Yesterday, over at Political Animal, David Atkins wrote, With Courage, Democrats Can Still Win With Seniors. It is about a new poll that finds that older people would reward a party or candidate who pushed for increased Social Security benefits. Atkins proposes increasing entitlement spending by raising taxes on the rich and cutting corporate welfare. He’s quite right that the Republicans would have an extremely hard time countering that kind of proposal.

Of course, the Democrats will not promise such policies. It all goes back to my much repeated observation that we really don’t live in a democracy. Such ideas are simply “off the table” while very unpopular ideas like cutting Social Security are perennially Good Ideas™. But my question is why Obama spent the whole of his first term looking for the ultimate bipartisan prize: the Grand Bargain. Politically, it made no sense.

Even worse, it made no sense economically. The idea was always that in exchange for the Democrats’ agreeing to cut entitlement spending, the Republicans would agree to raise taxes. Let’s think this through. We are in a liquidity trap — there is too little demand in the economy. So the Grand Bargain would cut government spending. This would be bad for the economy because it would reduce demand. And the Grand Bargain would raise taxes. This would be bad for the economy because it would reduce demand. Economically speaking, the Grand Bargain is a lose-lose proposition.

There’s only one reason for the Grand Bargain: to cut the federal government’s budget deficit. But we need bigger deficits right now, not smaller deficits. Just look at total government spending after the last four recessions. Do you notice anything? The government is not spending the way it normally does and we’ve had effectively no recovery. In 1937, Keynes said, “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” But apparently we’ve forgotten. (Or more likely: we now have a major political party that will destroy the economy until they get power.)

So the Grand Bargain is bad politics. And the Grand Bargain is bad economics. So why is Obama so interested in it? Why do I still fear if the Senate goes Republican next year that he may bring it back with even more concessions? (“I’ll tell you what, if you agree to get rid of just one loophole, I’ll raise the retirement age to 88 and end the food stamp program!”) I think he has a kind of addiction to being seen as The Reasonable One™ among those we refer to as the Very Serious People. A year and a half ago, I wrote, Return of the Son of the Night of the Simpson-Bowles. I noted then that trying to get credit from such people was a fool’s errand because they will always proportion the blame evenly between the Democrats and Republicans.

I would like to think that Obama has learned his lesson, but I don’t think he really has. Nor has the Democratic Party learned the most basic fact about politics in the United States. The one area where the Democratic Party is truly liberal — on social policy — the nation is conservative. On liberal economic policy — which is wildly popular — the party is conservative. But like I said: we don’t live in a democracy — at least one where every person has an equal vote. “All Americans are equal, but some Americans are more equal than others.” But I don’t expect Obama or the rest of the Democratic establishment to ever admit that.

I didn’t know it, but Kroger is the largest supermarket in the United States. The reason is that the company uses a lot of different names for its outlets. For example, around here in the Bay Area, we have Foods Co. And I have to admit: I liked shopping at Foods Co. But I am more than willing to boycott them. Currently, the grocery chain is being targeted by Moms Demand Action. According to the group, “Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the country, has policies that allow customers to openly carry guns in its stores.” And so they are investing six-figures into an ad campaign using images like the one above.

The idea here is that Kroger forbids skateboards in its stores because they are dangerous. And that is a good policy. But they have no problem with the open carrying of the guns. Most people would agree that people walking around grocery isles with loaded guns is dangerous. But the open carry crowd think it is just fine. And they are freaking out even as they claim there is nothing to see. They claim that it is “bullying.” But then, any political action they disagree with is “bullying.”

This is rich. We have a civilization where we do not need to haul around guns with us. So the ostentation display of guns is a provocative act. But if a mother with her two young children has a problem with some unknown man walking around with a semiautomatic rifle and a 30-round banana clip, then it is her who is the bully. That’s really quite amazing. People don’t have any problem with those who demand that people not do their shopping naked, but the people who request that their children not be placed in harm’s way are bullies. In a sane world, it would be unbelievable. Unfortunately, it is very believable.

One would think that after asking Kroger to change the policy, it would have done so. After all, the vast majority of people do not want to see gun fanatics walking around their grocery stores. But here is the Kroger response (pdf) in full:

It’s remarkable for its cognitive dissonance. They don’t want to put their employees in a position of having to confront people with guns. That makes sense. After all, these people have guns. If politely told of the store policy, these people might go crazy and kill the employee. It is also true that a slow checker might set someone with a gun off. Or another customer accidentally bumping into someone with a gun. This is why people walking around with guns everywhere is a bad thing.

Kroger also asks customers to “be respectful of others while shopping.” The problem is that some idiot walking around the store with a gun is by definition not being respectful of others. He is doing it to get in people’s faces — to make a point. He knows full well that seeing some anonymous man walk around with a gun is upsetting to other people, because they have no reason not to think him a murderer.

But what most impresses me is the false equivalence: “our customers are passionate on both sides of this issue.” That’s right, the vast majority of people who want to shop in peace compared to a tiny slice of the population who just want to be annoying. Even the generic polls that ask people about open carry find strong opposition to it. Let a man with an assault rifle walk through a suburban supermarket and then ask those people what they think of open carry.

Most of civilization is not about laws; it is about norms. In general, you shouldn’t have to have policies against carrying guns into supermarkets and churches. But this is what has become of conservatism in the United States. This is why the Senate filibuster had to be neutered. And it is why gun advocates feel they should bring rifles into fast food restaurants. Conservatism has become revolutionary. They care far more about their own extreme ideology than the niceties of getting along in a diverse society. Just the same, I have little doubt that Moms Demand Action will win this fight and Kroger will fold like a card table.

Andrew Prokop wrote an excellent article over at Vox yesterday, Why Election Forecasters Disagree About Who Will Win the Senate. It gives far too much attention to Nate Silver, but it still manages to provides little nuggets of information that I had been wondering about. For example, as I had thought, The Monkey Cage model used to be fully fundamentals based. Now that we are so close to the election, it is mostly polls based. That’s why a couple of months ago, it gave the Republicans an 86% chance of taking the Senate and now it only gives them at 53% chance.

But overall, the article doesn’t provide any surprising information. Basically, the differences in the conclusions of the models is based upon just how much each model uses fundamentals like the approval rating of the President. According to the articles, the modelers have looked at the effect of fundamentals in the past at certain points in the election cycle and they have found that they really do predict better than poll-only models. I think there is a major problem with this claim.

These modelers have not looked at the effects of fundamentals-based models before the fact. They’ve developed models based upon what they’ve seen in the past. Basically: they do multiple regressions and see how much each element affects the final result. So of course these models would predict the past better than the polls-only models. The fundamentals-based models have the conclusions built into them to some extent.

No one thinks that these multiple regressions are the truth. There is no theoretical basis for the belief that the President’s approval rating will affect the election outcome. It is simply a tendency that has been experimentally derived. And it turns out that generally the President’s approval rating is correlated with a “generic ballot” where people say who they would rather vote for: a generic Democrat or a generic Republican. Well, as Nate Cohn explained last week, these two have diverged. Obama’s approval rating is very low at about 40%, but the Democrats have a three percentage point advantage in the generic poll. For contrast, the Republicans had a three point advantage in 2010.

What I wonder about is if the fundamentals aren’t generally useless in off-year elections. Even in presidential elections, there is really only one important fundamental: economic growth. The change in GDP for the three quarters before the election is responsible for almost half of the variation in how well the parties do. My hunch is that all the other fundamentals are just added noise. Yes, they’ve correlated in the past, but it isn’t real. And that takes us to Sam Wang’s conclusion, “Because polls are a direct measure of opinion, and fundamentals are indirect, it’s generally a risky move to add fundamentals to a measurement.” In other words: fundamentals just add noise to the models.

It is important to remember that these are just models. What’s more, the polling data itself could be wrong. This isn’t a presidential election with nationwide polling. The competitive states are getting decent polling coverage, but they are hardly what we would want. And in the end, it will all come down to who shows up to vote. Right now, the polls are mostly of registered voters. Soon they will provide “likely voter” estimates. As a first brush, this tends to help the Republicans. Just the same, in 2012, many “likely voter” estimates overstated Republican voters because roughly half of the people who said they were unlikely to vote ended up voting anyway. So it is a muddled mess.

I’m back to what I thought a year ago: the Republicans have a 50-50 chance of taking over the Senate. And I’m kind of gloomy on that issue, because I’ve trained myself to be pessimistic in situations like this. Even in 2012 when I predicted that Obama would win 332-206 (which is what he won by), I wasn’t willing to say that Obama was certain to win. The truth is that we just don’t know. But we ought to know the evening of 4 November.

As you should know by now, you should be reading Jonathan Cohn every day. And yesterday was no exception. He wrote, Is Obamacare Making Insurance Cheaper in Your City? It is primarily concerned with the new Kaiser Family Foundation study that I wrote about yesterday morning, Good News About Obamacare Doesn’t Get Out. But Cohn went into a bit more depth about the issue, as he usually does.

I was very struck by the end of the article where he talks about how the lower premiums will be distributed. He provided the example of Los Angeles where the decrease in premium is due to lower prices offered by Anthem. So if people have Blue Shield right now and decide to just keep it next year, they may end up paying more. Cohn commented, “It’s confusing, I know. And you can safely assume that not all consumers are going to understand this. It’s going to cause real problems come open enrollment time, particularly since some people will choose to re-enroll in their current plans automatically.” Indeed it is confusing.

This is one of the many problems with neoliberal policy. There is this idea that people have nothing better to do with their time but to look at all the options for health insurance each year and decide which one is best. To conservatives, this is called, “Freedom!” But it doesn’t feel much like freedom to the average American who is already busy making ends meet. It reminds me of the lines at the grocery store. I think most people would prefer a single queue where they know they would be treated fairly rather than the current system where the most obnoxious people dash to the next check-stand that opens.

What’s more, the economics of neoliberal policies are never fully worked out. These policies normally have huge opportunity costs. But they are ignored because it is a cost that is far greater on the poor (with little political power) than it is on the rich (with much political power). I know that we consistently get saddled with neoliberal policies because we are told that they are the only ones that are politically viable. But the reason they are politically viable is because they benefit the rich, and the country is run by and for the rich.

I’m glad that Obamacare is working out well. There is no doubt that it is far superior to the system we had before. But it is still suboptimal. We continue to use “free” markets to provide services, even in cases where those exact markets were a total failure. Look at the way that those in the so called Education Reform movement are so eager to destroy the public school system because they claim it is broken. If only these people applied the same thinking toward the healthcare system. But of course, the two are exactly opposite. Destroying public schools is seen as in the interests of the rich, and protecting our byzantine private insurance system is seen as in the interests of the rich.

You can predict government policy with a simple procedure. Does it benefit the rich? If so, it is the mainstream policy. If not, it is out of the question — not even worth discussing — “commie talk.” Are you enjoying your oligarchy?

I’m sure you’ve read about The Economist review of Edward Baptist’s forthcoming book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The anonymous reviewer concluded, “This is not history; it is advocacy.” That was because Baptist just focused on how slave owners forced more productivity out of slaves. The reviewer just couldn’t understand why he didn’t spend any time on all the slave owners who got their slaves to be more productive by being nice to them. You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar! Am I right?!

There has been a lot of comment on this review, but most people just think it is funny. It is so over-the-top offensive that it is hard to take it seriously. Or maybe we are all so used to it by now that we figure, “Of course a conservative magazine would write that.” Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times noted that the review was very similar to what The American Spectator wrote about the film 12 Years a Slave, “If ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that Mr McQueen does not want us to hear about it.” Yeah! Can’t we get a little Margaret Mitchell fiction to cut the bitter taste of Solomon Northup’s nonfiction? A little balance, that’s all we want! Am I right?!

The Economist has reacted the way you would expect from a British publication. They admitted their error and moved on. In place of the article is an apology, Our Withdrawn Review “Blood Cotton.” (For transparency, they rightly leave the article after the apology.) And they don’t try to justify or minimize:

So good for The Economist. But the question is naturally raised: why is it that conservatives — Libertarians most especially! — are so often trapped by a kind of slavery apologia? One would think that believers in freedom would be especially offended by slavery. Yet they are forever making arguments that slavery was on its last leg and this nonsense about how slave owners treated slaves well because the slaves were valuable “property.” What’s with that?

I think there are two issues. The first, and less important, is that they define “freedom” in such a way that it is meaningless. For example, freedom is “paying no taxes.” It is not “the ability to find work.” Conservatives believe that the government has a role in enforcing property rights. But it has no role in seeing that people who were born poor after all the property was divvied up have an option to make a living. Thus, it isn’t surprising that such a skewed idea of freedom would cause them to get confused about an issue like slavery were the slave owner is, after all, extremely free. And eliminating slavery requires collective action, which they hate.

The second reason that conservatives tend to minimize slavery is much more important. Conservatives have created a kind of idolatry. In its most simplistic form, this is a religion where the founding fathers were demigods who produced the divinely inspired Constitution and so on. Slavery puts a real damper on this party. If God was really behind the founding of America, why didn’t he get rid of slavery instead of coming up with that three-fifths clause? Thus, conservatives need to minimize the horror that was slavery to make it at least seem acceptable enough that it could wait 77 years.

Of course, the knowledgeable and intelligent people at The Economist don’t fall for such a thing. They believe something more sophisticated: free market ideology. But this is no more defensible. If free markets work so well, why is there slavery? And note: during slavery, it was those in the South — the slave owners — who were in favor of free trade. In the north, the fledgling industries wanted economic protection. So, far from being anti-free-market, slavery fully embraced it. I’ve been in many arguments with libertarians about this, but the arguments are not good. They all come down to, “But protecting people from slavery is one of the things we do need a government for!” Of course, the kind of weakling government they want would never have the power to stop slavery. It’s all nonsense.

I think that intelligent conservatives need to take a close look at themselves. When The Economist can push an idea that is normally reserved for confederate apologists, it is clear that there is racism festering in the core of conservative ideology. It’s great that the editors of The Economist were quick to admit their error. But that error indicates something going very wrong at the magazine and the conservative movement generally. But maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe all political movements have racism bubbling under the surface. Am I right?!

Actually: no. I don’t think so.