Yesterday, I reported on the obsession of Wall Street Journal reporters Tamer El-Ghobashy and Devlin Barrett regarding how the shooter got through the security system at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was otherwise a good and informative article, but really: how did he get in? As I wrote, “This is a typically American approach to a problem: look everywhere but not at what is right in front of you.”

Now we have the answer: he forced his way into the school. Before I heard that, I was pretty sure that was going to be the answer and I thought that would settle the issue. What an idiot I am! Of course it doesn’t settle the issue. It puts the issue into sharp focus for conservatives: the answer is to put armed cops in every school. Check out the Fox News clip at the end of this segment on Up with Chris Hayes:

Let’s look at this proposal on its merits. At best, a cop at this school would have reduced the number of causalities, and it could have increased them. But this is a “last chance” sort of approach the problem. It is the last line of defense to protect our children. But apparently, it is also the first line of defense. Just like after 9/11, these people don’t really want to solve a problem, so much as appear to solve a problem. Because they just don’t want to even consider other lines of defense because some of them might lead to even the smallest limits on gun rights.

What’s more, this “cop on the beat” idea will only work in small spaces. The Clackamas Town Center shooting would not have benefited from a cop—it is just too large a space. But I think this gets to the heart of conservative thinking in this matter. They can only deal with details. This is all about stopping the shooting at schools just like this one. The fact that there have been mass shootings at movie theaters and shopping malls and parking lots doesn’t matter. That is yesterday’s news.

Check out the whole Up with Chris Hayes show. Lots of good information and some positive policy ideas.

People imagine an idiot savant to be someone like Raymond in Rain Man: a guy who can memorize the location of every card in a deck or tell you how many toothpicks have fallen on the ground. But I think of idiot savants much more broadly. For example, many excellent film directors exhibit an astonishing ignorance about many aspects of the film making process. (Or actors, most of whom seem like they’ve never even visited a film set.) But most telling, businessmen tend to show a shocking lack of understand of anything other than how to make money the way that they make money. Example: a man who is good at real estate investing will likely be very bad at bringing a high tech device to market.

This is important because in our society we assume that a rich man must be smart, especially when he pontificates about economics and finance. If such a man were simply as ignorant as the rest of us, there would be no problem. But he has lots of money to get out his usually ignorant policy ideas. Add on top of this the media’s gullibility about everything a rich man has to say, and well, you have a major problem.

Pete Peterson is perhaps the best example of such a man. David Weigel wrote an article earlier this week, The Failure of Peterson-ism. It is subtitled, “Why Peter Peterson and 20 years of anti-deficit campaigns have barely moved the needle.” I like Weigel a lot, but the article itself doesn’t really deliver. As best as I can tell, he thinks Peterson’s project has failed because it is comprised almost exclusively of a bunch of wealthy businessmen trying to convince the middle class that they don’t like what in fact they like a whole bunch. This is certainly part of the problem.

Matt Yglesias followed up this article with, Pete Peterson’s 1993 Forecast of Japanese Domination. It gets much closer to my thinking on the matter. He notes that Peterson wasn’t just claiming that debt was going to ruin America, but also that by 2003, Europe and especially Japan were going to have greater and rising per person GDP. That didn’t happen. Peterson was wrong about this for the same reason he was wrong about the debt: he believed that government borrowing would crowd out private investment in the economy.

Let me explain this. There is basically one reason that the government shouldn’t borrow too much money: it can take so much money out of available credit sources that private businesses won’t be able to borrow for their own needs. This can happen when the economy is booming. This is why Keynes said that governments should go into debt during recessions but pay down the debt during booms—just as we did in the late 1990s. But even if we did not have this general rule, we would know there is no crowding out going on today because private businesses are sitting on record levels of cash.

What’s more, if there was truly a shortage of cash on loan, interest rates would go up. Interest rates are instead at near record lows. In fact, even though the amount that the government is now borrowing is large, the amount we are paying in interest is also at near record lows. Earlier this week, Matt Yglesias tweeted out the following graph which shows how much we have had to pay in interest on our debt over the years. This is kind of like the “minimum amount due” on your credit card:

Notice anything interesting about this graph? We are paying half as much money to service the debt as we were 20 years ago when Pete Peterson was telling us that we were going bankrupt.

There are any number of reasons why Peterson has failed to change perceptions about the debt. But the main reason is that Peterson doesn’t care about the debt. He cares about “reforming” entitlement programs. But by “reform” he means “cut.” This isn’t about the budget at all—at least not in a real sense. Peterson just knows that all our problems stem from entitlements and so he wants to cut them.

Over at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, they write, “Instead of allowing our economy to go over the Fiscal Cliff, or once again avoiding action on our nation’s long-term debt and deficits, leaders should seize this opportunity to pass a comprehensive, bipartisan plan to deal with our long-term structural debt and put America on the path to a stronger economic future.” But going over the Fiscal Cliff would be good for our budget deficit. It would be a huge tax increase. Why isn’t Peterson for it? Because this isn’t about the budget, it is about destroying Social Security and Medicare.

The problem here is not that Peterson’s entitlement monomania is pathological and that it shows a shocking lack of understanding of accounting. The problem is that he is rich, and so people think he knows what he’s talking about. But he doesn’t. He knows a lot about investment banking, but that’s all. He is an idiot savant. Would you take policy advice from Raymond?

Afterword

Another big reason people are disinclined to listen to the supposed deficit hawks is that we balanced the budget before and all we got for it was a huge upper income tax cut, two wars, and billions in corporate welfare for the pharmaceutical industry.

We could use a bit of levity, could we not? Paul Krugman posted a short play that apparently one of the commenters posted somewhere at The Irish Economy. If you know anything at all about what has been going on in Europe or even just a little about who Paul Krugman is, you will find this quite amusing.

Basically, the idea here is that the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi (Drachet), wants to do things to “help” the patient (e.g. Portugal) that are based on long-discredited economic theories. Paul Krugman (deKrugman) is pointing out the absurdity of his approach. Much hilarity ensues.

All I’ve done is fix a little formatting and some of the typos. Enjoy:

That’s actually quite accurate. The writer is incorrect, however: America has not changed its mind. Half or more of the political elite still think that austerity is the way to go. I weep.

Everyone wants to know why it is we have so many mass shootings—one every five days on average. Most of all, I want to know. Brad Plumer wrote what turned out to be a disappointing story over at Wonk Blog, Why Are Mass Shootings Becoming More Common? It was disappointing, because it turns out that we don’t know.

One of the more compelling theories is that mass shootings are contagious. I’m serious. Plumer doesn’t say, but I think I know how it works. A mentally unstable person sees the news coverage of a mass shooting. He thinks, “Maybe that’s what I need! Maybe that will fix me!” I know that line may sound cavalier, but I don’t mean it that way at all. I know what it’s like to feel that you have no control on your emotions, and the desperation that goes along with it. Luckily, my mental dysfunctions do not go along with a confused sense of reality. But I can see how these people would follow others who have gone before.

It is much too convenient to hang all of this carnage on the media, however. For one thing, according to Richard Florida’s work, there really is no correlation (within the United States) between gun deaths and mental illness. But he did find a correlation between gun deaths and loose gun regulation. To be clear: the more restrictive the gun laws, the lower the rate of gun deaths. So gun availability—And this surprises no one, right?—is a critical issue.

Brad Plumer provided an amazing comparison. Today, another mentally ill man attacked a group of children. Twenty-two of them were injured—some of them badly. But none were killed. This is because it happened in China and the man only had a knife.

People are crazy all over the world. We need to do something about that: for them as well as us. But the biggest social problem with the mentally ill here in America is that they are too well armed.

Here is a graph from The Rachel Maddow Show based upon data put together by Ezra Klein. There is no doubt that this has something to do with gun availability:

I’m afraid that I will have more to say on this later.

Because I have been on a Marx Brothers jag and I wanted to forget about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I watched The Cocoanuts. It is the first Marx Brothers film, and it is a bit weird. It has a few songs by Irving Berlin, remarkable dance numbers, and some of the funniest comedy bits I’ve ever seen. The story—I know this will shock you!—is about a rich girl who wants to marry a poor boy with big dreams. “Wait!” you say. “Isn’t that the plot of Animal Crackers?” Well… “And A Night at the Opera?” Well… “And…” Yes, yes, yes! But this time it takes place in Florida at Hotel de Cocoanut!

Groucho owns the hotel that is staffed almost exclusively by beautiful young women who break into dance at just about any opportunity, which turns out to be in between just about every comedy bit. In fact, even though The Cocoanuts was originally a Broadway play, it seems more like vaudeville: comedy, song, dance, comedy, song, dance. And it works very well as such. If you are looking for any kind of narrative (And why would you?!) it is disappointing. There is a whole (Sub?) plot about Groucho selling property, but it seems to be nothing more than an excuse for what is admittedly a hilarious scene where Groucho tries to game an auction with Chico, who does not exactly get the concept.

Here is a very funny scene leading up to it where Groucho coaches Chico. Later, Groucho says “viaduct” but Chico thinks it is, “Why a duck?” Which is a damned good question!

The bad news is that the DVD I have is a Universal release, but it is terrible. The print quality from cut to cut is enormous. It is never particularly good, usually bad (high contrast), and sometimes almost unwatchable. The clip above is about as good as the quality gets, although the sound is better on the DVD. And like all the Marx Brothers DVDs I’ve seen, it comes with no extras at all. Nonetheless, despite all the technical problems, how can you not love this film?

Recently, the government found out about this big drug laundering enterprise. They’d laundered $9 billion over the last decade. So the feds got their paramilitary unit together, busted down the doors, and arrested everyone. Now they are all rotting in jail—for years. In fact, some of them will never get out.

I’m kidding, of course.

Did you see the figure: $9 billion? If they had laundered $9,000, then that probably would have happened. Even if it had been $9 million, it might have happened. But $9 billion? That’s real money! And therefore, that’s real power. And therefore: nothing.

The drug laundering company was British banking giant HSBC. And they weren’t just laundering for drug cartels; they were also laundering for terrorists. We know all of this because the Justice Department is very pleased with how they handled this case. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer proudly announced that HSBC is going to pay a record (not adjusted for inflation) $1.92 billion dollars. For the record, this is equivalent to 5 weeks of profits for the firm. In other words: big fucking deal.

But there’s more. Lest you think that the HSBC executives are getting off scott free: no, no, no! For the next five years, these executives are going to have part of their bonuses held back. Not forfeited, mind you: deferred. It is not clear whether they will be paid interest on this money or not. My guess is that they will get the interest. Anything else would be unjust!

Matt Taibbi has a great article about all of this, Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke. In it, he compares the treatment of rich drug law breakers (HSBC executives) to poor drug law breakers (drug users). For example, in 2010, the government made almost as much from forfeiture (mostly drug or alleged drug cases) than they got in this HSBC settlement.

Taibbi is clearly angry as we all should be:

In case you haven’t been paying attention these last, I don’t know, 225 years of the United States of America, we don’t have “equal justice for all.” We have something akin to a two tier “justice” system: one for the wealthy were almost no amount of misbehavior is punished; and one for the poor where little or nothing is required for the harshest imaginable punishment.

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

Afterword

Here is a bit from an interview of Matt Taibbi on Eliot Spitzer’s Viewpoint:

Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks is about as angry as I’ve ever seen him. Too big to jail:

Update (16 December 2012 11:16)

I fixed the amount of the settlement from $1.3 to $1.92 billion. I also fixed how this relates to forfeiture amounts.

I just found out about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I saw a bunch of chatter about gun control on Twitter. It actually made me feel good, because I thought that it was about the Portland shooting. I’ve been bothered by the lack of coverage of that shooting, because I figure it is due to the fact that “only” two people were murdered. Sure, you can say I’m clueless, but the truth is that I’m not very good at this quick change, short attention span culture we have. I’m not over that shooting yet.

The best reporting that I’ve found on the shooting is from the Wall Street Journal, Dozens Killed in Connecticut School Shooting. It seems that we now know that at least 27 people were killed, 18 of them were children. Details are few in this story, but the WSJ article was really pushing one part of the story. There is a locked double door entry system at this school. This is the result of past tragedies like Columbine. No one knows how the shooter got through, but the WSJ sure is interested.

My perspective about this is: who the fuck cares?! Clearly he did get through. It seems that he was the son of one of the teachers there. (They are both reportedly dead now.) That might explain it. Regardless, something explains it. But that is not going to explain why 27 people were murdered. This is a typically American approach to a problem: look everywhere but not at what is right in front of you.

I don’t know why this horrible event happened at Sandy Hook. But I feel fairly sure that a big part of it comes down to this:

So I’m thinking that maybe we need to start talking about mental health and gun laws in this country. Because no amount of investigation of the school’s security system is going to improve the situation in the future. If you have well-armed crazy people walking around, people are going to die unnecessarily.

Update (14 December 2012 5:20 pm)

Most recent data: 26 murdered, 20 of which were children.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the question of just how tolerant I am of people being dicks. I know that to some extent, I admire dicks. Bill Maher is a dick, and I generally like him. Of course, he’s funny, so there’s that. But I’m thinking more of the people from Americans for Prosperity who put up a tent in the middle of the right-to-work protests in Michigan. The only reason they did it was to be dicks and hopefully get the protesters to misbehave.

I try to turn it around. Would I have thought it clever if some guy had handed out copies of the Socialist Worker at Tea Party rallies? Yeah, I probably would have gotten a kick out of that. And if that guy had gotten in a fight? Well, it would depend. If some Tea Party person had just come up and slugged him, I would be angry. But if a confrontation happened where pushing led to punching, well, that happens. And I think I would have realized that “my guy” was being kind of a dick.

Yesterday, I saw a clip of Steven Crowder on Fox News. He was the guy who got punched by one of the protesters. Even if we accept Crowder’s claims (and we shouldn’t—see below), there is a very big difference between this situation and the Socialist Worker guy at the Tea Party. The people at the Tea Party rally were mostly upper income people: not necessarily rich, but secure. Crowder and his gang are being dicks around people who will be hit hard by this legislation. So Crowder is more like a kid loudly rooting for the concentration camp director Amon Goeth at a screening of Schindler’s List: yes, yes, free speech, but if the kid ends up bruised, no one is going to shed any tears.

Now it turns out that Steven Crowder selectively edited his video to make it look like the punch he got was unprovoked. The unedited footage shows that the guy who punched him was on the ground right before. He was there due to an altercation. Just the same, there is no indication that Crowder had anything to do with it. But this is what happens when you get into the middle of a fight. This is why most people do not get into the middle of a fight.

So it seems that Crowder is following in the footsteps of James O’Keefe, with the added feature of being a big whiner. (Actually, when it comes to it, I’ll bet that O’Keefe will whine like the rest of them.) Republicans are big on claiming that foreign civilians deserve to be bombed, minorities deserve to live in poverty, and women deserve to be raped—because they live, work, or walk in the wrong places. But when a conservative white man gets bruised after he jumps into the middle of a fight he helped to instigate? That’s an outrage!

The good aspect of this is that Steven Crowder will likely continue to have to hang with people like Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and the black-haired guy who is not Steve Doocy.

Update (14 December 2012 11:13 am)

The Young Turks covered the story. Watch it, it gives more details:

Robert Reich was the first person I heard make the argument for not balancing the federal budget. The argument is simple. Imagine that you have a business partner. You work very hard to save the company money and collect payments from customers. But every time you take a couple days off, your business partner spends all the company money on booze and hookers. That’s what it’s like to be a Democratic president: you cut the deficit or even eliminate it. And then a Republican comes in and spends all the savings—And more!—on foreign wars and tax cuts for the rich.

It is even worse than this. To a large extent, Democrats don’t even get credit for being fiscally responsible. Most Republicans to this day don’t know that Obama has slashed the budget deficit the last three years. In fact, I’ve had conversations with Republicans who didn’t know that Clinton had balanced the budget. The only Republican to cut the federal deficit in the last 30 years was Bush Sr, and only by a little. Yet the perspective, even among some Democrats, is that the Republican Party are the fiscally responsible one.

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias wrote, Cutting Spending To Obtain Tax Hikes Is Nuts. He explains this whole dynamic in a lot more depth than I’ve ever seen:

He notes that if Obama gives Medicare cuts in exchange for tax hikes, it hurts the Democratic program in the long run. Let’s suppose that Hillary Clinton is the next president. If she wants to start a program (Yglesias uses universal preschool as an example), she will have to pay for it, because that’s how Democrats govern. But where will she get the money? If Obama had not traded Medicare cuts for tax increases, she would have two options: raise taxes or shift money from Medicare to universal preschool.

The point of all this is that the budget isn’t some theoretical game. It is about policy choices: what you value. Obama may put the budget in a better state, but in doing so, he only makes good governance harder in the future. People—especially those like our president who suffer from “centrist syndrone”—generally think that anything that both sides hate must be good policy. Yglesias shows this is not true.

There is another aspect of this that Yglesias doesn’t talk about. But I think it is even more important. It is easy to cut taxes. It is hard to enact important government programs—especially now. Does anyone think we could ever get Medicare or Social Security passed now? I don’t. But once the economy starts running on all cylinders, there will be calls for tax cuts. Even before the economy is good, any eliminated deductions will be quietly put back in. And regardless, as soon as the Republicans are back in the White House, there will be tax cuts.

Obama spent most of his first term learning that bipartisanship was a crock. I fully suspect he will use his entire presidency to learn that budget balancing too is a crock. Alas.