Daily Kos Con Chart

This really isn’t a post, it is plagiarism.  In fact, I depend on Ed Darrell retweeting Nancy Flanagan — two people I have never met — for enabling my sin.  (Thank you.)  But I enjoyed this Daily Kos post so much, I had to share it and I can only wish it were my own.

Here you are, The Daily Kos Guide to the Conservative Movement!  Other than being too soft on the cons, try to find any fault in it.  If ever there were a better example of “funny because it is true” I haven’t seen it.

Enjoy!  And share.

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How I Know the Apollo Moon Missions Were Faked

Slightly different photo, makes it appear that the crosshairs have changed (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am siding with the conspiracy theories.  We didn’t get to the moon and back.  Come on!  Really?  I am supposed to think that we got a group of guys to the moon, landed them there softly, and brought them back without crashing when forty years later we cannot build a simple computer that won’t crash?

We can’t even make a waterproof computer.

Come on, how gullible are we going to be?

The moon mission was all about split-second timing, precise calculation, and exact synchronization…and I cannot even get a MS Word document to open in less than 40 seconds.

And here’s the funny part.  Hold on.  They did this with old fashioned transistor computers stuffed into a giant tin can and called it a rocket ship!  Ha, ha, ha, ha…good god, there’s a sense of humor there!

Here on Planet Earth, my little laptop struggles to keep up with my keystrokes as I type.

You know, I was going to research video of the moon landing — look for film crew members reflected in the masks of “astronauts”, for example — but my crappy little post-Space Age computer cannot stream the video steadily.  It drove me to the brink of insanity, to edge of my endurance, and virtually to the dark side of the moon as a matter of fact!

By the way, all those techies and engineers and scientists who jump up and down and nearly wet themselves in an orgy of geeky celebration are not nerds, they’re just hack actors and extras pulled off the street because they own a white short sleeve dress shirt and a pocket protector.  (That’s why Hollywood is believable than real life…there is no real life.  Remember that.)

So I am just going to accept that somethings are not what they seem to be and we can live in denial all we want as long as it makes for a good story and keeps the peace, but can we please — please! — take on a more terrestrial challenge and develop a computer that flipping works?  Then and only then I might start to believe in moon missions.

Until then I am scanning for jet contrails and power transmission lines in those “Mars” photos they’re sharing with us now.  Tee hee…oh, how funny those science guys can be.

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Correcting a Well-Placed Comment About Public Investment in Infrastructure

The New York Times reported on President Obama’s Miami speech yesterday where he proposed a program of public and private investment to pay for national infrastructure improvements.  The article quotes Ken Orski, the editory of Innovation Briefs and a transportatoin official for Richard Nicon and Gerald Ford.

Ken Orski tells us that back in the 19th century, canals and roads were financed with private money and suggests that public spending did not occur until Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This is not correct.

As far back as the 18th century government — federal, state, and local — invested in transportation.  None other than small government president Thomas Jefferson advocated for federal surpluses to be applied to infrastructure including canals and other “great objects” underway in the nation.  In fact, the Jefferson administration preferred government investment to private for the purposes of enabling free commerce.

Preceding the Civil War, federal investment — those pursued by Jefferson — did decline, but that did not mean private enterprise picked up the slack.  For the most part it shifted to the state level.  States spent nearly 10 times federal investment, but both were large sums for the era, nearly half a billion dollars preceding the Civil War.

The New York Times article also uses the railroad industry as an example of privately funded infrastructure investment.  This also is not entirely true, especially when you take into account the enormous grants of land.  During the 19th century tens of millions of acres were given to railroad interests which could then be sold or leased for profit to support rail investment.

The only large scale privately funded rail system in the United States was James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway lines out of St. Paul, Minnesota, but even here there were gifts of land in place.

The point is, since the founding of the United States, government as invested in infrastructure.  The investments increased in the New Deal era and throughout the strong post-World War decades of the second half of the 20th century, but public investment did not begin with the New Deal as Mr. Orski implies and as reported by the New York Times.

Misrepresenting facts makes sensible public policy decisions more difficult as some people are likely to think that we somehow did things differently and better in the past.  It paints the wrong picture because we did, in fact, do things differently and better in the past, but that was not a past reliant more on private investment, it was a past when shared public investment built and sustained a strong America.

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“Courting Cowardice” and Then Some

I was going to write about the United States Supreme Court Courting Cowardice, but Maureen Dowd did so already and did a very nice job.   (Good work.)

But…you know…well, no, I don’t know.  Something doesn’t seem right with the courts.  The Supreme Court feels especially squishy, intellectually vulnerable to the push and pull of ideology and public opinion.  Cynics — of which there are many, too many — might try to convince me that the courts have always been this way and even worse.  But I don’t know…

Someone stick a pin in their butts..

Maybe I never really paid attention before and I like to think I am a guy with a propensity to pay attention.

Listening to so-called highlights from today’s Supreme Court hearings has me questioning the both the judicial and the intellectual integrity of the bench.  Aren’t the justices supposed to be refereeing the law?  Instead they seem to be talking from the gut, as you might expect people to talk at a cocktail party, especially one where they might be hedging  in order to fugue properly the social scene.

Is that what a Supreme Court justice does?

The court’s role is fairly direct.  They judge the constitutional validity of the legislative and legal proceedings.  Isn’t that right?  Especially for justices who claim to protect the Constitution as an objective and fixed code, it seems to me that a lot of the questioning in hearings is nonsense.

Should, for example, the court pass on hearing a case because we don’t have a history of social outcomes or a view of the future bearing on the case as Alito suggests?

What kind of cop out is that?  I thought we judged cases based on its constitutionality.  A copy of the Constitution, Justice Alito, certainly must be in your office somewhere (or you can find the Constitution online) along with a history of case law appropriate for assessing minority rights.

The issue before the court isn’t about making peace between warring parties, it about the rights of United States citizens.  Surely there’s something in our history to help the Supreme Court with that sort of assessment.

Furthermore, if the rights protected by the Constitution are objective and eternal rights, what will change 10 or 50 years from now anyway?  Passing judgement on legal matters based on social reaction is shirking the responsibility of the court, is it not?

I have thrown a lot of question marks in this post, but that simply shows that I am utterly confused.  What the hell is so great about the Supreme Court if it starts thinking and acting like  radio talk show hosts or pundits sitting around a table on a Sunday morning news program?

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Government Investment and Growth: Roads as an Example

Looks like the road is blocked up ahead…

 

When Republicans refuse to consider government economic investment, ask them to consider the significance of roads.

 

Often we think of roads as merely the apparatus that provides for travel and shipping, keys to commerce and freedom.  This of course is very important.  Without roads we would rely on rails, rivers, canals and who knows what else.  Roads are simply a given and quite literally taken for granted when think about how easily we neglect them.

 

But roads played a deeper role in our country’s economic growth and prosperity.  Where, for example, would the nation’s budding automobile industry have been without an investment in roads?  Think about it.  How important has the automobile industry been to the economic history of the United States?

 

Without roads cars would have had very limited value.  This would have squelched demand and that would have limited growth of what was perhaps the nations largest economic engine going back to the 1930s through the end of the 20th century.  Roads were not built in anticipation of the automobile.  Roads were built to facilitate the use of automobiles, an infant industry.

 

And with it radiated countless other industries in the United States:  Tourism, home construction, retail, fast food.  Plus the commercial infrastructure of the auto industry has served as the foundation for defense when needed thereby expanding into other technologies, such as aviation.

 

We need to start thinking more broadly about our future.  When we think about what is worthy of investment, we need to think in long-term layers.  A significant problem with the way we manage government — indeed even business — is the way we focus on the present short-term gain.  That is not the sort of thinking that built our dominant economy.

 

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Advertising as Evidence of Wealth?

An 1890s advertisement showing model Hilda Clark in formal 19th century attire. The ad is titled Drink Coca-Cola 5¢. (US) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our society is awash in advertising.  It reaches us through all forms of media, old and new, and constantly in public space and discourse.  Advertising even intrudes on our private space via our growing dependence on personal technology, like our phones and computers.  But I wonder how often we stop to think about what this advertising means at a sort of socio-economic level.

I am thinking of it this way.  Let’s roll back time a couple hundred years.  Imagine a feudal society or even the early capitalist systems of mercantilism.  Who thinks a feudal serf or the new urban poor of the early industrial age had much need for advertising?  Or perhaps more to the point, who would think advertising would have much need for the impoverished masses?

It is hard to imagine an advertising industry scheming to promote one product’s advantages over another to people who simply struggled to survive from day to day.  One did not need advertising to tell him what he needed and why.  My guess is the poor pretty much understood this instinctively, just as we all would if we were put into a daily struggle for survival, well-being, and maybe a taste a rare leisure.

So what does that say about us, especially a society that markets so much to rich and poor alike?  For starters, we are not as poor as we were centuries ago.  And that is a good thing.  We still have vast differences in wealth and poverty, however, and that perhaps is not a good thing, especially if we begin to back pedal from more egalitarian economic prosperity, reversing trends of shared socio-economic growth.

Nevertheless, things are different today– life is more prosperous and generous– and this difference exists because of overall economic growth.  Advanced economic societies show signs of prosperity, even among the poor, and life comes with some basic assumptions and expectations about what is just and humane.  An higher economic standard exits for all, a baseline of sorts.

This isn’t uniform throughout the world, of course.  While we seem to be entering an era when literally billions of the world’s poor are now breaking into the middle class, wealthy societies — those that support an increased level of increased and shared wealth — do not reach everyone.   Large parts of the world remain left behind.

I haven’t much more to say about it.  However it seems to me that a very simple way to judge where wealth is becoming a kind of shared prosperity is to follow the money, specifically the money spent on advertising.  The United States in particular has perhaps the longest relationship with a nexus between affluence and advertising.

If there isn’t already, there must be some economic index that follows advertising dollars and reach.  If not, a dissertation might exist here.  What does advertising tell us about our wealth and economic prosperity?

Just thinking out loud again.

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Shut Down Simple-Minded Tax Cut for Job Creators Rhetoric

The simple-minded arguments promoting tax cuts for so-called job creators are misleading, incorrect, and frankly very stale.   For the most part, they do not fit the current economic environment and reflect a level fiscal irresponsibility that is in large part a cause of our national budget mess.  Smart tax policy has been absent for too long and it is time for that to change.

No smart business owner is going to hire people simply because he has more money.  If you manufacture widgets and you have a warehouse full of unsold widgets, what incentive do you have to hire more people to make more widgets?  You don’t have any incentive to do so.  What will you do with the additional widgets and the added costs needed to produce them?

The anti-tax movement argues that we need to ensure that “job creators” have the resources – i.e., money – to hire workers.  This argument has justified decades of increasingly unbalanced tax policy which favors the so-called job creators.  It is the “trickle down” or supply-side model that is not working, especially in our current depressed economy.

If the trickle down model did indeed work, we should be awash in jobs now.  The wealthiest among us are doing well.  They have money to invest.  Why are they not investing those resources here to create jobs here?  Because there is no demand for the goods and services in which they might invest.  Corporations likewise are sitting on record cash reserves.  Again, they are not investing here because it is not justified by demand.

If we want to stimulate growth, we need policy that puts more money in consumer bank accounts.  Often by sheer necessity, they spend the cash they have which then pushes up the demand we need.  Misleading rhetoric about “makers” and “takers” is unfair and incorrect.  One can make the argument – especially in the current market environment – that the middle and working class are the job creators.  Without growth their spending stimulates, we will be locked in stagnate economic growth.

Of course there is some investment underway.  However when businesses do invest, it is increasingly likely that they are investing in cheaper labor markets in the global economy.  We have a systematic labor and demand problem in the United States.  Maintaining tax cuts, subsidies, and other financial incentives behind the argument that it will spur growth has been proven a failed policy in the status quo and does not address the decline of our comparative advantages in the world economy.  We are poorer, less educated, and most importantly lagging behind other countries in our infrastructure and research investments.

Our remaining global stronghold is our financial sector – and to some extend our nation’s monetary system and reserve, although Republicans are determined to undercut that – but this sector serves a very small number of Americans.  Even American workers investing in 401(k)s see less from the financial sector as they have less income to invest and suffer most from the current era’s boon and bust market cycles.

We cannot expect to compete in old manufacturing sectors where we can no longer compete on the labor market, unless we want to undercut the middle class prosperity that has been a part of the American way of life for generations (which in fact is happening now).  We should instead be investing in future economic opportunities, maintaining a secure and educated workforce, and investing in smart infrastructure to sustain future growth.  But we are not doing this.  We are giving tax cuts instead and expecting something magical to happen.

Unfortunately, nothing magical is happening.  That’s obvious to anyone paying attention to our country’s economic trends over the past couple decades.

My two cents.

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Debunking the Fair Compensation Myth

The very wealthiest 1% in the United States possess more wealth than the bottom 40%, the top 20% possess more than the lost and dying middle class.  (See well-documented report here.)  Any suggestion that policy redistribute this inequality draws cries of anti-American socialism, most loudly from those barely hanging on in the sinking tiers of America wealth.  This is simply a symptom of ignorance.  A full 1/3 of Americans believe they are among the top 10% of American income earners and nearly all still believe the United States is the land of upward mobility and economic security.

Those are problems of understanding and conditions of cognitive dissonance.  But there is another layer to inequality and it resides mostly on the upper tiers of wealth distribution.  It is the idea that the very wealthiest somehow earned and deserve their growing wealth.  This view is supported by the idea that without competitive compensation — as unfair as it might seem — we would be worse off because “talent” would not be attracted to the complicated careers of corporate management and high finance.

There is a simple one word answer to this (although you still sometimes see it written in its more archaic two-word form):  Bullshit.

This is where the obligatory apology and reassurances need to enter any polemic about capitalism and its rewards.  Most people, myself included, do not want to live in a world where people are not awarded for their talents and efforts, we don’t want to take away the benefits of good fortune, but increasingly talents, efforts, and even good fortune play an ancillary role to strategic regulatory and market regulation.  While most of us work hard to earn a living and pay our way, a very elite few employ others to work even harder for them to change the rules that favor their privileged interests.

How else do you explain public policy that gives breaks to high incomes, subsidizes profitable industry (cf. fossil fuels, mercenary wars, industrial agriculture, etc.), and dismantle social structures that distributed opportunity more equally (cf. education, health care, social security).

The fact is, in an era when we invested more of our wealth in our common interests, we all did better, rich and poor alike.  In fact, in the second half of the 20th century right, high-priced talent and corporations produced enormous wealth for this country, indeed for large parts of the world.  American society was the envy of the world,  It was the source of innovation and creativity and we made political decisions to foster those characteristics.

If we returned to those days, does anyone really think a wealthy capitalist — a “job creator” — would stash his wealth in a mattress somewhere in the Cayman Islands?  (That, by the way, is another policy-enabled issue that we should address.)  If the potential for profits exists to be taken, someone will take it.  If today’s titans are unwilling to take risks, others will follow.  Someone on the sidelines today — squeezed out perhaps because of the enormous comparative advantage that those with great wealth enjoy — might be happy to invest for a single-digit margin where today’s robber barons expect double-digit.

Would we be any worse off if that happened?

Eventually money would return to the market.  Think of a reverse auction.  Investors would jump in if they thought opportunities were being usurped.  Likewise, for every CEO unwilling to spare his talents for anything less than tens of millions, there are talented people willing to take the helm.  Perhaps economies of scale enable tremendous compensation, but it need not be this way.  We didn’t pay CEOs 350 times the average compensation of his employees to attract his talent 30 years ago, why is that necessary today?

Today corporate profits rise — dramatically rise, to record levels — and worker compensation lags, even declines, and the trend is for the worst.

The myth of fair high compensation is perpetuated by those who profit from it.  They sustain it to keep complaints away.  Once we believed kings ruled by divine right.  The time to pull back the curtain is long overdue.

Moreover, looking at so-called talent, it isn’t so rare.  What’s the difference between a hot shot hedge manager in New York versus someone with similar talent and ability in Mumbai?  The answer is Wall Street.  One has access, the other does not.  Likewise a kid raised in Manhattan’s wealth stands to gain much more than a kid raised in rural poverty.  We created this wealth, no one did it alone.  One depends on the other.  It is time we put credit where credit is due.

But most importantly, if unrealized opportunity exists, it will be exploited.  It is absurd to think that we need to sustain an economic system that disproportionately favors the few at the expense of the majority.  It isn’t talent that matters, it is access to power that matters.  If our democracy is protected — something which itself is in doubt (cf., Citizens United) — citizens can regain control of that power.

We accomplish by voting wisely, that starts with turning against the regressive Republican Party.  We are not talking socialism, we don’t even need the redistribution that sustained the 50s and 60s in this country.  We simply need parity, both economic and political parity, along with the safety nets — social security, health care, education — that gives a strong society a solid foundation.

The truth is the world is changing.  The economy is changing…rapidly.  It is a global one.  Someday — which is really yesterday — we need to find a way to remain competitive in the global market.  What is happening instead is we are allowing a slim minority of people harvest the capital of generations and make off like bandits.  In the long run, even those of us who are better off will lose in this game.  It is time we wake up and get our accounts in order.

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The Economy Affects Democracy

A high degree vindictiveness runs through political discourse today and I think it is a direct outcome of our stalled economy and declining prospects for a stronger future.  Democracy doesn’t do so well when the base of economic progress and opportunity shrinks.

And the problem isn’t blameless.

Today we have an economic plutocracy controlling political discourse that favors its already established and successful interests.  Those fortunate to be in positions of opportunity — which increasingly is a privilege for the few — or simply hold access to power through wealth and connections have gained substantial economic benefit in recent decades, even in the short “post-recession” years.

Government economic policy has been reformed to align with the existing power and wealth interests of the status quo.  Therefore it should not be surprising that political choices which would shake up those policies and raise economic growth for the majority is not a priority of the already well-established and powerful few.

In America today, wealth literally buys a voice in our democracy.  The Supreme Court saw to it that money speaks louder than people. and increasingly our political discourse isn’t about helping people, it is about helping business, free enterprise, and a mythical group called “job creators.”  Conservatives and liberals alike kneel before the altar of free market principles as if it — and not the people who live and work and vote — represent their constituency.

The result is a depression of political consciousness and the destruction of national community.

In the short run, anyone in roughly the top fifth of income earners might benefit from the policies catering to the very wealthiest and so people in that group might go on supporting those policies.   But in the long run, protecting the interests of  the few over the interests of all, is a short-sighted allegiance that will bear bitter fruit.

Policies that benefit the few come at the cost of our global competitive advantage.  What made the United States strong was its progressive access to opportunity and a shared benefit from economic growth.  These advantages supported the greatest advantage of all:  A strong and engaged democracy.  But as the United States becomes more economically divided, it becomes more divided in the ideological realm as well.  Democracy falls victim to this kind of divide.

I believe economics and politics are directly connected and social progress evolves out of a connection that serves the most citizens fairly and objectively.  When you look at the world’s democracies, the don’t emerge from economies plagued by chronic poverty and inequality, they emerge from prosperity.  I think we can draw the conclusion, therefore, that the rise of incivility, the failure to govern, and an overall decline in American social well-being and prosperity that we see today is at least in part an outcome of a society that is increasingly an economically divided and for many a less prosperous society.

There will always be differences in wealth and achievement.  In fact, we celebrate wealth and achievement in this country perhaps like no other.  So it is important to understand that fairness is not about condemning success but it should be about maintaining rules and systems that truly do reflect shared obligations as well as opportunities.

Today, much like we experienced in our country’s history a century ago, the very fortunate have an unbalanced political and economic advantage through the sheer wealth they have amassed and the power it accrues.  It allows them to maintain a system which is out of balance with the economic realities faced by most Americans.  This is the threat to civil society and democracy that threatens from the shadows of our economic crisis.

The free market respects growth and profits, but not necessarily social well-being, equality, or even democracy.  These are values that arise from convictions of people, not the incentives of free enterprise.

As standards of living stall or decline, as the outlook for a better future becomes less promising, and as we become less willing to invest in our common good, social and political decline will grow worse, not better.  This is the risk that we face today.

So what is the solution?  A more sophisticated, better-informed voter, one who understands his or her best interests.  But greater equality and shared prosperity in economic growth is likely the seed to engage the voter’s interest in the first place.  One serves the other.

In the end, this is a very troubling chicken or egg dilemma that requires informed leadership to reset priorities and it is the responsibility of the people to elect those leaders.

It is a mess.

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Maybe We Should Ask Republicans What They Mean When They Talk About Economic Growth

Marco Rubio is the latest “rising star” in a dying party to espouse the empty and pointless rhetoric of American conservativism.  The text of his response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech is here.

Marco Rubio

Understanding what conservatives have in mind when they talk about America’s future and economic growth requires holding their rhetoric accountable to the facts.

The simple fact is we have lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more wealth in the hands of job creators than at any other time in recent history.  If GOP rhetoric were anywhere near the truth, we should be awash in new jobs and prosperity.  But we are not.

Rubio claims that large government and taxes that promise to help the middle class has “failed every time it has been tried.” Well, that is true if you forget mid-century America or turn a blind eye to the strength of European countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Germany.

Republicans like to say President Obama is anti-private sector, but the Obama administration overall accommodates the private sector quite well.  Obama went out of his way to remind us that the private sector is the key to prosperity.  In today’s political wars, however, the messenger is more important than the message.  Again, perhaps it is time to look at facts, not rhetoric.

We currently have the tax cuts, less government, and fewer regulations.  The wealthiest — the job creators — have seen their wealth increase by over 60% in the last decade.  So…keep asking…where are the jobs?  Where is the prosperity?  Where is the answer to these questions?

A classic worth repeating…because it is so true.

Rubio also says our financial problems begin with a country that spends too much, spends a trillion more than it takes in.  While that certainly is a problem, it is hard to see why this isn’t a funding problem.  We cut taxes with the idea that wealth would trickle down.  The increased overall prosperity would bring in increased revenues, the argument went, and that would cover the lower tax rates.  But as we see, that does not happen.

Moreover, Republicans — by giving even more cuts and subsidies, adding Medicare prescriptions benefits, and a few ill-advised wars — added to our financial unmet financial burdens.  Let’s not forget doing absolutely nothing to address the core issues behind the banking crisis that put us here in the first place and thus added even more to our deficits.

Yes…it is all the fault of government too big, isn’t it?  Hardly.  It is a mismanaged government finance policy that erroneously puts the blame on government generally.  Simply put, if you manage government to fail, it will likely fail.  It can’t be any more plain than that.

However, when Rubio argued that annual GDP growth at 4% would be a big part of helping balancing our books…he was right!  That’s why notable experts like Paul Krugman make the case for government stimulus to push economic growth.  It will be much easier to pay down the cost of this stimulus — and more — if we have ten years of growth versus doing nothing, as we are doing now, and let things remain stagnate.

(But Krugman, and others like him, is an expert.  He’s intelligent and informed.  He has spent his career understanding economics.  So he must be wrong.)

Anyway…this is all so tiresome.  What is it that Republicans want that we don’t have right now?  Are they really concerned about jobs or just growth?  And who are they anyway?  Millions of people vote GOP in this country as if those votes serve their interests.  Why?

I ask this because we should ask what exactly do conservatives have in mind when they talk about growth and prosperity.  The rank and file Republican voter certainly doesn’t understand this question.  If it simply is growth, especially for the wealthiest, Republicans have that and lots of it.  If they are talking about middle class growth and prosperity then things are not so clear.

Rubio served up a rambling list of tired complaints and clichéd promises that simply do not fit the facts of conservative principles.  They are intentionally misleading the public and misrepresenting their true objectives.  It is hard to understand how an informed and intelligent person could see things otherwise.  Show us some progress on the conservative agenda first, then may you have an argument that the less-is-more approach is a winning one.

If Rubio is a rising star representing the future of the Republican Party, there isn’t much to excite people expecting a more moderate and sensible GOP.  We have heard all of this before.  (We haven’t forgotten the 2012 elections already, have we?)

Alas, this is looking more and more like class warfare to me.  The conservative elite are pushing for more by demanding that the rest live with less…and pay for the privilege.  Conservatives have focused on dismantling government for nearly 30 years now.  It is the “Starve the Beast” argument and, unfortunately, it is winning and most Americans are losing.

How do conservatives address this fact?  How does their rhetoric square with reality?  It is time to ask more about what does a prospering America really look like in the ideal GOP world.

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