Over at Wonk Blog this afternoon, Harold Pollack presented, The Most Embarrassing Graph in American Drug Policy. I was shocked at that headline. “You mean America has a drug policy?” I said. It seemed always just to have a “lock up poor minorities and militarize the police” policies. It took me a moment to remember that America also has a “prop up oppressive governments” policy. Now all of these policy as done in the name of the “drug problem” but it never occurred to me that we had an actual drug policy.

The graph is not a surprise. As I’ve been arguing for coming up on two decades: the only positive outcome of the drug war is to perpetuate the drug war. In the 1970s, street level heroin was expensive and very unpure. How unpure? How about 3% pure at times. And then in the late 1990, the price had gone down substantially, and the purity was often over 90%. Now, had the purpose of the drug war been to provide heroin users with cheaper and better quality product, then the drug war was a stunning success! If the purpose of the drug war was to lock up as many users as possible, it was a great success! If the purpose was to cause as many users as possible to die of disease and overdose, then it was a huge success! In other words, if the purpose of our drug war was to harm as many people as possible, then we should applaud it. But if the purpose of the drug war was to keep people off of drugs, it has been an unmitigated catastrophe.

Here is the “embarrassing” graph:

I hope that it is obvious that this graph goes about 20 years past embarrassing right to criminal. There is no excuse for this. Law enforcement authorities should have long ago looked at this and thought, “We’re doing something wrong.” But instead, the mythology surrounding drugs causes a situation where there is no winning. If the supply of heroin on the street goes up, the DEA can scream, “We need more resources, drugs are getting more plentiful!” Of course, if there is some short-term disruption of supply, that too justifies more resources, “We’re making progress, give us more money!”

Some people (those who have not been reading me the last 20 years) may wonder why putting more people in jail causes the price to go down. That’s simple economics. The people at the top of the supply chain really have little to worry about. The people who are arrested are the mules and the street dealers. The people who take these jobs are desperate—many of them are addicts themselves. Thus, by incarcerating more of these low-level suppliers, the government increases the prices that these positions pay. More people willing to do these jobs means more product on the street. Greater quantity supply equals lower prices.

Of course, I’m none too fond of what Pollack has to say about the current drug policy. He thinks there is hope. Why? Obama! He actually applauds Obama for a reduction in the “rhetoric” of drug policy. But at least that’s true. He also credits him with a decline in drug incarceration. That doesn’t have anything to do with Obama. That is mostly just that states are running out of money to imprison such a large percentage of their populations.

So let me be clear: there is almost nothing to be hopeful about in the war on drugs. It continues on unabated. In continues on making the problems worse. I have concrete ideas on reasonable incremental changes we could make to improve the problem. And in a reasonable nation, they might be worth talking about. If the federal government would give up its control of drug policy, the states really could be the incubators of innovation. But as it is now, states can’t even liberalize their cannabis laws without the federal government stepping in and arresting law abiding citizens. So if there is to be any real improvement in drug policy, it will start with the federal government getting out of the drug game, which it never should have entered in the first place.

On this day back in 1779, the great Irish songwriter Thomas Moore was born. James Bond author Ian Fleming was born in 1908. Most people aren’t aware of it, but Fleming wrote the children’s book Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. It was published in three small volumes, but is basically one book. Fleming died shortly before the first volume was published. The film based upon the book is only vaguely related to it. Basically, they took the idea and the characters and created a new story. The screenplay was by Roald Dahl who is a much better writer than Fleming. Just saying.

On this day in 1910, the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker was born. He is best remembered for writing one of the classics of twentieth century popular music, “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad).” It seems that everyone has done that song at one time or another. Here he is doing it:

And human example of what I am talking about regarding guns, Wendy O. Williams was born on this day in 1949. At 44 she tried to kill herself with a knife. At 48 she tried with drugs. The month before her 49th birthday she got hold of a gun. There’s no backing out of that. It’s sad. Here she is with The Plasmatics doing (appropriately enough) “Butcher Baby”:

My childhood basketball hero, Jerry West is 75 today. Gladys Knight is 69. Magenta in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Patricia Quinn is also 69. And silly doctor Patch Adams is 68.

Also 68 today is one of the greatest pop musicians and songwriters of all time, John Fogerty. In the following clip, Bruce Springsteen says, “He’s the Hank Williams of our generation.” That’s about right. And here are the two of them doing perhaps my favorite Fogerty song “Fortunate Son”:

Creator of For Better or For Worse, Lynn Johnston is 66. And so is long-bearded bassist Leland Sklar.

Normally, the day would have gone to John Fogerty. But I have a crush. So the day belongs to the beautiful and talented Isabelle Carre who is 42 today. I only know her from one film, but just look at that face above: it makes you glad to be alive. (Of course, I don’t see many people smiling these days, so I’m a sucker for a smile.) The film is Romantics Anonymous, and here is my favorite scene:

Happy birthday Isabelle Carre!

Matt Yglesias has some insights into the Fast and Furious films. I’ve only seen the original one, but that’s all that’s really necessary. The film has an interesting theme that I have always found compelling: friendship trumps all. The question the film raises is whether the main character owes more to his friends than he does to his oath of office. Generally, movies either find a way to have it both ways or they ignore the issue altogether. But it’s an important question, “What would you do for your best friend?” Would you help him cover up a murder? A rape? A white lie?

Yglesias presents this in the context of economics. This kind of attitude is most associated with “low trust” societies. If you can’t trust the society at large, it makes sense that you would latch more strongly onto your personal relationships. It also looks like high trust societies grow faster. That’s not surprising. Economic transactions require a certain level of trust. If you know that a product will work as advertised, you will be more likely to buy it. Another thing that should surprise no one is that the level of trust goes down as income inequality goes up. On the simplest level: people become more segregated. What’s also true is that everyone knows that life is unfair; the more unequal it is, the more they see just how unfair it is.

What’s more interesting than these two unremarkable observations is what we get when we combine them: income inequality causes economic growth to slow. You would think that the rich would worry about that. Of course, you would also think the rich would worry about revolution but they never do. There are other reasons why income inequality will cause economic stagnation. For example, a very rich person can only spend so much. And demand is what drives the economy.

I thought this discussion of friendship was interesting for different reasons. When I saw that the government was going after the friends of the Tsarnaev brothers, I was really mixed. On the one hand, I don’t think I would help a friend cover up a murder. On the other, I think our society should applaud friendship. I don’t like the idea of everyone becoming some kind of government robot. That would be a society that I don’t want to live in. I felt the same way when the Unabomber was ratted out by his brother. That’s not to say that I condone murder, but loyalty is a value too. As I said, I accept turning in murderers. But anyone who would turn in a friend for tax evasion is not much of a friend.

The best society is one where strangers can trust each other. But that doesn’t take away from the need for loyalty in our personal relationships. And I don’t think society should celebrate those friends and family members who do place the collective above them. We should have mixed feeling about it. It should be seen as a decision (Even if an easy one!) and not just automatic as though of course everyone turns in his brother when he does something wrong.

Peter Queck and Bhaskar Sunkara provided me with my first review of the fourth season of Arrested Development. And they managed to put just about everything I hate about “criticism” into one article. Their fundamental problem with this recent material is that the producers of the show have changed its structure. Before, all plot lines were cross cut. Now, they are related in a way that doesn’t have a catchy phrase to describe them. But I can explain: each episode is told from a different character’s perspective. Thus, we commonly find out later that some story of character X was going on just off screen from when we first learned about character Y’s story.

Queck and Sunkara claimed that the cross cutting situation was “communism” and that the new structure destroys that. Leaving aside the strained metaphor, they seem not to understand the very basics of storytelling. Season 4 is no less integrated than Season 1. It is just integrated differently. More or less we could say that the cross cutting of the first three seasons was extended to be episode long. Thus in episode 1, we watch Michael’s story. In episode 2, we watch George’s story. They are happening at the same time. That is, in fact, cross cutting.

These guys also attacked the third season episode “S.O.B.s,” which I consider one of the best of the entire series. It lampoons the entire television industry in a wonderfully self-referenced, postmodern way. It is the most “inside” episode of a most “inside” television show. Their problems with the episode call into question how much they are even capable of meeting the show on its own terms. And that, as most of you know, is my biggest problem with critics: the pretense that their way of engagement is the only way. It’s fine to dislike something but it is not fine to complain that you thought it should have been something else.

They also commit the “not funny” sin. We all do this from time to time. Their problem is not just with the fourth season but with the third as well. Of it they wrote, “The quality of the show in the third season seemed to actually track its increasingly tenuous prospects, rolling out gags and characters more cruel, tasteless and grotesque than funny while circling a comedic black hole of self-reference.” Well, some of find the black hole of self-reference very funny. And I thought the fourth season rarely missed on a gag. And it isn’t like there isn’t a lot of stuff that would have fit very well in the first season.

Take for example, the scene where Lindsay and Tobias are sitting with a real estate agent. He asks if they have children. Lindsay says no, and Tobias doesn’t contradict her. As usual, they are both hoping that the agent might be interested in them sexually. After much very funny dialog, Lindsay admits that they actually do have a daughter. Tobias laughs uncomfortable, “Yeah, I should have caught that.” The camera pulls back and reveals their daughter Maeby was just out of frame. She says, “I could have spoken up but I just wanted to see if you guys got there.” As Zoidberg says, “Now that’s funny!”

But there was one part of their critique that I thought was dead on: the show is much less friendly. It is like the producers see the world in a much more negative light. And in that way, the show was not as much fun as it used to be. Clearly, that’s what the producers wanted, however. Part of it, I think is that George Michael and Maeby have grown up. George Michael especially is more an actor than a reactor. And he’s not nearly as nice a kid as he was. But what else could happen? He’s a Bluth, after all. The biggest change, however, is Michael who is far worse than he was in the first three seasons. But this is in line with his character arc. He got much worse over those first seasons. But now you can definitely see why he can’t seem to find a steady girlfriend.

Other characters have changed in various ways that don’t relate to the changed tone of the show. George’s brother Oscar is played quite differently (and I think better) by Jeffrey Tambor. Lucille is about the same, but I thought the writing could have been a bit more crisp. The Funke family is the same. G.O.B. is more or less the same, but it’s not clear where the producers are taking him. I’m hoping for a soft landing on that one, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Anyway, I wouldn’t count the opinions of a couple of guys who didn’t like season three of Arrested Development. Unless, of course, you didn’t like season three. But mostly, their review came down to the usual, “They didn’t do what I wanted them to.” Exactly how good the fourth season is will depend upon the upcoming feature film. I think that will color how we see this new season in the long run.

Afterword

Some people may be wondering how I justify my generally savage discussions of action films. These are cultural critiques. I always admit that the films are competently produced. The point is that these kinds of films are pernicious propaganda. My effort is to point out some of the ways they go wrong. This isn’t any different than a physicist critiquing the science in a film. And of course, I’ve done that too.

Dylan Matthews reported today on research by Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez on taxes and income inequality. They looked at the change in the top income shares since 1960 and compared it to the change in the top marginal tax rate. And not surprisingly, they found a very strong correlation. For example, in the United States, the top 1% of earners have seen their share of total income go up by a staggering almost 10 percentage points. Meanwhile, the top marginal tax rate has gone down by almost 50%.

Here is the graph:

The article put forward a couple of explanations as to why this is. The conservative idea is that having lower taxes makes rich people work harder and for productivity to grow. If that’s the case, why was growth so great under Clinton who raised the top tax bracket and so poor under Bush Jr who lowered the top tax bracket? There really is no evidence for this theory; it is all just the conservatives’ desire to justify their anti-tax mania.

The middle ground is that lowering taxes causes the rich to do less tax avoidance. That is to say that the rich aren’t actually richer, they just look richer on the books. This doesn’t explain much because it is simply not the case that the rich aren’t richer. Also, Matthews pointed out that if you include income from capital gains (the main way to avoid income taxes) the results of the graph above hardly change.

That leaves the liberal explanation. Matthews only mentioned one part of this: the rich have more money and this gives them more political power. This is undoubtedly happening. And it isn’t even limited to campaign contributions. It is just that the richer people are, the more parties they can give and the more politicians see them as “the right kind of people” who ought to be helped. What’s more, let’s not forget that our politicians are the rich.

Another important aspect of this is that lower taxes on the rich incentivize inequality. A company makes profits. Those profits could be used to reward the work force with raises (or bonuses). Or the company could invest in infrastructure. Or the company could distribute the profits to the owners. The lower the top marginal tax rate, the larger the incentives to distribute profits. This is more or less the same mechanism as found in the conservative explanation. But instead of the rich working harder, the rich just take more money from the lower classes.

In the end, I’m sure that this correlation is due to all of these causes and more. However, I think that my explanation is likely the strongest of these factors. There is a related factor, however: the “greed is good” mentality. The truth is that social forces kept greed in check for a couple of decades after World War II. But that really started to fall apart in the 1970s. Then we got the Reagan years where policy made a bad social phenomenon even worse. A big part of Winner-Take-All Politics discusses the fact that income inequality is not just a question of taxes. That’s clearly true. But it is wrong to think that taxes can’t be used as a mechanism to mitigate the problems of income inequality. There are direct and indirect effects. And we are clearly seeing this in the graph above.

The only real question now is if we live in a democracy. In general, I don’t think we do.

Jonathan Bernstein has words of wisdom for us: Ignore Those Polls! Those being the recent CNN poll that show that over half of the people don’t like Obamacare: 43-54. Apparently, Republicans are claiming that the poll proves them right: the people hate Obamacare! But then liberals have pushed back. Of the 54% who don’t like Obamacare, 16 percentage points of them don’t like it because it is not liberal enough. These are people like me who still want Medicare for all but who will take Obamacare over the Republican alternative, which is nothing at all. That means the numbers look more like this: 59-38. Liberals win, hooray!

But Bernstein points out that most people don’t really know what they’re talking about. It isn’t until next year that Obamacare even begins its full implementation. So asking people about Obamacare now probably shows about as much as asking people who they will vote for in 2016. And he’s right. The truth of the matter is after Obamacare is fully implemented, people will start to have real opinions on it—opinions that are based upon their experiences and not the latest talking points they heard on the TV machine.

Still, I think Bernstein is wrong to pooh-pooh the poll all together. After all, a couple of years ago, Obamacare polled far worse. Two years ago, the numbers were 43-48. My guess is that the change is liberals moving from being against Obamacare to being for it. In the end, that 38% is just the Republican base. And they will be against it until they forget it was a Democratic program. We can look forward twenty years from now when Republicans carry signs that say, “Government Hands Off My Obamacare!”

So I wouldn’t go as far as Jonathan Bernstein. The Republicans are kidding themselves if they think that this poll is good news for them. One thing about us liberals: we’re so used to getting nothing that when we get a minor victory like Obamacare, we take it—even if we grumble about it. Democrats do have a reason to be encouraged by this poll. However, Bernstein is right: in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter. Obamacare will prove itself or it will not. But given it only has to complete with the Republican offer of nothing (not even the fee for the gaming license), it looks hopeful.

The writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe was born on this day in 1819. She was an interesting woman. I recommend checking out the This American Life episode Lost in America. The third part of it is “Teacher Hit Me with a Ruler,” which is a history of “Battle Hymn” by Sarah Vowell. It’s a lot of fun. The whole episode is.

In 1837, Wild Bill Hickok was born. He didn’t live long. Also that year, the leader the of Russian democratic art movement and great painter Ivan Kramskoi was born. Author Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894. And Vincent Price was born in 1911.

Actor Christopher Lee (who is still working) is 91 today. One of the great villains of the last 20th century, Henry Kissinger is 90. Author John Barth in 83. Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison is 79. And the great Bruce Cockburn is 68. Here he is doing one of my favorite songs:

But the day belongs to biologist Rachel Carson who was born on this day in 1907. In 1962, she published Silent Spring about the dangers of pesticide use. But more important, it is the book that launched the modern environmental movement. Unfortunately, Carson did not live to see much of the effect of her work. She died two years later due to complications from breast cancer.

Happy birthday Rachel Carson!

In general, I like caveats. The world is not a simple place. But that can be taken to extremes, especially by supposedly liberal politicians. The best description I’ve ever heard of Obama is by Roger Hodge in The Mendacity of Hope, “Obama presents a dizzying series of hands—on the one and then the other, repeatedly, like some hyper-discursive blue-skinned Hindu deity—in which he discusses the Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (the wing to which he belongs, but he doesn’t really come out and tell us that), which embraces the new economy of advancing pools, even though ‘a sizable chuck’ of the Democratic base resists the agenda.” In other words, Obama is a conservative Democrat but he respects the rest of us who aren’t.

After President Obama’s speech last week, I didn’t know what to make of it. As usual, it sounded very nice. He got all the stuff that I didn’t like out of the way at first so he could provide me with a soft landing. But I’ve been hearing pretty words from Obama for five years and I’ve been disappointed in his actions for four. On economics, I feel more qualified to cut through his bullshit, but I’m none too clear on the War on Terror, regardless of what the current administration wants to call it. So I have to depend upon more knowledgeable people like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald to clarify what the truth actually is. So I was very eager to hear what Greenwald had to say, especially given his tardiness in weighing in. Finally, his morning he published, Obama’s Terrorism Speech: Seeing What You Want to See.

He started out saying what I’ve long known, although in this case specific to Obama’s speech on Thursday:

He then goes on to point out the fundamental purpose of the speech was to calm progressives. I’m a little more positive than Greenwald. I think it is progress that Obama cares enough to shore up his left flank. Most of his presidency was marked by a total disregard (Or worse!) for his base. Remember Rahm Emanuel calling us “fucking retarded”? That was Obama’s Chief of Staff telling us we were evil and stupid.

But that’s a small advance. There is a fundamental problem with all the plaudits Obama got for claiming the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) should be scaled back and eventually repealed. I don’t read this as, “Obama wants to repeal the AUMF.” I read it as, “Obama wants to tinker with the AUMF while he’s in office and then he’ll be for repeal after it isn’t his to use.” He also said, “Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.” As far as I can tell, he’s the one with that power and he’s the one who chose to use it so intensely.

And let me be very clear: the attempt to mollify liberals with the speech was offensive. To begin with, it was fundamentally the usual (very successful) appeal that, unlike George W. Bush, we can trust Obama. He only kills innocents all over the world after thinking about all of the complexities. What’s more, he said, “For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live.” That’s pure horseshit. Unlike Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, I do not believe that this or any other president loses a moment of sleep over all the killing they do. What’s more, as Norman Solomon writes in War Made Easy, presidents always claim to be very concerned about going to war; it is the last thing they ever want to do. The fact that they don’t end up killing themselves is either a miracle or an indication that they are lying. Which do you think it is?

Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Michael Hastings all agree on one thing: Obama’s speech put nice sounding words on top of what is George W. Bush 2.0. And so do I.

This morning, the New York Times reported that at least some of those Tea Party groups the IRS targeted were anything but pure. It noted, “But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former IRS officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.” For the umpteenth time: the more we know the less there is to the IRS scandal. (The same goes for Benghazi. Of course, it is the opposite for AP associated scandals, but no one cares about that!)

What were these groups doing that might cause the IRS to target them? Just the usual stuff that you would expect Republican groups to do. Also for the umpteenth time: the Tea Party is just the base of the Republican Party. Here are three examples from the Times:

• CVFC’s “biggest expenditure that year was several thousand dollars in radio ads backing a Republican candidate for Congress.”
• The Wetumpka Tea Party trained people for GOTV efforts for the (as they put it) “defeat of President Barack Obama.”
• The Ohio Liberty Coalition “sent out e-mails to members about Mitt Romney campaign events and organized members to distribute Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign literature.”

Again, I don’t see any problem with this stuff as long as it is understood as common partisan Republican campaign activity. The real problem with all of this is that the Tea Party groups really do think that they are something other than Republicans. Half the Republicans in the House of Representatives self-identify as “Tea Party” and yet the Tea Party thinks it is something removed from the Republican Party. It’s ridiculous.

But most of the coverage of the IRS scandal on the left is all about how this has nothing to do with Obama. I agree: this scandal has nothing to do with the president. Or at least it has nothing more to do with him than it had to do with former IRS head Steven T. Miller. Miller was fired from his post, even though he was not in charge when any of this took place. On the left, the reaction has been a great big yawn. The attitude seems to be, “Well, somebody needed to be fired!” If that’s the case—if accountability doesn’t matter—then why don’t we impeach Obama? I know that he had nothing to do with it, but somebody needed to be fired!

So start with an extremely minor scandal regarding IRS agents being politically incorrect in rightly targeting the tidal wave of 501(c)(4) applications from conservative groups. Add to that a right wing that is hysterical about even a hint of scandal. Finally, add a dash of the spineless left wing that cares more about protecting President Obama than any of the millions of other innocent Americans. And what do you have? The fall of a once great nation.

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!