State of the Union

I'm really really trying to watch and listen to the SOTU tonight, but it's so hard to do. Last administration I thought I just hated listening to GW Bush talk (which I did).  But now I realize that it's just hard to sit through political speeches in general.  Maybe it's just me, but I don't find political speeches exciting or inspiring- I'm much more a creature of the written word.

But as to the content: more of what we've learned to expect from Obama; playing the role of the Reasonable Adult in a room full of squabbling children.  And I guess that's appropriate for SOTU, which isn't a time for Fire and Brimstone.  I just hope that comes later when he hits the road.  I was glad to hear the push to end the tax cuts eventually.  I was less glad to hear about freezing government spending, as I think that just cedes too much ground to Republicans right now.

But it's so hard to listen to, that I couldn't pay full attention.  Got my checkbook balanced, though!!

Our Idiotic Punditry

I was talking with a colleague at work today about the Arizona shooter.  Both my colleague (PT) and I are mental health professionals with lots of experience with quite mentally ill people.  PT noted that he had seen some television pundits on the air talking about mental illness and what could have or should have been done with Jared Loughner and might have stopped the shooting.

First of all, under current mental health law and practice, being psychotic isn't enough to get someone locked up involuntarily.  A person has to be a danger to self or others, or so impaired that he/she can not take care of him/herself (that's the wording in my state, but I believe they're all similar).  Loughner was acting strangely, but not dangerously; yet talking heads that PT saw were claiming someone should have seen the signs and locked up this guy.  Of course those of us who work in psychiatric settings know that even if an ill person is locked up and medicated properly, there's nothing to stop him from discontinuing his medication as soon as he gets out, and the cycle repeats.  We see it all the time.

So the pundits (whom I didn't see- don't know who), generic TV talking heads, have no idea what they're talking about, as anyone who has worked in mental health could have told them.  That doesn't stop them from spouting off, of course.

But I want to make a larger point about TV punditry.  They don't know much about anything. Except politics and media.  And when I say politics, I mean it very narrowly: they understand how Democrats and Republicans frame arguments and play the games of electoral politics.  But they don't know much about policy.  That's why it's so hard to find out by watching television anything factual about something like the Affordable Care Act.  Since the media only uses their tired formula- "he said, she said", they allow one side to frame the debate with lies or distortions if they so choose.  With health care, that side is the Right of course, but the Left can just as easily benefit.

And the pundits can't really cut through the crap because most of them don't understand or try to understand the intricacies of policies.  They're not wonks, and they're proud of it.

So for all the mainstream media's heckling of basement-dwelling bloggers, the internet is really the place to go to get policy facts and actually learn something about the policies that affect us every day.  Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Chait and Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman actually know something about policy, not just about politics.  I don't know nearly as much as any of them (hey I only do this in my spare time!), but I think I know a lot more about health care policy than Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, and James Carville.  And it shouldn't be that way- those guys should be learning about policy and telling us about it, but they don't.

A Note About this Blog (posted by DT)

Well, my former partner in crime, AS, has faded from view here on this section of the intertubes, and I have decided to try to soldier on alone.  Hopefully he'll comment from time to time, but for now I have obtained full control of this little kingdom.

Shooting in Arizona (posted by DT)

I know you're all dying for my thoughts about the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona the other day.

I don't think that the actions of one quite crazy man can be pinned on the "political discourse". Republican hyperbole about health care in particular is indeed reprehensible, but this guy doesn't seem to be acting in reaction to any of that- his political views were, one might say, quite quirky.

But the issue that comes up for me is that it's so easy to buy a semi-automatic gun that any lunatic can get one- legally! I know Gun Control is a lost cause in the USA, and yes it's true that criminals are going to find a way to get a gun no matter the laws, but this shooter is just the kind of guy who might not know where to find one so easily the day he decides to make a name for himself. There should be many more controls on gun purchases- too bad nobody who lives more than 100 miles from an ocean agrees with me.

Income Inequality (posted by DT)

So I read that the rich are comparitively richer compared to the middle class than ever before:

The richest 1% of U.S. households had a net worth 225 times greater than
that of the average American household in 2009, according to analysis conducted
by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. That's up from the
previous record of 190 times greater, which was set in 2004.

So this is what I don't understand: why are the wealthy and their conservative shills so upset about the tax code and what Democrats are doing to them? They're winning the policy war! And they act like they're losing it.

The right wing machine is so good at politics and so focused, that they can keep liberals on the defensive even in the face of every fact. How do they do it???

(source: http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/23/pf/rich_wealth_gap/index.htm)

The Argument for Keynes and Deficit Spending (posted by DT)

I had some exciting email correspondence with my conservative group on the topic of Keynes and whether recent events have proved him wrong or right. Here's an edited version of my argument. I'm not very good with the layout on this site, so the graphs are at the top instead of where I want them- sorry!

I keep hearing how Keynesian economics is dead from those who don't seem to understand it. But the history of the last 80 years is great evidence that Keynes was right, that governments should run deficits during recessions and stimulate the economy. Let's start with the Great Depression. See the second graph above, with GDP charted during the period.

As you can see, FDR took office in 1933 when the Depression was at its nadir. He started Keynesian deficit spending and voila!, the economy started recovering. But there was a second recession in 1937-38; did government overspending cause it? Let's look at the federal deficit during the depression- see the top chart for when the feds were using deficit spending.

Notice that the deficit goes way up starting in 1932 (I guess Hoover gets some credit too! I didn't know that), and then dips severely starting in 1936, just in time for the next recession. Then it goes through the roof for WW II (in fact that peak is WAY higher than the current deficit), and yet the economy came roaring back.

So the Depression is a perfect example of how deficit spending helps an economy in recession.

How about since then? Well, recessions after 1945 have been much shorter in duration (on average) than recessions were before that time- recessions starting in 1900 lasted 23, 13, 24, 23, 7, 18, 14, 13, and 43 months. The recessions after 1945 lasted 8, 11, 10, 8, 10, 11, 16, 6, 16, and 8 months (the last listed here is the early 1990s one). Why is that? Because of Keynesian spending- we learned how to deal with deficits, and so now we spend our way out of them.

I've yet to hear any other convincing explanation for these numbers. Can we please stop arguing about whether Keynes was right?

Extension of the Bush Tax Cuts (posted by DT)

I've been having and listening to a lot of arguments about the extension of the Bush tax cuts lately, and it occurs to me that to a great extent we're arguing around each other. Last night, for example, I was talking with some family members, and the argument went something like this:

Liberal: These lower tax rates for the rich are unnecessary- they
don't need it and will hardly notice an increase
Conservative: The way to create jobs is to make sure the Rich have
money, since they're the ones who create jobs.

I strikes me that these arguments could theoretically both be correct. It could be that, while the Rich don't really need a tax break, having lower taxes would still create jobs and it would therefore be worth it to keep taxes low. In fact, if both these arguments are right, then the conservative wins the argument because the goal is to get the economy moving. If both arguments are wrong, then the liberal wins, because while the Rich might be unhappy and harmed by the increase, the economy as a whole would be benefiting (or at least not be harmed) and the federal deficit would be reduced.

So let's look at the facts. What's going on now in the economy? It seems that what's happening now is that the Rich (including rich corporations and banks) have mountains of capital in hand. Corporate profits have been stratospheric this year, and companies are sitting on large amounts of cash that they're not investing. Why not? Because there's not enough demand for products, and companies are not confident that this will change soon so they don't want to risk their cash.

So would a 4% tax hike on high earners change this dynamic? I don't really see how. If the argument is that the Rich need to take home more of their money to create jobs, then that assumes that some don't have quite enough cash in hand to create them now, or that they'd invest less money if more taxes were taken. But they're not investing right now, with these historically low rates! We've now gone through nearly a decade of these lower tax rates, which coincidentally has seen the least growth of any decade in modern history.

I think that if conservatives want to make the argument that the Bush tax rates create jobs, they should at least be required to point out some evidence showing that they've done so in the past.

So what are we left with? Everyone wants his/her own taxes lowered. Conservatives are left with a moral argument that this is "my money", not "the government's", and that the government doesn't know how to spend this money as well as the magic of the Invisible Hand. Except the Invisible Hand just created a huge recession, which would have been a second Depression but for federal government spending and policies.

So I know this isn't much of a shock to read on this blog, but liberals are right and conservatives are wrong. Marginal tax rates on high earners should go back up at least to Clinton-era levels. If conservatives want to make the case for lower taxes than that, they need to show it working, and the last 10 years have proven just the opposite.