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Sunday, November 8, 2015
Weekend Roundup
Nothing from Crowson this week: he wasted his editorial space with
a celebration of the World Series victors. I enjoyed the Kansas City
Royals' wins, too -- even watched a couple innings of Game 2, where
I didn't recognize a single name but had no problem understanding the
many nuances of the game. At least that much doesn't change much, or
fade away.
The main topic this week is the mental and moral rot that calls
itself conservatism, also known as the Republican Party. Scattered
links:
Anne Kim: The GOP's Flat Tax Folly: It seems like every Republican
presidential candidate has his own special tax jiggering plan, although
they all have common features, namely letting the rich pay less (so
they can save more) and increasing the federal deficit (hoping to trim
that back a bit by cutting spending, although not on "defense" or on
privatization schemes or on putting more people in jail). And those
who lack the staff or imagination to come up with signature schemes
fall back on the so-called "flat tax" scam (even more euphamistically
called "the fair tax" -- as spelled out in Neal Boortz's The Fair
Tax Book): Kim's list of flat-taxers includes Rand Paul, Lindsey
Graham, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson, who likens the tax
to a tithe. One thing flat-taxers always claim is that a single rate
would greatly simplify the income tax code, but today's "complicated"
rate chart is maybe two pages of the code. Reducing that to one line
in an age where everything is computerized is nothing. All the rest
of the complexity addresses the many questions of what is (or is not)
income, at least for taxability purposes. For individuals who don't
have many itemizable deductions that's already been simplified, but
for businesses that's where all the complexity comes in. The loopholes
for any given business may vary, but the bottom line is that businesses
(including self-employed individuals) get to deduct many expenses that
the rest of us cannot. The flat-taxers may think they're going to cut
through a lot of special cases, but it's often hard to separate perks
out from necessary expenses, to take one example. Another complicating
factor is that we often implement policy through tax incentives. For
instance, the tax code favors property owners over renters, married
people over single, and families with dependent children over those
without (although not nearly as much as the actual increased cost of
maintaining those children). The tax code has long favored private
health insurance (effectively subsidizing it), and since ACA added
penalties for those who are uninsured (who are, after all, not only
hurting themselves but becoming public liabilities). And this list
could go on and on, from things that seem eminently reasonable to
others that are truly perverse (like the oil depletion allowance).
If the economy itself were totally fair -- if all markets were
optimally transparent and competitive, and if had enough leverage
they could fully share in productivity gains and profits -- then a
flat income tax might also be a fair tax (although it would be easier
to account for and collect a business-only tax like a VAT). However,
virtually everything in the private sector economy is unbalanced in
ways that favor property owners and limit potential competitors. The
result, as we plainly see today, is vast and increasing inequality,
which at its current stage is undermining democracy and tearing at
the social fabric. Indeed, this is happening despite a current tax
system which is still progressive: which taxes the rich more than
it taxes the poor, and which provides some redistribution from rich
to poor. In this context, the flat tax does three things, all bad:
it reduces the tax on the rich, increasing inequality; it increases
taxes on the poor and at least half of all working Americans, in
many cases pushing them into (or deeper into) poverty; and it kills
the critical idea of progressivity in tax collection. If anything,
we need to extend the notion of progressivity throughout the tax
system. For instance, we currently have a flat tax on capital gains
and dividends -- almost exclusively a favor to the rich -- but both
are forms of income. If anything, as unearned income you can make
a case for taxing them more progressively -- since they contribute
more to inequality, and since the tax rate has no disincentive.
(A higher tax rate offers more incentive to hide income through
fraud, but not to gain the income in the first place. I've argued
in the past that the proper framework for calculating a progressive
scale for unearned income should be the lifetime, which would
encourage saving by the young and/or poor.) I'd also like to see
progressive taxes on corporations, which would help even the playing
field between small and large companies. (At present the latter tend
to use their scale advantage to crowd out competition.) Of course,
it's not true that every tax should be progressive. But some taxes
have to be progressive enough to counter the economic system's
built-in bias toward inequality.
As a rule of thumb, any time you hear "flat-tax" or "fair-tax"
you should automatically reject its advocate. Most likely they don't
know what they're talking about, but to the extent that they do they
are out to trash society, the economy, and the public institutions
that make them possible.
Paul Krugman: The Conspiracy Consensus:
So, are we supposed to be shocked over Donald Trump claiming that Janet
Yellen is keeping rates low to help Obama? Folks, this is a widely held
position in the Republican Party; Paul Ryan and John Taylor accused Ben
Bernanke years ago of doing something dastardly by preventing the fiscal
crisis they insist would and should have happened under Obama. If Trump's
remarks seem startling, it's only because the press has soft-pedaled the
conspiracy theorizing of seemingly respectable Republicans.
Uh, doesn't this mean that Trump understands that low interest rates
are the right thing for the economy? Sure, he's pissed that Obama gets
credit for the stimulated growth, but if he were president he'd want the
same low rates so he could get credit for the growth. Maybe he thinks
that Yellen is such a partisan hack that if a Republican were president
she's raise interest rates just to get them blamed for the downturn. On
the other hand, what does that say about Republicans calling for higher
interest rates? That they're willing to harm the economy as long as they
think a Democrat will be blamed for it? On the other hand, when they
were in power, you have Nixon saying "we are all Keynesians now" and
Cheney "deficits don't matter."
Nancy LeTourneau: The Effects of Anti-Knowledge on Democracy:
Starts with a long quote from
Mike Lofgren: The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge -- worth
checking out on its own, among other things because the first thing
you see after a quote attributed to Josh Billings ("The trouble with
people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that
ain't so.") is a picture of Ben Carson. Lofgren writes about Carson
(evidently before last week's revelations about pyramids and arks):
This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson.
The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every
imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is
worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave
owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust
(author's note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw
Ghetto rising, and no, it didn't). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon
enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.
It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines
Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid
Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances.
And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has
pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters.
Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes.
[ . . . ]
This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather
than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican
goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who
say something he doesn't agree with. The mechanism to bring these
heretics to the government's attention should be denunciations from
students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.
Perhaps Lofgren was trying to burnish his conservative bona fides
with that Soviet Union example: one closer to the mark would be the
Salem witch trials.
LeTourneau adds:
That's why I'd suggest that the root cause of an attraction to
anti-knowledge was the creation of Fox News. What Murdoch managed to
do with that network was to pose the proposition that facts were
merely the liberal media at work. So on one side of the "debate"
you have the conservative garage logic and on the other you have
liberal facts. The rest of the media -- in an attempt to prove they
weren't liberal -- accepted this frame, giving credence to anti-knowledge
as a legitimate position. That traps us into things like having to argue
over whether the science of human's contribution to climate change is
real because denialism is given credence as the opposing conservative
view.
I've seen an argument that right-wing opposition to climate science
is based on the perception (or maybe just intuition) that the whole
thing is just an excuse to promote government regulation; i.e., that
because we reject the solution, we have to deny the problem and all
the science behind it. That only works if the problems aren't real,
which is to say never -- although global warming has had an unusually
long run because people readily confuse the variability of everyday
weather with the uniformity of climate, and because the latter is a
bit too stochastic for certainty. There are many other examples of
this -- taxes, stimulus spending, military intervention, defense
spending, personal guns: all cases where the right-wing holds to
a position based on political conviction regardless of the facts.
Part of the problem here is that right-wingers have taken extreme
stands, based on pure rhetoric, that have seized their brains like
prime directives: like the notion that all government regulation
is bad, or that government is incompetent to act. Part is that
when right-wing "think tanks" have taken problems seriously and
tried to come up with conservative solutions, they've sometimes
been adopted by their enemy (leading one to doubt their sincerity:
cap-and-trade and Obamacare are examples). As the right-wing has
lost more and more arguments, it's only natural that they'd start
to flail at the facts and science that undermines their ideological
positions. From there it's a slippery slope. For many years, the
right has complained about leftists in academia poisoning young
minds, but in 2012 Rick Santorum broke new ground in arguing that
people shouldn't go to college because the very institutions teach
people to think like liberals. Since then the GOP's struggle against
science, reason, and reality has only intensified. That leads us
guys like Carson, and he's far from alone (see, e.g., the flat-tax
brigade, above).
Also see LeTourneau's
"Who's to Blame for This Mess?". Most of the post is a quote
from a
Robert Reich post, where Reich is interviewing "a former Republican
member of Congress," who starts out with "They're all nuts" then goes
down the presidential lineup, starting with Carson and Trump ("they're
both out of their f*cking minds") and ending with Bush and Christie
("they're sounding almost as batty as the rest"). He places blame:
"Roger Ailes, David and Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh.
I could go on. They've poisoned the American mind and destroyed the
Republican Party").
LeTourneau has yet another piece,
The Policy Vacuum of Movement Conservatism, where she quotes
Michael Lind:
Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its
young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s,
Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea
of "rollback" in the Cold War and made their peace with the more
cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment. In the 1960s, Reagan
denounced Social Security and Medicare as tyrannical, but as president
he did not try to repeal and replace these popular programs. When he
gave up the confrontational evil-empire rhetoric of his first term
toward the Soviet Union and negotiated an end to the Cold War with
Mikhail Gorbachev in his second term, many conservatives felt
betrayed . . .
Indeed, it's fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955
right -- repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then
pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution -- have
completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.
On the other hand, Lind omits the one project that Reagan and successors
succeeded spectacularly at: tilting the economy to favor the well-to-do,
especially at the expense of organized labor. One might argue -- I would
emphatically disagree -- that Reagan offered a necessary correction to
the liberal/egalitarian tilt of the previous five decades, but what's
happened since then has tipped the nation way too far back toward the
rich. And it's clear that the right, like the rich, has no concept of
too much and no will to turn their rhetoric back toward center. Still,
they can only keep pushing their same old nostrums, even having watched
them fail so universally under Bush. Lind's generation of conservatives
may have mellowed as he claims, but there have been at least two later
points when the Republicans turned starkly toward the right -- in the
1990s under Gingrich continuing through the Bush administration, and
after 2009 with the Tea Party doubling down in the wake of failure.
Moreover, they haven't given up on the defeats Lind identified, even
though they continue to look like losing propositions. Indeed, it's
hard to see that they have any viable policy options, leaving them
with little beyond their conviction that all they really need is the
right character -- maybe a Trump or maybe a Carson. After all, they
wrap themselves so ostentatiously in piety and patriotic jingoism
that they feel entitled to rule, even when they lose as bad as McCain
did to Obama.
Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't
have time for this shit right now):
Olga Khazan: Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair:
One of the most disturbing discoveries of the last twenty years: the
average life expectancy in Russia took an alarming downturn after the
fall of communism. When I was growing up, one thing we could take for
granted was that we were making progress on nearly all fronts, one
being that we could expect to live longer lives, and our children
longer still. Russia showed that politically-engendered economic
despair could end and even reverse that progress. But who thought
it could happen here? I first read these reports a year ago and did
a quick inventory. On my mother's side of the family, I have a cohort
of 20 cousins, b. 1925-43. The first of those cousins to die was in
2003 (emphysema, i.e. cigarettes). The youngest to die was 71, in
2011, and the youngest still alive has beat that. The oldest still
alive is 89. But a number of their children are already gone: the
first a victim of the Vietnam War, one to a car wreck, one to cancer
in her 30s, several more (and my records are incomplete). Perhaps the
most striking was one who died at 64, just three days after his father
died at 88. I'm pretty sure all of my cousins did better economically
than their parents, but despite more education that's less true for
the next generation. Just some data, but it fits, and makes the stats
more concrete. Khazan cites the work of two economists who blame
inequality. That's right, but we need a better way to explain how
that works.
PS:
Paul Krugman also has a comment on this, including this chart
which shows a downward trend in deaths for all the charted wealthy
countries (plus US Hispanics), compared to a slight rise among US
whites:
The Anne Case/Angus Deaton paper both posts refer to is
Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic
Americans in the 21st century.
Gareth Porter: The New Yorker Doesn't Factcheck What 'Everyone Knows' Is
True: Examines a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins on the
shooting of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had tried to make a
case that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible for the 1994 bombing of a
Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. I've long be skeptical
about Hezbollah's (and Iran's) guilt here, mostly because it seems out
of character, but it's become such a propaganda point for Israel and
the US that most western journalists (like Filkins) take it for fact.
Nisman's indictment of prominent Iranian and Hezbollah added fire to
the charges, but as Porter points out there is little substance in the
indictment -- the main source is the MEK, an anti-Iranian terrorist
organization originally set up by Saddam Hussein but lately primarily
used by Israel to disseminate disinformation about Iran's nuclear
program. Nisman further charged that Argentine presidents Carlos Menem
and Cristina Kirchner conspired with Iran to cover up the bombing, but
again his evidence is suspicious. As is Nisman's death, apparently a
suicide but still, like the bombing, unresolved.
David Waldman: Good guy with a gun takes out a theater shooter! GunFAIL
CLXIII: What's that, 168? Looks like Waldman's been collecting
stories of gun mishaps for a while now, and this is about one week's
worth (Oct. 11-17, 2015): 47 events. The title refers to a guy in
Salina, KS who was watching a movie and fidgeting with a gun in his
pant-pocket, finally shooting himself in the leg (i.e., the "theater
shooter" he "took out" was himself).
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