some idea of just how unimpressive this is, during the recovery after the far smaller dot-com recession, we got a growth rate of roughly 3.5%. And you may remember: that was an anemic recovery. Earlier, more robust recoveries saw far higher GDP growth. But those were in the days when he didn’t live under an oligarchy. (But note: poor economic growth hurts the poor and rich; the rich really are short sighted.)

Dean Baker — the Pollyanna of economists — noted something to make even these poor headline numbers worse. In the first quarter of last year, due in part to the bad weather, the economy actually shrank by 0.52% (2.1% annualized). That means that the economy had some catching up to do. And so the growth during the following three quarters should have been really strong. And indeed, the second and third quarter growth rates were good: 4.6% and 5.0% annualized rates. That makes the 2.6% rate for the last quarter all the more troubling. We’ll have to see what happens next quarter. But this really has been the “next quarter” recovery: it has constantly been crummy but hopeful. As Herbert Hoover never actually said, “Prosperity is just around the corner!” Or, as Annie said, “The sun ‘ll come out tomorrow!” Or as the actual Pollyanna said, “There is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.”

But if you want to think the last quarter growth rate was only bad through a combination of bad weather and a very strong third quarter rate, feel free. But Dean Baker had even more bad news. It turns out that of the one-third of the GDP growth rate in the last quarter is due to increases in inventory, “This will be a drag on growth in future quarters since inventories will almost certainly not continue to accumulate at the same pace, which was extraordinarily rapid.” In other words, much of the growth is effectively siphoning off growth that would have happened later.

Let us not be too down in the dumps about this, however. There are are things we have to keep in mind. First, of course, this is just one quarter. Maybe everything will be back up in the first quarter of this year. Second, poor economic growth should lessen some of the pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates. In this regard, I don’t know why the Fed is so keen to act anyway, with inflation and the employment to population so low. Time will tell. “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow! You’re always a day away!”

Yesterday, Talk of the Sound reported, New Rochelle Police Draw Guns on Black Youths Over Snow Ball Fight NSFW. This took place in New Rochelle, NY — a town of about 80,000 people just north of New York City. In the video that I embedded below, a police officer seems to be detaining and searching two men who were having a snowball fight. But he does so at gunpoint. According to some sources, the police had been called because of a report of someone with a gun. It’s possible, but it sounds more likely to be a justification after the fact.

What I wonder is how this can possibly be correct procedure. The officer walks up to one man who is knelling on the ground. He is holding his pistol in one hand and searching the man with the other hand. If the man on the ground had been so inclined, he could have grabbed the officer’s weapon. Guns are not an especially good weapon up this close. And then, after searching the first man, he walks to the second — leaving him prone to the first man. If these had actually been dangerous men, the foul mouthed officer could have been taken down or even killed.

According to Talk of the Sound, this was not some inexperienced officer. They are not providing the name of him at this time, but they did report, “We will say that he is a Superior Officer (i.e., Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain)…” Of course, I’ve never particularly bought into the whole idea that our policing problems are due to a lack of experience and training. There are bigger problems — particularly the culture of police departments. One thing is very clear in this video: the officer is not there to serve. He’s there to bully everyone.

So I think that the officer knows this is not a case where dangerous men are running around with guns. If he did, he would have responded in a different way. He would have put his gun away and called the other officers in a bit closer. My best guess — from years of interacting with police officers — was that it was an exciting opportunity. Two young black men were having a snowball fight, so he brought his car to a sudden stop and jumped out of the car. When the young men didn’t immediately respond to him, he drew his gun. Or he drew his gun immediately. And later that night when he went home, he told his wife about what a dangerous job he has.

Another interesting thing in the video is that the officer repeatedly looks toward the camera. He actually seems a whole lot more concerned about it than he is about the lawless snowball fighters. And I suspect that it is the presence of the camera that caused the whole thing to be resolved so quickly and amicably. It’s possible by that point, the officer realized that he looked like a total jerk. But I’m not sure shame is something that many officers allow themselves to feel.

Ultimately, this is as good an example of the problem with our policing that you will find. Why was it necessary for the officer to draw his gun? It clearly wasn’t. But as I’ve written too much around here, police have convinced themselves that their jobs are really dangerous, when they are not. And as a result, police officers tend to be pussies who would rather kill innocent children than risk the slightest threat to themselves. In this case, everything worked out well. But pulling a gun is dangerous, and should be a last resort, not de rigueur.

Update 3 February 2015 9:40 am

The Daily News reported, Video Showing New Rochelle Police Officer Pulling Gun on Teens Not What It Seems: Cops. According to them, when they showed up, one person put something in his waistband and ran. The other officer chased him, but didn’t catch him. I’m not sure what to make of that. Regardless, why was it necessary to hold a gun on the people who did not run? Why was the officer yelling obscenities at the young men when they were already on the ground with their hands in the air? And why did the officer search them with his gun still drawn? I am more convinced than ever that this is a great example of a badly trained police officer with a chip on his shoulder.

It’s always fun to read Paul Krugman when he’s angry. And he was angry on Friday, I See Very Serious Dead People. He discussed a number of things, but I want to focus on one thing that he almost wrote about. One of his main complaints with the world of economic policy debate is the way that the very people who claim to be pushing “serious” policy ideas are the ones pushing useless and, very often, counterproductive policies. “I know that people who airily dismiss the austerity debate and all that and demand that we focus on the long run think they’re taking a brave stand; but you know, they aren’t.” That’s about right.

It often seems to me that talking about the “big picture” and the “long run” and “structural issues” are just a way to appear to be doing something, without actually doing anything. This problem is global, but it is especially typical of the United States. I noted this after 9/11. An obvious change would have been to put pilots in a separate compartment from the passengers. But that would have cost a lot of money. So instead, we got entry x-rays and bans on shampoo. But overall, it was just very clear that the government felt it more important to look like it was protecting us than it was to actually protect us.

With economic policy, the solutions to our problems are pretty simple. We went through this in the 1930s, and we know what works. But instead, we get the exact same policy prescriptions that failed back them. The most annoying of these is the idea that businesses aren’t hiring because American workers just don’t have the skills that employers want. This same thing was said in the late 1930s, but somehow, when the government started spending in expectation of World War II, those same workers were plenty skilled. And after the war, they continued to be. Funny that. Even funnier is the fact that so many establishment figures today recycle this same point without a hint of irony.

But I don’t think that they are ignorant. The purpose of claiming that the problem is a “skills gap” is that it doesn’t have a clear solution. The only thing that can really be done is to have the government pay for workers to go back to school and get those skills that businesses are supposedly so desperate for. And that means it is always at least a couple of years away. And when the last crop of students finds that they aren’t any more employable than they were before, no one cares. It isn’t like there are labor reporters everywhere disseminating the information.

Our economic problems are just a matter of doing what worked before: stimulus, which used to be the standard response to a recession, regardless of political party. This was true right up to the last Republican president. Our economy would be booming right now if Obama had grown the government the way that Reagan and the two Bushes grew it. But we couldn’t do that! So instead, much of the Washington punditry — including many so called liberals — call for mysterious, complicated, and slow policy. Needless to say, such pundits don’t have to worry about losing their jobs. So the pain they push on the rest of us and the years of bad times their policy preferences guarantee are no big deal.

Economic policy is not rocket science. When people claim that it is, all they are doing is arguing that we do nothing. It is kind of like global warming denial: we just don’t know enough; we need more study; there are no simple answers. It’s all nonsense. It’s all stalling. It’s just a way for the power elite to hang onto power.

By far, the best thing that Vox has done is to bring Max Fisher to my attention. He covers the Middle East for the website and he often takes on the tone of a patient parent, “Stop doing that; it’s racist.” I’ve written about his work a number of times, most notably in, The Bigoted “Muslims Condemn” Ritual. Well, Fisher was back a couple days ago with another article where you can almost hear him sigh before the first word, US Media Coverage of Michelle Obama’s Saudi Arabia Trip Isn’t Just Wrong — It’s Racist.

There is a very real and casual racism in this country — not just against Arabs but against Persians, Indians, and pretty much any other group you could name. If it hadn’t been for the Nazis and the Holocaust, Israelis would be included in that group. I still commonly hear people refer to “towel heads” and “those people” who attacked us on 9/11. It is the most naked form of racism. Race itself is a racist construct and you can see it clearly here. Muslims are commonly equated with Hindus and Sikhs, even though there is far more relationship between Muslims and Christians and Jews. But they are all the same to most Americans, not because they are, but simply because Americans are some of the most ignorant and parochial people on the planet.

Fisher made nine points in his article, but it all comes down to one thing: the American media coverage shows a shocking lack of understanding of Saudi Arabia. The supposed kerfuffle is that Michelle Obama didn’t wear a headscarf to the funeral of King Abdullah. This has been portrayed as some kind of major statement about the terrible treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. I’ve also heard it claimed that her dressing in blue instead of black was some big deal, but even I know that white is a traditional funeral color in many regions.

The main issue is that the elites of Saudi Arabia would be freaked out by seeing a woman who wasn’t enclosed in a portable tent. Fisher wrote, “Saudi royals are comfortable with the West and with Western customs; many spend long parts of the year in Europe and a number were educated in American boarding schools or colleges.” Of course they are. It reminds me of Mike Huckabee running around the nation claiming that those backwoods morals are so superior to the terrible morals of those New York and Los Angeles elites. As if he isn’t perfectly comfortable with elites, as he’s shown time and again. Just because elites here and in Saudi Arabia demagogue with religious fundamentalism doesn’t mean they fall for it.

It is one thing for the masses to have no idea that a Jain, unwilling to swat a fly, is quite different from a radical political Muslim suicide bomber or a Christian sniper who was proud of his 160 confirmed kills. But when the media can’t tell the difference, we are doomed. And I really do think that is the case and that they aren’t just pretending to generate clicks. Similarly, what are we to make of Ted Cruz’s tweet, “Kudos to @FLOTUS for standing up for women & refusing to wear Sharia-mandated head-scarf in Saudi Arabia”? I suspect he actually thinks that — and he is a smart and educated guy. But once you build a worldview based upon the idea that America is better than all other countries, this is the kind of blind stupidity that results. And that’s not just Ted Cruz — that’s America writ large.

Afterword

For the record, Saudi Arabia really is an awful place.