Why Do Republicans Believe Spending Dedicated To Helping People Is Wrong?

According to new information (reported by VOX) anti-poverty spending does far more good than we’ve been told. Why do Republicans hate helping the poor? Maybe it’s their way of looking at things. If you measure everything in dollar terms, obligation is bad, therefore irresponsibility is good; spending is bad, therefore not spending is good.

Republicans, believing what corporate lobbyists tell them, assess problems in dollar terms too. If you spend a lot of money on a problem it’s a big problem. If you spend no money on a problem it’s not a problem at all. They choose the second approach. Problems which no money is spent on don’t exist. Poor and sick people die more quickly, quietly and (above all) more cheaply if you limit their access to healthcare. If you can use their health problems to extract maximum profits out of them that’s not a problem either, that’s a good thing. But obligation to heal people is expensive and therefore a problem.

Food benefits to poor people are a relatively small part of government spending but if you don’t know any poor people it seems like an easy item to cut when you’re trying to maximize tax benefits to your wealthy contributors and the people you golf with. From where the average Republican lives you hardly notice children going hungry. If it causes them to do poorly in school you can tell yourself it’s their moral failure. If they have to work three minimum wage jobs to feed their kids you can say that is a measure of high morality. By refusing to give them a food subsidy you are doing them a favor by making them better people. They're setting a better example for the children they are never home to see or interact with.

The effectiveness of anti-poverty spending isn’t measured in the same way on the Republican side. It’s not effective if it helps poor people because the good done by spending is not measured by the Republican accountant unless that money is spent in an upward direction. Money spent on people down the income scale is measured as a negative, the way accountants measure employee pay and benefits. The good we do in life almost always subtracts from profits.


Meanwhile, in Kansas, the capitalist utopia, where corporate tax cuts bloom like sunflowers and there are no public needs because there is no money to spend on public needs… a governor is hurting. Poor pitiful him. (The whole sad story is in the Kansas City Star.)

Brownback isn't the only example of Republican nuttiness. There's Dan Burton, former Republican senator from Indiana, now a lobbyist for bogus science and cult worship. (Reported in Forbes.)


The Republican Right seems to be certifiably insane. It believes the best way to fiscal responsibility is to cut taxes. The best way to make a fair society is to make sure all tax liability falls on people who work 9-5 jobs. And the best way to handle healthcare is to make sure it’s unaffordable for sick people and poor people so they die more quickly, cheaply and quietly.

And the best medicine apparently isn’t the kind pioneered by Pasteur and Salk and the other lifesaving scientists who delivered us from mass epidemics. Republicans used to be a practical and sensible lot. A bit stodgy and stingy but sound. Now they are represented by fruitcakes and sociopaths and hypocrites. A sad end to the once progressive party of Lincoln and T.R.

Inequality Is Bad For Us

In scientific tests animals reject inequality. So do children. Why do adults keep silent on it?

Maybe because the beneficiaries of inequality punish criticism. In grade school, teachers reward fairness. In the real world the controllers of income and markets reject fairness because they can get away with it, and they suppress dissent (as shown in this National Journal piece). They get away with it because they hold power. They hold us hostage because they have the money.

Joseph Stiglitz, one of our great Nobel Prize winning economists, says inequality is holding back our economic recovery. (Here's his piece in the NYTimes.)

Paul Krugman, our other Nobel economist, also liberal, doesn't disagree exactly but he doesn't see how Stiglitz's argument works out.

This is how liberal economists are different than conservative ones: they are skeptics. They demand you show them the math, which is not true of the economists who gave us the economic collapse.

Just ask Glenn Hubbard. (This Rolling Stone article does a good job dissecting his conflicts of interest.) He was one of the midwives of the economic crisis. He built the car that drove us over the cliff. He was a Bush economist while he was also earning money rationalizing what the large financial institutions were doing that caused the crisis. (Watch the documentary Inside Job if you want to see Hubbard talk himself into a corner.)

Closed systems that self-justify tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, and they do this because no matter what mistakes they make the people who run them find ways to keep their money and their power.

Krugman has a neat seven minute tutorial on inequality that's worth watching.

Inequality is not natural, it is not common sense, it is not good for us. It is, however, good for the people who keep telling us it's natural, sensible and good. Ask yourself this, what kind of a businessman works to impoverish his customers? That is what Reaganomics has done over the past three decades. The engine of any strong economy turns out to be workers who earn a good living. See Krugman's video above.

But now even conservative economic journals like the Economist are beginning to see the damage inequality does. For one thing it insulates the rich from negative consequences and healthy skepticism. It also is just bad economics on a fundamental level, never mind what economic yes-men say to their wealthy clients.

Inequality, I'm speaking of vast inequality like we have today, isn't fair, isn't inevitable, isn't natural, isn't sensible, and isn't a good thing. It's holding us back. It's even holding back the rich who think it benefits them. What would happen if our politicians understood this?

Republicans and The Greater Fool

I didn't realize that pretending to be charitable could save a person millions of dollars in taxes every year. But it's worked for Romney. He can promise to give to charity and take the deduction and then not give as much or at all, as this article in Bloomberg News explains.

Fuzzy Math? Voodoo Economics? Flim-Flam? Senate Republicans prove that math that you refuse to look at doesn't actually exist. At what point can you prosecute a political party for covering up the truth? Or for lying? There's a non-partisan report that shows clearly that cutting tax on the very rich doesn't help the economy at all. No wonder they're hiding it.

Information is power. Hiding it gives power to the powerful, who tend to be Republicans and their clients. Republicans prefer the public didn't listen to Nobel Prize economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Listen anyway. Make them mad. And vote accordingly.

There is a weird consistency to Republican thought (if I can call it that.) They prefer Americans believe bad science and non-science rather than the best science. They want Americans to ignore what NASA and our top atmospheric scientists have been saying about climate change. They want us to ignore the evidence of Hurricane Sandy. Republicans persist in trusting numbers that don't add up, plans that their candidate won't show, voodoo economic policies that failed disastrously during the Bush years.

There is, in economics, something called the "Greater Fool Theory", which says that you can always sell a product, no matter how bogus, no matter how foul and dangerous, simply by finding someone more foolish than you are, or more ill-informed or gullible, to buy it. To increase the number of greater fools you can also lie.

(As Romney is doing in Ohio and Michigan right now with his ads falsely claiming Obama somehow forced Jeep to send American jobs to China. Obama saved Jeep and Jeep is increasing its hiring in Ohio and Michigan.)

What Has Reaganomics Done For You?

Today's must-read is from Mother Jones.

Look at the graphs and read the data and ask yourself: "What has Reaganomics done for me?"

Better still: "What has Reaganomics done TO me? To my neighbors? To my neighborhood? To my kids' schools? To our family budget?"

To all of us...

Big Lies

Two and a half years later we continue to hear Obama being blamed for the big deficit. Deficits are inevitable during recessions, but Obama didn't create the famous 1.3 Trillion dollar deficit of 2009. Bush created it, as the ultra conservative Cato Institute points out.

Honesty has never inconvenienced FoxNews though. If there's a useful lie, repeat it, louder if possible. Eventually it will collect a consensus around it, giving it "truthiness", and it'll become what people believe is true.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

The Republicans have also learned it's useful to exhume the Founders and use them like sock puppets. (There's a good story about this in the Atlantic. They call it Zombie Economics.) Never mind that the Founders would never have said what the Republicans pretend they said. Remember, Alexander Hamilton created the National Debt to help our economy grow, and Washington used the military to enforce tax collections. It didn't end there. Our greatest presidents supported what the Republican Party opposes today, and deplored what the Republican Party now stands for. Lincoln favored Labor over Capital. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive lion who pushed worker protections and aggressively broke up the largest corporations of his time. Eisenhower opposed massive military spending. Even our bad presidents are better than the current Republican leadership: Nixon proposed universal health care and created the EPA.

Talking Back to your Tea Party Brother-In-Law

This post by economist Jared Bernstein is the smartest, most useful piece of writing I've come across this year.

Memorize it.

Send it to everyone you know.

Send it to your elected representatives, your governor, your mayor.

Send it to your newspaper. If they won't print it, send it to your alternative newspaper.

Tack it to lampposts. Leave copies where you have coffee every day.

Xerox copies and drop them from an airplane over the State Fair.

If it does nothing else, it might shut up those smug relatives who feed off the garbage on FoxNews.

It may be a hopeful sign when the economists who help Republican politicians with their math start calling the Republicans stupid and dangerous. Here's an article from the New York Times.

We are in the grip of dangerous extremists eager to trigger complete economic collapse so (at least this is the theory) Jesus will come rescue them. I doubt He will though.

What the Middle Class Loses the Upper Class Keeps

Today's must-read is a New York Times article about how the richest bankers and corporate heads are paying themselves better in this recession than they earned before they helped tank the economy and we bailed them out.

Also, Mother Jones reports on how American workers work harder and longer for less money than they earned a generation ago. Not a good thing, unless you own instead of working for a living.

The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's Republican Party newspaper, is reporting that workers who once could expect to earn more and have greater job security as they gained experience, skills and efficiency, now earn less and have less job security as they get past 40. The opposite of how it worked in Eisenhower's America.

Note that the WSJ's solution is to pour more of your earnings into Wall Street (boosting stock prices and executive bonuses and options, while skimping on the middle class "good life"). Was this negative trend part of a long range Republican plan? I don't think they achieved this by accident.

American workers have always been proud of producing more goods and services and doing so better and quicker and therefore earning more for it. It's enabled them to join the middle class, own homes, send children to college and retire comfortably. It also enabled them to be better consumers, which made a lot of businesses more prosperous. A broad prosperity is a more durable prosperity. This was the model until 1980, when the Reagan Revolution changed the formula.

The model since 1980 has been for workers to produce more goods and services better and quicker... but earn the same, or often less, for doing so. Since 1980 the prosperity of people who work and produce has not been considered prosperity at all, it's been relabeled a negative, a debit, a burden, a liability, a cost.

The wages of average workers have remained flat or declined since 1980. This was part of the Reagan Revolution too, but something a lot of people didn't realize they were voting for. This "doing down" has crossed over into the public sphere as well, where the temporary upper bracket tax cuts are sacred but the middle and working class tax cuts and benefits are negotiable and easily taken away, and now, as a finishing touch, middle class public employees are losing their rights and their job security. The job security in the public sector was something that allowed government to pay lower wages, but now security is gone too. Ironically, the savings are being shared out very narrowly to the very rich, with burdens shifted simultaneously onto the middle class.

Prosperity and security have become a narrow right, an upper class right, as was the case before the Great Depression. The real "gift" of Reaganomics is a new aristocracy and a growing servant class. The shift we are seeing is "validated" by Republican mathematics, which puts middle class prosperity in the cost column and upper class prosperity in the profit column, one bad and to be avoided, the other a sacred good to be protected. We need to change the math. It isn't fuzzy, as one Republican once said; it's actually crystal clear, but it's wrong, it's unfairly weighted, its values are skewed toward the values we revolted against in 1776. Ironically, the Republicans are using pictures from the 1950s, the broad prosperity they are destroying, to advertise the new narrower economics that benefits only their richest clients. Un-rich Republicans will receive their reward in heaven, supposedly.

Today's Must-Read from the Wall Street Journal

Today's must-read is an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by economist Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He isn't the first to dispute and disprove the Big Lie that's dominating the public conversation and shaping our national policy right now: the bogus idea that austerity creates jobs.

We've gotten to a dangerous point in our history. Our policies appear to be driven from the minority side and entirely based upon an unproven, actually a widely disproven, belief system.

The so called "genius" of unregulated markets and low taxes caused the mess we are in, so the Republicans and their massively wealthy sponsors are pushing public opinion toward doubling the bets on the bad policy. Voodoo Economics remains the Republican policy. Or call it religion.

As proved true with Iraq, Republicans don't care if something is true. They think they can make it true. In the words of the Bush White House "We create our own reality." And maybe they can make good things come true for a narrow group of very wealthy Americans.

What is happening is exactly what they said they wanted to happen. They want to kill government, our representative government. They want to kill democracy. They want to be rid of a government that can and will protect the public from pollution and poisonous products and fraud and financial collapse. These things don't bother them. Often they profit from them.

Are they willing to kill the government that builds roads and bridges and educates our children? Apparently yes. They look to a different future. They are taking their tax cuts and investing them in China and Indonesia and India, not here. They are guessing that poorly educated Americans will be more eager to do as they're told, and will work for much less. That is the Republican future.

It's a bold plan, but it isn't what anyone voted for. The only logical reason to shrink government spending at a time when business is flat is to depress the economy to make Obama unpopular and get a Republican president in 2012. So killing jobs is a good thing, for them. A flat economy is a good thing, for them. The Republican client list is holding trillions and is happy to wait another year and a half for the economy to get better.

Bubble Economics (Whose Bubble Was It?)

I read an excellent piece about bubble economics by Jonah Lehrer in Wired, received via BigThink.

A couple of aspects of bubble dynamics that aren't part of the public discussion, or are discussed too little (more about the why below):

1. Narrower concentration of larger and larger pools of investable wealth (investable = excess wealth beyond necessary living costs) creates greater instability, as was proven during the volatile "gilded age" prior to the creation of correcting regulations and moderating bodies under both Roosevelts and other presidents. Narrower competing investor groups tend to see-saw markets more quickly and pit too much investable capital against too few plausible investments.

2. Bubbles are bound to emerge when there is a rush to scoop up limited plausible investments, and plausible investments are bound to be fewer when the consumer market is relatively impoverished or has a weaker growth of income per rising necessary costs, as occurred post 1980.

3. Consumer incomes will reach a critical point when their income is rising more slowly than necessary costs (food, fuel, housing, education, healthcare). That critical point was delayed but made more critical by access to credit, and the cynical manipulation of that credit.

4. When the worker/consumer economy flags and there is no effort to counter that weakness, what does the investment class do? Does it take its enormous income rises and tax cuts and invest in goods and services (jobs) here in the U.S.? No. They have every motivation to hold (as they are now holding trillions) and wait for further depression of wages; they will also hold rather than invest in production where demand is slack. They will instead invest in other markets, like Asia and South America, which is what is happening now. (It's ironic how they manage to do so while wrapping themselves in the flag.)

5. Is it fair to call this recent bubble a middle class housing bubble? I don't think so. It didn't burst; it deflated. Promised prosperity stopped materializing. The middle class and working class economy stopped getting air in the form of wage and income rises. Wages and incomes ceased to be robust enough to enlarge the economy. Housing costs continued to rise based upon demand (partly demand for credit access and the added usefulness of real estate as collateral), based upon expectations workers were fed, empty cheerleading by economists about an economy the working class had been shut out of. Bubbles are filled by excess income. The working and middle classes have had lagging incomes for thirty years, so it wasn't their bubble.

6. I think another critical point was reached when baby boomers began shifting retirement savings out of equity markets into treasuries and other safer or more arcane securities (gold, real estate, newer magical financial instruments).

7. Lehrer's description of herd behavior is apt. What I don't hear discussed is the basic counterbalancing role of government, to invest and regulate countercyclically. A more apt analogy than tulips and fads would be the familiar model of the overloaded Indonesian ferryboat, where the near swamping on one side will cause a sudden and catastrophic rush to the opposite side of the vessel and a rapid capsizing. Economies need large institutions with no profit motive or profit requirement to act countercyclically. IN A RECESSION THE LAST THING YOU WANT GOVERNMENT TO DO IS SPEND LESS. Everyone else is spending less. To get out of recession government needs to counter that natural thrift instinct and spend more. I hear no one saying this. I hear no one speaking about the key countercyclical responsibility of government. In a healthy economy public and private institutions would know that role and fill it.

8. I can only assume that the guiding motive of the powers on Wall Street who are controlling the American economy isn't to right the economy and keep it seaworthy; it's to jettison more people, to swamp more lives, to lower wages, to panic small investors out and purchase their holdings cheap, too offload American capital and invest it elsewhere. (Borrowing a scenario from Germany in the 1930s, to invite the oppressed to sell their goods to their captors dead cheap. Where they are going they won't need their things.) I think the Republicans and their clients have exactly the economy they wanted. They are safe and dry and they find it easier to deal with other parties who are treading water.

I notice this. I don't read it being reported. I don't hear it being discussed. I write about this. But who am I? I am not an economist. I am a writer. Economists know which side their bread is buttered on. Controlling the incomes of a mandarin class allows concentrated wealth to shape the public mind and the public conversation how they like.

The Premeditated Murder of the American Middle Class

This headline isn't from a lefty blogger, it's from Investors' Business Daily:

10-Year Real Wage Gains Worse Than During Depression.

Did you wonder how the American economy went bad? Look no further. The vast majority of Americans are nervous, underpaid, and either out of work or working harder than ever. This does not make for a robust consumer economy. When you starve the majority of incomes it has consequences.

The middle class isn't just done, it's been ruled irrelevant. So says Advertising Age. With flat incomes and rising necessary expenses on fuel, housing, education, healthcare and food, their disposable incomes have disappeared. Without money to spend you don't matter anymore.

The engine of the great American prosperity 1945-1975 was a prosperous working and middle class. The two were practically the same thing. Reaganomics ended that by flattening middle class incomes, killing unions and shifting the tax burden off the rich and onto the middle class taxpayer. Reagan accomplished this with the willing help of millions of American workers.

Today's GOP is outdoing Reagan, though, mounting an all-out assault on the American middle class, while protecting the very small, very rich upper class. A lot of Americans still vote Republican out of habit, out of team spirit, out of obedience to the dog whistle.

The middle class Republican has to swallow a lot of outright lies. Self deception is something you learn to do, and if you practice for a long time you get good at it. Being obedient helps. This GOP ability to lie and get away with it is remarkable enough it's written about in places like Forbes.

Who is really paying taxes? We (the working and middle classes) are. They (the rich) are not. Yet the sacredness of upper class tax cuts remains the keystone of Republican politics.

The reason for the current deficit? Reducing taxes on those who've taken all the income increases over the past generation and a half, while increasing taxes on those whose incomes have stalled–––on most Americans. The Republican policy is to protect and help the few who need no help or protection while leaving the less fortunate, most of us, unprotected and unhelped. Sometimes it's worthwhile to listen to a Nobel economist.

The debt, run up by Bush and compounded by the collapse Bush and his Republican policies precipitated, makes the current situation worse. It takes chutzpah to make debt an issue when your own party created it. If you like massive debt––Vote Republican.

Who is Happy With This Economy?

Do you ever wonder if the Republicans actually want the economy to fail? There's been a lot of conversation about it. The signs are pretty clear. But the media are too polite to bring that discussion into the open. Here are a few links. Not much pops up in newspapers or television news.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/playing_a_game_of_chicken_with029667.php

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79739/washington-gop-opposition-quantitative-easing

http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-being-grilled-about-muni-debt-because-republicans-want-the-states-to-collapse-2011-1

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/01/the-failure-caucus.html

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/06/24/republicans_want_america_to_fail

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/block-heads-by-digby-so-republicans-are.html

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/02/dire_news.php

http://gawker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy#!5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy

When they are honest Republicans actually say it themselves:

Another economic meltdown would do Republicans a lot of good.

An economy that doesn't recover (except for the very very rich) hurts Obama's chances of re-election.

It would spread the blame for the collapse of 2008 and make the Bush administration look less inept.

Republican clients like having an insecure, underpaid workforce that's grateful to work for less.

Republican clients are doing fine. They were bailed out. Their stocks (which many of them scooped up at the bottom of the market) rebounded. They paid themselves bonuses for this. And the less for us, the more for them. What working people don't earn, the rich get to keep. It's called a Plutonomy.

I love how the Wall Street Journal equates lavish personal spending and heavy lifting. (Some of their spending is lavished on shapers of public opinion.)

A weaker economy makes tax revenues drop. Republican clients want lower revenues because a weaker government can't regulate them.

(Just as an aside, here are some suggestions for the anti-government crowd, to help them avoid hypocrisy. A little list of the things they should do without.)

Thing is, the Republicans want government NOT to work. Democracy is a nuisance. They want to get elected to government... so they can make it NOT work.

They (in the famous words of Grover Norquist) want to drown our form of representative government in the bathtub. Goodbye democracy.

To help kill our government they are happy to run up an enormous debt and not pay for it.

And in the interests of putting fewer, richer people in charge, they'd like it if fewer people voted. They'd like a small elite deciding what a vast uninformed and poorly paid population does.

Are you following this so far?

A government that can't function is less popular with average people. This is the Republican goal. When government doesn't have the funds to function properly it makes people mad, not at the Republicans who made it not work, but at government itself, which has always been reliable. It helps to have a public that doesn't pay attention or is easily misled.

Republicans like it when government doesn't work. They've been saying this for decades. They've finally delivered and this is what we are experiencing every time we hit a pothole, every time class sizes increase, every time our tuition rates go up. Wait till our fire departments can't get to us. Wait till the government can't respond to the next flood or the next wave of violent storms. Wait till the government can't shore up the financial system or starts selling the national parks.

This bad economy can't support a decent, functioning government, and that is exactly what the Republicans want.

Ronald Reagan and Zombies

I think it was Yogi Berra who said "You see interesting things by looking."

Imagine Ronald Reagan and Zombies.

Nick Coleman had something relevant to say. When doesn't he have something relevant to say? I guess that's why the Strib let him go.

For the deciders of the Republican party it's about making rich people richer and tax-free.

They get there by serving up hatreds and worries to their hysterical, gullible base.

This Lousy Economy, brought to you by Friedman, Greenspan and Reagan

For those of you standing outside the pay window like hungry people outside a Parisian restaurant, here's Krugman's report card on the geniuses and "visionaries" of the Milton Friedman/Alan Greenspan crowd. He gives them an F. So why are we still doing what they tell us?

Read Krugman.

Do everybody a favor and post this to Facebook. Krugman didn't get a Nobel Prize for nothing. He's the most rational and important voice on economic issues today, and he happens to be right. The problem is the guys who screwed the economy still own the microphones.