My head is filled with all the House Republican madness about defunding SNAP, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. The whole thing is such a clear demonstration of what the Republican Party has become. In his column this morning, Paul Krugman wrote, “Even some conservative pundits worry that the war on food stamps, especially combined with the vote to increase farm subsidies, is bad for the GOP, because it makes Republicans look like meanspirited class warriors. Indeed it does. And that’s because they are.” Of course, it is even worse than this. It’s even worse than Jonathan Chait says when he claims that Republicans are narcissists. The modern Republican Party is a nihilistic movement. They really don’t believe in anything. They simply have a vestigial memory that the rich are good and the poor are bad.

For some time now, Dean Baker has been on a crusade against big numbers without context. He pointed out that all of this talk of $40 billion in cuts gives the Republicans political cover. In my defense, I’ve been presenting the number in terms of how it affects the poor. In fact, I put it in context of how many people could be affected (6 million). But when talking about what the Republicans are doing, it is more correct to look at how much money the Republicans are saving the country. And it isn’t much. Over the next decade, the Republicans would be saving us 0.086% off what we will spend.

Of course, in this particular case, the Republicans are not arguing that we must cut SNAP because we don’t have money. But that doesn’t much matter. Republicans throw out justifications for their policies in a random way. It is all about providing political cover. They know that their arguments don’t have to convince people; they just have to be good enough so that the mainstream press will report them as one side of their “both sides now” coverage. And as we see, the bar for that is low enough that a mouse could climb over it.

In order for a society to function properly, it is necessary that everyone agree on norms. What we are struggling with here is a press that can’t admit that one side of the political process has abandoned norms. We continue to get the most naive reporting where journalists pretend that Republicans really believe what they claim. In a normal system, it really would be okay for the press to go to both sides and see what they have to say. That would provide actual coverage. But in our system, reporting without analysis just plays into the hands of the Republican Party.

In the case of the SNAP defunding, we see very clearly how disingenuous the Republicans are. But even in this very clear case, the mainstream reporting does not go beyond he and she said. “The Democrats say that SNAP is a program with low costs, great effectiveness, and little waste. The Republicans say it is a program with high costs, poor effectiveness, and rampant waste. No one can say who’s right; it’s just a matter of opinion!” But of course there is an objective reality. The Republican position is actually just that they don’t like the government to spend money on the poor. And that’s fine! But they should be forced to make that argument and not hide behind falsehoods about fraud that our journalists could easily check if they weren’t afraid of not appearing “objective.”

The biggest political theory of the last 30 years is supply side economics. It was the basis of the policies of all Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan onward. The idea is that if the rich are given more money, they will use it to invest in business and thus create jobs. According to the theory, if you give money to the poor, they will just spend it. The rich, on the other hand, will help businesses to grow and this will help the poor.

The idea is nonsense as anyone who has ever run an actual business should be able to explain. Businesses expand when they see a lot of demand for their products. If a computer repair business has to turn away business for lack of resources, it will hire another tech to be able to take the extra work. This is as simple a notion as there is. Now it is also the case that in rare instances, a company may see a market opportunity but not expand to meet it because they simply don’t have the start up capital to do it. Maybe expanding would require buying more property and the cost of a loan is too high. But that is a rare case. In general, businesses are demand constrained.

But this isn’t a matter of conjecture. If businesses really acted the way that conservatives claim, then businesses should invest a lot more when profits were high compared to when they were low. That’s why I found the following graph from Dean Baker so interesting. It shows corporate profits and investment as a share of GDP since the end of World War II. The thing to notice here is that there is nothing to notice:

In general: corporate profits don’t seem to have any effect on investment. In there is any effect at all, in the long term, it seems that high profits lead to lower investments, not the other way around. So it seems that the very basis for supply side economics is wrong. In fact, look at the 1980s. As taxes went down (not seen on the graph), the share of investment went down. When taxes went up in the 1990s, investment went up. I’m not saying that high taxes cause investment to increase. Rather, tax policy doesn’t seem to have much effect on investment at all.

Associated with this is the conservative obsession with budget deficits (at least when a Democratic is in the White House). Again, the argument against deficits is that government borrowing “crowds out” private borrowing and thus investment. It is certainly true that if the government is borrowing a lot of money while the economy is booming, borrowing costs may be high and thus cause the private sector to invest less than it normally would. The problem is that conservatives rarely complain about deficits when the economy is doing well. Instead, they complain about them at times like now when the economy could use government spending. Right now there is all kinds of money sitting around looking for places to invest. Unfortunately, there are few private sector takers for that money because businesses don’t see any reason to invest when demand is so poor.

Bobby Jindal was right when he said that the Republicans had become the stupid party. It is very strange. I understand that not everyone agrees about policy. But the Republicans have lost any grip they once had on good policy. Their policy is entirely driven by ideology. They don’t push free market solutions because they think that they produce the best results. They define free market solutions as good and don’t care what results come from them. That’s no way to run a country. We saw where such thinking brought the Soviet Union. That is where the Republicans are headed.

According to legend, 190 years ago Joseph Smith found those golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon. There is no doubt that there were no golden plates. But that still leaves an important question: was Smith delusional or was he just a charlatan? I tend to think the latter. What really makes me think that is the fact that Smith put together the Book of Mormon witnesses. If he had been simply delusional—prone to religious visions—he would not have felt compelled to justify his loony story. As a con, Mormonism is far more interesting than it is as a religion. As a religion, it is a throwback to much earlier faiths. By the start of 19th century, there was much more interesting religious thought and it just isn’t found in Mormonism. This isn’t to say that Mormonism is a bad religion. I figure that most religions started as one form of a con or other.

Singer Nick Cave is 56 today. Here he is with the Bad Seeds doing “Red Right Hand”:

Other birthdays: political activist Christabel Pankhurst (1880); Tommy Lasorda (86); Jeremiah Wright (72); singer Debby Boone (57); and comedian Sue Perkins (44).

The day, however, belongs to the great physicist Michael Faraday who was born on this day in 1791. In physics, we tend to only celebrate the theorists, but Faraday is one of the few exceptions to this. His experimental work led directly to the development of Maxwell’s equations, which are pretty much the beginning and end of of electromagnetism. Among Faraday’s many discoveries was electromagnetic induction. This is the process by which changing magnetic fields create electric potentials. In other words, if you apply a magnetic field to a circuit, it will cause a current to start. Faraday is an example of how one doesn’t need to know mathematics to do physics. Of course, he clearly had great mathematical reasoning ability—he was simply never trained in its formalism. My experience teaching physics was that students who claimed to understand the physics but not the math actually understood neither.

Happy birthday Michael Faraday!

On this day in 1866, the great writer H. G. Wells was born. One of the holy trinity of early science fiction (with writer Jules Verne and publisher Hugo Gernsback), he is best known for novels like The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. As he got older, he turned away from science fiction and became much more interested in realistic social commentary in the form of the more talented Upton Sinclair, who won the day only yesterday. Still, as with Sinclair, his politics were worthy and he did much to improve society. I find him compelling even when he was wrong about things; if it can be said of anyone, it can be said of him: he had a pure heart.

Novelist Stephen King is 66 today. I’m not a huge fan of his, but I’ve read enough of his work to know what an incredible talent he is. The Shining, for example, is really well done. It is extremely frightening and engaging. According to him, the great Richard Matheson is his biggest influence. (Note: I just learned that Matheson died on 23 June; I had hoped he would make it into his 90s; I’m very sad.) He also said something that I really like, because it means that King thinks I’m talented, “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.” I don’t really agree with that, however. I’ve been paid to write some fairly bad stuff and no one is interested in paying me to write my best work. But I do like the idea that no one should be able to doubt my talent because I paid my PG&E bill with money I made from writing.

The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe is 59. He is important because he is now doing in Japan what none of the “serious” rulers in other developed countries are doing: he’s spending money. Roughly 70 years ago, the whole world learned that the way to get an economy out of recession is for the government to spend money. This acts as a way to jump start the economy. But somehow, when the world went suddenly into recession in 2008, all the “smart people” of the world forgot the lessons that we learned from the Great Depression. Instead of calling for governments to spend money, all these people called for balanced budgets and other forms of austerity. After five years of this madness, we clearly see what everyone should already have known: Keynesian economics works. Shinzo Abe is the only major leader who is acting on this. Of course, he hasn’t been in power long enough for us to see the final results. The initial results are good and I have little doubt he will be successful. But I also don’t doubt that once he is successful, the “smart people” will refuse to accept the fact and will instead insist that the only way out of recession is more austerity.

Other birthdays: the great Mannerist painter Lodovico Cardi (1559); low temperature physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853); composer of The Planets Gustav Holst (1874); the founder of Penguin Books Allen Lane (1902); novelist Fannie Flagg (69); producer Jerry Bruckheimer (68); actor Bill Murray (63); filmmarker Ethan Coen (56); actor Rob Morrow (51); actor Ricki Lake (45); and actor Luke Wilson (42).

The day, however, belongs to the great animator Chuck Jones who was born on this day in 1912. He is best known for being the most innovative of the directors during the golden age of Warner Bros. Cartoons. He started as an assistant animator and worked his way up. By 1938, he was directing whole cartoons. At first, these were very much in the tradition of Disney Studios: they were beautifully rendered, but not really funny. Slowly, he developed the style that we associate with Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes; it wasn’t until the late 1940s and 1950s that he was creating his best work. He continued to work for Warner into the 1960s, when he started his own studios (which did work for Warner Bros. in addition to many others). One of his greatest triumphs was the animated Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1966. Here is Rabbit Seasoning from the peak of Jones’ creative period at Warner in 1952:

Here is a video clip I found some time ago where Chuck Jones teaches how to draw Bugs Bunny. Of course, using it, I tried to draw the wascally wabbit and found it was not nearly as easy as the master made it appear:

Happy birthday Chuck Jones!

On 13 January 2012, the cruise ship Costa Concordia hit a rock off Isola del Giglio and basically fell over. It was sad—mostly because 32 people died. But I’ve never been that interested because as tragedies go, it wasn’t much of one unless you are a shareholder of the Carnival Corporation. But yesterday, an acquaintance sent me a link to the image above (the link has a higher resolution image). And I am interested in the photo.

In a fundamental sense, I have a very immature appreciation for art. I like bright colors. A lot. And in that way, I don’t suppose that I’m much different from most toddlers. There is much to like in this picture. The composition is great—the various elements fit together like blocks. The light on the pole out frame is a nice touch. And the whole thing looks like the mess that one wakes to after a hard night of drinking.

But mostly, I just like the red, blue, and yellow.

Update (21 September 2013 10:58 pm)

Originally, I wrote that 2 people had died. I don’t know why I thought that. And that makes it a far more tragic accident. Sorry about that.

On this day in 1902, the great poet Stevie Smith was born. She was also a novelist, but I haven’t read anything but her poetry. In fact, I most know of her from a really great film Stevie—which you should watch if you get the opportunity (it isn’t available on DVD). Her work is simultaneously playful and dark. Take, for example:

The great television producer Jay Ward was born in 1920. He created shows such as Crusader Rabbit, Hoppity Hooper, and George of the Jungle. But I love him most for Rocky & Bullwinkle. I discussed the show only last month (it includes a documentary about the show). But rather than embed yet another clip of that show, here is Super Chicken:

Other birthdays: songwriter (co-writer of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”) Roy Turk; actor Anne Meara (84); actor Sophia Loren (79); and activist Van Jones (45).

The day, however (and easily), belongs to the great writer Upton Sinclair who was born on this day in 1878. He is best known for the novel The Jungle. It is an amazing book. It is dystopian yet true. With 1984, there is always the sense that no government could be that perfectly authoritarian. But in the case of The Jungle, that is really the way life was. It is also the way life is in many parts of the world. And perhaps most interesting of all, it is the way that modern day conservatives wish society to be. This brings to mind the work of John Rawls who said that a just society would be the one that you would choose if you couldn’t predict where you would be born. Conservatives always look to a society in which they would be at the top. And indeed, the Gilded Age was a great society to be in if you were rich.

In addition to his large body of work, Sinclair also tried his hand at politics. He ran for governor of California in 1934. He was hugely popular. But then the newspaper owners turned against him and effectively cut off any good or even objective coverage of him, and he ended up losing. It’s a good thing to remember. There is no such thing as democracy if there is not a free press. And the lack of a free press does not have to be the result of government interference. Around here, Sinclair is most often mentioned for one of his many great quotes, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” We see this again and again, but most profoundly, we see it with supposedly objective journalists.

Happy birthday Upton Sinclair.

Yesterday, the House Republicans finally got around to dealing with the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), generally known as “food stamps.” Traditionally, food assistance to the poor was linked to farm subsidies in the Farm Bill. But this year, the Republicans just couldn’t do it, because the leadership was only able to offer a $20 billion cut to SNAP—the nihilistic wing of the party refused to vote for the bill without a $40 billion cut. So back in July, they cut the Farm Bill into two pieces: one for support of farmers and one for support of the poor.

Very quickly they passed the “farmers” bill. This part of the Farm Bill has long been attacked by liberals and conservatives alike as crony capitalism. As it is, it gives billions of dollars away to very wealthy and profitable farmers. But the House Republicans not only funded it. They funded it for more than Obama had requested. Apparently, there is no limit to Republican largesse when it comes to the rich.

It took the House Republicans over two months, but they finally passed the “poor people” bill. And of course, the nihilists got their $40 billion cut. In addition to this, states will have strong incentives to cut the program even more. Estimates indicate that as many as 6 million people will lose access to SNAP benefits. There was this stunning bit of hypocrisy:

All of this is not to say that the Republicans do not have their stated reasons for being for these cuts. Initially they stated that it was all about stopping fraud. But there is basically no fraud in the system. Now, they claim that they are just trying to get those lazy bums to get jobs. They point to the economic recovery as a reason that there should be less people receiving SNAP benefits. But Paul Krugman demolished this argument earlier today. Although there has been an improvement at the top, the poor have seen no economic improvement at all. He provided the following graph to show that SNAP enrollment and the plight of the poor work in lockstep:

There really is no point in countering the Republican arguments here. This is as clear an example of what the Republicans are as you will ever seen. They want to spend money on the rich. They do not want to spend money on the poor. It isn’t that they are hypocrites so much as that their constituency is simply the rich. Earlier today, Jonathan Chait responded to Henry Olsen at the National Review who found this behavior “baffling” and referred to the image of Republicans as “Scrooge McDucks” as a stereotype:

The problem for the Republicans is that there are very few rich people. So they need to maintain the pretense that they really care about the non-rich. But they are indeed lucky that they have a mainstream press that is willing to pretend that they mean what they say. It isn’t just the National Review that won’t admit that Republicans simply hate those who make less than a quarter million dollars a year. It’s all about “plausible deniability” except that rather than bombing the poor in Cambodia, the Republicans are starving the poor in this country. They claim to be helping the poor. But it takes a lot of effort and apologetics to believe that.

Earlier this week, I discovered a great website, On the Issues. It provides quite detailed information about the positions of politians at various times in their careers. I’ve found it really useful. One thing that isn’t so useful—But very interesting!—is their use of the political philosophy chart. These charts place a person’s ideology on two scales: economic and social. Thus, if you are economically conservative and socially liberal, you are a libertarian. (In my experience, libertarians are not this, but that’s another matter; it is what they claim to be.) If you are economically liberal and socially conservative, then you are a populist. You get the idea.

The reason such charts aren’t that useful for politicians is because it is highly subjective how you would rate different votes. In particular, I think the scale as used by On the Issues makes the range of disagreement on economic issues look much wider than it is. Nonetheless, it provides a decent idea of where politicians are. The website provides ratings for all the presidents since Kennedy. So I went ahead and plotted all of the presidents on one graph, with the Republicans in red and the Democrats in blue:

What immediately stands out is that the Democratic presidents have been much more moderate than the Republicans. The only president who doesn’t qualify as moderate is Obama, and this I find hard to believe. I accept his 80% on social issues, but if he is a 20% of economic issues, it is only because of the extremism of the Republican Party. You may wonder who that most moderate of presidents is—there just on tic from the very center of the graph. That is none other than Richard Nixon! And that is more or less correct.

What you see with the Republicans is a steady march toward extremism. But surprisingly, the most extreme Republican president wasn’t Reagan or Bush Jr. It was Bush Sr. That shows how the ranking are not that accurate. I don’t think that anyone thinks that Bush’s father was more extreme on social issues than his son. But the chart is clearly correct in that the two Bushes and Reagan were roughly equivalent in their ideologies.

Similarly, on the Democratic side, the numbers don’t seem quite right. The first three Democratic presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter—are all ranked at 40% on economic issues. Carter was distinctly more conservative than his predecessors. And the idea that Clinton is even more liberal is just ridiculous. Again, I think these ranking are just relative. Since both Clinton and Obama received nonstop opposition from the Republicans, they are ranked as more liberal than they should be.

What is most interesting in all this is how there have been no populist presidents. I understand there being no libertarian presidents; libertarianism is an extremely unpopular ideology. But the vast majority of the Republican base is actually populist, not “right conservative.” These people are mostly Republicans for social reasons. Yet the party does not offer them a populist choice. The reason for this is that the Republican elites really are libertarian. But since no one likes libertarians, they have a choice: they could compromise on economic issues and become Democrats or compromise on social issues and become Republicans. Their answer should be obvious: they care about money far more than they care about freedom.

But if the political philosophy chart was really accurate, the Democrats would be clustered around 60% on economic issues and the Republicans would be clustered around 90%. Bearing that in mind, the chart is very interesting. And if you want to drill down into policy, On the Issues provides a great deal of useful information.

The Republicans really are divided. But it isn’t between the crazy and non-crazy. It is between the nihilists and the extremists. What are normally referred to as the Tea Party are just conservatives who aren’t interested in the political process and so want to send “messages.” As a result, those who want to, you know, win elections, are pretty upset at what is going on in Washington right now. Bear in mind, these people are not any more interested in what is best for the country than the Tea Party is; they just recognize that explicitly trying to destroy the nation is a really bad marketing campaign for the GOP.

Byron York is a man who I almost never agree with, but he was making a lot of sense yesterday. Over at the Washington Times he wrote, Actually, Senate GOP Can’t Filibuster to Defund Obamacare. It’s a really good article because it explains some of the ins and outs of congressional process that I have to admit to finding mysterious. He points out that the Republicans do not have the 41 votes they need for a filibuster in the Senate. But it’s worse than that. “Cruz & Co” can’t even stage an old fashioned talking filibuster.

This morning, the House passed their bill of a continuing resolution (CR) along with defunding Obamacare. But as York points out, Harry Reid can just strip this out of the bill with a simple majority vote:

All this information came from a Senate Republican aide. It is very clear that a lot of Republicans are just sick of all this bullshit. The aide said, “This is not a gimmick or a scheme. It is Rule 22 of the U.S. Senate. Everybody knew this. This is an existing rule. It is taught in Senate class when you do your orientation. It is not a surprise. Nobody sprung it on [Ted Cruz].”

By Democratic standards, I’m an extremist (that is, I’m a liberal). And from time to time, I am certainly in favor of hardball tactics. For example, in the end, I think the immigration bill that Congress came up with was most likely not worth supporting. But there is a very big difference between the good extremist fight and political self-immolation. This is the major rift in the Republican Party today.

Where this goes from here, I’m not sure. But one thing is for clear: the House Republicans will not be able to claim that they passed a CR and the Senate killed it. That means that public opinion on a government shutdown is going to come down hard on the House Republicans. If the Senate had voted the House bill down, the Republicans could have framed the issue as, “The Democrats are forcing a government shutdown just for the sake of funding Obamacare.” But as it is, they won’t be able to say that. Instead, the Democrats will correctly claim, “The Republicans are forcing a government shutdown just for the sake of defunding Obamacare.” The optics of that are really bad—so bad that Boehner may be forced to allow a clean CR vote and move onto the next (and far more dangerous) Debt Ceiling hostage crisis.