I’m trying, as much as possible, to make my political writing more understandable. It’s very easy to throw around words that don’t mean much to most people. One of those words is “austerity.” In a general sense, there is nothing special in the word. I live a life of great austerity because I don’t have much money. And in a political context, it means much the same thing. Unfortunately, it implies a lot that is just nonsense.

In America and especially in Europe, people who call for austerity are really calling for deficit reduction. But as we’ve seen, it is not just any deficit reduction. When France reduced its budget deficit by raising taxes instead of cutting spending, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn was furious. Rehn and others claim that raising taxes is bad because it will slow economic growth while making poor people go hungry will not. You don’t have to know much about economics to know what nonsense this is. What’s really behind this is that Rehn wants budgets to be balanced on the backs of the poor because they aren’t his friends; he doesn’t want them balanced on the backs of the rich because they are his friends.

The idea is all the same, though: balanced budgets will lead to business confidence and the economy will improve. I’ve shown many times before that this just isn’t true. Let me repeat it here very briefly. When the economy is booming, government borrowing depresses the economy because private businesses have to spend more money to borrow so they can invest in and grow their businesses. But that isn’t the case right now! In fact, private businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash and doing nothing with it. So all that a balanced government budget would do is take even more money out of the economy and make the economic downturn worse.

This morning, Paul Krugman put together a great graph that shows how this is working in Europe. There are five countries in Europe that have been struggling the most: Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Iceland. These countries are usually referred to as GIPSI (gypsy) or, by people who are jerks, PIIGS (pigs). For the last 5 years, these countries have been cutting their budgets like good little boys and girls, because the heads of the European Union have told them that this is the medicine that will fix their ailing economies. Well, how is that going? Not well:

On the y-axis, we see that the countries can now borrow money at a lower rate. This is because the European Central Bank (ECB) decided, after a long delay that they would be the lender of last resort; in other words, the ECB is guaranteeing that the countries won’t go bankrupt. But look at the x-axis. Despite all the austerity: the budget cuts and “belt tightening,” the governments of all these countries now owe more than they did before!

How can that be? After all, aren’t they spending less than they were before? Well, yes they are. The problem is that by spending less money, they put less money into their economies. This meant that more people lost their jobs—both government workers and private sector workers. Consider an example. There’s some government worker who was planning to buy a new car. But now that he’s lost his job, he can’t buy a new car. That means the guy who was going to sell him that car didn’t make his commission, so he isn’t going to buy that flat screen television he was looking forward to. And on and on. By cutting government spending, the economy gets even more depressed.

But how is it that the government that is spending less actually owes more money now? Well, spending is only one side of the budget. If you cut your spending by 3% while reducing your revenue by 5%, you are going to owe more. All those spending cuts meant that people in the economy didn’t have as much money. As a result, they didn’t owe the government as much taxes. Thus, all the austerity—all the hardship placed on the working classes—actually made the problem worse.

What’s especially bad about this is that all of this was predictable and was predicted by a large number of economists. It isn’t hard economics. In fact, the economics used to justify such austerity programs was hard. Economists and politicians had to twist themselves into knots to justify how cutting spending in a depressed economy would help. They used an idea called “expansionary austerity” promoted by a guy named Alberto Alesina, who by all accounts is a very smart economist. Instead of the obvious idea that if people have money they will spend it, Alesina flipped this on its head. He claimed that if businesses see governments getting their budgets in order (But only through spending cuts, not tax increases!) then they will have “confidence” that will make up for the massive decrease in demand that budget cuts cause.

That’s fancy foot work. And I have to admit, as a non-economist but someone who is very good with math and all that, I’m impressed with the theory. It does take a smart guy to come up with a theory like that. But it fails the Ockham’s razor test. We already had a very simple model of how the economy works. And as is usually the case, the simple model was the one that was right, not the complex one with its loopy loops.

Yet here we are. Throughout Europe and the United States, conservatives are calling for more budget cuts. It doesn’t matter how much evidence piles up that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. But they aren’t pushing these policies because they work. They are pushing these policies because these are the policies that they always favor. And now they have an excuse for pushing the policies. The fact that the work of Alesina & Ardagna and Reinhart & Rogoff has been shown to be wrong doesn’t matter. They still use this work to justify their policies. They want to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

We declare our right on this earth to be rich, to be ever richer, to be respected as the rich, to be given the supreme rights of the rich in this unjust society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

Afterword

It was easier to parody Malcolm X’s quote than Sartre’s. Actually, Sartre’s quote is closer to what I believe. Malcolm X’s quote is almost plaintive, “We demand to be respected.” In our society he was thought to be so radical and scary. But what was he asking for? Just the simplest of things: human dignity and respect. Our society seems to have gotten worse since that time. Now Sartre better speaks to our larger problems, while Malcolm X’s demand still largely goes denied:

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

By the way: those means do no include armed rebellion. Modern war is the most unjust thing imaginable. If a group of people want to go to war, that’s their business. But they always end up harming those who just want to live their lives. These are the other 99%—Jesus’ meek. War makes things worse. War exists to perpetuate itself. It is not a form of politics.

Images are from a great cartoon by Brian McFadden in the New York Times. Check it out!

Matt Taibbi has written an interesting article over at his post at Rolling Stone, On Christmas, Republicans Quietly Declare War on Themselves. As usual with Taibbi, it’s a fun read so I highly recommend that you take a gander. But I think he is basically wrong.

His thesis is that the Republican Party spent the Bush years treating the electorate as though they were a bunch of fools, so it should be no surprise that their party is now nominating a bunch of fools. In a comparison that perhaps only Taibbi could come up with, he says that the Bush years were the political equivalent of Married With Children, “an ongoing self-parody routine where couch-potato America tuned in week after week to cheer on the nitwit hero as he and his brood took on a world of self-serious snobs and their silly ‘civilized’ conventions (like, say, international law).” You know: political junk food that you know will make you fat and impotent, but oh don’t it taste good!

I agree with him on one point: John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin—”one of the few potential candidates in the Republican Party rolls even dumber than George Bush”—was entirely Steve Schmidt running the Karl Rove playbook. And since I’m on the subject: liberals like Schmidt a lot more than they should. He came off looking pretty good in Game Change. But that’s like saying that Othello came off looking good in his play. Yeah, Iago is the true villain in that play, but Othello is still the one who strangled Desdemona. Schmidt is the one who thought so little of the American people and of the country generally that got Sarah Palin nominated to be vice-president of this country. Schmidt should be living in a cave somewhere if not in a grave after his quite rational decision to kill himself. That is, after all, what Othello did.

But here’s the thing. There is nothing new about conservative politicians saying wacky things. The Todd Akins and Richard Mourdocks have been around in the conservative movement forever. These are the people who President Eisenhower was discussing when he wrote:

Of course, Ike was wrong when he said their number was negligible. Then, as now, they represent 20% of the nation and 40% of the Grand Old Party. And they were out there in the 1950s talking about how God wanted black people to be poor. They were talking about how Jews controlled the world. They were talking about how water fluoridation was a communist plot. This was all done when Karl Rove was a little boy.

Now, there is little doubt that young Rove looked at all this nonsense and thought, “A large segment of the American public is made up of complete idiots!” He didn’t create it. He just used it. The problem is that using it gets harder and harder. Not even half of the Republican Party is made up of these “nuts” (Karl Rove’s term). So the rest of the Republicans and pretty much all of the Democrats have to be deceived into thinking that Republican candidates aren’t part of the Crazy 40. But that’s really hard in a world that is so interconnected. Within second of Richard Mourdock saying that pregnancies resulting from rape are “something that God intended to happen” people know about it on Mount Everest.

So now, the Republicans and the national Chamber of Commerce are hooking up to spend $50 million this year to stop “fools” from running for office. This will not work. For one thing, since 40% of Republicans (the Crazy 40) are these very fools, that means that roughly 40% of the people who run for the Republican nomination will also be fools. Most of it just comes down to abortion absolutism. If you don’t think that rape gives a woman the right to abort a pregnancy, you are going to run into rhetoric about how God intended it and how you ought to turn lemons into lemonade.

This is why the smart Republicans are doing the only thing that just might work: voter suppression. If only the Crazy 40 vote, it doesn’t matter what fools the Republicans nominate. And just like the non-crazy 60% of the GOP, the Crazy 40 will also do the bidding of the super rich. And that’s all that matters.

I think that it is important to understand what conservatives mean when they say certain things that make absolutely no sense. The big example of this is, “The government can’t create jobs.” This sounds like nonsense on the face of it. For one thing, it is usually said by some politician and you can’t help but respond, “The government created your job!” But that’s not what conservatives mean when they say that the government can’t create jobs. But don’t misunderstand: they are still wrong. It is just that there is a certain amount of sense in what they are saying.

When Senator Idiot says that the government can’t create jobs, he means that the money that is used for his job comes from taxing people. If that money didn’t go to the government, the tax payers would spend the money and thus create one or more jobs in the private sector. Thus, the government creates a job only by removing a private sector job. This is not a totally stupid idea. There is something to it and under certain circumstances it is even true.

The problem is that, like most conservative economic thinking, it is simplistic. Consider our current economic system where we are very far from full employment. Money is just sitting around not being used. Companies are sitting on piles of cash rather than investing and hiring because demand is so low. In this situation, we could fire Senator Idiot and put the money we pay him back into the private sector by reducing taxes.

In a booming economy, the result would be another job in the private sector for Senator Idiot or someone like him. But in a weak economy like the one we now have, the result would be even more money in the private sector, where it would just sit around doing nothing. So currently, and really, for about the last 13 years, government spending really does create jobs. When government spending does not create jobs is almost never. But there are times. Remember at the end of the Clinton presidency? Remember how Clinton was reducing spending? That was the correct thing to do, because the private economy was buzzing. Personally, I think that if a Republican had been president, he would have continued to spend. But that’s a story for another time.

Even at full employment, when the private sector is booming and businesses are desperate to borrow money to invest and hire, it is fine for the government to take some of that money and hire. There is nothing necessarily better about a private sector job than a public sector job. It is just in this case, you can’t say that the government is creating a job, because the money being used to create that job would be used by the private sector to create a job. But that is very rarely the case.

Now most conservatives don’t even know this much. They are just repeating a talking point. So when you talk to them, you will probably need to educate them as to why conservatives claim that the government doesn’t create jobs. And that’s actually helpful because it gives you some common ground on which to start your discussion, “Yes, the government doesn’t create jobs when the economy is at full employment.” From there, you can talk about all the money that is just sitting around doing nothing in a depressed economy. You can talk about how business owners don’t hire when they don’t have many customers. And before you know it, that conservative will be talking like a Keynesian.

Aaron Carroll has another one of his Healthcare Triage videos out. I have to say, it’s a mixed blessing. In general, I agree with everything Carroll has to say about just about everything. So the information that he presents is really good. But does he have to try so hard to act and sound like his producer John Green? Green is a good example of how you can be really successful at something that people think of as creative, while not being the least bit creative. It’s been about a year since I’ve watched any of Green’s highly polished videos because (1) they are all the same and (2) he generally manages to waste ten minutes of my time without informing me of anything at all. Compare him to CGP Grey, and there is no contest. Of course, Grey doesn’t put out videos every week like his livelihood depended on it. (Oops!)

Carroll’s newest video is “The Sky Isn’t Falling.” That’s great, because that’s what I try to explain to people in my life. If you’ve heard some outrageous story, chances are it isn’t true. And if it is true, it is most likely not indicative of a trend. And if it is indicative of a trend, it’s a new Republican plan to stop people from voting. Carroll is a doctor, so he’s talking about doctor stuff. And it is really interesting. It turns out that our kids drink less than kids in other comparable countries. And they smoke less. They have less sex. Pregnancy rates are down. Stealing is down. Assault is down. It isn’t all good, but it mostly is. The main thing is that our kids are fatter than kids in other countries, but even there, the trend is good: our kids are getting less fat.

But Carroll is such a white bread kind of guy, he won’t make the important connection that I will. We here in America spend about twice what comparable countries do on healthcare and don’t even provide healthcare for roughly 20% of our citizens. Conservatives like to blame this on the unhealthy lifestyles of Americans: we’re fat; we smoke; we’re violent. But the data that Aaron Carroll presents indicates that this is not the case. So what exactly are the conservatives going to blame our poor healthcare system that nonetheless costs us a fortune?

I’m not being naive here. That was just a rhetorical device. They will blame it on whatever is handy. Remember when the deregulated collateralized debt obligation (CDOs) caused a financial crisis? Or when deregulated Savings & Loans caused a financial crisis? Or basically when any kind of deregulated thing caused catastrophe? Remember what the conservatives always said was the real problem? It was the fact that there was still some regulation. In a truly, completely, “more mythical than A Midsummer Night’s Dream” world, there would be no problem.

So if we aren’t being over-charged for bad and incomplete healthcare, it must be the government’s fault. It must be that Medicare exists. Or Medicaid. Or food stamps! Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that it can’t be that we have a totally screwed up pseudo-free market healthcare system that doesn’t work. Remember how the conservative mind approaches problems. First, it eliminates all possible solutions that contradict ideology. Currently, that eliminates pretty much all solutions. Then, from the couple of possible solutions left over, it picks one. It doesn’t matter how the solution is picked, because they are all useless. The conservative hope is that the problem fixes itself, so that their useless “solution” is eventually forgotten.

It is important to remember, however, that things are in generally not so bad. And this is despite the conservatives doing everything they can to make the world the worst place possible.

Happy new year!

I’m not big on predictions, especially political predictions. But back in July, I did offer up, The Next Three Election Cycles. That was not so much a prediction as it was an explanation of what I thought it would take for the Republican Party to make substantial changes in order to start winning national elections again. The predictions in the article, however, still look pretty good.

I said that the Republicans will likely pick up a few seats in both the House and the Senate. What’s more, I said there was a 50% chance that the Republicans will retake control of the Senate. The reason for this is that 2008 was such a great year for Democrats. They have to protect a large number of seats compared to the Republicans. The fact that the Democrats still have a 50% chance of holding onto the Senate in an off-year election should give you some idea of just how badly the Republican Party is doing.

And it is important for the Democrats to maintain control of the Senate. There are lots of federal executive and judicial nominations that Obama will need to make the last two years of his presidency. So it would be really good if the Senate stays in the hands of the Democratic Party. But it wouldn’t be catastrophic if it didn’t happen. And the reason it wouldn’t be catastrophic is that if the Republicans gain control of the Senate, it will be for two years, and two years only.

This morning, Ed Kilgore helpfully reminds us that the political landscape will be infinitely better for Democratic Senators in 2016. Instead of trying to hold onto the gains they made in 2008, it will be the Republicans who are trying to hang on to the enormous gains they made in 2010—you remember: Obama’s “shellacking.” Kilgore provides the numbers:

Remember, if the Republicans take control of the Senate after next year’s elections, they will only take control by the smallest of margins. In fact, people are talking about there being a 50-50 split in the Senate, requiring Joe Biden to spend most of his last two years as vice-president hanging out at the Senate. So just with those numbers, the Senate will go back to the Democrats in 2016. (I predicted this as well in my article.)

But it is even worse for the Republicans. The 2016 election will be “on year”: a presidential election. So the entire electorate will be more liberal. So there will be a Democratic Senate after the 2016 election. That isn’t a debatable point. What’s more interesting at that point is what will happen to the House. Every day that goes by, the great Republican gerrymandering coup of 2010 gets less powerful. So by 2016, the Democrats could take back the House. And that has to cause thoughtful Republicans a great deal of worry. After all, they will be but four years away from another gerrymandering opportunity, but this time it will be during a presidential election. The Democrats might gerrymander the Republicans right out of existence.

Regardless of all the predictions you are going to hear over the next couple of days, remember this: the 2014 elections are not going to be a big deal for either party. About the only good news that the Republicans might get is that they control the Senate. And that will last exactly two years. The Republicans are a dying party. And having a slim majority in the Senate may be the last thing they have to celebrate for a very long time.