brainiac conspiracy

Forest For The Trees

One thing that's really infuriating about our political discourse is the inability or unwillingness of many members of the Washington media corps to acknowledge the reality that a number of the people who govern us are not particularly concerned about our welfare and are, in fact, greedy little sadists:

Ryan, meanwhile, is trying to shift his party away from the relentless focus on spending and deficits that has dominated GOP thinking in recent years. In its place, he is working to identify conservative policies that offer a helping hand to poor and working-class families [...]

With his budget still being drafted, Ryan declined to say which programs would get the ax. But his report argues that the nearly $800 billion the federal government spends on anti-poverty programs each year should be trimmed.

You don't need a degree in Economics from Wharton to understand this: taking money from poor people doesn't improve their lot, it only increases their suffering. This is by design because people like Paul Ryan genuinely believe that poor people are poor because they are morally deficient creatures, and it wouldn't hurt to inform the Post's readers of this salient fact. Yes, I know this isn't fair and balanced reporting, but people like Paul Ryan are not fair and balanced persons and hence don't deserve to be judged by those standards.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Obviously, yes!

In the shutdown era, Democrats have had a more moderate image nationwide than the tea-party-burdened GOP. But that image may be at risk if liberal Democrats set the pace for the party. We could see them rally around a progressive leader---Warren, de Blasio or some yet-to-emerge candidate---who speaks their language of economic populism. If the agenda of this new New Left drives Democrats’ choices, it might weaken the ideological and demographic coalition that has led the party to victory in four of the past six national elections.

Because proposing to raise taxes on rich people to pay for infrastructure and health care, or suggesting that we break up the banks and throw their executives in jail, are both bad, horrible, very terrible things because heaven forbid our government should actually give voters the things they actually want. We must never have liberal/leftist government because "populism", a view that is only held by the wealthy and by people who live in the greater D.C. metro area. The rest of us? We don't exist.

---Baron V

Unserious Ideas

They're busting out all over.

Actually, I like the term "income support" over "guaranteed income" because it implies that everyone who receives support is working and earning some kind of income---even though it won't ever be true---which helps to immunize our side from the criticism that we're robbing from the makers and giving to the moochers (which will never be true, either). You think that someone outside academia and/or the blogosphere (looking at you, Senator Warren) would consider proposing legislation to this effect? Sure, it'll never pass in the current political climate, but as a trial balloon, it could serve a useful purpose as a gauge of public sentiment. Who knows, the majority of the voting-age population could be unserious persons! But we'll never know unless someone asks them.

---Baron V

Welcome to My World

Where a generation of Americans is expected to work until they die:

At age 58 and less than a decade away from retirement, Nancie Eichengreen, found herself having to start over from scratch.

It was 2012 and she had been laid off for the second time in 10 years from her job as a legal secretary. She spent a few years collecting unemployment benefits and dipping into her meager 401(k) savings to fill in the gaps.

“It’s kind of scary because I don’t envision a retirement for myself,” Eichengreen told Yahoo Finance. “I’m just going to have to keep working.”

Two years ago, she decided to start over completely, going back to school for a Masters degree in social work at Yeshiva University in New York. Today, Eichengreen now 60, is living off of student loans and says it’s unlikely that she’ll be able to pay off her $200,000 student debt, which includes what she borrowed for her first Masters studies in broadcast management.

“I don’t think social workers make much money so I’ll probably be dead before I pay that off,” she said.

Her situation is unfortunate but not unique. Thirty-four percent of workers have nothing set aside for retirement, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration. A study by the National Institute on Retirement Security found 40 percent of workers 55-65 years old do not own assets in a retirement account.

A MyRA account isn't going to solve this person's problems, nor is any other private investment scheme. There are tens of millions of people in this country who don't earn enough money to invest, and they deserve a decent and dignified retirement, too. But in most places, they won't be able to have one on the $15,000 a year that comprises the average Social Security benefit. So whether we double Social Security disbursements, raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour, enact a guaranteed annual income of, say, $30K a year, and tax the wealthy to pay for it, our policymakers need to realize that some radical redistribution of income is necessary to stave off mass poverty and social unrest, and the longer they dawdle, the more radical the redistribution will need to be.

---Baron V

Should Still Be an Option

And if the people who govern us had a lick of common sense, they'd be reminding everyone in Washington that the possibility of minting some platinum coins is still very much on the table. That is, if they want to avoid another fake crisis. Sure, the 27-percenters will throw a fit, but nobody else will. That's because our job creators don't want to see sudden spikes in interest rates, and most other people in America won't care because they don't follow this shit the way people do in DC. Which is to say, there's no political price to pay for retiring this issue once and for all beyond a meaningless impeachment vote---which, come to think of it, will probably boost the President's popularity ratings, just like it did for the last guy to be impeached.

---Baron V

Call it Theft

It's all well and good for those of us in the liberal wonkosphere to talk about income inequality as a failed neoliberal policy experiment, and while it's undoubtedly true, it's a lousy way to make the case to the general public. It's a fault too many of us on the left have, i.e., that if we discuss causes and effects using rational discourse, voters will behave rationally and vote in their own best interests. Unfortunately, our actual lived experience shows that this simply isn't the case; that as many people---if not many more!---vote with their emotions as with their intellect. Team Republican understands this a lot better than our side does, and that's usually how they win elections. That's how they ended up with the crazy Congress: Because they gauged---quite accurately---the national mood at the time, and they channeled the anger and rage that people were feeling over the banks and the bailouts, and the fear and despair over losing their jobs, into voting irrationally against their own best interests. I'm not saying that our side needs to adopt their strategy, i.e., lying to voters, but we could learn something from their tactics. So instead of using antiseptic language like "income inequality" or "neoliberal economics," we should consider making arguments that appeal to people's hearts, not their heads. How to proceed? Try this:

1. We need to raise the minimum wage to retrieve the billions of dollars your employers steal from you each year;
2. No one should go hungry or homeless in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and that's why a job should be a right, not a privilege;
3. Fifteen grand a year is not enough to live on, and that's why we need to increase Social Security;
4. Crime is crime, no matter who commits it, and that's why crooked banks need to be shut down, and the homes they stole returned to their rightful owners;
5. Education should also be a right, and that's why public education should be free from pre-K to grad school;
6. We have the wherewithal to accomplish all of these things. We simply need to revise the tax code so everyone is subject to progressive taxation, not just middle-class Americans.

Yes, I know that these are all "populist" arguments, and that only Republicans are ever allowed to make populist arguments in official Washington, but our side really should give it a whack sometime. A lot of people in this country are still pissed off and angry about the damage that banksterism and crony capitalism has inflicted on them. We just need to give them some reasons to vote for us.

---Baron V

Social Security is Broken

It's just not broken the way the Fix the Debt charlatans say it is. Now, I have no idea if taking the "mad as hell" approach will persuade people that Social Security benefits need to be increased by a generous amount, but I would think that the "balancing budgets at the expense of letting our parents and grandparents starve" argument wold be sufficient to convince just about anyone who's not in Pete Peterson's income-tax bracket. But however we argue it, the argument needs to be made because there's going to be an explosion of poverty in America over the next couple of decades if we don't.

---Baron V

Pity the Poor One-Percenters

Nobody knows de troubles they seen:

With $1 million to spend and no need for a mortgage, Laiyan Wong expected to be able to easily buy a two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. What she didn’t anticipate was how much competition she’d have.

Wong viewed more than 10 apartments in two months, gradually increasing her budget to $1.5 million as it became clear that others were looking for similar properties amid a plummeting supply of homes in her price range.

“I made four bids and was outbid each time,” said Wong, a trader at an investment bank, who eventually got a mortgage and paid $1.6 million for a condo that was about to go under contract to someone else. “You have to be willing to make a decision in a few minutes and overpay the asking price.”

Manhattanites with budgets that would buy mansions in most of America are discovering it’s tough to find even a two-bedroom apartment in New York as the inventory of homes shrinks. The number of available units for less than $3 million---those generally considered nonluxury---has plunged by the most on record, creating a shortage that’s unlikely to be alleviated any time soon as developers focus on ultra high-end condos that have set price records by wealthy investors.

Only in some parallel universe that is beyond the comprehension of plebes like us would someone who can afford to pay $1.6 million in cash for a fucking home be considered anything other than extremely rich, and the homes that cost a million-plus dollars be classified as middle-class domiciles. You want a bargain on a house, you go to Jersey City or to one of the less glamorous suburbs on the Island, and take the LIRR to work every day. But of course what these people really want is the prestige of a Manhattan ZIP code, so they overpay obscenely for apartment-sized dwellings. If they were the only persons who were injured by their vanity, it wouldn't be so bad, but that's not the case because by overbidding for flats all over Manhattan, they keep driving up the cost of housing for everyone else. There's a real simple policy fix to remedy this; perhaps our leaders would consider implementing it one day.

---Baron V

Monday Night Music Blogging

Because we should have a royal family in America. Are the Reagans still available?

---Baron V

Midday Music Blogging

Because welfare moochers are, as always, a thing.

---Baron V

Schadenfreude

As a rule, you never like to read stories about people losing their homes. It's sad! But it's one thing when it's working people whose homes are being stolen by banks, and it's another thing altogether when it's people who built homes where homes should never be built. Because in the end, it's just like the realtors say: Location, location, location!

---Baron V

The Timeline's Too Short

Yes, the policies that started the Mexicanization on America began roughly thirty years ago, but the boots-on-the-ground mechanisms that formulated and promulgated the policies were another decade in the making, and they should remind us that very little happens as a matter of policy in our country without a great deal of premeditation, and that to win the policy wars, it's essential to win the messaging wars. (It shouldn't have to be that way, of course, but in a political climate where discourse is driven largely through the filter of network TV, it's pretty much inescapable.) That's something that liberals have never been particularly good at---though "Change We Can Believe In" was one of our catchier marketing campaigns---and since the crazy people have already got a monopoly the fear side of the ideas market, we need to do a better job of appealing to voters' collective aspirational psyche, using easily grasped terms to which everyone can relate. So in the future, as an example, instead of pitching our policies with nebulous catch-phrases like "public option" and "affordable care," why not try the more inclusive and understandable "Medicare for all" instead? Just trying to be helpful here.

---Baron V

Making The Pie Higher

Serious persons, they just can't seem to agree on how to do it:

Economists are still trying to sort out what broke those historical links between growth and jobs/incomes. Robert Shapiro, an economist who advised President Clinton on the campaign trail and in the White House, traces the change to increased global competition.

“It makes it hard for firms to pass along their cost increases---for health care, energy, and so on---in higher prices,” he said. “So instead, they cut other costs, starting with jobs and wages.”

Shapiro said the best way to restart job creation is to help businesses cut the costs of hiring, including by reducing the employer side of the payroll tax and pushing more aggressive efforts to hold down health-care cost increases.

Obama seems to have embraced an approach pushed by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz: helping more Americans graduate college and go on to high-skilled, higher-paying jobs.

All of these prescriptions are totally inadequate.

Cutting taxes on corporations won't change anything at this point besides increasing dividends for shareholders. Cutting health care costs will help, but it does nothing for the plight of healthy young people who can't find jobs out of college. And while college is important, if the jobs of the future don't require a four-year college degree (and many don't, particularly in IT, health care and homeland security), other educational alternatives are equally essential. (This was one of the few agenda items the President raised last night that I agreed with completely.)

More adequate: raising income taxes on rich people to pre-1980 levels. Taxing investment income and estates above $1 million as earned income. Eliminating "private equity" loopholes for interest-payment deductions, or raising the corporate income tax altogether. Imposing a windfall profits tax. Imposing a financial transactions tax. Imposing a carbon tax. Then take all that money that's flowing into the government's coffers, and make post-secondary education at any state college/university/vocational school free to any state resident who qualifies for admission. Make Medicare available to everyone. Then take the money that's left over and give everyone who wants one a unionized government job until public-sector employment approaches pre-1980 levels. If the money runs out, borrow more. In the meantime, re-enact every banking law that has been repealed since 1980, and re-instate every industry regulation that has been repealed since that time.

I know these are all deeply unserious proposals, but our private sector has managed to kill off millions of jobs on its own without being burdened by any of these measures. Yes, China, computers and robots have all played a part in driving wages down, but the big-obvious problem that too many of the most serious among us refuse/fail to acknowledge that we have been laboring for the last 30 years under an economic model that was expressly designed to make rich people richer while impoverishing everyone else, and while both Democrats and Republicans have taken turns running the government during that time, the post-1980 economic model has been modified only slightly, and only at the margins. In other words: get rid of Reaganite economic theory, and the problem goes away. At least that's what I'd be willing to bet, if anyone would care to take me up on it. Of course, the only way we'll ever know if people like me are wrong or not is to enact all of these proposals, give them five years to take effect, then see where we stand in terms of "economic growth" and who is or isn't sharing in it. If it doesn't work out, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong.

But either way, you want more people to have more money, create an economy that gives more money to more people. Because the economy we have, well, doesn't by intent.

--Baron V

Random Thought

Most people in this country agree that rich people can afford to, and should, have their taxes raised to reduce the deficit and fund the government. A problem arises, however, when we discover, contra the conventional wisdom, that there are no rich Americans. Don't believe me? Just ask them.

---Baron V

Secretary K-Thug

Of course, he'd be an inspired (and inspiring) pick for Treasury, and his Senate confirmation hearing would likely produce more mirth and merriment than anything we've seen in the Village for some time. On the other hand, we know enough about him to say he can be, well, a bit prickly at times, and he certainly doesn't suffer fools (or Austerians) gladly, so it's hard to see him being terribly happy as a cabinet minister whose pleas for sanity are sure to be shunted aside, or roundly ignored, by the serious persons who have gained the President's ear on the economy and entitlements. But I signed the petition anyway, just for shits and giggles, and so should everyone else. Who knows, some A-lister on Team Democrat might pass along the suggestion.

---Baron V

Disconnect

The gaping chasm that that seems to exist sometimes between the priorities of our Washington policy-makers and the actual needs of the electorate---well, it's a very real concern, and it's likely exacerbated by the fact that our policy-makers in Washington simply don't live the way the rest of the country does:

The Washington region has emerged from the recession looking even more affluent compared with the rest of the country, boasting seven of the 10 counties with the highest household incomes in the nation, new census numbers show.

With a median household income surpassing $119,000, Loudoun County heads the list. Fairfax County, at nearly $106,000, is second. Both have held the same positions for several years running [...]

Household incomes rose in most counties around Washington last year, even as they continued to sink around the country.

---Vitelius