Seriously, though, the GOP has been claiming that reducing spending (mixed with, what, Unicorn farts?) would bring the economy back around for months now. Why the shift? Oh, right, because cutting spending has done the exact opposite. It is, like, actual economics or something.

Normally it is just one side of the debate that insists on being ignorant of economics and history, and, when the idiotic side wins, everyone can look back and say “boy, what were we thinking. Those other guys were right the whole time!”

Well, we had that chance in 2008, but we elected a Democrat as President who seems not to have learned anything from the disaster that was 2000-2008. Nope. He’s just piling on.

Do you remember the collective exhale we enjoyed back in November 2008? That was premature. We’re still on the same carnival ride (to hell).

We had a chance to whip out the public credit card and put the economy back on a sane footing, but we’re going to bury it instead. We had a chance to say “unregulated banking and finance leads to disaster after disaster that we end up having to pay for (and the malefactors always walk away rich)”, but that ain’t gonna happen. We had a chance to enforce the rule of law, but someone (hint: his initials are Barack Hussein Obama) didn’t wan’t to seem ‘petty’. Etc.

We are, I’m sorry to say, fucked.

The oligarchs have captured the system, and they’re not gonna want to give it up anytime soon.

They think that history will somehow prove them to be prescient. They think that the Democratic party’s approach to economic problems will leave the US in a ditch (and that the voters will blame the Democrats for getting us there).

The problem they are going to have with that is that their economic ‘plan’ is a dishonest one, and only works politically, not economically. They claim that cutting taxes and spending lead to a great America, but history (and textbook economics) disagrees.

We’re in a ditch now because Reagan’s Big Ideas (which Reagan was lucky and/or smart enough not to force into law) were actually forced into law by George W. Bush. And here we are.

If we can, now, increase spending enough to get the economy going again, we will, later, be in a position to balance the books and get on with things.

(Which, historically, is when the Republicans will come back and screw everything up again.)

The gist of what McConnell is saying: ‘We [Republicans] can’t get you to see this our way, so you can have your stupid debt ceiling raised. But we’re warning you: you’ll have to face the consequences!’

The funny part is that they think government spending is actually the problem, and that if America doesn’t control spending right now, everything is going to go to hell — and that voters will blame the Democrats.

The reality is that reducing government spending right now will only make things worse. They are actually just saving themselves from ending up holding the bag on that possible extremely likely disaster.

This could end up OK, which wasn’t my predicted outcome as recently as, oh, lunchtime today.

Josh Marshall sums it up nicely:

At the end of the day though, McConnell’s “evil genius” move seems like all it does is make the Democrats go to the public with what they believe is best for the country and be accountable for it. I have a hard time seeing that as being a meaningful threat. Since that’s what people who are given the power to govern are supposed to do.

UPDATE: Apparently it was the Democrats who were holding the debt ceiling hostage. Who knew? Seriously, if you hear this meme getting any traction in the media-sphere, immediately cross the person pushing it off of your list of credible sources.

Now we’ve learned that there is a third reason that the $2 trillion gambit is ridiculous: They haven’t found $2 trillion to cut. It’s just a made-up number. If they had an actual plan, we could ask them: “OK, which things are we going to cut to get $2 trillion out of the budget?” They don’t have an actual plan.

Fuckers.

Today, I cleaned the bathroom and got through about 3.72% of The Third Reich at War. I’m proud of the fact that I read Richard Evans’ two previous books, but that dude freaking wrote them, and that while, probably, cleaning his own bathroom now and again, and then wrote the third volume.

Read more books, y’all. It is, literally, the least you can do. If you’re ambitious, write one (or two or three).

I am a voter, and, theoretically, my vote matters. Practically, and currently, my vote doesn’t seem to matter anymore. This is depressing.

The thinking (arguably naïve on my part, I realize) behind not voting would be that another politician might come along and notice that there were voters out there who could be drawn back into the process by a more credibly liberal politician. (Obama did well with this group back when he was credibly liberal, and that turned out pretty well for him.)

My actual expectation is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will spend eleventy billion dollars that will do a lot more to determine the outcome of the next election than my pathetic principles.

Sad.

(This was originally written as a comment on a Nate Silver blog post. I don’t know if nytimes.com approved it)

Obama’s plan to reduce the FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) contribution.

This is money that is separate from your income tax and is the money that is intended to pay for your Social Security benefits.

Republicans have a long history of hating Social Security and hoping that it would go away. One of their favorite tactics is to publicly complain that the FICA money isn’t enough to cover the benefits, and that Social Security has to change to stay viable. (One of the reasons the FICA money is always in trouble is that Republicans have a long history of raiding it to pay for things they like, like tax cuts.)

Funnily enough, most Republican plans to ‘fix’ Social Security would end up compromising the whole enterprise, which would probably lead to it being curtailed or scrapped.

Now President Obama has this neat-o idea to lower all of our FICA contributions enough to allow most Americans to bank an extra $1-2,000 in 2011. With this additional spending the economy, supposedly, would be all better and we could put FICA back where it was.

This is naïve. Ridiculously naïve. The end of 2011 will roll around and the economy, no matter how much it does improve, will be presented as too weak to be able to survive a FICA ‘tax hike’, and there will be a lot of pressure (from cynical politicians and their usual enablers, mostly) to make the cuts permanent.

And then the Social Security ‘lock box’ (as it was memorably called by the last politician to talk sense about Social Security to Americans — over 10 years ago) will run out of money, and the Republicans will get their wish.

Please, Mr. President, drop this cockamamie idea. Don’t hurt America.

PS – There isn’t a single thing in the rest of the plan I would fight for (even my own tax cut), and plenty of things besides this FICA nonsense that I would actively fight against.

What is the power of the internet? (Broadly, and, perhaps, less obviously): The ability to collect (‘capture’) information from people who, for the most part, don’t realize that by adding information to other information (technically: meta-data), they are adding value to the Internet.

The neat thing about this is that people who use the Internet (at least nowadays) don’t realize how much meta-data they add to the Internet just by using it.

Google realized this (or some form of this) a long time ago. Amazon did too, but almost by accident (they thought, at first, that they were just selling stuff).

Facebook succeeded in being popular when being popular was the whole point, and are now realizing that capturing all the data and meta-data that their users are entering (for free!) is the thing to do.

Jimmy Wales, as odd a fish as he may be, may be saving the Internet from over-commercialization by hosting the ultimate user-entered meta-data collection site out there: Wikipedia. Amazon, Google and Facebook are collecting users and information furiously, but I have a feeling that they are in it for (warning: Shocker!) the money.

Take a look at one of your pay-stubs if you don’t believe me. Them’r separate deductions.

I only bring this up because were entering an era (hopefully brief) where some politicians [cough-republicans-cough] will try and tell you that Social Security and Medicare have to be ‘fixed’ in order to save the general budget.

The people who set up Social Security and Medicare anticipated this line of ‘reasoning’ and built in an answer to it when they launched these programs: they funded them separately from the general budget.

The politicians who want to ‘reform’ Social Security are actually trying to hide the fact that in the past they (and their ideological predecessors) have used money that was meant to fund Social Security to hide their deficit-busting spending and tax cuts. Rather than make good on all the I.O.U.s they took out, they want to make Social Security just go away (and they want those I.O.U.s to evaporate too).

Take another look at that pay-stub, and think about this: your contributions to Social Security and Medicare aren’t part of your regular taxes. Meaning: all your deductions and all that work you put into your 1040 form don’t make one bit of difference to what you pay into those funds. Back when you were a part-time dishwasher making less than enough to pay the rent, you got pretty much all of your regular taxes back (because you were, basically, poor), but the money you paid into Social Security and Medicare didn’t come back to you when you filed; it went into those funds.

There are politicians out there who want to take all of that money away. Watch out for those fuckers.

I have a feeling that NPR probably had an intern reviewing all of his public statements, and were waiting for him to go that last millimeter too far. I figure that it took this long because, in his usual smarmy way, Williams would always very carefully hedge his nonsense.

Smarmy hedging and inside-the-beltway ‘common wisdom’ will, sadly, still have a place on NPR, but this is a step in the right direction. Thanks, guys.

Small update: It seems as though most of the other high-paid (or over-paid, rather) inside-the-beltway talking heads are tut-tutting Williams’ firing. Well, fuck them too. I am sick of so many of these people attempting to hide their upper-upper-middle-class authoritarian biases behind annoying (and usually unbalanced) on-one-hand/on-the-other-hand-isms.

Wordiness is a problem for one white woman who spoke to researchers about NPR: “I think it can be clever and quirky, and smart and insightful. But I don’t choose to listen to it because it’s too much talking for me.

… is anything to go by, then I think that NPR would be better off just keeping the listeners they have.

It is simple. Give the on-field officials one more, er, official hand gesture: ‘go to the video’ (Cricket, a game that has been played since the early 16th freakin’ century, has an easy one: The Ump draws a box in the air above his or her head with his or her fingers).

If the video official can tell what happened, the result is reported to the field. If not, some sort of signal is sent to the field and the field official uses whatever judgement he or she has and makes a call.

This gives the official on the field an out when they aren’t certain what just happened, but leaves the judgement calls on the field. And it could happen really fast.

The idea behind capitalism, as a system, is that people with money available to invest in things actually invest in things that will make these wealthy people more money. A side benefit of this system is that these relatively wealthy people have to hire less wealthy people to put their various schemes in motion. This ‘side benefit’ really is a side benefit — if wealthy people could make money without paying any wages, they’d take that option every time. Or not, maybe, but they have done so every time they’ve gotten the chance.

If money itself was a real thing that had real value, this system wouldn’t work very well, but, happily, we have a kind of money that has a shifting value. Typically, when the system we have adopted works correctly, that value actually goes down a little every year. Yup, inflation. What this does for us is make wealthy people worry that if their money isn’t ‘working’ for them, it’ll eventually go down in value and be lost.

Side note: The inflation that helped European countries discover and develop capitalism wasn’t our modern, government-controlled-bank-controlled inflation system, they got their inflation from Mexico via Spain in the form of newly-mined Potosí silver. An historical accident, really. Anyway:

This means that people with cash laying around will try to invest it in things that return more than inflation will take away. Putting that money into a savings account (remember them?) made it available to that bank to loan to somebody who would pay back a little more than the bank would pay you in interest. The guy who borrowed your savings deposit would try and use the loan money to put himself in a position to pay back the loan and still make a little more. Another option was to skip the bank and invest directly in the dude (or gal) who had some money-making idea. That’s a simple way of describing the stock market.

Another side note: A lot of bank loans went to working folks who wanted (or needed) cars and/or homes for their own use. These borrowers were just betting that they were good for the money, and that having a car or a home was desirable; the effect is the same: someone got paid to make a car or part with a home, and the bank made a little more than they paid you for saving with them.

In any event, this whole system was kept going by the idea that money that sits around just goes down in real value, so people with money kept putting it back into the system hoping to stay ahead. So we had a situation where money sought out opportunity. Most of those opportunities involved people earning wages, which is money, so everything kept moving.

This turned out to be a pretty good system, all-in-all, and, arguably, a much better system than communism. (What as, to simplify, communism tried to take ambition out of the equation — with the results history has demonstrated.) Until…

Until

Inflation gets taken out.

Oopsie. Without inflation to worry about, money looks like a great thing to, er, invest in. When inflation goes away, cash is an awesome thing to have in your portfolio. Why invest your money (and risk losing some of it — always a risk even when the system is working correctly) when it’ll be worth just as much tomorrow as it was worth today? Or, maybe, even more?

That’s pretty much where we are today, sadly. A lot of banks have plenty of money (thanks, in many cases, to the fact that they were ‘rescued’), but they’d be stupid to put it into anything risky. There are also individuals who have money — lucky them — who are quite happy to hang on to it.

Where does that leave us?

Snide version: Depends on who ‘us’ is.

Thoughtful version: It leaves us wondering when inflation will come back and money will start flowing into the economy that we rely on.

OK, then, how might (a little) inflation get put back into the system? (A teensy, teensy bit of inflation, I promise.)

The banks can coast indefinitely on their (now healthy) reserves, so until something else comes along to change things, they’re gonna sit on whatever cash they can accumulate.

Yet another side note: Right now, the banks can get cash from the Federal Reserve for, well, pretty much for free. The banks love this cheap cash when cash is so awesome. The Fed is making this cash available in the hopes that the banks will put it into the economy. Good luck with that, Fed.

The government could print more money, right? That would cause inflation, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, but we have a grown-up economic system. The ‘let’s just print money’ thing does appear to add to inflation, but it really just multiplies inflation. Germany and Zimbabwe have both done it in living memory, but they did it to pay bills they couldn’t borrow to cover. They would have borrowed if they could have, but their economies were too messed up. This, in both cases, led to what is called hyper-inflation, which made their money worse than ‘variable’ in value, it made it worthless.

What the United States government is in a position to do is exactly what Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany couldn’t do: borrow.

Just like the potential home- or car-buyer mentioned previously, the U.S. government can tell potential lenders “I’m good for it, I’ll sign right now.”

Our government can get cash, right now, at less than 3%. Being the government (as opposed to a bank), it doesn’t need cash to sit on, it needs cash to invest. If it can get the economy growing again, it’ll have the income to pay back the loan. Just like some person who wants to buy, oh, a hot-dog cart, the U.S. government can say “when I have this cart, I’ll be able to pay you back.”

Here’s the cool bit: Once the government jumps in and starts borrowing (and spending) money, inflation will come back. It doesn’t even matter what the government spends money on. (WWII worked great for this, and WWII isn’t much remembered as terribly productive. Important, Noble, even, but WWII mostly blew shit up.) Once inflation comes back, private money (the money the banks and wealthy people have) will go back into the economy again.

It gets better. Timed right, the government can jump back out of the borrowing market before rates go up much and let the private money take over. That should leave the economy growing faster than the 3% the government can borrow at today.

Which means:

Our government could pay back all the loans with less money than it borrowed. And save the economy, which is to say “the capitalist system”.

So, you are advocating for increasing the deficit?

Yup. Deficit spending is the only tool we have to keep capitalism alive, and capitalism is the best system we have right now.

Rand Paul is a self-identified libertarian, and has, now, exposed some of the problems I have always had with libertarians. Chiefly, the libertarian idea that the occult hand of the market will correct errors — any kind of errors.

The spot where young Dr. Paul has gotten into trouble lately is on civil rights legislation; he has given the impression that he feels that having the government step in and tell business owners that they can’t refuse service to customers based on, oh, whatever, is wrong and that the market will punish said business owners perfectly adequately.

He seems to think that having the government telling business owners that black people have to be treated like, er, people is redundant, what as these businesses will go out of business if their business practices are, what? Unsound?

Seriously, WTF? Has this motherfucker ever been to Mississippi?

I’m annoyed that an eHarmony.com ad made a big deal about intellect being one of 29 things that they match people up by. Seriously? Intellect and 28 other things? Um. Fuck eHarmony.com.

How about Intellect and then twenty-eight other, less important things. That may or may not matter. Stupid eHarmony.com.

Priceless.

The whole thing is available online from PBS here.

What should people call the non-RINO Republicans? Well, according to my friend Mark Best, the answer is:

BLOND PIGs

Bullies, Liars, Obstructionists and Nuts Driving the Party Into the Grave.

Nicely done, says I.

Um, fuck that. Seriously, fuck that.

The following appears in all-caps for emphasis:

THE TRUTH IS NEVER A DISTRACTION. IT IS WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PAYING ATTENTION TO.

Realism might return when, what should we call it? False-ism? is exposed.

People like me will be happy to put the Bush administration policies behind us only when they are exposed, punished if that is required, and explicitly disavowed by the current administration if they are found to be illegal, immoral, dishonest, or stupid. Or all four. Until then, they need to be paid attention to.