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.

American politics are dominated by culture war, and one of the most disturbing aspects of the culture war is the quest for authenticity---especially since what is considered most authentic is usually measured in the ugliest possible way.  Take, for instance, Paul Waldman's examination of how Rick Perry plays the "authenticity" card.  Perry's schtick is that he's more Texan-than-thou, and his Texanness is defined very specifically as a brand of hyper-masculinity: the bigger man/Texan is the meaner, stupider, more violent man/Texan.  There's a lot of ironies inside this kind of authenticity-tripping, the biggest being that the measure of what is "authentic" are based in plain old myth-making.  Waldman talks a bit about how the myth of the cowboy is beloved in the U.S. because it appeals to this sense of authenticity, but it is pure myth:

Violence and the culture of honor have always been key themes in cowboy mythology, which is less a construction of history than a production of the American entertainment industry. It was essentially invented by Buffalo Bill Cody, whose wild west show toured the country and the world beginning in 1882.

This is absolutely correct.  Unlike 95% of Americans, I've actually known cowboys in my time, as in "men (and women) who work huge Western cattle ranches" kind of cowboys.  The job always struck me as uniquely boring and people's attachment to it was baffling to me.  You spend a lot of time.....watching cows.  And if you've never watched a cow before, I can assure you, cows are not here to entertain us.  Quite possibly the opposite.  Cows, like Rick Perry, are boring and stupid.  Perry is actually puffing certain aspects of his persona up in order to be considered more "authentic", a contradiction that should cause the concept of authenticity to fold up on itself and die, but unfortunately, in an America that cannot tell fantasy from reality, exaggerating your life in order to seem more authentic is surprisingly effective. 

But outside and within the state of Texas, this idea that Texans are Real Men, and Real Men are stupid, violent assholes has this hold over people, and it pisses me the fuck off. It's bad for the country, bad for men and women, and bad for Texans as a whole, because it erases the truly vibrant culture of the state and replaces it with the image of a whooping redneck with shit for brains.  Take, for instance, this bit of shameful business:

You may have heard the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted and executed for murdering his daughters by setting fire to their house, a crime of which he was almost certainly innocent. As Politico recently reported, when the campaign of Republican senator Kay Baily Hutchinson, who was challenging Perry in a 2010 gubernatorial primary, considered raising the issue, they tested it with focus groups. One voter memorably told them, “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”

Actually, it does not.  It's an act of cowardice, as proved by Hutchinson's eventual fear of bringing it up.  That's always the contradiction at the heart of the manly man business---it's about acting all tough, but preening masculinity is fundamentally an act of cowardice.  It's rooted in insecurity and fear of how others will see you.  When you kill an innocent man because you're too afraid to let him go because you live in fear of people who've decided that masculinity is mutually exclusive from morality, you are a coward.  A quivering-in-your-boots, pissing-on-your-jeans coward.  

But hey, I'll give you this: you're still a Texan.  For some reasons that are obvious and some that are not, I'm not fond of this Real Texan bullshit.  Texas, like any place else, should be defined by the people who actually live there.  Which isn't to say that the state doesn't have  a distinct culture that can be identified, but that can also evolve, as cultures do.  As I noted in the most recent Bloggingheads I was on, there's a lot of iconic Texas culture that isn't politically loaded with these sexist, racist, anti-intellectual, pro-violence cultural markers.  Living in Austin, for instance, you would suffer occasionally from ignorant rednecks pulling the "Austin isn't real Texas" card, to which I'd say, "Yeah, Stevie Ray Vaugh, Willie Nelson, and some of the best barbeque in the country somehow means we're not real Texas".  I'd go further much further even in rejecting the concept of "Real Texas".  Texas is country-western, barbeque, and guns, but Texas is also the eccentric Houston hip-hop scene, the imaginative vegetarian cuisine of Austin, and people swimming in some of the coolest natural spring pools in the country.  Texas is Wille Nelson, but Texas is also Spoon.  Rick Perry is a Texan, but so is George Bush, and, more importantly, so were Ann Richards and Molly Ivins and Barbara Jordan, and so is Jim Hightower.  

I'd genuinely like to see this whole cult of authenticity fall away.  The irony is that when it does is when we can finally take a look at ourselves and see ourselves for what we really are, and we're more complex and interesting than any myth-making about authenticity provides.  

Yesterday, for obvious reasons, I was in a crappy mood all day.  So I turned to my favorite resource for lightening a sour mood, which is Regretsy.  After reading a few pages of it until I was all caught up, I looked up at the links at the top and decided to check them out.  I found People of Walmart to be unfunny, since most of the “humor” comes from poking fun at people for being ugly, fat, or unable to afford better-fitting clothes.  But Lamebook is another story entirely.  Lamebook is funny because it, like Regretsy, gets its humor straight from the goofier aspects of human nature.  I particularly like all the posts involving parents interacting with their children on Facebook.  Facebook is great, but it was only until moms started to join Facebook that it really became the centerpiece of the new American renaissance, I say.

The site cheered me up immensely, which is why I was sad to see a link at the top of the page asking for money for their legal fund.  They’re in some legal shit with Facebook over copyright quarreling, they say.  A little googling showed that this is indeed true, and Facebook’s rationale is as poor and mean-spirited as you could imagine:

In response to the complaint, Facebook deemed it “unfortunate” that Lamebook had turned to litigation after “months of working with Lamebook to amicably resolve what we believe is an improper attempt to build a brand that trades off Facebook’s popularity and fame”.

Facebook is claiming that the site can’t hide behind satire, which is funny, because I personally laughed my ass off for hours.  Human nature might be the main target of Lamebook, but the way that Facebook has drawn out certain tendencies in people is definitely part of that.  But what really annoyed me was that Facebook expressed petulant anger that someone else out there is OMG building off their popularity and fame.  Which in no way, shape or form takes jack shit away from Facebook.  If anything, Lamebook probably just makes readers want to use Facebook even more, since it highlights some of the best reasons to waste hours on Facebook (such as laughing at the way people can be).  I know it had that effect on me.  I’m trying to imagine if creative artists reacted to each other in this way.  Can you imagine, say, Dr. Dre being so stupid as to not work with Eminem because he doesn’t want anyone to benefit from his pre-existing reputation? 

This entire situation is a great demonstration of why the ready assumption that businesspeople are motivated mainly be a rational desire to increase profits is a really dumb one.  But you see that assumption all the time!  You see it with libertarians, who argue that we don’t need regulation because the profit motive makes markets self-correcting, as if they were mindless machines that aren’t influenced by some of the more irrational thinking of actual human beings.  And you see it with liberals, who make the opposite assumption—-they believe that business is solely motivated by profit, and that means businesspeople are bound to make harmful choices if that’s how best to make a profit.  The truth is way more complicated.  Yes, profit motive is a big deal, and that sometimes results in good business decisions, as libertarians insist, and it sometimes results in BP spilling unimaginable amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, as liberals insist.  But insisting that businesspeople act mostly out of pure rationality is giving them too much credit.  I think it’s also important to remember how much irrationality impacts business choices.

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Glenn Greenwald has an intriguing post suggesting the tongue-clucking over Christine O’Donnell has less to do with her views—-since when is being a right wing extremist a drawback in the eyes of the D.C. crowd?—-and more to do with her class status as someone who has struggled financially.  I agree with many of his points, particularly since he has plenty of evidence of nose-holding in O’Donnell’s direction for the sin of being broke and suggests, correctly, that the main difference between the right wing populists taking over the Republican party and the party leaders in the past was an aesthetic one.  The old guard was just simply more interested in selling their vicious right wing politics through dog whistles and polite lies, and the new school is more loose-lipped.  I do think he overstates the case somewhat; in O’Donnell’s case, I think the old guard has specific grievances with her and the way she’s taken them for a bunch of money.  And there is a legitimate election concern when you candidates have a problem spinning their own points of view so that swing voters are confused enough to vote for them.  But he’s basically right: for the Villagers, “just folks” is a costume you wear, not an actual lifestyle.  The ideal candidate is a rich, pampered upper class person who can put a cowboy hat on for pictures.

What’s fascinating to me is that all this goes on while the Republicans—-the party that prioritizes cutting taxes for the very richest above all other concerns—-have unblinkingly adopted anti-elitism as their garb.  It’s a lie that is so profound that its most naked manifestations make the non-wingnut parts of the audience wonder how they just get away with it.  For instance, Carl Paladino spent most of his victory speech railing on about toppling the “ruling elite”, so much so that if you had no context and wandered in, you would swear that you had walked into an early 20th century communist rally.  Paladino, of course, is a millionaire who had $10 million of his own money just laying around to spend on a primary campaign for an election he has to know he’s going to lose.  He decried the “elite” in front of a crowd that I guarantee has an average income a couple of brackets over the average.  To look at his policies, you’d think the “elites” that he’s out to get are exactly the same as the poor and unemployed. 

The lie, in other words, is so big that I don’t even know if there’s a name for it.  Is it an existential lie?  The Big Lie?  The biggest?  It was such a whopper that I can’t believe that the folks listening didn’t get headaches from the straight cognitive dissonance between the claims being made—-that they are the rabble fighting off an elite that is defined by being poorer than they are—-and reality.  I spend a lot of my time chronicling right wing lies.  Many of them are factual.  Many are more just disingenuous poses (“Liberals are the real racists!” “Abortion hurts women!”).  But these insanely rich Republicans talking about how they’re going to kick out the “elite”?  That’s such a reality-destabilizing lie it’s like me belligerently insisting that I’m Marilyn Monroe, and anyone who points out that I’m not simply hates gerbils.  It. Makes. No. Sense.  It’s maddening.  I’m sure it’s meant to be. 

More than any other lie they tell, the one about how Republicans defend the little guy against the “elite” is the one that makes me despair the most for my country.  The only proper reaction to these claims is hysterical laughter, and yet they’re being offered as if they’re serious, and taken in that spirit.  It’s complete madness.  When you have so much of the population indifferent to basic reality, what do you do?

At first, when I read tristero’s angry post about this review of Alice Waters’ new book that teaches the very basics of cooking, I thought he might be overreacting a little bit.  Here’s the quote in question that got him so mad:

And foodies. Do they feed families? Do they struggle to plan meals in the midst of soccer practice, homework and commutes? No, they can sit around, sip their wine, and consider their ingredients. If they do not have the 1/8 teaspoon of Aleppo pepper they need, they can just change their plans and go out for sushi.

In context, this quote is an attempt to ingratiate the reader into the world of cooking more for yourself, so I didn’t really see the big deal.  The review of In the Green Kitchen is laudatory, and the reviewer is obviously one of those foodies she’s deriding.  The rhetorical device she’s using is common enough.  It’s a way of saying, “You may think that in order to fit into this world, you have to be smarter/richer/more possessing of free time than you are, but actually it’s quite easy.”  It’s an attempt to set fears to rest by paying lip service to their existence.  You see it all the time. 

But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought tristero was right.  The intention of these sentences may have been to lay fears to rest, but the result is reinforcement of the idea that “foodieness”  is some wicked elitist hobby. In an attempt to reassure people that merely liking to cook doesn’t make you a bad person, the writer reinforced the idea that there’s something morally suspect about most people who like cooking.  In an essay aimed at convincing people that cooking well isn’t actually that hard, this sort of rhetoric undermines the point.  And as tristero pointed out, this reinforces right wing frames that imply that a populist moral superiority is easy to achieve by embracing bad taste and especially bad health habits, and that there’s something wrong with people who take pleasure in living well.

The only reason to include such counter-productive rhetoric is because liberals are so easily duped into playing the anti-intellectualism-as-populism game that right wingers created.  I don’t know when it was that everyone in our culture universally agreed that there was something shameful about having good taste and good sense, but nowadays if you want to defend either good taste or good sense, you often feel like you have to set up disclaimers about how you’re not one of Those People, the ones that think these things matter.  So to establish your right to praise the art of eating well, you have to denounce Those People who really enjoy eating well.  It reminds me of the dizzying trend of hipster-denouncing as a trend in and of itself.  You can have your good taste in music, I suppose, but only if you make it clear that you think that thinking that’s important is sick and possibly immoral.  Trying to keep up with it all will drive anyone to suck down a constant stream of aspirin. 

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I really don’t understand how multiple Republican Senators saying that people are voluntarily unemployed because of unemployment benefits isn’t blaring from every cable pundit’s mouth and every Democrat’s press office as the worst thing anyone’s ever said (seeing as how it kind of, er, is).

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. 

And what’s funny is that conservatives still don’t get it.  From Rick Moran:

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.”

Megan McArdle, economist-always-in-training, argues against health insurance using quite possibly the worst argument ever:

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.

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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.

But hey, at least Michael Steele is still the head of the RNC! And that means that we still get helpful explanations from him of what Republicans are really all about.  He and Harold Ford were speaking together at the University of Arkansas, and this exchange happened:

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. 

Megan McArdle posts a letter from a reader which argues that poor people wouldn’t be so fat if they loved money more than Cheetos:

As someone who works in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles—land of the perfect body—I totally agree that government pressure will do nothing to make people lose weight. People will only give up one pleasure in exchange for a more intense pleasure. And if you’re poor and miserable, and eating is the high point of your life, you’ll always reach for the cheetos.

I suspect the only way people will change their behavior is a sudden desire to move up the social ladder. Being thin and attractive gives you a competitive edge, especially if you live in a city with lots of talented people. The moment someone I know suddenly gets ambitious, or makes partner, or needs investors, they start losing weight. In California, being fat will hurt any career, whether you’re a doctor, lawyer or accountant. We all take our cues from television/movie industry and the message is clear: you must be sexually appealing, no matter what you do. And so we tune out the Dominos commercials and reach for the tuna. Thank God for sushi, or we’d all go crazy.

No one I know is starving, but no one is ever full. But the point is we’re compensated in other ways…

There’s a belief about poverty, evinced most commonly in the “why you has cell phones?” argument, that anything involved in poverty which has utility or, god forbid, pleasure attached to it is ultimately an indication that the person is not really poor.  Even worse, the presence of anything even remotely pleasurable (and pleasure is being defined as loosely as humanly possible as “things which are not soul-rendingly terrible”) is evidence that poverty is itself a choice, the most comfortable thing for people without the drive or ambition to do more than work three jobs and wait for the bus at 5:40 in the morning. 

This comment, and McArdle’s tacit endorsement of it, are a depraved level of stupid.  It would be the equivalent of me saying that the reason people have children is because they’re too intellectually incurious to figure out other things to do with their free time, or that the reason people become faux-libertarian faux-economist bloggers is because being six feet tall and female makes you otherwise unemployable in socially useful pursuits. 

Poverty, theoretically, should not make you the marionette of others’ social expectations.  High-calorie, low-nutrient food is insanely cheap.  My local Meijer is selling both boxes of Cheese-Its and bags of Dole lettuce mix at three for five dollars.  A cup of Cheese-Its has 312 calories, a cup of lettuce has seven calories.  A rational person with little money, even if they absolutely love the leafy crap out of lettuce, is going to go for the higher-calorie food, even if it’s worse for them.  Making anything even remotely filling out of a lettuce is going to require you to buy other vegetables, cheeses and proteins, which pretty much means that for a budget-conscious shopper, it’s not only a useless purchase, but perhaps even a counterproductive one.  A package of microwaveable brand-name hot dogs is $2.50, a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts requiring seasoning and cooking is $2.39.  Hungry Man dinners and Healthy Choice dinners are the same price, and one promises twice the calories of the other.  A pound of generic Cheetos is $1.25 a bag, as is a bag of baby carrots.  Healthy eating is the pleasure denied here.  Except for the microwaveable dinners, the ability to buy food which requires the purchase of yet other foods in order to constitute actual meals is the luxury - not to mention preparation time, the shorter viability for fresh foods, even the fact that they require types of storage that a box of crackers doesn’t.  You have to spend extra money just to make the food you actually bought worth buying.

It’s really very sweet that McArdle and her reader are willing to understand the plight of the miserable poor who just can’t derive as much pleasure from being a highly successful professional with a paid electric bill as they do from eating puffed corn coated in authentic orange dust.  However, on behalf of the poor, I respectfully ask that both of them stop being fucking morons. 

So today the President will sit down with Skip Gates and his arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge PD to have a beer. A lot of Internet bandwidth and airwave time have been spent dealing with trivialities, such as who is consuming which brand of beer (Obama a Bud,  Gates tossing back a Jamaican Red Stripe. Crowley’s will opt for a Coors Blue Moon).

I just want to point out that the fact that we’re talking about a beer summit confirms the role of class in this whole brouhaha, an issue I raised earlier (”Why class does matter in the Gates arrest debate”). They are not sitting down to share a bottle of wine; the decision to “lower the class bar” by using the alcoholic beverage of the working (class) man is quite purposeful. Beer is a social signifier that Gates, Obama, and Crowley are on the same level as regular guys shooting the sh*t. Palin aligned herself with “Joe Six Pack” for the same reason—to indicate she’s down with the working class American.

Of course this is all artifice; Crowley is sitting down with the President of the United States and a superstar scholar from Harvard. Gates and Obama are way above Crowley’s station in their professional and social spheres. However, what the Gates incident has taught us is that if you take Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates or any prominent black man out of context—they can still easily and quickly drop well beneath Crowley’s station given the right (or more accurately, wrong) circumstances. In the often-disappointing real world colored by perception and stereotypes, it’s a rude awakening. If the President and Prof. Gates are anonymized into the average black man, it is still a world of driving while black, voting while black, shopping while black, hailing a cab while black, and now, being in your own home while black that they would experience.

What will these three talk about today, as they chug a cold one? I venture they will touch upon race in some, hopefully productive way, but I can put money on it that class won’t be on the table.

***

racism

  • noun 1 the belief that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race. 2 discrimination against or antagonism towards other races.

  — DERIVATIVES racist noun & adjective.

It’s clear

no one wants to be labeled a racist

, no matter how insane and inappropriate an action or comment they make. Some people seem to have a definition of it in their heads that excludes the possibility that anything THEY say or do might be steeped in racism, intended or not.

Take Boston Police Officer Justin Barrett, whose beat is District B-3 (Dorchester and Mattapan). He mass-mailed an execreble piece of trash to his presumably fellow non-racist friends (as well as The Boston Globe(!) and colleagues in the National Guard):

“His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”

“He indeed has transcended back to a bumbling jungle monkey, thus he forever remains amid this nation’s great social/racial divide…”

“That paragraph was as pathetic as jungle monkey gibberish.”

You are a Fool. An infidel…You should serve me coffee and donuts on a Sunday morning.”

I am “not a racist but I am prejudice [sic] towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they say is freedom but it is merely attention because you do not get enough of it in your little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers.”

“Gates is a goddamned fool and you the article writer simply a poor follower and maybe worse, a poor writer. Your article title should read CONDUCT UNBECOMING a JUNGLE MONKEY-BACK TO ONE’S ROOTS. JB”

Ummmm…never mind racist, this man is a dumbass for it sending to the media. Or maybe he really thought there was nothing wrong in that missive. No one is saying he can’t have an opinion over who is right or wrong in this incident—why in god’s name is it relevant to refer to Gates as a “jungle monkey” in his criticism? BTW, the Police Commissioner, Edward Davis took Barrett’s gun and badge;  Barrett is awaiting a termination hearing.

Watch the “apology” below the fold.

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In my prior posts on the arrest of Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates in his own home by Cambridge police officer Sgt. James Crowley I have mentioned that class privilege plays a role in this debacle as much as race does. A lot of the debate about the incident dances around the topic but misses the big picture—race and class are always factors because we are human beings colored by experiences and classification within this country’s historical framework of those two elements.

I’ve seen hundreds of comments around the blogosphere getting bogged down in wish list items—“if Gates had only been more polite” or “if the cop had only walked out once he saw the ID and knew it was Gates’s home.” Yes, either might have defused the situation, then again, maybe not. Yes, the cop was being yelled at by Gates, but it’s less the yelling, than one specific thing that he said that hit the red alert button on class—he tossed down the “don’t you know who I am” card (”you have no idea who you are messing with”). That, friends, comes from privilege of a different kind, one that has nothing to do with race.

On Salon, I was relieved to see this given an apt name for this particular use of the power play, “Ivy League Effect,” by “Phantom Negro.” The reason for the pseudonym was obvious to me. As a fellow Ivy League prof, “Phantom Negro” knows Gates has the power to make live miserable for him/her (”Dr. Henry Louis Gates has reach and influence in the academy”).

The Ivy League is not real life. College in general is not real life, and the Ivy League is a more fantastic version of college. The amenities are better, the rules are flexible, and everyone, student and faculty alike, is well aware that the realities of life as most people know it are merely a peculiar footnote to the day-to-day of campus life. I do not speak out of turn when I say this. I know because I am in and of that world.

As a black Ivy Leaguer, something funny happens as you become ensconced in ivy. You’re smart enough to understand that race and racism are a reality you deal with on a daily basis, but you also know that your university ID sets you apart. Does this mean you are kept from hurtful incidents? No, but it is to say that much of the outrage felt at a racial slight is replaced by outrage at a class slight.

It’s a closed, strange universe that I have experience with as well— though I’ve been a lowly peon in that universe. Plus, my brother is a tenured professor who, thankfully, has somehow managed to stay down-to-earth and his feet firmly planted in the ground.  I’ve always told him that if he starts exhibiting signs of what I called “acadamic bastard fever”, a sisterly ass-kicking would be in order. But I’ve seen the wrath of the Ivy League/Celebrity Effect before, and it’s a breathtaking level of ego rage, sense of entitlement and coddling that is mind-boggling. Even if you’re in a college town, some of these characters fail to realize that no, not everyone in town “knows who you are” and, well, they don’t really give a damn, either.

Much more below the fold.

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So, I have a problem.  I think that Bridget Kevane actually is kind of a supercilious asshole, irrespective of gender, for her insistence that the only problem with leaving two 12-year-olds in a mall with three younger kids, and then the 12-year-olds dumping the younger kids off to go do something else is that people hate educated women. 

Kevane is a college professor, and chair of her department.  She was tired one day, and so decided, for some reason, to leave her daughter and her friend, both 12, in charge of an 8, 7 and 3-year-old at the mall.  Kevane mentions that nobody’s ever been abducted from the mall, which would be fine, except that kids in the 3 to 12 range are perfectly capable of doing stupid, irresponsible things absent parental supervision minus the omnipresent predator with their windowless van.  And guess what?  The 12-year-olds did something stupid: they left the other kids by the cosmetics counter in Macy’s and went to go try on clothes.  And those kids, left alone, weren’t going to get abducted - but they could have liked the way something looked and put it in a pocket, or in the three-year-old’s stroller.  They could have knocked over a display running around the store, run out into the parking lot, or, hell, maybe they could have started a ribald stand-up act that would launch them to perversely corrupting fame based on both the novelty and this great bit about how a Capri Sun is harder to get into than a woman’s pants. 

The younger kids were found, police were called, mom was charged with criminal neglect. 

But, mind you, the 12-year-olds took a babysitting class, which should have made all of this impossible, just like kids who take swimming lessons never dive into the shallow end of the pool, and 16-year-olds who take driving lessons never get into accidents. 

Did authorities overreact to Kevane because she was a professor?  Possibly, possibly not - it’s hard to imagine that Kevane, a highly-educated white woman, wouldn’t have faced the same punishment, if not worse, if she’d been working minimum wage jobs instead of chairing a department, if she’d been black instead of white.  Even if she was Professor Brad Kevane, the kids were still at the mall unattended.  Perhaps her being a professor did open her up to a different form of criticism, but reading over her article, it’s hard to say that it isn’t at least somewhat justified.  Kevane barely admits that her trust was broken by the 12-year-olds, that they actually did something wrong.  She never admits that there may have been alternatives to dropping them off at the mall, and that her own childhood experiences don’t mirror the decision to leave five children alone in a large shopping complex.  What she does show, in spades, is the ability to look with unremitting disdain on anyone who might think she made a bad decision along with the ability to presume that because she thought it was a good idea, it must have been. 

Judith Warner claims that this is a part of a larger cultural sexism against uppity, educated women, and also Sarah Palin is bad.  I’m not sure how that fits in, but it does.  Both Warner and Kevane are hiding behind a legitimate issue - sexism generally and anti-education sentiment in particular - to mask the fact that Kevane is openly declaring that She Knows Better About Parenting and that when she screws up, it’s everyone else’s fault but her own.  This is how Warner ends her post:

The hatred of women — in all its archaic, phantasmagoric forms — is still alive and well in our society, and when directed at well-educated women, it’s socially acceptable, too. Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place.

The classism here is redolent with the smell of savings accounts, furloughs and important magazine subscriptions.  The most put-upon women in our society are its most well-educated, facing problems that lower classes would never encounter.  (And yes, Warner puts this forward as a standard attack on educated women, which makes it even stranger that she would actually turn around and do it.)  I’m writing about this not because I’m denying that educated women do face sexism and misogyny for their accomplishments, but because Kevane and Warner are using the privilege inherent in Kevane’s position to mask a very simple truth: Kevane screwed up.  And unlike the vast majority of other women, she gets a feature piece in Brain, Child, promotion by a prominent advocate of a certain theory of child-raising and vocal (if somewhat misappropriated) support from a writer for the New York Times.  Other forms of sexism and misogyny are also socially acceptable, and their victims may not even have cars to get their kids to the mall, or the resources for a lawyer and a mock jury or, hell, the education to write a measured piece on how great and admired of a parent they are besides this one little boo-boo. 

A degree is not a “get out jail free” card. 

I was slobberingly grateful yesterday that Jesse wrote about Ross Douthat’s latest ode to the oh-so-sexy (because you think they’re too scatterbrained to use contraception) red state ladies and their leader Sarah Palin, but alas, after reading Matt’s rejoinder, I’m forced to jump into the game.  Matt singles out this quote from Ross’s attempt to play the Palin-the-victim card.

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

As yes.  As much as people like to compare her to the Shrub, in actuality, Palin is Richard Nixon reborn.  Her strategy of playing the poor, put-upon victim—-just like you, white people, who are sick of hippies and black people that want to share your lunch counter!—-is right out of the Richard Nixon “Southern Strategy” handbook.  Matt’s answer is funny:

I think the implicit idea here that the real class struggle in the United States is between graduates of fancy colleges and graduates of less-fancy colleges is pretty blinkered.

You say “blinkered”, I say “intellectually dishonest”.  Douthat is playing the same tired game that Ivy League-educated East Coast conservative commentators have been playing for a long time—-praising the white middle class that viciously and racistly dominates the red states like they’re the only truly oppressed people in the country, oppressed because of their pureness, goodness, and ability to have rowdy sex without protection, the only kind that really gets you off.  We’re treated to pity-the-rednecks-and-wannabe-rednecks essays about how snooty liberal elite sneer at hunting and fishing, at religious beliefs that are built strictly around wishful thinking that would make your average kindergartner blush, at big hair, at over-the-top patriarchal fantasizing about zygote life, and now at state schools.  Well, all that and we get to hear about how the willfully fucking stupid are morally purer than the rest of us. 

But the implication is clear—-the red states are the salt of the earth, and the goodness and light of the dominant class shows why the liberal elite are bad people.  They hate Sarah Palin not because she’s a nasty person with nasty beliefs and a nasty ideology.  No, it’s because she’s a shiny female specimen with good hair, because she has 5 kids and acts like pregnancy was a big shock (instead of what happens when you do it without using contraception), because she went to State U., and because she’s a gleeful redneck.  Because liberal elitists have this irrational hatred of this specific tribe of white people, a hatred that has nothing to do with political differences and everything to do with an irrational hatred of pick-up trucks, country western music, and the word “y’all”. 

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My favorite kind of racist is the “not-racist”.  The not-racist is a special and wonderful breed which insists that not only is it not racist, but all the negative and pejorative things they notice about other races comes not from any racist motivation but instead the fact that other races just keep insisting on being inferior.  The not-racist also has a constant out against accusations of racism: The Friend.  The Friend is a friend of the race which the not-racist is criticizing, and is always a.) successful, b.) intelligent and c.) making the exact lifestyle choices which other members of their race fail to make (and which, in turn, fully explain everything about their supposed “racial inequality”).  The Friend is a better person even than the not-racist, stable and hard-working and intrepid and probably not a real person, but whatever.  Perhaps most importantly, everything the Friend does is not for their own benefit or edification, oh no.  Everything they do is done in order to allow the not-racist evidence that they can’t possibly be racist, and to provide proof that the not-racist knows that of which they speak.  The Friend is not a person; the Friend is something akin to a melanin-infused Pokemon that the not-racist can pull out in during any battle, like Pikachu if all the other Pikachus had higher incarceration and lower employment rates than all the other Pokemon.

There’s a movement afoot to promote black patronization of black businesses, not much different than what any number of ethnic groups ghettoized into ethnic enclaves have done for centuries.  According to not-racist Amy Alkon, this is just plain wrong.  And she’s got a reason why:

Oh, please. A friend of mine is a black fashion designer who started with nothing and built her business herself, selling clothes out of the back of her station wagon after she couldn’t afford the living expenses in New York City and had to turn down a scholarship to F.I.T. It isn’t skin color that makes the difference, it’s enterpreneurial spirit and a burning desire to make it; enough so that you’re not afraid to fail and pick yourself up and start again when and if you do.

I choose you, Negrochu!

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