Media Matters brought my attention to, The Media’s Imaginary Coffee Salute Scandal. It seems that Obama had a cup of coffee in his hand when he saluted Marines while exited Marine One. The right wing are freaking out, even though Bush the Younger did the same thing all the time while holding his dog. It is just another thing for partisans to freak out about. And I don’t especially care.

What I have cared about in the past is the habit of our men in uniform saluting the President of the United States. This goes back basically to the beginning. To me it has always smacked of military dictatorships. But it is what we have always done and it does go along with Marines code (pdf) that states that one should salute “all officers senior to you in rank.” The president certainly is entitled as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (and not simply Commander-in-Chief). But the Marines mention a number of other civilians who should be saluted, such as governors. Thus this is a sign of subordination of the military to the civilian government — a very good thing indeed. Conservatives want to turn this around.

But the Marines are a practical group and they note conditions under which one should not salute. For example, if you are bent over an engine trying to fix it, you are not expected to salute. But most important in this situation, you don’t need to salute when, “Carrying articles with both hands or being otherwise so occupied as to make saluting impractical.” That would pretty much relieve a president from ever having to salute.

Of course, the president never did salute. You know Colonel Jackson, General Grant, Colonel Roosevelt, General Eisenhower? None of them ever saluted. The tradition started in 1981 when the star of Bedtime for Bonzo did it because he thought it was super keen. He had been in World War II, but only stateside working in public relations. But you know how it is: once they stuck “under God” into the “Pledge of Allegiance,” people assumed it had always been there. Allen West, who really should know better even though he is a total authoritarian nut job, called the “latte salute” disgraceful. But you gotta wonder where West and all the Fox News ranters were when this happened:

Of course they were no where. No one cared. And no one cares about the “latte salute.” Brian Adam Jones sums up the issue well:

The man can’t win. No Democratic president can win. This is because the right wing in this country has nothing to talk about in terms of policy. The world view of the right is that the nation is divided into the patriots and the traitors. And the Democrats are by definition traitors. It doesn’t matter if any given Democrat is a president or not. Thinking this way doesn’t make those on the right traitors, but it definitely destroys any claim to being patriots.

I saw this bumper sticker on the back of a car — okay, it was an SUV, of course. On its face, it is not as offensive as “If You Like Your Freedom Thank a Vet” or “Freedom Isn’t Free.” These bumper stickers equate freedom with our enormous military that does very little to protect our freedom anymore. What it does is support corporate interests. But above all, these bumper stickers just say, “Whatever the military does is great and it is wrong to ever disagree.” In other words: you are not free to express your opinions. Subtext: because we lost the Vietnam War because people didn’t “support” the troops.

This new bumper sticker (new to me, anyway) is much better in that it is explicit. There is no pretense that the things we have the military do are for the good of the country or its people or any people, for that matter. It is simply belligerent. Note that it doesn’t say if you “can’t” stand behind the troops, it says “won’t.” So the problem, according to it, is horrible liberals like myself who just refuse to do what is right. It is not a matter of differing opinions.

Of course, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t “support” or “stand behind” the troops. This entire conservative meme is a phantom. No American I’ve ever seen has wished our military ill. So what people who claim that we must “support the troops” mean is that we must support whatever war the United States is involved in. What’s more, we must support ever more funding for our military. And above all, we must be bellicose, “America, fk yeah!”

The truth is that a lot of liberals (and some conservatives) over the years have indeed stood in front of the military. They did it to yell, “Stop! You’re making a mistake!” But again, people put these bumper stickers on their cars not to call for leadership but to call for conformity and the acquiescence to authority.

Everyone loves this photo:

But this is someone standing up to another country’s army — a country that we have, at best, a difficult relationship with. What this young man did is exactly what peace protesters do, but obviously not as ostentatiously and not with the shocking amount of courage. And this gets to the very heart of what I so hate about all of these bumper stickers: the mentality that goes along with them is authoritarian. It is “America: right or wrong.”[1] And that is just about the most anti-American thing I can imagine.

Do we live in a military dictatorship? Is Bill O’Reilly right that after the government decides to go to war, all those who disagree should, “Shut up”? (This has long been official policy.) Should we all be good authoritarian followers who do just what the government tells us? I think the people who put these bumper stickers on their cars think so.

But these same people tend to be right wing reactionaries — supporters of the Tea Party and the John Birch Society and similar groups. And in general, these are the people whose love of and loyalty to the United States is the most contingent. These bumper stickers don’t say, “I love America!” They say, “I love the military!” America is always great regardless of what it does to others. But what America decides to do internally is not to be supported without conditions. These people believe in “America,” not America. And the unwavering support for any and all military adventures is a sign of that. And that, of all things, is what they put on the back of their cars.

[1] There is one early quote of this that I quite agree with. In 1872, Carl Schurz supposedly said, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” But that is completely counter to the sentiment, “If You Won’t Stand Behind Our Troops, You Are More Than Welcome to Stand in Front of Them.”

I want to say a couple of things about Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I haven’t fully digested it. The first is from the beginning of the book. The very first graph in the book is, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1910-2010.” It is an extremely interesting graph.

Whenever I’ve looked at similar graphs in the past, what I’ve focused on is that inequality is actually higher now that it has been in the last century. But this time, what I focus on is how inequality comes crashing down during World War II and it doesn’t start coming unhinged again until the late 1970s:

There are a couple of things that do not seem to be going on here. First, this is really not about the top tax bracket. It had been raised steadily throughout the 1930s without much effect. But inequality was on a steep decline before 1942, when the income tax really went up. (It isn’t that the rate went high, but the income level at which it took effect was greatly reduced.) Then, in 1964, when the tax rate was greatly lowered, income inequality stayed pretty much constant. Finally, income inequality started to rise in the late 1970s — years before Reagan brought the tax rate down further.

(Here’s an interesting thing. In 1987, the top marginal tax rate was reduced to 38.5%. This is 1.1 percentage points lower than it is today. But it applied to all incomes over $186,000 in adjusted 2014 dollars. Today, the rate is $403,000. So income taxes on the wealthy are actually quite a lot lower today than they were then. Basically, we have exactly the same top tax rate as we had in 1993.)

The second thing to note is that this doesn’t really seem to be about unionization. I’m not saying that unions aren’t important, because I think they are hugely so. But in terms of unions, they don’t seem to be of critical importance to economic inequality itself. Union rates went way up in the 1930s, again without much effect on inequality. And then after the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947, we see a constant decrease in unionization, but income inequality stays at about the same rate.

What I think income inequality is all about is norms. During World War II and following it, it was just unacceptable for the rich to pay themselves ridiculous amounts of money. Of course, there were strong unions to enforce these norms. But there is no doubt that people like Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises have had their effect. Regardless, since the rich will not police themselves (and really, I don’t expect them to), we need confiscatory taxes. These are not taxes intended to raise money for government services, but rather just to change behavior. If you tax incomes over a million dollars at 95%, you will see far fewer people getting paid more than a million dollars a year.

The problem, of course, is that the rich have great incentives and abilities to game the system to avoid paying taxes. This is why Piketty pushes for an international wealth tax. This is basically a way of making money disappear over time. The reason conservatives love the idea of a gold standard is that if you put a kilogram of gold under your bed, in ten years you will still have a kilogram of gold under your bed. On the other hand, if you put a kilogram of potatoes under your bed, in ten years you will have nothing at all. It makes more sense to have money be more like food and less like gold. I would love to see that, but I’m not too hopeful in the near future.

The second thing I was struck with was Piketty’s discussion of public debt. He notes that there are three ways that public debt can be managed: taxes on capital, inflation, and austerity. What I find so interesting about this list is that the first two things are simply off the table. According to the Serious People, you couldn’t possibly tax capital or allow even modest inflation. They say it would harm the economy! And it would. A little. But the alternative is austerity: cutting government spending and raising taxes on income. But these harm the economy too. But instead of harming it a little, they harm it a lot.

We get stuck with bad economic policy because it is good economic policy for those who are already rich. And those who are already rich are the ones who control the conversation. This is ultimately the biggest problem that we face on the economic front. And it isn’t just the rich within different countries. It is also the way that rich countries treat poor countries, as discussed in Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans. I know we will eventually solve these problems, I just don’t know how.

One thing I really hated about Karl Rove was his “50 percent of the votes, plus one” doctrine. I don’t go for that precisely because I believe in democracy and not in mob rule. Of course, it is all the worse in the United States where very few people vote. So getting 50% of the vote almost never means 50% of the people are in favor of a particular policy or candidate. And the conservative approach is always the same: get as few people to vote as possible.

There are some things that are not open to a vote, however. This is what the Bill of Rights is all about. This is why it is so frustrating to hear libertarians, who I think are totally wrong but usually fairly smart, say that if slavery were what the people wanted it would be okay. Wrong! And in a small defense of libertarians, the smart ones understand this very clearly. There are some rights that are not open to a vote. What’s more, we have rightly decided as a people that there are some rights you cannot even give up. If you want to be a slave, you can’t be. That is a freedom you do not have.

So even though I still believe that Scottish independence is a good idea if done properly, I find the vote quite questionable. What if the “yes” vote had received “50 percent of the votes, plus one”? Would that really have made it okay to upset the current reasonable state of things on the basis of a single vote? I don’t think it would be. And that brings up an interesting question: what level of support would justify independence? I wish there were an easy answer to that question.

There are two parts of it. First, I think there should be a very clear majority. I think some kind of supermajority would be appropriate — perhaps 60%, although maybe just 55% would be more appropriate given that it isn’t the only requirement. Second, I think there should be a high level of homogeneity in that majority. This is similar to the decision of the Second Continental Congress that all the colonies be on board before they decided on declaring independence. Clearly, this creates all kinds of problems of definitions. You wouldn’t want Scotland divided up by households so that some old crank is the only thing that is stopping Scotland from getting its independence. But Scotland is divided into 32 council areas and I think majorities (or maybe even submajorities) in all of those ought to do.

I’m sure this is the kind of proposal that is likely to make me hated by everyone on all sides of the issue. But the truth is that I don’t much care how Scotland wants to organize its affairs. I’m just using it as an example. When it comes to very important and disruptive things, I think more than a simple majority ought to be needed. Of course, here in the United States, we have a conservative movement that is the worst of all worlds. At the same time that they believe that they ought to be able to turn America into a theocracy with “50 percent of the votes, plus one,” they stubbornly obstruct the government on things they even agree on. See, for example, how the Republicans in the Senate use the filibuster against nominations that they later vote unanimously for.

The truth is that creating a governmental structure that works is really hard. My hat is off to Mr Madison. But it is also true that there is literally no free system that can work if the vast majority of the people don’t abide by social norms. That means that nothing works if we don’t treat each other with shared humanity. And I think this is why America is at such a dangerous point in its history. The leadership of a major political party does not accept the legitimacy of the other political party. Can you imagine what would have happened if the Supreme Court had canceled the Florida recount and anointed Al Gore president? The same people who concocted the Brooks Brothers riot, would have started a revolution. Liberals didn’t like how George Bush became president, but they accepted it because they accepted the system. I think most conservatives accept the system. But the people leading the movement do not. And things could go south quickly if “50 percent of the votes, plus one” ever worked in the liberals’ favor.

Philip Klein interviewed Paul Ryan at the Washington Examiner yesterday, Paul Ryan to GOP: Don’t Assume a Wave. Unfortunately, it’s in video form. But Jonathan Chait decided to take the week off from ranting about what a little dweeb Thomas Frank is and how opponents of education “reform” are big ol’ meanies who don’t care about the kids. This allowed him to write an actually interesting article with quotes, Paul Ryan Declares War Against Math. Go read the article if you are interested, it is rather good. But it isn’t surprising. Paul Ryan is a fraud and we have yet more evidence.

What I’m interested in is what Ryan had to say about the big bad budget crisis that is coming Any Day Now™. “The shame of it is, we just wasted eight years of knowing this crisis was coming, it’s the most predictable economic crisis we’ve ever had in this country, knowing about it, and not doing anything about it for eight years because of this presidency.” Wow. We’ve known about it since 2006, but it’s Obama’s fault. Bush was the guy who pushed the big tax cuts. Bush is the guy who provided the big give away to the pharmaceutical companies known as Medicare Part D. Obama actually cut costs with Obamacare, rolled back some of those tax cuts, and over all savaged the budget, which has been bad for the economy. He’s done what all the pretenders like Ryan claimed they wanted, but still Ryan says he has done nothing.

Of course, Ryan’s idea of dealing with the impending budget crisis that will now and forever more be here Any Day Now™, was to cut taxes. But this is nothing new. Paul Ryan is a hero of the Very Serious People, which means that he is by definition very unserious. But let’s look at his hysterical claim. “We’s just wasted eight years!” This is Social Security Paradox thinking: we must cut spending now or else we will have to cut spending later.

What’s really going on with Paul Ryan and the Serious crowd is that they are afraid that if we don’t cut spending right now, later the problem will be urgent enough that the people will call for tax increases. On the rich. The horror! But Paul Ryan would never say that. And anyway, his prescription has always been to cut taxes on the rich right now and savage social programs. So he isn’t even fine with the status quo of keeping taxes very low on the rich.

But the terrible thing is that if there really is an impending budget crisis that will happen Any Day Now™, we can fix it on that very day. We can cut spending on that day. We can raise taxes. It might be a bit painful but it would not be catastrophic. In fact, it would probably not be any worse than the last six years have been for the poor anyway. But there is an impending crisis that does not allow for quick fixes like the budget: global warming.

Ryan, of course, doesn’t care about climate change. It is hard to say where he is on the stages of global warming denial, because he bounces around. But that’s the point of the stages: you decide to deny doing anything about global warming and then you pick a reason. The more you know or the more your audience knows, the higher the stage you pick.

Doing something about global warming will take decades. The lifetime of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is uncertain because of how much it cycles, but more recent estimates indicated about 50 years. The lifetime of methane is about 10 years. And the lifetime of nitrous oxide is about a hundred years. Of course, this isn’t the amount of time that it takes to remove these gases. This is the amount of time it takes to remove a molecule on average. Think of it as a half-life, but it is actually the amount of time it takes to remove somewhat more than half. Still, you can see: if we stopped putting carbon in the atmosphere today, the problem would be with us for decades to come. And it might cause changes that would stay with us for thousands of years.

Paul Ryan, like pretty much all Republicans who seem to shop at the same store for their suits and their ideologies, thinks that we absolutely must do something about the budget crisis that will happen Any Day Now™, even though we can easily address it. But global warming is a problem we can put off until things are catastrophic, even though there is really nothing we can do at that point but wait it out. This is modern American conservative thinking. And it is terrifying.

There was a time when the Census Bureau just released figures on poverty as in, “How much money are people making?” But as conservatives saw that poverty rates remained high, they balked. “What about all those fist fulls of sweaty cash we are giving them?!” they screamed. That is: what about the aid the poor get from the federal government? And so the Census Bureau came out with another measure, the Supplemental Poverty Measure or SPM. And it showed something really interesting: since the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, SPM is actually higher than the old way of measuring poverty. Right now the old way indicates that we have 15% poverty and the SPM indicates we have 16% poverty.

Of course, you know how it goes. If poverty were down, they would declare “Mission Accomplished!” and call for eliminating poverty programs. And if poverty were not down, they would declare that the poverty programs don’t work and call for eliminating poverty programs. But if you look at the actual data, you will see something that is really interesting. From 1967, the poverty rate went down — and fast. It went from roughly 26% to less than 18% in that great inflection point year: 1980. Things changed under the great economic stewardship of Ronald Reagan and his war against the “welfare queens” on behalf of the poor beleaguered rich. The poverty rate shot back up to the low 20% level.

Luckily, a man of the people came to town in 1992. And by “man” I mean Bill Clinton. And by “the people” I mean, of course, “the rich.” The bubble-based boom that he was president during allowed more people to get jobs and so the poverty rate again went down. Over the course of six years, it went down from 21% to 15%. But during those years when poverty was being reduced, Clinton kept his word that he did not come to praise the poor but to bury them: he did indeed “end welfare as we know it.” And look how well it worked! Poverty rates were going down! It had absolutely nothing to do with his welfare policies (or any of his other policies, for that matter), but there was a correlation. And who cared?! He would be out of office by the time all the pain came back!

Under Bush the Younger, the poverty rate stayed pretty much where it had been. It went up a percentage point during the his first term in response to the recession. And then it went down a percentage point during his second term during the recovery. But when the crisis came, it went up starkly and continues to stay high. There are two great conservative heroes of the 20th century, although most conservatives aren’t aware of this. The first was Ronald Reagan, but he could only do so much. In much the same way that it was true that only Nixon could go to China, it required New Democrat Bill Clinton to solidify those conservative gains and really stick it to the poor long term.

And where are we today? Well, it depends upon where you are in the pecking order. Michael Hiltzik laid out the situation very well today, Census Data on Poverty Show Results of Economic Policy Gone Wrong:

Of course, one reason that Social Security is such a powerful anti-poverty program is that it is the only one that hasn’t been savaged over the last four decades. But the conservatives would love to savage it! It’s the one remaining poverty plan that they could destroy and create huge numbers of 70-somethings out in the labor market keeping wages down at McDonald’s!

This is one small bit of good news, though, “Also striking is the effect of relieving the poor of the burden of medical expenses.” So Obamacare is likely to work to reduce poverty in the years ahead. Or at least, it will work in those states that have accepted the free money of the Medicaid expansion. But it also shows why Obamacare is such a big target for conservatives: it helps the poor!

I used to be of the opinion that conservatives didn’t hate the poor; they just didn’t care. They loved the rich and wanted to do everything they could to help them. That often involved harming the poor. But harming the poor wasn’t the point. I’ve come to think that I’ve been wrong about that. The truth is that harming the poor is usually bad for the rich — or at least not helpful. The money the poor get will jut get spent and circulate to the rich anyway. So helping the poor really helps the rich. See my article, I Was a Middle Class Food Stamp Kid.

So it would seem that harming the poor is an end in and of itself for conservatives. The only doubt I have is the thought that conservatives can’t be that mean and spiteful. But that’s just silly. Conservatives in red states all over the nation are rejecting free money from the federal government that would provide healthcare to the working poor. This is free money that would help everyone in their states. They aren’t taking the money out of pure spite. So of course they would hurt the poor just for the sake of it.