Category: Philosophy

What Liberal Pushback Should Look Like

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Thomas Geoghegan, has just written an OP/ED suggesting that Social Security and taxation should be increased, not decreases:

As a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of “saving” Social Security. We should not “save” it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker’s preretirement earnings. While jaws may drop inside the Beltway, we could raise that to 50 percent. We’d still be near the bottom of the league of the world’s richest countries — but at least it would be a basement with some food and air. We have elderly people living on less than $10,000 a year. Is that what Democrats want to “save”?

“But we can’t afford it!” Oh, come on: We have a federal tax rate equal to nearly 15 percent of our G.D.P. — far below the take in most wealthy countries. Let’s wake up: the biggest crisis we face is that most of us have nothing meaningful saved for retirement. I know. I started my career wanting to be a pension lawyer. In the 1970s, lawyers like me expected there to be big pots of private pensions for hourly workers. By the 1980s, as factories closed, I was filing hopeless lawsuits to claw back bits and pieces of benefits. Now there are even fewer bits and pieces to get.

A recent Harris poll found that 34 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement — not even a hundred bucks. In this lost decade, that percentage is sure to go up. At retirement the lucky few with a 401(k) typically have $98,000. As an annuity that’s about $600 a month — not exactly an upper-middle-class lifestyle. It’s too late for Congress to come up with some new savings plan — a new I.R.A. that grows hair, or something. There’s no time. We have to improve the one public pension program in place. Should we means-test it? No. I don’t care if they go out and buy bottles of Jim Beam: let our elderly have an occasional night out at a restaurant.

The most paralyzing half-truth in this country is that people hate taxes. People are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a CBS/New York Times poll in January were willing to pay more taxes to save Social Security at its modest level. To “save” it, most of us don’t need to pay. We could lift the cap on high earners, the 6 percent of workers who make over $106,800 a year. If earnings above the cap were subject to the payroll tax with no increase in benefits to high earners, there would be no deficit in the Social Security trust fund in 2037, as projected.

If people are willing to pay more just to “save” Social Security, they should be glad to pay more to raise it.

I cannot imagine a such a full throated defense of basic human decency as government policy from any Democrat on the national stage, and that is a large part of the tragedy that is the Democratic party.

What the Shrill One Said

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Paul Krugman offers a data point that shows that default and devaluation works better than austerity and debt peonage.

The spread on an Icelandic CDS is now about a third that of the Irish CDS, which means that their borrowing costs are lower, as is the confidence of the market in their credit.

Rolling the Nobel Laureate:

Why, it’s almost as if defaulting on debts run up by runaway bankers and letting your currency depreciate works better — even from the point of view of investors — than socializing private-sector losses and grimly sticking with a fixed exchange rate.

Or to put this in earthier terms, if you want to survive this sort of financial meltdown, f%$# the banks, not the average citizen.

Alan Greenspan, STFU!

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Ayn Rand’s most successful apostle* is back at it again saying that regulations are causing all of our financial problems, and gives us this bon mot:

The problem is that regulators, and for that matter everyone else, can never get more than a glimpse at the internal workings of the simplest of modern financial systems. Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

With notably rare exceptions, Abraham Lincoln enjoyed the play Our American Cousin.

As Paul Krugman observes, the level out outright cluelessness shown here is mind boggling, though the best response comes from Henry Farrell, who holds a “With notably rare exceptions,” contest that is hysterically funny.

*No, really, he actually hung out with her and was a part of regular meetings in her apartment.

Quote of the Day

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There has been a bit of discussion about whether or not economics is truly a science going around the economics blogs, and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes what I think is the definitive comment on whether it is the dismal science, or just dismal:

I conclude that economics is not yet a science. Economics is more like a science when people do not care about the outcomes.

More Evidence that the Wall Street Journal is Going to Rupert Murdoch in a Handbasket

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They were reporting that the Wisconsin State Democratic Senators were returning to the capitol shortly, which was emphatically denied by the state Senators in question.

This was clearly planted because as time goes on the Republicans are losing ground. For example, one of the more prominent teabagger PACs is begging for money because they are losing this fight, and a counter protest, complete with Koch brothers free bus service, could only muster 700 attendees.

The lesson to be learned here is that when you make nice, no one notices who was on what side, but when you fight back people do notice, and if you are on the sane side of the argument, you win.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

The man who pursued William Jefferson Clinton’s penis from Arkansas to the District of Columbia, Richard Mellon Scaife, has lambasted Republicans on their attempts to completely defund family planning:

The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives — urged on by conservatives opposed to abortion — has voted to defund Planned Parenthood. On this issue, Republicans and conservatives are dead wrong.

My grandmother was a friend and a supporter of Margaret Sanger, one of America’s earliest, most effective advocates of birth control.

I met Sanger several times before her death in 1966 and was impressed by her intellect and her commitment to many issues, not the least of which was enabling every woman to be “the absolute mistress of her own body,” as she put it.

I didn’t agree with everything the formidable Mrs. Sanger espoused. Yet I respected her dedication to making health-care and birth-control services available to all Americans, especially to those with low incomes, no insurance and no other recourse to medical services.

When you have gotten too combative for rabid right wing Pit Bull for Dick Scaife, you have seriously gone off the rails.

And in the Annals of Hypocrisy…

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We have Ayn “Atlas Shrugged” Rand, who took medicare to pay for her lung cancer surgeries, and Congressman Paul “We will transform our social safety net into a hammock” Ryan, who freely collected social security benefits after his father died.

I don’t generally begrudge people accessing social programs, but when you call people who need them “moochers” and the like, you are a hypocrite and a wanker.

Russia

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The bombing is clearly a horrible thing, but I don’t have much to add, though I would suggest that you look at Mark Ames article on Russian stoicism.

The Russian reaction may seem cold, or even heartless, in their reaction, but consider the alternative:

As appalling as it might seem, let’s remember what America’s far more sentimental reaction to 9/11 got us: two disastrous wars, tens of thousands of deaths, and the sorts of police-state measures once thought unimaginable. The difference may be more in our sentimentality than in our brutality.

By simply soldiering on, and letting it roll off your back, it makes it much more difficult for the Terrorists to win.

I Think That This is Corruption, Not Stupidity

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One of the more puzzling aspects of the financial meltdown is the complete lack of prosecutions of high level bankers, and Bill Black of New Deal 2.0 explains why:

What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ’s senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals. On Huffington Post, David Heath writes:

Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. An investor in loans who documents fraud can force a bank to buy the loan back. But convincing a jury that executives intended to make fraudulent loans, and thus should be held criminally responsible, may be too difficult of a hurdle for prosecutors. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,’ Wagner said.”

(emphasis original)

What is going on here is that the prosecutors are assuming that the agents of the financial institutions are perfect agents of those institutions, and that they would never act in their own personal benefit if it were detrimental to their employer in the long term.

This has a number of names, most commonly, it is called the principal agent problem, and the (now unconstitutional) theory of the theft of honest services prosecutions was based on this.

The facts here, though not necessarily the law, are clear:  Various high level agents at financial institutions engaged in activities that were likely to blow up in the long term, but were unlikely to do so before these agents profited from them.

The only question is whether this behavior was merely stupid or negligent, in which case, a life-time ban from the financial industry is warranted, or fraudulent, in which case, incarceration is warranted.

The calculus here is not rocket science, and the fact that prosecutors are sticking to such a transparently false theory is to my mind more of an indication of corruption than it is of stupidity or wrong headedness.

Without jail time, we will see the behavior repeated.

Hell, we are seeing it repeated right now, that’s why the bonuses are so big this year.

All You Need to Understand About Republicans

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It should be noted that Paul Ryan, the soon to be head of the House Budget Committee, is requiring his staff to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

While I’ve not read this book, I did her (mercifully shorter) treatise on her philosophy The Virtue of Selfishness in high school, and Kung Fu monkey has the final word on Rand and her Randroid followers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Indeed, and he will be drafting our budgets. <Facepalm>

H/t Paul Krugman.

David Brooks is the Victim of a Botched Brit Milah

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 I don’t mean that there is physical damage to his penis.  I mean that the Brit Milah, the first mitzvah that a Jewish boy experiences, is supposed to, you know, make you Jewish, and Brooks’ biography states that he is a Jew did not work.  This guy is about as Jewish as Ann Murray.

Somehow or other he manages to express dumbfounded amazement at his experience at having a discussion with a Jewish theologian where she makes points that are so mainstream in Judaism that you can’t hear a Rabbi’s sermon without hearing at least one of them twice:

In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities. “We live in a relativistic culture,” she told me. Many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking. They find it hard to give a straight yes or no answer to tough moral questions. When they go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety.

[Dr. Erica] Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle. “I try to make people uncomfortable.”

Shocking, here is a Jew who asks a question in response to a question.  What do you think of that?

Brown seems to poke people with concepts that sit uncomfortably with the modern mind-set — submission and sin. She writes about disorienting situations: vengeance, scandal, group shame. During our coffee, she criticized the way some observers bury moral teaching under legal casuistry and the way some moderns try to explain away the unfashionable things the Torah clearly says.

Sorry, but I’ve heard this from Reform Rabbis through black hat Orthodox.

I don’t mean to imply that she  is not a rigorous thinker, or that she might not be an engaging teacher.  What I am saying is that this is completely mainstream Jewish thought, and that any Jew who expresses surprise and wonderment at what is standard boiler plate for a B’nei Mitzvah speech given by a 13 year old.

I have seen such expressions of surprise from Christians that I’ve dealt with, I recall a Pentecostal woman in college who was stunned when I noted that the afterlife was simply not particularly important in Judaism, for example (It’s orthogonal to Tikkun Olam), which blew her mind.

It’s one of the reasons that I object to the term “Judeo Christian,” because there are real and deep differences in ethics and philosophy.  I would argue that existentialism, with its focus on personal responsibility, is actually closer to Judaism than many of the strands of Christian theology.

As Ioz observes, “This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.”

I am not sure if he’s really stupid, or if his hanging out with right wingers, who either are evangelicals, or who find evangelicals “useful idiots,” but he really needs to spend some time listing to the rabbi’s sermons, as opposed to playing on his Blackberry.

H/t Brad Delong.

Brains…Brains…Brains…Brains…

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Paul Krugman laments the fact that failed economic ideas are now the conventional wisdom:

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

……

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

Go read.

It is a good analysis, but I think rather incomplete.

He seems to think that Barack Obama, in his attempts to appease Republicans, has given them cover to promulgate these failed ideas.

I think that this is too Byzantine an explanation. The simpler explanation is that Barack Obama gives lip service to these failed ideas because he actually believes in these ideas.

It explains his unwillingness to prosecute the banksters, their fraud against consumers in the HAMP, their attempts to water down financial reform, etc.

This is not cowardice.  This is corporatist thinking to a degree that makes Bill Clinton looks like Karl Marx.

EuroFail

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The Euro Zone monetary authorities are crowing about the success of Latvia, because they held the hard peg to their currency.

It appears that their GDP may grow this quarter, after as Matthew Yglesias observes, their GDP feel by 4.2% in 2008, 18% in 2009, and will fall slightly this year.

This is not success. As Paul Krugman writes, “They have made a desert, and called it successful adjustment.”

Compare their progress to those of the Icelanders, Dr. Krugman supplied the graph pr0n) who devalued, and eschewed austerity.

Note also that Iceland’s meltdown was the most severe this far seen, but, because they eschewed the nattering nabobs of negativism that are the pain caucus, they had what amounts to the mildest and shortest downturn.

This is a Fascinating Analysis of the Koran

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Essentially, the speaker notes that the Koran is a far more nuanced document than either the fundamentalists or the islamophobes would imply, and that you really cannot understand it in translation.

Certainly that is my experience with the study of Torah, where I really don’t think that I can claim to have ever even read it, since with my pathetic grasp of Hebrew, I do not know more than a smattering of words and a few greetings.

In any case, listening to Lesley Hazelton is a good way to spend 9 minutes.

H/t Yves Smith.

Buh Bye Bean

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Melissa Bean has conceded the election to her Republican opponent Joe Walsh, and honestly, it makes me happy.

I’d feel different if she were the margin for control of the house, but she isn’t, and she is arguably the worst Democrat in Congress, because she sold her soul for campaign donations to the financial industry, and she was the most effective force on Congress for gutting financial regulations.

While she is (until January) was a member of both the Blue Dog and New Democrat Caucus, she was always about raking in the campaign dough from banks, pharma, etc. so that they can stay in office, which shades her more toward the New Dem side, as opposed to the Blue Dogs, who tend to be motivated more by their own misguided philosophy or a desire to appease constituents.

Give me an honest reactionary over a pseudo-moderate careerist any day.

In related news. Lisa Murkowski beat Joe Miller in her write-in bid.

In your face, Sarah Palin.