All the blather about "fiscal conservatism" that comes off conservatives is, I generally believe, just that: blather. The notion that they want to slash social spending because it's the "responsible" thing to do has always and forever been belied by Republican willingness to spend like madmen when it came to private contractors feeding off the military, corporate giveaways, and of course, tax breaks for the rich. No, the entire conservative view of social spending is rooted in a authoritarian, hierarchical view of the world that believes that it's somehow for the best if the lower classes suffer privation. After all, how will you know how comfortable you are if you don't have people going hungry to compare yourself to?

If you doubt this, spend five minutes listening to any wingnut rant about the economy. Their imagination is captured by the fear that some poor person somewhere might have occasional moments of not suffering. Any suggestion that a poor person might have a moment of joy, a bit of relief, a pillow to lay their head on at night? All this is considered offensive to the wingnut, evidence that the poor are simply not suffering enough. Which is why you continually see "outrages" on the right, such as learning that most poor people have a refrigerator in their homes, a factoid that reasonable people should find unremarkable because refrigerators usually come standard with apartments. (Seriously, I find this outrage completely baffling. Are they suggesting that a smart move for a person living in poverty would be to pawn a refrigerator that is almost surely owned by their landlord? Talk about fiscal irresponsibility!) And needless to say, images of poor people owning phones are sure to set off any wingnut worth his salt. How dare they have a way for potential employers to reach them?! They're poor! They have to bootstrap it by communicating with others through smoke signals. Anything less than that is being coddled by the system.

Once you piece together the various outrages against poor people for having refrigerators and phones, it becomes clear that for all the talk of bootstraps, conservatives really don't want poor people to find a way out of poverty. That's why they really get angry if someone has any tool to help them save money or earn money. The refrigerator is offensive, because it allows a person to buy food at the grocery store and cook, which stretches the food dollar. Apparently, you're supposed to be living on Doritos. The phone connects you to the world, which is the bare minimum for job seekers, and we can't have people looking for work actually, god forbid, find it. And so on. 

And so it goes with the latest assault on people living on the edge of the knife. Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania is cutting people off of food stamps if they have more than $2,000 in savings. This will help expediate the process of getting people in unemployed or under-employed situations out of their homes and into the streets. If you have to burn through the money you were counting on to pay rent on food instead, that will subtract months of you sitting around in an apartment, acting like you deserve shelter like some uppity shelter-haver. You can eat or you can have a daily shower, but Corbett and his supporters think you're just asking too much if you want both.

Of course, having savings to lean on while unemployed is critical if you, lower income person, are trying to get a job in order to not be dependent on food stamps anymore. Under the new Corbett system, where you have to choose between shelter or food, you can kiss that job goodbye. Employers aren't generally known for looking fondly on people who show up to interviews in unwashed clothes without having had a good night's rest or a shower. If the goal is to make sure people living in poverty have all avenues of escape cut off, good job, Pennsylvania! If your goal is anything else, well....I reject that it could be. No one could be that stone cold stupid. Occam's Razor: the intention here is to make escaping poverty impossible. 

Atrios named him the Worst Person in the World yesterday. He sent Charles Pierce on an amusing rant. He's David Gregory, and he got a little overexcited thinking about making the people he sees as "support staff" cry themselves to sleep at night. I will let Pierce describe:

Before we leave the weekend's debates behind, and in keeping with the blog's first rule of economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. — I would be remiss not to mention the performance on Sunday of Dancin' Dave Gregory, chronic Vineyard vacationer and Beltway King of Pain. He reached an entirely new level of smarm when he asked Jon Huntsman the following question:

Let's talk substance. So Governor Huntsman, name three areas where Americans will feel real pain in order to balance the budget?

See, you stupid proles. The only "substance" worth talking about is exactly how miserable your lives will have to be made in order to keep The Deficit from eating our children in their beds, and how wretched your existence will have to become so that David Gregory and the people with whom he goes to dinner can think themselves people of serious purpose. And then, even after Huntsman had once again pledged fealty to the economic sadism that is the plan offered by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan, which is why Huntsman's position as The Only Sane One is not entirely accurate, Gregory still wasn't satisfied.

Three programs that will make Americans feel pain, sir? 

Not that Atrios and Charles are wrong to blanch at Gregory's slobbering desire to see throngs of people begging in the streets, of course, but I also hesitate to draw too much attention to our disgust, for fear that these kinds of questions are going to get toned down. As I was noting gleefully on Twitter when a couple of anti-choicers started bleating at me, I want them to explain, in lavish detail, how sex is only for procreation and that women who have sex for pleasure deserve to be punished as the dirty whores they are. They know, as I know, that it's probably not best for them to show their hand like this, which is why they're constantly on about "babies", but if you push hard enough, the "sex is evil and should be punished" belief always comes out. That's where we need them: showing their true face. The more honest they are, the better.

Ideally, we'd have a situation where the Republican candidates started competing with each other to see who could come up with the most lavish trials they wish the 99% to endure. If we could get Mitt Romney trying to outdo Newt Gingrich by explaining how he won't be satisfied until good Christian women are selling blow jobs in the church parking lot to make rent, I think that would probably work out pretty well. Sure, the Republicans will eat it up, but it won't do much to help the Republicans pick up votes from those oh--so-important swing voters and independents. 

Via Whiskey Fire comes this illuminating piece from Jeff Carter at Townhall explaining why the sole blame for high unemployment is that people are too stupid and lazy to get jobs, coupled with "advice" on how to get one. Carter appears to believe that since a talentless moron like him can get work, so can you, though he's reluctant to offer wingnut welfare as an option, fearing the competition that arises when literally any moron could do your evil job. But what makes this piece special in the growing pile of hateful nonsense wingnuts are churning out to rationalize our terrible economy? Carter's amazing talents at literary interpretation:

If you are an unskilled laborer, it may seem like there are no opportunities. But, there are if you move to where the jobs are. In the 1930's and 1940's, there were several great migrations in the United States. The migration from the Great Plains to California was captured in the John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family. Many families moved from the rural south to the industrialized north for work. Just because you have lived your whole life in one area of the country doesn’t mean you are stuck there.

I'm surprised he didn't take it to the next level, and argue that you should avoid going on food stamps by pressing women with newborns into sharing their breast milk with you in lieu of purchased food. Maybe mow their lawn or something in exchange. My guess is that he didn't think of it, because he probably hasn't read the book, because even someone as dumb as Carter would grasp, upon reading The Grapes of Wrath, that Steinbeck has a fairly low opinion of people like the entire staff of Townhall. 

Which made me think about other classic works of literature and how they could be interpreted by conservatives, with or without actually reading the books in question. So I thought I'd make a list:

Oliver Twist: This story clearly demonstrates that putting bastard children into workhouses puts them on the path to peace and prosperity.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Innocent men can be convicted of rape just on a woman's word, so we should dismiss rape cases unless the crime happened in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, and the victim was a virgin on her way to church. Additionally, growing up in racist communities brings out the best in little girls.

Angels in America: The key is getting religion before you let dudes put it in your butt, and then you wouldn't get AIDS.

Moby Dick: The endangered species list is wrong, because it prevents good men from fulfilling their dreams.

A Christmas Carol: The ending demonstrates that we need  no government regulation, because our capitalist leaders are so naturally generous and fair.

The Handmaid's Tale: Women should simply give up on this feminism thing so that men aren't forced to take drastic action.

The Lottery: When your number's up, it's better for everyone if you don't whine about it so much. 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Women who don't accept that men prefer to marry virgins are pathetic lost causes.

The House of Mirth: Women should spend their youth trying to get married as quickly as possible to the first man that will have them. 

Slaughterhouse-Five: WWII truly produced the greatest generation.

Come up with your own!

This is a small item, but really jumped out at me as a classic example of how all-out the war of the rich on everyone else is right now in this country. There's no attempt at improving your lot in life so small that imperious fuckwits like Bloomberg won't try to put a stop to it. The latest example? New York City is trying to keep people from using services like Airbnb to make a little scratch on the side. 

Bunking in other people’s apartments is a growth industry. There’s a whole (and growing) online universe of apartment-swapping, of sublets, of short-term rentals, promulgated by firms like Airbnb.com. And, as it turns out, nearly every such deal is illegal here. Last spring, a law went into effect that bans the rental of New York City apartments for fewer than 30 days, providing what the mayor’s office described as “a clear definition of what constitutes transient and permanent occupancy.”

Oh for fuck's sake. Home rental services save money for travelers and help offset the outrageous rents that New Yorkers have to pay. Outside of a few complaints from neighbors who really need to learn to mind their own damn business---believe me, most of the complaints stem from jealousy and not from actual concerns about renters' behavior, as the vast majority of people who use Airbnb behave decently---having people rent your space hurts no one and helps a lot of people. I have a friend who would rent out her apartment when she'd travel, which helped pay for the travel and saved her the expense of a cat sitter. Without it, I imagine she would have struggled to pay for such "luxorious" items such as actually attending friends' weddings. Plus, the more people who can rent space this way to come to New York, the more tourists we have. Who spend money! Lots of it! They have more of it to spend because they're getting a deal on their lodging. 

I suppose our economic overlords would say that if we can't afford hotel in NYC, we should consider vacationing in our summer homes. Marie Antoniette would be thrilled. 

This sort of tone-deaf hostility to ordinary people taking charge of their economic lives really does say a lot about how our economy got to be so shitty, and why we can't get it together to fix it. 

Watch the video for Digby's thoughts on the process of right wingers dehumanizing Occupy Wall Street with an eye towards rationalizing the crushing of dissent with violence. I want to agree with what she says here and add another thought: dehumanizing the protesters is part of a larger process of dehumanizing all the victims of the economic recession. Since that figure includes, to one extent or another, most of us, that means the best bet for the right now is encourage a culture of complete alienation, where we not only can't feel empathy for people down the economic ladder from us, but also a culture where our attitude towards people like us is indifference and towards people up the ladder is uncritical and worshipful. Where Americans don't see each other as human beings at all, but where all relationships are about competition and dominance at all times. That includes and may even be especially true regarding romantic and familial relationships, which is why there's so much emphasis on the right on "traditional", i.e. male-dominated marriage and protecting "parental rights" to control your children with violence. It also explains the escalating hostility to even the most basic forms of sexual expression, unless they're tightly controlled and have all the eroticism squeezed out of them. Sex is a subversive force, after all, that encourages intimacy and affection and distracts you from constantly establishing dominance and submission in every encounter you have. (Ironically, this is true even in BDSM, where it's the dominance/submission aspects that are met with controls and limits, but value is put on self-expression and a sort of anarchy of spirit. Well, at least in the best examples of it.) 

This is why the pepper-spraying incident at Wal-Mart bothers me so much. I all too easily can see how someone can convince herself that it's nothing more than weeding a garden. It stems from the same place as Republican voters cheering the idea of allowing people to die of preventable causes or a foreclosure firm thought it was a great idea to mock the people they foreclose upon for Halloween. We're being encouraged to stop seeing each other as people, and more as obstacles or annoyances. We're encouraged to look at another's suffering and think not of ways to relieve it, but simply, "Better you than me." It's the Ayn Rand-ization of America, in other words, and I'm not sure what it's going to take to turn the ship around. 

The discussion over whether or not it's "good" for Occupy Wall St. to have been attacked in the middle of the night by a police force sent by Bloomberg is being tested today, and I think the "yes" side will bear out. The protesters are, as I write this, having a giant protest at Wall St. itself, attempting to delay the bell (and failing, but that's to be expected), but definitely raising a stink. Prior to this, there was a push-pull over the issue of Wall St. itself, because the security apparatus down there being what it is, actually taking the fight to Wall St. on a permanent basis has heightened dangers for the protesters. But now that the campers have been kicked out of Zucotti Park, much of the rationale for keeping it at a small distance from Wall St. itself has disappeared. This could be a good thing, albeit maybe not so much for individuals who are going to get arrested more frequently and with more violence. But that, in and of itself, sends a message; it's telling that the ugliness escalates as soon as they get that much closer to the Masters of the Universe who will not be sullied by having to interact with the ordinary people who they have fucked royally by treating our entire economy like it's a big casino. 

The question is, as always, what it's going to take to keep going forward. I think most mainstream media has taken it too much as a given that the protesters will lose interest as quickly as our media culture loses interest in any one non-adultery story, and one of the best things Occupy Wall St. has done has been to subvert that narrative and keep themselves in the news. What I hope is that they really do realize and commit to the idea that this is a long term project that won't take just months, but years. The civil rights movement has to be the model going forward, even as the Arab Spring was the initial inspiration. After all, the demands of the protesters in Arab Spring countries were usually the ouster of dictators, and Occupy Wall St. is calling for extensive policy changes to address the fucked up economic system we have here. That's a long-range battle. That's why the library is so important; boning up on history can be inspirational. 

I'm sure the occupiers are on it, but it seems to me that a smart move for phase II would be to maintain the occupation, but in a slightly more spread out way: safe houses and churches for stashing stuff, and maybe a bus or two, especially for housing the library and other information-gathering and transmission operations. Repeated protests at Wall St. itself, varied up so as to avoid the problem of media boredom. I think this can be done; I just hope that the occupation doesn't believe the media hype that petering out is inevitable. 

Samhita from Feministing and  I are doing a weekly chat podcast for our friends at Citizen Radio. This show will be completely different from my weekly podcast at RH Reality Check, which has a more NPR-style news and opinion format. (By the way, RH Reality Check is having a fund-raising drive. Since they're the best source of reproductive rights news on the internet, please consider chipping in and supporting them.) This new podcast is going to be more freeform and chatty, much like Citizen Radio. It's called Opinionated and we have a cat for a logo. You can check out the first episode here. We discuss the library situation at Occupy Wall St., which has since been updated with news that at least some of the books survived. It remains to be seen this morning what the return of the library to protesters will look like.

Speaking of Occupy Wall St., I went out there last night to re-donate my book and take some pictures/show support (I would have re-donated others if I'd had second copies, but I only have, for obvious reasons, multiple copies of my own), and was thrilled to both meet commenter rowmyboat, who is working as a librarian, and to find out how frigging organized they are with the People's Library. They were entering ISBN numbers on an iPhone, presumably so they could be registered on this database. You can look around and see if there's holes in their collection of books that would be useful to their cause and donate here, if you're not able to get down there. If you are able to get down there, they need help retrieving books from the storage facility that is holding them. I know we all look forward to hearing about how well the books survived the raid, as well as hearing about the other stuff that was confiscated. My friend Darcy was tickled to have contributed the first copy of No Logo to the rebuilt library.

Observations about last night:

*People were in surprisingly high spirits, though there was still lingering ill feelings about the raid. I think the combination of adrenaline, thrill at surviving, and disgust about what happened is easy enough to understand. People showing up who were released from jail still seemed shell-shocked.

*The crowd was heaviest around 8PM, probably around 1,000 people. We left and came back after a couple of hours, and it had thinned considerably, but the General Assembly was still going on (and probably the reason that the crowd thinned, honestly. The work they do is important, but it's also hard to sit through.) 

*The police strategy for keeping people from rebuilding their camp was, as you can imagine, controversial. They barricaded most of the park and were searching anyone with heavy bags to make sure they weren't smuggling in tents, sleeping bags, or blankets (though some people did get in with blankets). Some times they seemed to think food was banned, and some times they let it in. People yelled at them for doing this, and it seemed to bother most of the police tremendously. In fact, I would say the most relevatory thing to me was the way the police were behaving. Most of them seemed genuinely  unhappy that the city was using them as schoolyard monitors to harass the hippies, who are, after all, advocating for police economic rights along with everyone else. When accused of being fascist, they seemed less pissed and more hurt, at least the ones I saw, though I'm sure some cops get off on pushing hippies around. Some cops were quietly supportive. Two separate officers went out of their way to help us find our way into the park, and I saw at least one cop engaging the protesters in a friendly fashion as they explained their views. 

*Funniest exchange heard all night, when there was yelling because the cops started getting aggressive about bag searching. Protester 1, at cop: "Nazi!" Protester 2, at Protester 1, "Don't say that. He may be a fascist, but he's definitely not a Nazi." Real life Godwinning! Also, I suspect from the cop's reaction to this that he is neither. 

We left before it even really came close to the point where questions would be asked about camping out. In my time there, no one even talked about it, honestly. I haven't heard word yet about what they eventually did. 

I was on Bloggingheads with Erica Grieder yesterday, and we talked about the raid:

I'm not sure why people are acting like there's a debate over whether or not it's good for the cause to have a political crackdown like this. From what I understand, the whole point of non-violent protest is to provoke authority figures into showing their true colors, and garner sympathy for your cause. 

Contrary to the claims of conservatives, our Constitution does not guarantee the right to unfettered, utterly corrupt capitalism to allow the top 1% of our society to suck up all the wealth created by the working people of this country, leaving the rest of us to live paycheck to paycheck, constantly worrying about homelessness or bankruptcy (if we're lucky enough to have mere worries and not actualities).  What the Constitution does guarantee, and which pains our wealthy ruling class so much, is the rights of the 99% to vote, to speak out, and to organize. And these rights have been under attack in an unprecedented way in the past year. Republicans have spent the past year using all the power they have to destroy the right of workers to organize and of large numbers of people to vote. Now Mayor Bloomberg, who likes to play at being the "good" Republican, has shown his true colors by escalating the assault on freedom of speech with last night's raid of Occupy Wall St. (If you're in NYC and want to go show support, they're reconvening in Foley Square by City Hall.) 

Bloomberg would have you believe that he's not attacking basic First Amendment rights. His press release says:

No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out – but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others – nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here – the First Amendment protects speech – it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.

This is bullshit on its face---closing in on arguing that since print or digital media isn't "speech", it's not protected, since the tents are part of the necessary materials to speak---but even within this framework, Bloomberg is lying. The attacks on freedom of speech and press went well beyond evicting protesters and banning tents. Allison Kilkenny, writing for In These Times, explains how thorough the assault on speech and press was:

"Cleaning" is the city's favorite excuse to close down the protest, though the attempt at an innocent facade by the NYPD became all the more absurd when numerous reports began to trickle in of press being bullied and intimidated into leaving the area. Rosie Gray, a writer for the Village Voice tried to beg her way into gaining access to the plaza, which the police quickly quarantined during the raid, preventing media from seeing what was happening. "I'm press!" Gray reportedly exclaimed, to which a female officer replied, "not tonight."

Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones reported being "violently shoved" by police as he tried to photograph a man being placed into an ambulance on a stretcher, in addition to being removed from the park's area even when he told police he is press and has the "right to be here and observe what is going on." As the officer dragged him from the square, he told Harkinson if he stayed in the park he "could get hurt."

Additionally, Jared Malsin, the former chief English editor of Maan News Agency, was arrested alongside City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, who was reportedly bleeding from the head by the time he was arrested.

The obstruction of witnesses seemed a high priority for the NYPD, who in addition to blocking media access, also prevented residents near the park from leaving their building, and told doormen to "lock up," according to NBC New York reporter Melissa Russo.

According to the Tech Herald, the airspace over the area was also closed, forcing helicopters to land instead of getting pictures. many reporters on Twitter asserted that they'd been removed from covering the raid, and many were threatened with arrest and stripped of their press passes. In addition to Mother Jones and the Village Voice, the NY Observer was blocked, and Tech Herald is also claiming that the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, NBC, CBS, and Reuters were denied access. There are AP pictures, but because of all this, the pictures of the raid are pretty thin. Even without direct reports from reporters being denied access (or arrested), the timing of the raid makes clear Bloomberg's media blackout intentions. They clearly hoped that by doing this work while most reporters are in bed, they would gain an advantage over the press and prevent them from getting there on time. 

Then there's the destruction of the library, which I suspect was on the top of the list of things the NYPD and Bloomberg did not want reporters getting pictures of. Media Bistro is reporting that the NYPD destroyed over 5,000 books that have been amassed in the OWS library over the past two months. The young protesters who were volunteering as librarians tweeted the ordeal of watching what has come to be, historically speaking, the symbol of authoritarian governments oppressing its citizens. 

Protesters locked arms and tried to keep the dumpsters full of books and tents from leaving, but obviously to no avail. Personally, I donated about a dozen books to OWS, mostly about feminism in response to requests for more feminist discourse and history. Some of them weren't exactly books you can just saunter into a local library branch or Barnes & Noble to find, either, such as the radical feminism reader. So this image of the books being tossed into the trash is just adding to the emotional distress of this situation. 

So don't believe the lies. If this was just about a clean park, there would have been no need to go over the fucking top in the asssaults on speech and press that included threatening journalists (and arresting one), squelching witnesses, and destroying over 5,000 books that were provided, free of charge, by supporters who want to assist protesters' desire to educate themselves and, frankly, give them something to do during their downtime. 

You know, it would be nice if intellectually vapid who got their jobs because their editors had a moron quota to fill would recognize their incredible luck and react with humble gratitude. But of course, if Megan McArdle did that, her job of being the Marie Antoinette of the Atlantic would probably disapper. After all, there are a number of other featherheads who have never spent a day wanting in thei life willing to pen broadsides against the poor for having the nerve to demand bread when there's so much cake to eat. 

As you're aware, there are many who loathe Mayor Bloomberg because they---we---suspect he's trying to turn New York into a playground for rich people, and the rest of us can go hang. McArdle gives up the ghost by straight up claiming that New York City---with all 8 million residents!---should really be seen as a very large gated golf community that is reserved solely for millionaires, and anyone who complains about that should go move to a trailer park in Oklahoma and live off killing squirrels. If you think this is an exaggeration, check out her claim that life in New York is and should be a luxury item, like a yacht. (Via Roy.)

Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from "really rich" people, natch).  Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them "reasonably sized" apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn't afford to live in New York.....

There's a sort of irritating supposition in all of this that living in New York (or San Francisco, or Boston) is something that just happens to you, like getting cholera.  And that therefore high incomes, expensive real estate, and so forth, somehow don't count for the purposes of assessing how well off you are relative to the rest of society.  In fact, perhaps society should get busy making it up to you for all the hardships.....

Living in a blue state is a choice.  If coming to New York meant that you had to put four people in a three bedroom apartment that's uncomfortably far from a subway line, instead of buying a nice little condo in Omaha, this does not mean that you are not "really" better off than your counterpart in Omaha; it means that you have chosen to consume your extra wealth in the form of "living in New York" rather than in the form of spacious real estate, cheap groceries, and an easy commute.

Let's count the assumptions:

1) That the entire city moved here to participate in the glamor of living in New York City, except perhaps a few trust fund kids born in penthouses in Manhattan. McArdle claims she used to live here, and so I find it surprising that in her entire time here, she never once spoke to a native New Yorker. In fact, that's technically impossible, unless she had a single driver take her solely to the homes of other transplants (where only other transplants were invited), and never entered a restaurant, subway car, bank, or grocery store. My guess is that she spoke to lots and lots of native New Yorkers, but most of them registered to her as the staff of this well-appointed resort she lived in, and not really people per se. So she can simply ignore their existence for the purposes of her Scarlett O'Hara-style rant. The irony here is that McArdle is herself a native New Yorker. Maybe growing up here really honed her skills at not seeing other people who aren't so privileged. 

2) That the exact same jobs available in New York City are available in Omaha, Nebraska. Hell, I'm a writer and can, in theory, write from anywhere. In practice, however, working out of New York or D.C. makes a huge difference for your career. But even the technical ability to work from anywhere is simply not true for everyone, especially not everyone of the people that McArdle considers "people", i.e. the professional class. A lot of people with middle class jobs come here because that's where the jobs are, especially if they're in a field like the arts or politics of some sort---jobs that have a lot of cachet but don't pay rich people salaries. Sure, we can indulge in the increasingly virulent American game of "who do you think you are anyway?", but the fact of the matter is that these people, along with working class people, are required to make New York a pleasant place for rich people to live. Without them pumping life into the culture of the city, you, a rich person, may as well move to a golf course gated community. Which brings me to the next assumption she makes. 

3) That New York City doesn't need the working or professional class to be what it is. The reason rich people flock here is because of the amenities and the culture, which non-rich people provide. McArdle, who clearly can't perceive you as a human being unless you have granite countertops and space for a large but expensive wine collection, may not notice that. Perhaps she thinks those rock shows perform themselves, those paintings are conjured by magic in the air, those shop girls helping you buy nice clothes are just fancy robots, those ever-interesting restaurants have ghosts preparing and serving the food, and those cabs and subway cars work by automation. But they don't. Rich people even require the rest of us to be hanging around the streets to add color to their exciting New York lifestyles. Again, without the rest of us, there's no reason to live here. McArdle snootily suggests that people should pay a premium for living in such an interesting city! Too bad she doesn't think that rule applies to the rich. Since they benefit from living here, they should also pay their fair share. 

I'm not surprised when McArdle snots about how she's glad she moved away from here. I'm sure that D.C., where there's more space to push the working class to the margins so the McArdles of the world don't have to rub shoulders with them, is much more her speed. Reading her piece (and Bloomberg's fucked up petulant claims that the poor brought this financial disaster on the country, and not the rich bankers) had the opposite of its intended effect; she sold me on the idea that we should levy a tax on millionaires and spend it solely on subsidized housing for the poor, with an aim towards driving down the rents on everyone else. I loved Roy's take so much that I just want to quote a chunk of it here:

She's not limiting herself to the simple point that some things are expensive and if you don't have the money you can't have it. She's talking about the desire to live in New York -- not just to move there, but to keep living there if you'd been there a while without getting rich -- as if it were the desire to live on Park Avenue -- no, better, to live in a fairy palace on a cloud, in fact, a palace and a cloud you wished to steal from your betters. It's not just that you can't afford New York -- it's that you're insolent to even think you should be tolerated there. You just don't deserve it.

Never underestimate how much not having to endure shared breathing space with those they perceive as beneath them motivates conservatives, especially of the "libertarian" stripe. It was the basic urge underpinning the outrage over health care reform---much of the propaganda about it basically centered around the argument that precious you may have to share waiting rooms with them. That you may even be examined on the same tables. It's unsurprising that this naked loathing for the not-so-privileged is coming out in waves as a reaction to Occupy Wall St. So let's take a moment and be thankful the weather is nice this week, giving the protesters a little boost to keep on not moving. The longer the stay, the more petulant the wingnutty tantrums like McArdle's and Bloomberg's get, and the more the rest of us can see them for who they really are. 

I'll add that McArdle was laying down this foot-stomping as part of her insinuations that the Occupy Wall St. protesters who can afford NYC housing prices have no business being down there. Which, of course, demonstrates the conservative deliberate misunderstanding of the whole thing; they keep insisting that it's a pity party thrown by the poor for themselves instead of a targeted protest of a corrupt economic system. I thought this post neatly dismantles the claim that you can't speak up against horrible wrongs unless you yourself are on the verge of starving to death:

If you believe that your betters are tilting the playing field not through luck, not through accident, not merely through hard work, but through the greasing of palms and the escaping of the same rules that apply to you—then I think it's fine and appropriate to speak up. 

This is a similar logic to those who suggest (say) American women shouldn't complain about disparities in the United States because, hey, Afghanistan! Burkhas!  It's a logic that allows the people at the top to deflect the complaints (merited or not) of people in the middle and even people near the bottom—in in deflecting, serves those people at the top quite well.

And just to make the whole situation more irritating, McArdle issues a disingenuous denial of what she's doing:

So yes, the people at those protests--at least the ones who get arrested--really are, on average, unusually affluent.  (Or at least, their parents are).  Whether that matters is a different question I won't opine on.

Oh nonsense. You just dropped a bazillion petulant, spoiled words whining about how only the rich can and should be able to live in New York. If you really weren't offering an opinion about the right to protest the corrupt system, here's an idea: why not avoid offering an opinion by not offering an opinion?

The American Enterprise Institute has decided, shockingly, that Barack Obama is wrong about income inequality.  Well, not really wrong that it exists, but wrong to actually care about it.  Like most modern problems, the root of systematic income inequality is giving a shit that it exists.  Much like the boogeyman, diabetes, and The X Factor, if you just ignore it, it'll go away.

There are a few arguments in the post that deserve some further investigation.  And don't worry, "further investigation" means looking at them, realizing the basic logical errors involved, mocking them, and then moving on.  We ain't gettin' think-tanky up in this piece.

First:

Liberals frequently claim the average American family has been losing ground for the past three decades—or at least since Ronald Reagan took the presidential oath in January 1981. (As if the 1970s with its sky-high Misery Index was a great economic time.) The CBO refutes this. Its data show real median after-tax household income (half of all households have income below the median, and half have income above it) grew by 35 percent over the past three decades.

The "losing ground" argument actually has a lot to do with...hold on, let me use a picture here.

It has a lot to do with that. Technically, if you take someone with $100 and give them a nickel, and then take someone with $10,000 and give them gold bars, both people are better off. Technically.  In real terms, however, the poorer person has lost a substantial amount of ground to the richer person, as the richer person has been given a metaphorical wealth rocket to get metaphorically ahead in order to, metaphorically speaking, leave the poorer person really screwed. 

Have the poor lost ground to the super wealthy? If you demand a technical adherence to a recognizable meaning of "losing ground", yes.  If, however, you just don't want to think that, then don't. It's a free country, and the American Enterprise Institute will pay you on the basis of merit for how straight you can keep your face while saying it.  It's the free market we've all come to know and warily accept in our lives.

The CBO fails to factor in that American households in the top income quintile have, on average, almost five times more family members working than the lowest quintile. (Analysis by AEI blogger Mark Perry). Those folks are also far more likely, as Perry notes, than lower-income households to be well-educated, married, and working full-time in their prime earning years. Perry also notes that “individuals are not stuck forever in a single income quintile but instead move up and down the income quintiles over their lifetimes.” (Indeed, a Treasury study on income mobility found that starting in 1996, half of taxpayers who started in the bottom 20 percent had moved to a higher income group by 2005.)

Shorter AEI: put a ring on it, and money will flow unbidden from the joyous coupling of your bound nuptials (please post pics). One of the odd things about Mark Perry's analysis is the "almost five times more family members working that the lowest quintile".  This makes it sound like the top quintile has eight kids, two parents working, every kid over 14 pitching in and earning cash, and generally living the Little House on the Cul De Sac life we all dream of.

The actual numbers?  The bottom quintile has .42 people working per household.  The top quintile? 1.97.  The five times figure doesn't mean you have five times as many actual people working, unless the poor are actually all cyborgs who can send their brains and legs to work while their torsos watch Maury Povich. What it means is that less than half of poor households have anyone working at all. 

The problem isn't that the poor have vast unproductive families sitting around taking up time and energy that could be used to start finally getting some capital gains on that five bucks they got back from DeeDee last week, the problem is that the poor don't have jobs.  They're about fifty percent more likely to have part-time jobs, and five times more likely to not have jobs at all.

It's also odd for AEI to argue that the poor should be getting better educated when they wrote three days ago that student loans should be means-tested.  Get a full-time job that's not available with the education you can't pay for, and sustain it all by getting married to someone who also can't find a job or get a degree.  

Last but not least:

And why did the top 1 percent do particularly well? One potential  explanation from CBO:  ”The compensation of ‘superstars’ (such as actors, athletes, and musicians) may be especially  sensitive to technological changes. Unique characteristics of that labor market mean that technical innovations,  such as cheap mass media, have made it possible for entertainers to reach much wider audiences. That increased exposure, in turn, has led to a manyfold  increase in income for such people.” 

You know how that hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs cleared a million last year, or that CEO of that failed tech venture got a $5 million golden parachute?  They were totally blowing up Twitter.

So, a brief thought I had about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan today: it sucks.  Pretty much everyone with a brain thinks that it sucks.  But I think I came up with a way that it sucks even more than it was previously thought to suck.  Walk with me, will you?

The 9-9-9 plan consists of three taxes: a nine percent income tax, a nine percent sales tax, and a nine percent "business tax".  The business tax is a receipts tax rather than a profits tax (as the current corporate income tax is). What this means is that you don't get to deduct anything except "investments, all purchases from other businesses and all dividends paid to shareholders." In other words, you're now taxed nine percent on all wages and salaries paid to employees.

Under the current system, an employee whose pre-tax salary is $50,000 actually costs an employer $53,825 once FICA taxes are added.  (For the purposes of this post, all we're concerned about is the employee's pre-tax salary and the employer FICA contribution.)  This is because the employee pays 7.65% of their income in FICA taxes, and the employer matches with another 7.65% contribution. The 9-9-9 plan would do away with FICA taxes, and one of Cain's promises is that your employer will pay you that 7.65%.  He claims to have worked in private industry before, but that statement makes me doubt this claim.

Anyway, there's no FICA tax under the 9-9-9 plan...but there is a business tax.  And the money used to pay your $50,000 salary is subject to a 9% tax.  That means the cost of paying you is actually $54,500.  Using powers of math, the cost of employing you is $675 higher under 9-9-9.  

Amazingly, the problem gets worse the more you're paid.  FICA tax is not assessed on wages over $106,800.  For someone paid $250,000 a year, the total employer-side FICA charged is $8,170.20, for an effective employer rate of 3.26% and a total cost of $258,170.20.  Under 9-9-9? Your employer would pay $22,500 in taxes on your salary for a total cost of $272,500.**

Not only do poor people get a drastic tax increase, but every single person in America would instantaneously become more expensive to employ!

...Pizza joke!

**Figures changed (I accidentally used the lowered 2011 FICA withholding rate).

Perhaps the least-covered bit of news from yesterday's Apple press conference is that the iPhone 3GS is now free on AT&T's network.  This leaves the iPhone poised to become the smartphone version of the Motorola RAZR, both ubiquitous and universally despised as a cheap piece of shit because it was the free thing you got with your cell phone contract. 

However, this is important for another reason. IPhones have become the new ubiquitous things that poor people shouldn't have if they're really poor, joining the illustrious list of virtually everything that requires electricity to function.

Alas, they're free now. Free for you, free for me, free for Poor Patty and free for Poor Steve. (Granted, you still have to pay the monthly bill, so the poor can still be resented for being able to do that.)

This leaves a void, people.  A void in the list of things that poor people aren't allowed to have even as they sift through the cultural detritus of what used to be middle class luxuries.  The air conditioning they never turn on?  The budget DVD player that got a Redbox movie stuck in it? That stuff costs money, people. It's our duty to pass broad moral judgments whenever people have the potential to make unwise decisions.

Well, whenever that potential involves the theoretical misuse of $8 an hour for something other than dirt-flavored ramen

So, what's the new iPhone, people?

Via GOOD, the New York Observer had an awesome exclusive.  A producer for Greta Van Sustern's show on FOX News was down at Occupy Wall St., trying to get some rambling stoners on tape to embarrass the protesters, and instead ended up interviewing Jesse LaGreca. LaGreca proceeded to dress down FOX news for being a propaganda outlet instead of a news organization, and then basically wiped the pavement with this guy.  At the end, trying to salvage the segment, the producer concedes the point about FOX, but then asks what role Obama plays in all this.

The obvious objective here is to get a protester putting all the blame on Obama, so that can be aired on FOX, but LaGreca wisely doesn't take the bait and instead uses the question to call out the question for being disingenuous by noting that the conservative opposition to Obama is trying to stop him from doing any good in the world. I just wanted to stand up and applaud at that part. The left is getting to a point of Obama-obsession that rivals the right. It's not just the leftists who have convinced themselves the man can't do anything right, though they are a problem. Even the most stalwart Obama supporters have made the situation All About Obama, when in fact there's a much larger problem at hand than the fact that our President is oft-times a weenie. I have many of the same criticisms of Occupy Wall St. as others---while the hippie thing is overblown, I really do wish that there wasn't so much hostility to fellow travelers who look "straight"---but I'm a strong supporter of it for one reason above all other things. It's focusing people's attention where it belongs, on the banks and widespread social inequities. This is a problem that's expanded beyond just the electoral cycles and goes straight back to a larger trend towards the right in this country, a trend that's pushing Republicans to the far right and Democrats to the center. Focusing like a laser on Obama and making this about whether or not he's "betrayed" us fails to shed any real light on the problem.  For good reason, i.e. Americans continue to elect Republicans in large numbers, both parties believe that Americans like the status quo of increasing inequities and corporate control of everything, and so neither party has a reason to change their approach.

Occupy Wall St. is blaming the right people, and pointing out the real problems in our society. It's a start. And LeGreca models the best way to keep our eyes on the prize, by making it about addressing underlying values and systems and not seeing a single politician as the force that will save us all, and then plunging into despair when he makes the rather inevitable compromised decisions that come with the territory of being a politician.

Via Roy Edroso, I see that at least one wingnut has risen to the bait of defending the Tea Partiers who bellowed their approval at the idea of letting an uninsured man died. John Hawkins of Right Wing News rose to the bait, by pointing out that Blitzer was asking about someone with a good job who can afford insurance but simply doesn't pay it.  Of course, John ignores that "The Left" was doing more than simply disagreeing with people who say that someone in that situation should be left to die---though I am surprised at how few people have pointed out that they often are left to die---but that we were appalled at the bloodthirsty love of needless death on display at the debate.  It wasn't just that someone made a somber argument for the necessity of letting some people fall through the cracks (which again, is the status quo---emergency rooms are required to care for you regardless of ability to pay, but in the situation Blitzer describes, the man would actually be taken off life support), it was the foot-stomping glee that the Tea Partiers had at the idea of death. You get the impression that if Ron Paul suggested that they send a squad of people to his house to rape his wife and beat his kids, you know, to "send a message" about not buying your own insurance, the audience would have gone nuts with approval. That, I think, more than the argument, is the concern here. 

But I'm honestly surprised more wingnuts haven't risen to the bait like Hawkins, because the way Blitzer asked about this question was a complete and utter red herring. Red herrings are a favorite argument technique of conservatives---which is why I suppose Blitzer is fond of them, rat bastard that he is---but they have no place in a presidential debate.  A common red herring, for instance, is for anti-choicers to invoke the specter of someone who is 9 months pregnant, wakes up and says, "You know, childbirth doesn't seem like a good idea after all," and waltzes into a Planned Parenthood to have an abortion.  This never happens. But the reason wingnuts bring it up is because they can't win the argument on real world grounds, so they make up fairy tales to debate instead.  That's why having a so-called journalist do this during a debate instead of asking a real question is utter bullshit. You're just eating up time that could be spent on discussing real-world concerns.  

Let's revisit Blitzer's question:

A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I’m not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I’m healthy, I don’t need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it.

Your average American can see immediately at least one major problem with this question. There is no such thing as  "good job" that doesn't have insurance benefits.  He might as well have said, "So you have this 30-year-old who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs, and he figures that he doesn't need a police force. Should he be able to opt out of the percentage of his taxes that go to pay them?"  Blitzer should be ashamed of himself for concocting a myth and throwing it out there like it matters.  And sure enough, Hawkins---dishonest fuck that he is---laps that shit right up, claiming that millions of Americans who are going without insurance could totally have it if they wanted. Sure, if they quit paying their rent, but let's be real here.  The notion that there are 30-year-olds who are like, "La di dah, I could totally pay for insurance with my vast fortune, but I choose not to because ha ha, the federal government's got my back!" is asinine.  It just doesn't happen, as most working uninsured work part time (aka, in not-good jobs).  And if you can find that one example somewhere in the mists of time---you heard from a friend of a friend about this person---so what?  We really shouldn't be making broad policy decisions that affect the entire nation because of one guy someone heard about somewhere. 

Now, there is the exception, I suppose, of entrepeneurs.  There are a lot of freelancers and entrepeneurs who take their chances with going uninsured, because money is tight and also because insurance is more expensive than Blitzer is letting on.  But that's just one more reason that universal health care is such a good idea! Right now, many creative and interesting people are stuck in jobs (jobs that someone else would probably like to have, especially in this economy!) that don't use their taients, and one of the major reasons is health care. I know a lot of people who are 30-year-old entrepeneurs of various sorts, and their attitude towards health care is not the cavalier one Blitzer describes. It's actually better-described as "desperate". Good health care that actually provides is simply too expensive for most people, and so the holy grail of this world is getting a contract with someone who values your contribution enough to offer health care on top of what they're paying you.  Universal health care reform will pay out many long-term economic dividends in this way, by encouraging more people to go with the small business ideas of their dreams, many of which will be successful and create more jobs....with health care. 

In fact, I would argue that this is a major reason so many corporate interests oppose health care reform. For all the blather out there about "free markets", much of modern day conservatism is about squelching actual free markets, where people with fresh ideas can actually compete with big businesses. The last thing big business interests want is to encourage entrepeneurs. Big business doesn't want to innovate or work hard; they just want to sit around collecting obscene profits off over-priced goods, safe in the knowledge that many of the people who could compete with them if set free are instead tied to desk jobs, in no small part because they want health insurance. Republicans are the protectors of entrenched corporate interests, and that's why, regardless of their poses, they oppose anything that would encourage genuine entrepeneurship. 

New Bloggingheads!  This time it's me and Joshua Treviño, patriarchy-lover extraordinaire and former Bush speechwriter, discussing the Perry campaign's chances and the role Texas plays in national politics.  You may be surprised to find that I'm largely unwilling to get into the weeds with him about the reality of the "Texas miracle".  It's not that I'm unaware that the "Texas miracle" is a myth.  I point out in the video that Texas's unemployment rate is still at a record high and is only one point below the national average, and here I'd like to add that Texas has higher unemployment than Massachusetts or New York.  Plus, dwelling on unemployment numbers is a way to distract from the fact that decades of neglect and Republican rule have created a culture of poverty in Texas that is stunning to even see, which Treviño no doubt has, since he travels a lot.  It's got the 6th highest poverty rate in the nation.  And pretty much everything that's shielded Texas from plunging even further into the abyss has nothing to do with Rick Perry's leadership: as someone who lived there 32 years, I can state with assurance that the mass migration of people to Texas owes more to the weather than any other factor.  Unlike someplace like New York that has hot summers and freezing winters, most of Texas doesn't have a winter to speak of, and a culture of air conditioning prevents the summers from being that bad.  New York is actually harder to take than Austin in the summer because it's so humid and there's so little intense air conditioning---some days you're just going to be sticky no matter what you do.  Not so in Austin. When people ask Marc and myself what we miss most about Texas, we tend to say "the weather".  The Tex-Mex, our friends, the Alamo Drafthouse---all fine things, but 70 degree days in January is hard to beat. Central Texas is the new Southern California, a place where you go when you could go anywhere, because it's got nice weather, and unlike Southern California, it's still not as crowded, though that's changing.

Anyway, getting off-topic.  Here's why I'm wary of arguing about the non-existent "Texas miracle": the old maxim that if you're explaining, you're losing.  This is the same trap liberals always fall into.  Conservatives trot out some quick, farcical, but evocative phrase like "Texas miracle", toss that out there, and enjoy watching liberals start arguing it, complete with heavy details and nuance that cause everyone who isn't already a detail-oriented liberal to tune out.  They try to drag you down the rabbit hole, too---if you successfully argue something simple as a rebuttal, they have a bunch of other lies to throw out to get you back to the bad habit of 'splaining shit. Treviño tried to bait me repeatedly like this, trying to toss out half-truths and falsehoods in order to get me to argue them down.  Anyone undecided watching this finds themselves emotionally attracted to the easy lies and not to the complex truths.  As long as we're fighting on their turf, we're losing.

Treviño asked me a hard question about this, and I struggled with an answer.  Clearly, the answer for an Obama win in 2012 is for them to start getting those jobs created and fast.  Steve Benen was closing in on the answer with this piece where he told the administration to start approving Republican requests for projects in their districts that would create jobs. He's right that they need to get that approving pen out and start fast-tracking some jobs.  But he's wrong that they should do it in places like Bachmann's district.  There's no return on that investment for them.  Even if Obama turns the economy around in some shitty little Whitopia Republican hellhole, they are still not going to vote for him.  The hardcore Republican districts vote their religion and skin color, full stop.  Giving them money in some political kabuki isn't what's going to get the job done.

No, the answer is to target spending in swing districts.  Ohio, Florida, places like that?  They're not going to be entranced by bullshit memes about the "Texas miracle" when they're experiencing an actual Ohio miracle or Florida miracle. Show them that Obama has the will to use his power to get them working again, and they'll respond positively.  Most people trust Democrats more on these issues than Republicans, and only vote for Republicans out of a desperate sense that since the Democrat isn't working, then they'll take their chances with the new guy, even if they're less trusting of the new guy's message. 

Of course, that's the sort of bold, ass-saving move we're not used to getting from Obama, so I'm not going to bet the house on that one.  But I do think it's important to remember that if you're explaining, you're losing.  If someone starts to go off on the "Texas miracle", I recommend joking it off instead of explaining it off---it is a miracle, because after all, Rick Perry had shit all to do with it, so you might as well thank your supernatural deity. All your efforts would be better spent focusing on what Obama has accomplished, and suggesting that a solid Democratic win in 2012 could help him accomplish more.