Category: Public Policy
Fairer McPay for McWork
Fast food workers are striking for better pay – and while many media outlets are dutifully burying this worldwide event, a trickle of information is coming in, with the usual anecdotes about impoverished single mothers flipping burgers for $8/hr, year in and year out, on public assistance, struggling to buy groceries and pay rent.
Conservatives often come back with the smarmy insight that fast-food jobs werent “intended” to be lifelong careers. To which we ask: intended by whom?!? Y’see, one slap-in-the-head aspect of the invisible hand (which conservatives love, honor and obey, if not understand) is that markets dont have intentions, any more than they have fingernails. Employers advertise jobs, and by market magic, workers appear, offering their labor. And it so happens that adults with dependent children, and not just high school kids, are a large fraction of the fast-food workforce.
The good news is that when conservatives deem a market outcome or market-participant behavior to be “wrong,” they unwittingly take a giant conceptual leap forward. Because in order to reject classical economics, one must first accept the premise that markets sometimes screw the pooch, making it necessary for Keynesians to step in and apply a fix. Seems many conservatives, in their limited way, already appreciate that we have a national problem with many single heads-of-households trying to support families on minimum wage jobs.
Conservatives just have to take the next step. Complaining that an increase in the minimum wage will force fast-food firms to raise prices misses the point: their prices are held artificially low through a kind of corporate welfare. Income that fast food workers receive in the form of public assistance (through medicaid, EITC, food stamps, housing, etc.) must be regarded as a government subsidy to fast food firms, who, in its absence, would have to pay more in compensation. Thus, raising the minimum wage will serve primarily to shift that burden off of taxpayers, and onto those firms and its customers, where it belongs.
Earlier this year, CBO came out with a report that both puffed up and pooped on Obama’s plan to raise the minimum wage. While they predict that an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 will succeed in increasing the wages of most low-wage workers (raising many families out of poverty), they also predict that some will lose their jobs, and that the overall rate of employment for low-wage workers will likely drop a bit (0.3%).
CBO is a respectable non-partisan source, so we will for the moment politely ignore the fact that a long line of empirical research has failed to observe any such drop in low-wage employment rates following a modest increase in the minimum wage. We might focus instead on CBO’s bottom line: the prediction that an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 will send an additional $17 billion of income to workers making less than triple the poverty line. In a time of high poverty and sky-high inequality, that might not be a whopper of a increase, but surely it would be a modest mcpositive.
Refs:
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44995
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/05/15/fast-food-workers-strike/9114245/
http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/15/news/economy/fast-food-strike/
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/along-the-minimum-wage-battle-front/?_r=3
Bush’s Many Benghazis
On March 2, 2006, a car bomb killed 4 people, including one US diplomat, in close proximity to the US consulate in Karachi, Pakistan. Remarkably, this was the 4th terrorist attack on the Karachi consulate in less than 4 years, with a bombing in 2002, a shooting in 2003, and an attempted bombing in 2004. None of these attacks, nor the Bush administration’s failure to prevent them, was ever investigated by Congress.
On Sept. 17th 2008, a mortar attack on the US Embassy in Yemen killed 18. This same Embassy had been attacked with mortars just 6 months previously, killing 2 people in a nearby school. Neither attack was investigated by Congress.
On September 11, 2012, an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya killed 2 people, including one US diplomat. 6 hours later, an attack on a CIA compound one mile away from the consulate killed 2 CIA contractors. These were the first attacks of their kind against US diplomatic facilities in Libya.
The 2012 attack on Benghazi has subsequently been investigated by (1) the FBI, (2) the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, (3) the House Armed Services Committee, (4) the House Foreign Affairs Committee, (5) the House Intelligence Committee, (6) the House Judiciary Committee, (7) the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, (8) the State Department Accountability Review Board, and (9) the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. The recently formed (10) House Select Committee plans to conduct yet another investigation.
During Bush Duh’s term in office, in addition to the 4 attacks in Karachi and 2 attacks in Yemen, there were also attacks on US diplomatic installations in Islamabad, Calcutta, Saudi Arabia (twice), Bali, Uzbekistan, Greece, Syria and Turkey. Most of these attacks had more casualties than Benghazi, with 9 killed in Saudi Arabia in 2004, 12 killed in Karachi in 2002, 18 killed in Yemen in 2008, and 39 killed (160 wounded) in Saudi Arabia in 2003. None of these attacks resulted in Congressional investigations.
Put otherwise, among attacks on US diplomatic facilities, there have been 8 Congressional Investigations into a Benghazi attack that killed 4 people, but none into 13 such attacks that killed more than 90 people during the Bush Duh presidency.
What distinguishes Benghazi from the 13 attacks that occurred under Bush Duh? Considering the extent to which it’s been poured over by US legislators, not a whole lot. Findings from the many Congressional investigations into Benghazi have been mixed. One Senate report found that the attack on Benghazi could have been prevented. Prior to Benghazi, the last terrorist attack Congress investigated was 9/11 itself – and the 9/11 commission said that 9/11 was preventable too. That may not be surprising, because unlike Benghazi, the World Trade Center had been attacked by terrorists once before.
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_U.S_consulate_in_Karachi
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/13-benghazis-that-occurre_b_3246847.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_attack_on_the_American_Embassy_in_Yemen
Bundy: Welfare Queen
The predictably pathetic story of Cliven Bundy – and the story of that story, as it was first told by the usual right-wing infotainment outlets – is a fine demonstration of the chasm between rural, red state America’s image of itself and reality.
America’s loony right imagines a wholesome, rural and (of course) white America, of morally upstanding Christians – self-reliant individualists, all – struggling beneath a heavy federal burden of taxes and regulations. Like most of the loony right’s fantasies, this description bears no relation to reality.
Divorce rates in the countryside have now caught up to cities and suburbs. Rural rates of alcohol abuse are among the highest in the country, and rural America has perhaps the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world. Rural Americans furthermore are less educated than their urban counterparts, less likely to have health insurance, and, tellingly, have the highest suicide rates in the country: (The top 6 states for suicide, in order, are Alaska, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, Nevada and Idaho.)
But it isnt simply that rural America is poor, uneducated, unhealthy and unhappy. They are also dependent on rich liberal states to pay their way. Red states typically pay far less in federal taxes than they receive back in federal aid. No matter how they rail against Washington and the intrusiveness of government, red states are the real welfare queens. Bundy is a typical case – whining, in effect, that the federal government isnt generous enough as it subsidizes his cattle by letting them graze at below-market rates. Bundy literally wants a free lunch (for his cattle) – the bill to be picked up by everyone else.
Ironically, the people with the most legitimate complaint are the 640,000 residents of Washington, DC, who suffer taxation without representation – paying federal taxes, yet lacking representatives in congress.
Refs:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/27/opinion/stepp-teenage-pregancies/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/us/24divorce.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/rural-suicides-follow-medicaid-cuts/story?id=15058964
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/rural-suicide.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/health/13rural.html?_r=0
great in depth report on Bundy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjmacnab/2014/04/30/context-matters-the-cliven-bundy-standoff-part-1/
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/04/27/foxs-howard-kurtz-slams-foxs-coverage-of-cliven/199044
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spending_by_state
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/states-federal-taxes-spending-charts-maps
Offin’ Folks, Okie Style
What better occasion than a public execution gone awry to meditate on one core absurdity of conservatism. Before the curtain was drawn to conceal the botch job from the viewers’ gallery, members of the press saw Clayton Lockett writhing and buckling, struggling to speak and rise against the gurney’s restraining straps. Reporters who have been watching Oklahoma executions since 1990 claim to have never seen anything so gruesome.
Doctors, unable to find a better vein to insert the IV, used one in Lockett’s groin. It says volumes about American culture – that while it’s okay for spectators to watch the state strap someone to a gurney and kill them with injected poisons, it would be indecorous to subject them to a view of the condemned man’s pelvic area – and so prison staff covered it with a sheet. Consequently, they didnt notice that the needle became dislodged, and most of the poison spilled out. When they finally realized their error, all the poison on hand was used up, and with Lockett still alive, the execution was actually called off some 35 minutes after it began. Lockett lent a hand by dying of a heart attack 10 minutes later.
As Buckley Jr. famously quipped, a conservative is someone who thinks the US government is incapable of running Amtrak, but ready to install democracy in Iraq by Tuesday next week. Perhaps it’s so obvious as to not require stating explicitly: if you think government is inept, you cant rationally empower it to off its own citizens. You might as well also advocate for drunk driving – finding incompetents and vesting them with great power to maximize the harm they can do.
Demonstrably, Oklahoma’s government is incapable of killing people in a manner that doesnt shock all but the most calloused of consciences. But you dont need to be a skeptic of government efficiency to recognize that the criminal justice process, in its entirety, is so flawed that it cannot be empowered to end life. As Obama said the next day, “In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems: racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, situations in which there were individuals on death row who were later discovered to be innocent because of exculpatory evidence.” It’s worth noting that Obama – though he will never again run for office – still supports the death penalty, likely for the same cynical political reasons as many other democrats.
Government inefficiencies in teaching children and feeding the poor can be tolerated. Errors in the trial process are unfortunate, but at least they’re somewhat reversible. However anyone who thinks government is fundamentally inept cannot rationally support the death penalty. Conservatives, who pretend fealty to the founding fathers, should be guided by them. Given that 12 of the 25 specific rights in the US Bill of Rights benefit the accused, we must infer that the founders were far more concerned by the threat posed by government than that posed by mere criminals.
Conservatives are in a conundrum: anyone who asserts that government is too inept to run a railroad must be pretty dumb to want to give that same government the power to execute people. But if government can be trusted to kill people, then it can certainly manage less critical tasks, like administering insurance programs and designing websites. Conservatives are having trouble picking their poison….
Refs:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/01/us/oklahoma-botched-execution/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1151378-5-1-14-doc-letter-re-clayton-lockett.html
http://news.yahoo.com/oklahoma-halts-execution-inmate-dies-apparent-heart-attack-005203696.html
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/05/02/drugs-in-botched-oklahoma-execution-leaked-from-iv/
http://time.com/85278/oklahoma-execution-iv-in-prisoners-groin/
http://time.com/86034/obama-says-botched-oklahoma-execution-deeply-troubling/
Voter ID Laws Are the Fraud
Voter turnout in the US is abysmal, but predictably so. Turnout in winner-take-all style elections tends to be low across the world, because people are sensitive to the relative ineffectiveness of each marginal vote. When the difference between a 51 and 70% majority – or the difference between a 5 and 10% minority – actually affect the composition of the government, people respond and turn out in greater numbers.
Getting Americans to vote has for a long time been an uphill struggle – so it’s all the more troublesome when conservatives look for new ways to suppress turnout. One recent ploy are voter ID laws. While you and everyone you know probably has a driver’s license, passport, social security card and birth certificate, a fair number of the poor and old do not – and they’re especially burdened by having to obtain or replace such documents.
Voter ID laws arent like poll taxes – they are poll taxes: their imposition all but guarantees that a citizen will have to give money to a government agency, or be denied the right to vote. Even when ID cards are offered free of charge, documents needed to obtain them are not. And while $30 for transport and fees (a typical replacement cost) may not seem like much, it happens to be the average weekly Food Stamp benefit. For the elderly, the journey from the nursing home to the government office (or 2 or 3) may be a greater burden than the money. In either case, voter ID laws will cause legitimate voters to reasonably choose to not vote, simply because the cost is not justified by the benefit.
While there are several types of voter fraud, voter ID laws target just one kind – voter impersonation – which happens to be among the rarest. One DOJ study for the period 2002-05 found 26 convictions for voter impersonation – out of 197 million votes cast. That gives us a voter impersonation rate of .00000013. To get an idea of just how rare that is, the US in that same 2002-05 period had about 60,000 homicides. Put otherwise, the US voter impersonation rate per 100 million votes cast is 13 – while the US homicide rate per year per 100 million people is about 4800 – 370 times greater.
One look at the crime stats for voter impersonation, and the real purpose of voter ID laws becomes obvious. Their aim is to disenfranchise legitimate voters. And it’s no coincidence that practically every one of the 30+ states that have enacted some sort of voter ID law have done so with GOP legislatures and GOP governors. Voter ID laws dont prevent fraud – voter ID laws are themselves the fraud.
Refs:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/story?id=17213376
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-id-vote/story?id=17206253
https://www.aclu.org/voting-rights/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet
Stop the Deportations Now
In law, there’s a distinction between mala prohibita and mala in se – between acts that are crimes simply because they’re prohibited by law; and acts that are wrong without respect to what the law says. Rape, murder and arson are classic examples of mala in se. Restrictions on selling booze on Sunday are classic mala prohibita. Illegal immigration is too.
Many laws fall into the gray area in between. Small offenses like parking illegally become a major nuisance if everyone flaunts the rules. Leaving the park at dusk may be a public safety or municipal budget matter. Then there’s the case of the double-yellow line: it’s completely arbitrary which side of the road the law dictates that you drive on; but once the rule is established, its intentional violation is mala in se.
Immigration laws are fundamentally mala prohibita. While it’s constructive to regulate the movement of people across borders, if only to minimize disruptive effects, human migration is as old as our species, and the reason we dont all still have Kenyan and Tanzanian addresses. Leaving one place in the hope of finding someplace better is normal, natural and common. Illegal immigration is literally a regulatory offense. And unlike other such offenses, like environmental crimes, it doesnt sicken and kill people. While the loonies on the right refer deferentially to polluters as “Job Creators”, undocumented workers cleaning their hotel rooms and picking their raspberries are treated with contempt. Anyone who comes to America in search of a better life deserves to be treated with decency. Those who oppose amnesty and rail on about how “They broke our laws!” need to be reminded that the offense of migrating illegally is on a par with removing a mattress tag.
With Obama deporting more than 1000 illegal immigrants per day, John Boehner absurdly claimed that the president cannot be trusted to enforce immigration laws. Unfortunately, Obama is enforcing those laws, and much more aggressively and effectively than his predecessor, inflicting a lot of pointless misery, at considerable cost and of dubious benefit. Boehner, of course, was hoping to create a smokescreen for his own ineffectiveness. More recently, he took a swipe at Congress for their trepidation over engaging the issue, which was an even greater hypocrisy. A majority in Congress is ready to support immigration reform – however Boehner’s primary ambition is to hang on to his speakership, and he’s afraid that pushing immigration will destabilize the GOP-TP coalition that he needs to keep his job. This, ultimately, is why nothing’s likely to happen on immigration with this Congress.
And that leaves the president to make do with existing laws, which are entirely unsuited to deal with the reality that 4% of the US population is in the country illegally – one out of every 25 US residents, comparable to the entire population of Pennsylvania, Ohio or Illinois. Obama has rightly been brought to task by liberals over his whack-a-mole approach: his administration is finding, arresting, holding, processing and deporting some 400,000 people per year – double Bush Duh’s highest annual totals.
Apologizing to displeased hispanics, Obama disingenuously suggested that he’s bound to execute the laws as written. But on the contrary, an executive, under the established doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, has ample latitude to set enforcement priorities, and allocate the government’s limited resources as he sees fit. Given their great cost and questionable utility – not to mention their harsh, unpredictable and destabilizing impact on many US families and communities – the deportations can and should be stopped NOW. Obama should tell Congress to come up with a plan to deal with the situation, or suffer the President’s reasonable, defensible decision to defer action in the interim, and to direct resources toward more worthwhile ends.
Refs:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31227/it-really-illegal-remove-your-mattress-tag
http://tjshome.com/dumblaws.php
Legalize It (All of It)
No issue better captures conservative vapidity than drugs. Their supposed “fear of big government” is somehow not triggered by a US police state, which over the past 40 years has eviscerated the bill of rights, subverted democracy at home and abroad, and given the US the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.
The US police state went into launch mode decades ago. Though crime rates have been falling for more than 20 years since their 1991 peak, incarceration rates have continued to rise, seemingly independent of the drop in crime. The US incarceration rate is now over 700 per 100,000 – by comparison, the rate in many European countries in under 100. When you include probation and parole, you find that 3% of the US population is under correctional supervision. Drug crimes incarcerate about half of all federal prisoners, and about a quarter of all people in all US prisons.
Press a conservative on his inane opposition to drug legalization, and you’ll hear the squeaky voice of a paternalist with no love for freedom, and no respect for the judgment of other adults on how they choose to organize their lives. Like socialists, conservatives have no trouble subjugating individual liberty to the perceived needs of the collective.
The most common conservative rationale for drug prohibition is the protection of OTHER people from the consequences of an individual’s choice to use drugs. It’s curious that analogous social concerns are never seen in the context of food stamps or welfare – in which conservatives happily let children of poor parents endure severe material privation in the name of “individual responsibility.”
But of course conservatives’ “suffer the little children” feint on drug issues is just lipstick for the pig. Conservatism’s defining trait is its lack of principle. Conservatism is NOT a political philosophy – it’s 10 lbs of shit packed into a 5 lb bag by historical accident. Lacking any principles, conservative positions hover in the ether, without foundations. A trillion dollars spent on the war on drugs hasnt saved lives, reduced usage, or even increased drug prices. And it doesnt protect children. (Ever hear of liquor store owners hawking booze in or around schoolyards?) Conservatives essentially oppose drug legalization in the same way they oppose gay marriage – for no reason at all. Like every other conservative policy position, it isnt about a convincing argument, a principle, or (heaven forbid) observational data or scientific analysis. They oppose it because they oppose it.
Three year olds behave the same. They point their finger and declare “I want that.” A three year isnt interested in the particularities of fairness, history, propriety or decency. They dont give a damn about facts or logic – they know what they want, and naked desire is the alpha and omega of their universe. A three year old’s opinion on who’s turn it is to play with the dolly (mine!) is as immutable as a conservative’s opinion on drug legalization for EXACTLY the same reason. An opinion not based in fact nor derived from logic is amenable to neither.
Refs:
great all-around source: http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/index.cfm
including these greatest hits:
http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107
http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=128
other sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
http://fcnl.org/resources/newsletter/septoct11/mass_incarceration_massively_wrong/
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777-1,00.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html
PS: In response to several readers’ queries on whether Wile E. Coyote (Eatus almost anythingus) ever finally caught and ate the Road-Runner (Velocitus delectiblus), I’m posting this link, in the hope that it settles the matter conclusively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuE-GpNV0sY
The Folly of Conservatism
For anyone serious or curious about the world, conservatism is impossible. Human knowledge advances so rapidly that it’s a challenge to keep up, even within one’s own specialty. As new information arrives, beliefs must continuously be revised and reevaluated – if not discarded.
A succinct critique of “Traditional Chinese Medicine” is that you cant trust anything traditional in medicine. Given that our knowledge of the body is changing now faster than ever, any medical practice that’s remained the same for decades – let alone centuries – is highly suspect. And medicine isnt a special case – through modern scientific investigation, mankind is quickly and steadily expanding knowledge in virtually all fields of inquiry.
And that’s a deal-killer for conservatism, which implicitly relies on the fallacy that our knowledge of the world, ourselves, science, morality, etc., is so complete that our beliefs can or should remain constant over time. Progressivism, by comparison – of which liberalism is just one strain – embraces the reality that our knowledge of the world, and the world itself, is ever changing – and that therefore, necessarily, our policies and positions must also change.
That conservatives chronically mangle science is not a coincidence. We might say that a conservative’s sine qua non is, precisely, an inability to intelligently collect and process new information; conservatives rarely even make it to the next step, which is updating existing beliefs with new knowledge. Across such diverse subjects as evolution, climate change, economics, the health costs of coal, or the ineffectiveness of teaching abstinence, conservatives maintain a static belief system by continuously suppressing new information. One is left to wonder at which is the cause and which the effect: whether scientific illiterates are more easily seduced by discredited policy prescriptions; or whether inculcation in conservatism directly thwarts the development of critical thinking skills, and so frustrates scientific literacy.
As I’ve written previously, conservative positions are not amenable to fact or logic because they arent based on them. Conservatism begins and ends with naked belief, sustained not by learning but by faith, fastidiously sheltered from antagonistic information and argument. Conservatism, by almost any definition, it is not a political philosophy, but a religion.
PS
On the folly of grammatical conservatism: written English does fine without apostrophes in negative contractions (doesnt, couldnt, etc.). A childhood victim of French accent marks, CT is a big fan of streamlining. Parisians do fine without milk in coffee or aigu in cafe; likewise, Americans arent wont to confuse an inability with a repetitive song (cant). For one of such a mind, the eyes all but bleed from tripping over the New Yorker’s umlaut in coöperate – as if the term might otherwise reference a pidgin’s pigeons…. Our evaluation and reevaluation of this issue is, as with all things, ongoing, as new information arrives –
Ref: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis.html
Hurricane Annie-Get-Your-Gun
Florida gets more than its share of natural disasters, and its state legislature is working hard to guarantee the safety of Florida residents in time of crisis. A bill that recently cleared Florida’s House of Representatives would permit gun owners to carry concealed weapons without a permit whenever an emergency is declared.
I know you’re thinking: wow, streets filled with freaked-out rednecks; frightened and confused survivors roaming in search of food, water and medical attention; hot, humid, overcrowded shelters; people angry, frustrated, confused, distraught – how better to perk up spirits, bring hope and speed recovery, than with an infusion of firearms! As a conservative will readily explain, every problem facing America today can be cured with a little extra paranoia and a high-capacity magazine….
This is among the most absurd examples of conservative fantasies about individual empowerment. Disasters are the archetypal case in which individual action is of limited usefulness – when people in the affected area largely depend on an organized response from outside. One can only wonder at the enthusiasm of first-responders as they venture into a newly-minted free-fire zone…. And never mind the fact that typical responses to natural disasters use curfews to diminish the threat of looting – now Florida’s legislature would guarantee the right to bear arms to roving bands.
A conservative in his application of the concept of personal liberty is much like a five year-old who’s discovered a pistol in his dad’s desk drawer. No matter its utility In the hands of a sound-minded adult, the young and-or developmentally impaired will find a way to kill himself with it.
Refs:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/11/us-usa-florida-guns-idUSBREA3A1UF20140411
http://rt.com/usa/florida-guns-disaster-riots-044/
Three Time Loser
Paul Ryan’s latest sham-budget follows in the conservative tradition of Reagan and Bush Duh, each of whom gifted generous tax cuts to the rich, while leaving the nation with giant deficits and tepid growth for a decade after. And so it’s useful to revisit why Reaganomics, in its would-be third iteration, is still stupid.
We’ve all become revoltingly familiar with Job Creator – the idol behind the conservative altar. When mighty Job Creator is appeased with tax cuts on His Ginormous Income, He favors His people with jobs. Indeed, Ryan’s latest supplication to Job Creator bestows fully half of its tax cuts on people making more than $620k/yr – AKA the one percent. People with incomes over $1 million would enjoy an average tax cut of over $200k/yr.
While it’s true that if you let the investor class keep ever more of its absurdly large fraction of national income, they have to park it someplace – the problem is WHERE. Since capital is free to roam in search of its best return, tax cuts on the wealthy are as likely to create jobs in Asia and Latin America as they are in the US.
And that’s why trickle-down economics is (still) stupid. It’s created millions of new jobs in Asia and Latin America, and greatly enriched America’s already stupendously wealthy, but it’s done squat for Americans who weren’t already members of a yacht club. And it’s a bit curious how conservative enthusiasm for free trade extends only to one production factor: capital. They’re less keen on porous borders for labor.
There’s a much more efficient way to stimulate the US economy via fiscal policy. The lower your income, the greater the fraction of it that you consume (as opposed to save or invest). And consumption is primarily done locally – through rent, groceries, gas, etc. So when you give ordinary working people a tax cut on their wages, that little extra in their take-home is almost certain to go into the local economy, to boost aggregate demand, to which firms respond by hiring.
Ryan couldnt be satisfied with giving away the farm to the very rich – he does it by taking money out of the pocket of people who really would spend it locally: students, the working poor and the elderly – by cutting Pell Grants, EITC, Food Stamps, Medicaid and Medicare. As a bonus, he’d also cut Head Start and public investment in renewables. Ryan one-ups Reagan’s dumb with dumber.
This aint rocket science. Because their 30 year-old fantasies have been so utterly discredited, conservatives have to come up with ever more elaborate fictions – like Job Creator’s faithful servant, the Confidence Fairy – to obfuscate the true basis of their fiscal policies. Conservatives seek to cut taxes on the wealthy as an end in itself – the rest is lipstick for the pig. Reagan and Bush Duh’s big tax cuts led to weak deficit-fueled recoveries, compared to the tax increase on the rich that kicked off the Clinton Boom and surplus. The other great post-war boom occurred during the 1960s, when marginal tax rates on the wealthy were over 70%.
The good news is that Ryan’s budget has zero chance of becoming law. We might be thankful that conservatives in Congress content themselves with empty partisan gestures – Ryan’s latest offering to a make-believe deity is of the same species as the House’s 50th vote to repeal the ACA. That the Tea Party’s economic illiteracy is exceeded only by its parliamentary ineptitude is a happy coincidence for which we all should be grateful.
Refs:
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/paul-ryan-budget-medicare-health-care-105234.html
http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/04/02/fox-touts-paul-ryans-new-budget-plan-ignores-ec/198715
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/gop-budget-the-anti-robin_b_5142770.html
HAPPY EASTER !
Carlton Thurman's Liberal Field Guide 