Anyway, Dissenting Justice wrote about Bartlett’s piece, pointing out Tea Partiers have no idea what’s happened with federal taxes (only 4% think federal taxes have fallen, whereas it’s 100% true that they have). Then, comes this comment from, ahem, “MaggotatBroad&Wall”:
Bartlett is a tax/fiscal policy expert. Nobody should dispute his numbers. He was instrumental in augering in the Reagan supply side revolution that created trillions in new wealth and tens of millions of new jobs.
He became enraged with the GOP, and left the party under GWB because of the GOP’s fiscal irresponsibilty. So did many others, and I believe that’s in part why they lost control of both houses and the presidency. But Bartlett took it a step further. He decided to enrich himself writing books trashing GWB and his former party. I have no problem with that.
If I were asked a question about federal taxes, I’d be tempted to think about ALL the different kinds of taxes I am burdened by (state sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, cigarette taxes, liquor taxes, social security, medicare, and probably dozens more, etc.) and lump them all together in my response about “federal” taxes. So I believe Bartlett is being a wonky nit.
Ladies and gentlemen, your Tea Party in a nutshell: when asked about federal taxes, they think about state and municipal taxes that the federal government has nothing to do with, along with federal taxes that have remained wholly unchanged. This is why thousands of people who still wonder why the entire plane isn’t made of out the black box material show up on random lawns to protest - because they have no idea what it is they’re angry about, which lets them be really, really fucking angry about anything.
This is why I disregard Tea Partiers as serious voices in the political dialogue - they are literally too stupid for their feelings to matter. And if any of them are reading and are angry about this, please see the prior sentence for my response. Thank you.
Wow, Bank of America is getting rid of its overdraft fees on debit cards. This is how little I trust commercial banks: I’m sure there’s a rub. I’m sure they’ve found a secret, special way to screw customers that live paycheck to paycheck, and this is all just a P.R. campaign to obscure that. But maybe not. Maybe this is how they’re going to be competitive. Instead of overdrafting your account when you use your debit card and don’t have money, the plan is to have your card denied, which the vast majority of people would prefer, I’m sure. If this is what it purports to be, then it’s such great news. Overdraft fees are a pernicious form of usury, a real human rights abuse. G.D. explains:
In practice, though, many banks enroll their customers in the programs without telling them and assess charges to customers’ accounts out of sequence in order to force them into overdrafting their account.....
But the proliferation of banks in poor neighborhoods has done little to keep the unbanked from opting for “fringe banking services” — check cashing services, payday lenders, and the like. Those institutions charge onerous fees of their own, but unlike the big banks, their fees are explicitly outlined. Customers may cough up $12 for the privilege of cashing a $300 check, but it makes more economic sense than being stuck with miscellaneous surcharges over the course of several weeks for not maintaining a minimum balance, withdrawing money from an ATM, writing a check, or overdrafting your account — penalties that can accrue much more easily and be much more disastrous when your life is inherently unstable.
However predatory and exploitative you may think the banks are towards the working poor, I promise you that they are much worse than you can imagine. How do I know? Well, I used to work at a bank. For the first couple of years I worked at a bank, I had a fairly laid-back, easy existence. I had a good life working at a branch that served downtown Austin, and I worked mainly with business customers, the people from the bars and restaurants that came in and out all the time because they were moving a lot of cash. But then I got promoted to manager and moved to a smaller branch in a wealthy neighborhood. That didn’t worry me overmuch, though. Working with wealthy customers can be a headache, since they’re so entitled, but at least your customers are making money off the bank and are by and large happy about that.
What I didn’t realize when I signed up for the job was that I was also inheriting a mini-branch in the mall. And even though that branch was small and not even really full service, it immediately became the source of 90% of my headaches. What’s not fun in commercial banking is having paycheck-cashing being a huge part of your foot traffic. How it works is this: banks don’t cash checks for non-customers, unless the check is drawn on that bank. Then they have to. A lot of people who don’t have bank accounts would far prefer to get their checks cashed at the banks, where the fees are usually a lot smaller than those horrible check cashing places. But the bank management hates these folks, because they don’t make any real money off them, besides the relatively small $3-$5 check cashing fees. So they make it hellish to cash your paycheck at a bank. The ostensible reason is “security”, but it doesn’t take even the dimmest teller but a week to figure out how little sense that makes. (Checks drawn off other banks are riskier to cash, because they aren’t funds verified. The losses from fraudulent checks aren’t nothing, but are better and more efficiently handled by training tellers to spot frauds instead of putting the customers through some of the security theater they subject them to.) They had to present one or two forms of ID and put a thumbprint on the check, and since everyone tends to cash their checks when they get them, this level of ID requirements plus the crowds makes the lines unbelievably long. The people who suffer the most are the poor tellers, cashing one check after another for people who are crabby because they’ve been working all day and this long ass line is the only thing between them and having their cash.
Steve Benen has a post up expressing amazement that Republicans have decided to make “starve the unemployed” a talking point. Not that it’s surprising that many Republicans believe that unemployment benefits are wrong because they give people who live paycheck to paycheck the occasional opportunity to avoid taking extremely shitty, underpaid work that makes it difficult to look for another job with any potential at all. Just surprising that they’d say that in an era of 10% unemployment, when it seems politically unwise to tell people that it’s their own fault that they can’t get a good job in the worst economy since the Great Depression, and implying they’re lazy. Clearly, the teabaggers are emboldening a lot of dipshits in the Republican party to say stupid shit they’d otherwise think twice about. Most people find these statements appalling, but teabaggers hear nothing but ego-stroking---the underlying argument they hear is that hard times could never fall on them, because they’re good people. Wishful thinking goes far with right wing populists.
I realize Democrats are smart enough to use this to their political advantage in fund-raising and getting votes, but there’s so much more that you can do with this. After all, here’s your major argument for why they’re against universal health care. They cannot stand the idea that someone who has to work for a living might have options, that you may be able to hold out for a better job because you don’t have the threat of death or homelessness hanging over your head. Universal health care means being able to have insurance that’s meaningful at all between jobs, after all. If you have a pre-existing condition, for instance, you basically have to take any job that’s out there, no matter how shitty, as long as it has benefits. Yes, they’re trying to build a society where 90% of people work themselves to death so the other 10% can live lives of unbelievable sloth and luxury. There’s ways that Democrats can weave that truth into a larger narrative in campaign ads.
I wish I could say I feel sanguine now that the Republicans are running around telling Americans that they’re lazy people who don’t deserve to live, and that we only exist to work our fingers to the bone to enrich others. Unfortunately, I’m not resting easy. That message puts off most people, but it energizes a wacky minority, and an energized minority often can wield a lot of power in a democracy. (Look at the anti-choice movement, for instance---they’ve made huge gains while basically standing for the principle that the way 95-98% of Americans live should be severely restricted and punishable by law). We should be very afraid, especially when the Democrats often are so afraid of their own shadows, they’re always making a bunch of random concessions to conservative craziness to exactly no electoral or political benefit. I, for instance, can’t wait until Republicans start claiming on TV that KSM got the civilian trial that Obama nixed, and the hosts don’t bother to correct them.
Politico, of course, has the Republican response to Jim Bunning’s comments as a feature story, because what really matters is how Republicans position themselves on this issue rather than, say, the single Senator assuring that millions of people don’t have money to eat this week.
The Humble Libertarian asks why the rest of the Senate doesn’t just capitulate to Bunning’s demands, which is sort of like asking why the person whose bed is getting shit all over by the crazy man doesn’t run out and get some plastic sheets at the hardware store. Bunning claims that his unilateral stoppage of unemployment benefits (among a myriad of other programs) is designed to stop deficit spending, which would make sense except that dude is all about Bush’s deficit-expanding tax cuts.
By the reaction, you would think that Bunning was trying to throw poor people out into the street, force grandma and grandpa to eat Meow Mix, strip soldiers naked and send them into battle, while singlehandedly increasing his carbon footprint to the point that the ocean drowns Los Angeles in a wave of melting arctic ice due to global warming.
Well, actually, when you indefinitely suspend the only source of income for people who can’t find jobs, you’re doing exactly what one and two mockingly refer to. In general, when you have no more rent money, you do get thrown out on the street and have to eat the lowest-cost food you can (which might not be Meow Mix, but instead the dollar menu at Burger King...so, yeah, Meow Mix). When you can’t even accept the fact that unemployment benefits aren’t just something tossed on the luxurious existence that is not having to drive to the office every morning, you render yourself morally and intellectually incapable of discussing this.
Of course, pointing this out to the public at large requires a more robust PR effort than Congressional Democrats seem willing to mount. How hard is it to say, “Look at this, and look at the fact that Susan Collins is the only Republican willing to go on the record and support continuing unemployment benefits in a recession. If Republicans are too partisan to support keeping unemployed people off the streets in a recession, how are we ever supposed to work with them anything that requires the least bit of foresight, sympathy or rationality? We can’t. Ergo, these people are assholes. I yield my time.”
The New York Times did a profile of one of the Tea Party movement’s leaderless leaders, Keli Carender (warning: link to interminable blog).
As we all know, the Tea Party has no leaders, which means that everyone in the Tea Party is simultaneously totally fucking awesome and persona non grata. But when Ms. Carender, who is a leader but not a leader, is asked about Sarah Palin, she says the following:
Sarah Palin? She will have to campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support, Ms. Carender said, adding, “And if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired.”
And what, pray tell, are “Tea Party ideas”?
Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare.
“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”
Got that, candidates? You want the Tea Party’s support, you take basic questions about how government should be run and you fucking sigh through that shit. Then you go all Randian, except that Ayn Rand didn’t like charities, but whatever, and then you push a massive entitlement program onto the states, or maybe not, but whatever, because you can bounce around.
All this thinking about what the hell your formless, aimless mass protests are about is really hard, you know?
I’ve been meaning to respond to M. LeBlanc’s post questioning the “hypocrisy strategy” since she wrote it, but it took awhile to get my thoughts together on it. The hypocrisy strategy in question is an attempt to undermine Republican credibility by showing how many Republican politicians are saying two things simultaneously about the stimulus bill. When they’re in D.C. and trying to hurt Obama, they say that the stimulus was a complete failure that didn’t do anything to create jobs or improve the economy. When they’re back home trying to stir up enthusiasm for themselves as legislators, they are praising the stimulus and, most importantly, taking credit for something they voted against. In some cases, they whip out giant checks full of money they have openly denounced and pretend that they’re the source of the funds. As M. notes, Rachel Maddow has been hitting this hard.
But as this round-up from Maddow’s show demonstrates, the argument is taking off, with multiple media outlets picking up the narrative, including conservative ones:
M.’s criticisms are twofold: She’s wary of calling people hypocrites, because this reduces complex human responses to soundbites, and that’s fundamentally dishonest. But also, she doesn’t think the Republicans are hypocrites on this:
There’s nothing hypocritical about what the Republicans are doing. I thought then, and continue to think, that the “gotcha"-ism of trying to get Republican governors to say they would reject the stimulus money was misguided. In fact, their world view is completely coherent if you look at what they do, rather than what they say. What they say is a string of platitudes that pretend that they actually care about the health and well-being of Americans. They have to do this, because they’re politicians. And Democrats let them get away with it, because they’re politicians.
Ezra asks why, if I think thebenefits of health insurance are so minimal, I have health insurance. Revealed preference! Gotcha!
But the answer as to why I have health insurance is simple: my employer pays for it. If my employer didn’t pay for it, I wouldn’t have it. I’d buy a catastrophic policy from a reputable insurer to cover any amount that might bankrupt me, and self-insure for everything else. That would probably cost me a little more than what I pay The Atlantic for my first-dollar coverage, so I opt for the first-dollar coverage. It’s not like I get the money The Atlantic is spending on my benefits back if I choose to go without.
Okay, fine, fine, she gets insurance because she’s required to. But that doesn’t really explain why her preferred option is any better, particularly as she’s fond of talking of her many, many, many health ailments ad nauseum.
But do I think I would be noticeably more likely to die if I did give up my policy? Certainly not for the next twenty years, because I am unlikely to get cancer much before 65, and everything else that might kill me would be treated on an emergent basis, where insurance probably wouldn’t affect my outcomes nearly as much as the fact that I am an upper middle class professional with a (soon to be) husband who writes about health care policy for a living and a father who used to work for the New York City health and hospitals corporation, both of whom will no doubt be sitting on top of the doctors and the hospital bureaucracy to make sure I get excellent care.
So, her main argument against health insurance is that she as an individual happens to have really good connections who will scream and hold their breath until precious Megan gets what she needs (and left unsaid is that said connections will also help her pay for her healthcare).
Morbidity? Maybe. But we’re more likely to take out a second mortgage to cover physical therapy than we are to go without.
I’m pretty sure my life would be, on net, better if I had the cash wages and a catastrophic policy instead of the health benefits. As someone who’s moderately sickly, I’ve spent a lot of my life worrying over false positives from tests of dubious pertinence, and no time at all treating conditions we caught early.
This is incoherent - her life would be better not having a system which moderates the cost of her healthcare because she’s had a diversity of treatment experiences? This is like arguing that it’s okay to eat raw chicken off the floor because sometimes Panera has good soup and sometimes it doesn’t have enough salt in it.
But the system is not set up to facilitate real insurance; it’s set up to hide the cost of medical treatment from as many people as possible, because we have developed a social belief that no one should have to consider the cost of medical care, except maybe your friendly neighborhood bureaucrat.
No, actually, even people with health insurance consider the cost of health care. Because there’s no form of health insurance which makes things free - even (or especially) socialized healthcare. McArdle’s entire premise is that everyone else is as bad at economics on a micro and a macro level as she is, and so the communal subsidization of healthcare costs becomes a grave social evil because they don’t understand that the actual cost of their doctor visit was any higher than their co-pay. It’s not just that people are supposed to assume that the only cost of their going to the doctor is the $20 they pay because of a negotiated insurance agreement; it’s that they’re also too fucking stupid to read the numerous documents they get from both their insurer and doctor telling them otherwise.
All of this hints at the problems that plague many of the studies Ezra and others have been citing, showing marvelous results from insurance: as I said in the beginning, uninsured are not like the rest of us. Do I think that my risks would shoot up to match those found by the studies Ezra likes? No I do not, and I doubt that Ezra would try to argue otherwise.
Megan, you marvelous dumbass, you’re not like the rest of us. Saying that a chunk of 40 million people isn’t like a chunk of 260 million people doesn’t become the “Megan McArdle is really awesome” show. This isn’t even a clever diversion, which is the sad part - it’s just naked egotism masquerading as a policy argument.
Via Sadly, No, I see that the Vatican and their misogynist sycophants like the Anchoress are up to their usual tricks, namely blaming women---as they’ve done going back to Eve---for pretty much everything that goes wrong, even when the vast majority of people who fucked this up were male. You, being a generous, logical human being who doesn’t hate women, might look at the financial crisis and blame it on banksters who have made it a habit to create bubble economies to continue to generate wealth on paper without having to do tedious things like actually build wealth, on the grounds that actual wealth-building takes too long and requires hard work---the sort of thing that belongs to the era of higher marginal tax rates and hefty labor movements. This is because you are insufficiently appalled by vaginas, and women who use them for fun instead of pumping out one mouth to feed after another. Time for the godbags to step in and set you straight.
Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not “believe in the future” and have few or no children.
“The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television’s “Octava Dies.”
Blah, blah, we’ve heard this song and dance before---the way to improve the economy is drastically expand the number of people using the limited resources of the planet. The reason this will work is because Jesus hates independent women so much that he will reward us for depriving women of the right to birth control with more resources, a la the loaves and fishes story. He’ll also stop heating up the planet slowly if you women stop with the thinking of yourself as human beings who have more than one purpose (baby factory) in life. Oh, you thought global warming was the result of a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases that are released by human beings---which means the more of them to create those gases, the worse it gets---but you were wrong. Global warming is magic punishment for ladies thinking they should get to do things besides pump out babies and pray a lot. Look, god sent us out of Eden because some bitch thought she had a right to know things. And he’ll send the entire planet into flaming global warming hell if women today don’t learn their lesson already. That is, if global warming is real. There’s some confusion on this issue.
The funny thing about all this is that one reason we’re in this situation is that the economic bubbles that throw us into turmoil are functionally Ponzi schemes. Take the housing bubble. It’s a complicated issue in a lot of ways, but one of the major problems is that housing prices kept going up and up because more and more people bought into the investment opportunity, and like a good Ponzi scheme, the whole thing fell apart when you ran out of people to buy in. Like Atrios was constantly saying, there just aren’t enough people who can afford houses at those prices. And sure enough, the bottom fell out.
This is ironic, because the solution being offered---pump a bunch of extra people into the system---is another elaborate Ponzi scheme. The idea is that if we can’t find more people to buy into the larger “making money without creating wealth” economy, we’ll just make more, and boom! Problem solved. If only Ponzi had thought of just making up whole new populations to buy in! The problem is that the wall you hit is resources, which are limited. Now, in the West, where these thinly veiled racist appeals are aimed (since they only seem interested in coaxing white people to breed more), it’s true that it’s possible to cut back and share more with all these new people they’re demanding. A lot of us have more living space than we really need, for instance. But in other ways, the resources to handle the new people we’re already making are strained as it is. And if you don’t think so, ask a new parent to tell you how easy it is to find day care. This boundless rage aimed at women for fucking and getting away with it distracts from the fact that it’s not just that women are selfish, slutty bitches that is driving down the birth rate. It’s also that the resource wall has been hit---a lot of families with one or two children might want more, but they can’t afford the college tuition, nor can they afford to have children that don’t go to college, since your earnings without a degree are so damn low on average.
I believe that these Vatican fuckwits and the Anchoress believe their own bullshit. Who isn’t entranced by an easy one-stop shopping solution? Ruin the sex lives of people you suspect are having more fun than you, spread misogynist ideals, and fix the economy without admitting that we need major overhauls to the capitalistic system? What asshole wouldn’t want to sign up? But unfortunately for them, the reason it sounds too good to be true is it is. Though I suppose that when a real resource crunch hits the fan---and I include the effects of global warming in that---they figure they’ll be dead and the rest of us can just fuck the fuck off. Including those children they want you to start having.
The good news is that most people are going to look at 10% unemployment and laugh at the idea that the problem is not enough people competing for jobs.
Things are looking pretty bleak right now. The Republicans have made it clear they intend to filibuster all Democratic legislation on principle---the principle that the recent elections signal nothing but a blip in a system that’s meant to be one-party rule, and they are therefore obligated to resist these interlopers who’ve obtained power illicitly, through winning elections. (This assumption that power is so rightfully yours that democracy shouldn’t get in the way is the argument used by dictators for life, by the way.) The teabaggers are getting bolder and bolder in their development of a new Know Nothing party. The economic recovery isn’t doing much for the 10% of Americans that are unemployed. Senate Democrats still seem to think the game is being played with the old rules. Avatar will probably win Best Picture. Dark times, indeed.
The two often traded jokes, especially when Steele panned President Barack Obama’s long-stated plan to let income tax rates return to higher levels for families making more than $250,000 a year.
“Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money,” Steele said.
Ford later asked the audience of mostly college students, “Who in here makes a million dollars a year?”
When you let Harold Ford sound like a prince next to you, you’re doing something very wrong. As Think Progess explains, the median household income in the U.S. is $52,000 a year, which means that it would take 20 average American households to pool their income to make enough for Michael Steele to live in his version of abject poverty. Fewer than half a percent of Americans make a million or more a year. When Republicans say they want “small government”, this is what they mean---government for and by that half a percent of Americans.
That Steele played the “pity the poor millionaires” card in the worst economy since the Great Depression was awesomely out of touch enough, but what happened next laid bare the entire Republican argument for why they should get a majority vote every year.
“How many of you want to make a million dollars a year?” Steele quickly responded when no hands were raised.
Well, okay then. There’s the Republican argument in a nutshell---give the goodies to rich people, because you want to be like them, though of course the vast majority of you have no chance at all. Using the premise that the rest of us should gladly give up everything to the already-privileged because we want to have their privileges, you should also stop dating if you rate less than a “10” by an impartial jury. You’d rather be smoking hot than average, right? So why clutter the marketplace with your adequate level of hotness? You and your demands to be taken seriously as a human being when you’re not in the top half a percent of people on the hotness scale are embarrassing.
It’s interesting that Steele thinks this argument is actually the one that sells the Republicans to the public. I’m skeptical. Some votes, sure. The fantasists of the right wing movement are nothing to sneeze at. But first of all---even though Steele is just as ignorant of this fact as much Democratic leadership and the mainstream media---the Republicans aren’t actually in the majority with this argument that the economic elite should be able to squeeze the public for all its worth. Second of all, what elections they do win often depend on their support for upholding other hierarchies that more typical Americans can support, because they’re on the winning side of that oppression. Racism and sexism get the Republicans a whole lot more votes than “millionaires deserve to fuck over the country”. You have a lot more people sobbing over the tragedy of hard-working sperm that’s thwarted by interfering ladies who think they have rights than you do sobbing over the woes of millionaires who have to live in slightly less lavish style than they’d prefer.
We often wonder what a conservative paradise would really look like on the liberal blogs, and it looks like Colorado Springs---home to many defense contractors and to Focus on Family---has become a shining star in the much-desired collapse of basic government services that Grover Norquist and other anti-government fanatics have always wanted. Unfortunately, it seems less paradise to have much-slashed government, and more stinky, ugly, boring, and scary.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
In addition, cutbacks in community service spending means that summer programs for kids that keep them off the streets will be cut, and programs that help elderly people get out and about will also disappear. The streets are less safe, not only because they cut back on police, but also on streetlights. And private business will be hurt, because tourism is going down, due to these cuts and others.
One thing I thought was interesting in watching the House Republicans battle Obama last week was how much Republican talking points about budget don’t take into account how government revenues depend on a highly variable tax base, and when the taxpayers make less money, so does the government. Now, I understand that it’s in their political interests to pretend the only relevant aspect of government budgeting is how much goes out, because they are opposed to any government spending that doesn’t enrich their friends or leave people dead. But the implicit denial that a stimulated economy will help increase revenue in the future was fascinating, since old arguments about tax cuts also assumed the more money being invested out there means more money coming in. I suppose “lower taxes” is an article of faith with Republicans now, and they quit bothering to even justify it from a pragmatic viewpoint a long time ago. (In part because it’s indefensible---the wealth does more for the government and general prosperity if the middle class has it, and Republican policies that concentrate wealth into the hands of the already wealthy are ineffective.) I bring this up because Colorado Springs isn’t just in the grip of the fallacy that you can have services without taxes, but also that you can have a tax base without having a population that makes enough money to pay taxes.
First of all, let me say I was wrong about one thing in the liveblogging last night. The way that Obama phrased the student aid plan last night set off all sorts of alarm bells for me. The way he explained it was that they would eliminate subsidies and replace them with tax credits, which sounds exactly like a transfer of money from the lower income students who are eligible for subsidized loans to higher income students who could use all of the tax credit. What loan subsidies do for students is simple: the federal government pays your interest on your subsidized loans while in college. IIRC from working in federal student aid, depending on your income and your grade level in college, you could borrow up to $8500 a year in subsidized loans. So I was alarmed. But when I looked it up, I found that he was being a little cagey about what “eliminated subsidies” means. The plan is to stop subsidizing loans made through banks and instead lend directly (presumably still interest-free in the same parameters), which would free up $94 billion over 10 years that could go directly to students as grants. Well, okay then. That’s actually a great idea, and I apologize for being angry about it. But you have to understand, a lot of the pandering Obama is doing is legitimately alarming.
The spending freeze situation is such an annoying gimmick that I just pray that it works how they no doubt hope. I nearly fell off the bed in anger last night when Obama dusted off that hoary right wing pandering trope about how since you tighten your belt in hard times, the federal government should. I guess Obama didn’t get the memo about how every time you repeat a trope, you lend it authority and credence, because that was an awful thing to do. Equating your household and federal government is bad for a number of reasons. For one thing, it implies that federal discretionary spending is identical to personal discretionary spending, and that the scare term “earmarks” are the government equivalent of buying nights out to dinner and video games. It’s basically telling people that the federal government is a person who spends for pleasure, like people do, and that it can be regarded as a consumer entity. This in turn helps the Republicans, who are willing to ride that metaphor hard, implying that non-military spending is the equivalent of mommy buying fancy make-up and the kids getting fancy toys, and that can be cut. Making military spending sacrosanct only reinforces this idea---masculine spending is always necessary, don’t you know? It’s the ladies and children who need to be controlled.
Of course a spending freeze is a stupid idea. Obama swears up and down that they can freeze spending while expanding spending to keep our economy from bleeding out jobs by only cutting unnecessary spending and giving it to necessary spending. Again, the notion that the federal government is out there spending money on lipstick and wine is floated, by a Democrat. I don’t disagree that the federal government spends a bunch of unnecessary money. But I fail to see what they’re actually going to cut, especially during a recession. Obama says “earmarks”, but the whole cutesy plan of putting all the earmarks on representatives’ websites will only demonstrate that you really can’t cut there, because the voters who look those pages up are going to see nothing but a bunch of money that’s an investment in their community. Everyone wants earmarks cut---someone else’s earmarks. In your district, it’s an earmark. In mine, it’s an investment in the community.
There are huge swaths of federal spending that should be cut because they create major problems. If Obama rolled out a plan to cut those instead of earmarks, then I’d be all ears. For instance, he tied Michelle Obama’s childhood obesity campaign to health care. Okay, fine, but what concrete steps will you take to make sure that people eat better from babyhood on? Simply telling people to eat better won’t do it---people have known they need to eat better for decades, and yet they don’t. But completely reworking our agricultural spending so that we quit subsidizing the fast food industry would help a lot, but making it more expensive to eat a bunch of crap. However, I doubt very seriously we’re going to see the Obama administration try to rework our agricultural system during a recession, because a lot of choices would threaten existing jobs even if they created better jobs down the road. And because eliminating cheap, high calorie food would be extremely unpopular, because it saves people money in the short term while continuing to blow health care costs through the roof in the long term.
Color me absolutely puzzled by the Obama White House’s absolute capitulation to Republican talking points. Obama intends to announce a three-year freeze on non-defense discretionary spending during the State of the Union address, which is about as clearly as you can say uncle without finding secret evidence that Glenn Beck is your mother’s brother.
The glaring flaw of Obama as a President as opposed to Obama as a campaigner is that he seems to wholly lack the conviction to sell his ideas in any competent or coherent fashion. Obama passed a necessary (but flawed) stimulus bill, and then spent a year letting it be defined inaccurately by its opposition, in the process giving legs to a crazy-yet-effective Tea Party movement whose unifying cry started out as fierce bromides against his black pimpitude.
Right now, Barack Obama has no coherent governing philosophy - to a degree, that’s to be expected, because in many ways external situations and preexisting laws are dictating what he has to deal with. For better or for worse, he is associated with the stimulus bill, the bank bailouts and the healthcare bill. This isn’t just him admitting out of the blue that he was wrong, but pulling a bizarre political 180 that’s going to invariably make him look like a failed government expansionist, a failed government shrinker and, in general, a failed politician.
I don’t want Obama to be perfect. I just want him to approach governing as if it’s a thing he wants to do in order to accomplish some rational goal rather than freaking out because we lost a single Senate seat during an incompetently run special election.
I wasn’t surprised to see that this weekend set the record for highest grossing weekend, in part because we paid $15 a pop for a matinee to see “Avatar”. Of course, that’s in New York; I’m sure that it wasn’t so expensive everywhere else, though having gone to see 99% of the movies I’ve seen in the past 7 or so years at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, I have no idea what a movie costs. But rising costs are going to result in rising receipts, even if the same number of tickets sell.
But that’s not all there is to it. Even when they’re expensive, movies are still a relatively cheap form of entertainment, and so they actually can do much better in a recession, as people choose movies over other, more expensive ways to get out of the house. I’d bet that Netflix and other forms of at-home movie and TV are going to do a lot better, too, as staying in is the cheapest of all. But on Christmas especially, people are looking for an excuse to escape their families, and so the movie business wins and wins big.
However, I suspect that this recession may really be the end of the music industry as we know it. They’ve been dying for a long time now, due to downloading, competition from indie labels, and alternative distribution that gives people what they want (the music they want to hear on demand) for free, like YouTube does. People justify spending on movies, because movies are better than alternatives. But the alternatives to buying music more diffuse. They do include illegal downloading, but it’s also true that people will just skip it and listen to the radio or YouTube instead. The corporate tendency to play it safe doesn’t do the music industry any favors, because if you flatten all music out and make it sound the same, then the consumer only has to buy one album to get that sound, even if they like it.
I’d also argue that the recession is going to create an obstacle to selling more music that’s a little harder to overcome, which is that people are more attracted to comforting things in hard times. When it comes to movies, this might mean seeing more formulaic comedies and action movies, but with music it’s a little different, because records are so much more replayable than movies. So, if you want something comforting with music, you’re going to just play your favorite stuff, instead of exploring new stuff. Again, this is going to be all the more true when the product the industry is pushing is designed to be as disposable as possible, making your favorite albums sound more timeless by comparison.
All in all, what economic hard times mean for the entertainment industry is a complicated thing, and actually pretty fascinating. Radio really came into prominence during the Great Depression, and it’s hard not to wonder if the actual economic downturn played a part in that, because it encouraged staying home for your entertainment. We’re looking at a surprisingly similar situation now, both in terms of the severity of the recession and in the fact that there’s all these infant technologies that provide cheap entertainment in the home that stand to benefit. One thing that indicates that the same thing may in fact happen is the fact that Kindle books outsold real books at Amazon this Christmas. I don’t know why that might be. It’s probably a combination of factors: the novelty of Kindle books makes them easier to push for Christmas than regular books, the sense that they are less wasteful than real books probably helps them sell when “green” has become a marketing tool, and just the fact that Kindles were given as presents, and so Kindle books were sold on that like video game sales tag along after console sales.
But I also have to wonder if the perception of thrift during a recession plays into this. I say “perception”, because I’m not sure a Kindle is actually cheaper. The books aren’t much cheaper, and the device itself is expensive. (Though Kindle books on iPhones probably help push sales.) But what Kindle books do is they don’t take up space, and so they create the perception of thrift for that alone. That, plus the association of “green” with thrift helps make something that reduces paper waste and tree usage seem thriftier. I think that people also tell themselves that buying a Kindle will help them read more books, which is both considered a virtuous thing and a great way to get bang for your entertainment buck. The same money spent on a 2 hour movie will buy you 6 or more hours of reading entertainment, after all. Kindles create an opportunity to indulge these arguments while getting rid of the downside of walking around with a bag full of physical items that will take up space in your house. (Of course, you can’t resell Kindle books, but I doubt as many people are devotees of the resale shop as I am.)
Anyway, thought I’d toss out some random ideas on how the recession will affect entertainment. What trends do you see, Pandagonians? Which do you think will stick, and which do you think are flashes in the pan?
Charles Lane, writing at the Washington Post, advocates that we cut the minimum wage to create hundreds of thousands of new, terribly paying jobs.
Here’s a thought: Instead of trying to “create” jobs by tweaking this tax break or increasing that spending program, why not stop doing things that destroy jobs?
[...]
Reduce the federal minimum wage. In 2007, Congress enacted a three-step increase in the minimum wage, which was then $5.15 per hour. The final installment took effect in July, raising the rate to $7.25 per hour. In the meantime, unemployment climbed from 4.7 percent to 9.5 percent.
I am not saying that the minimum wage increase caused this; far from it.
You know, I generally like to start off my arguments by linking together two pieces of almost entirely unrelated information. Charles Lane works for the Washington Post. There were dozens of unsolved murders in Washington, D.C. last year. I’m not saying Charles Lane is a predatorial super-killer; far from it.
But study after study has shown that this supposed benefit to the poor prices low-skilled workers out of entry-level jobs. It was unwise to keep raising the cost of hiring them in a recession.
But Charles Lane really likes taking college students into alleys and savagely beating them with 2 x 4s. It is unwise for the Washington Post to continue to hire this man.
What Lane is actually proposing is that we create hundreds of thousands of terrible new low-paying jobs to artificially lower the unemployment rate. While these jobs will technically exist (should they come to fruition; a drop of $2.10 per hour per worker isn’t exactly freeing up massive pools of money for new cashiers and ride operators at amusement parks), it’s hard to say that there’s a benefit to our economy in creating the least rewarding type of employment for a group of workers almost all of whom had better jobs paying more beforehand.
Technically, we could “solve” unemployment tomorrow by allowing every employer in the country to pay $2.50 an hour (ever wonder why even in the most economically depressed times, shitty restaurants are still hiring waitstaff?) - employers could easily create incredibly low-cost positions, we’d have jobs for everyone and, best of all, our entire economy could collapse under the weight of a newly employed populace that doesn’t earn enough to pay rent. Or get bank accounts. Or eat, really.
Actually, after shooting out that many kids, it’s a wonder 42-year-old Mrs. Duggar hasn’t been hospitalized for other complications before.
“This weekend, Michelle Duggar was admitted to an Arkansas hospital due to gallbladder issues,” a rep for TLC told People. “The pain from a gallstone was generating some contractions. Just to be safe, she was airlifted a Little Rock, Ark., hospital, so that in the unlikely event that she had to be delivered early, she would be close to a NICU center.”
Although Michelle remains hospitalized, the network spokesperson said both mom and baby are doing fine
Many people criticize the Duggars on several fronts, from their “quiverfull” religious beliefs for overprocreating to putting a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint on the increasingly overpopulated, under-resourced world. I’ve made fun of them as well, but I can’t really say much about over-sized families because my late mom is one of 14 children (she’s third from the right in the back row)…
I couldn’t find a photo with all 14, but those three kids in the photo are the children of two of the siblings. The child on the right, Dennis, is about the same age as my grandparent’s youngest child.
As you can tell by the age of the photo, quite a few of my aunts and uncles were born and raised during the Great Depression—no welfare, no food stamps back then—my grandfather, who was born in Barbados, came to the US through Ellis Island like many during that period. He held several jobs, including one as a railroad porter.
My family was just poor like everyone else in their Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, NY neighborhood, which was racially and ethnically diverse at that time (ironically it is becoming diverse again now).
During family get-togethers I hear the stories of the hand-me-down clothes, second- or third-hand broken-down bikes, sacks of potatoes, beans and rice as diet staples, the trolleys, and the milkman’s cart, etc. A German neighbor of theirs was always giving the kids baked goods. It’s rich oral family history; a snapshot in time from those days in Brooklyn.
But they were happy and self-sufficient and neighbors all pitched in with one another during that time, and certainly during the 40s and 50s, did live well since the older kids grew up, moved out and those who were old enough in the household went to work.
As far as I know there was no religious quiverfull reason for having so many kids; we found out many years later my grandfather was Jehovah’s Witness; my grandmother, I believe, was a rarely practicing Episcopalian. But clearly there was no attempt at birth control, either.
So I can’t imagine having 14 kids, but somehow my grandmother did it. In fact, when my mom was born, it was in the house—my grandmother hid her pregnancy because she thought it was embarrassing to be pregnant yet again. But she went on to have more, lol.
By the way, none of my cousins is shooting them out like grandma or Mrs. Duggar.
Wow, 
I really don’t understand how 
The New York Times did 
Things are looking pretty bleak right now. The Republicans have made it clear they intend to filibuster all Democratic legislation on principle---the principle that the recent elections signal nothing but a blip in a system that’s meant to be one-party rule, and they are therefore obligated to resist these interlopers who’ve obtained power illicitly, through winning elections. (This assumption that power is so rightfully yours that democracy shouldn’t get in the way is the argument used by dictators for life, by the way.) The teabaggers are getting bolder and bolder in their development of a new Know Nothing party. The economic recovery isn’t doing much for the 10% of Americans that are unemployed. 
We often wonder what a conservative paradise would really look like on the liberal blogs, and it looks like Colorado Springs---home to many defense contractors and to Focus on Family---has become a shining star in the much-desired collapse of basic government services that Grover Norquist and other anti-government fanatics have always wanted. Unfortunately,
First of all, let me say I was wrong about one thing in the liveblogging last night. The way that Obama phrased the student aid plan last night set off all sorts of alarm bells for me. The way he explained it was that they would eliminate subsidies and replace them with tax credits, which sounds exactly like a transfer of money from the lower income students who are eligible for subsidized loans to higher income students who could use all of the tax credit. What loan subsidies do for students is simple: the federal government pays your interest on your subsidized loans while in college. IIRC from working in federal student aid, depending on your income and your grade level in college, you could borrow up to $8500 a year in subsidized loans. So I was alarmed. But when I looked it up, I found that he was being a little cagey about what “eliminated subsidies” means. 
As you can tell by the age of the photo, quite a few of my aunts and uncles were born and raised during the Great Depression—no welfare, no food stamps back then—my grandfather, who was born in Barbados, came to the US through Ellis Island like many during that period. He held several jobs, including one as a railroad porter.