Tag Archives: economy

Livin’ Large

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The_Sims_-_Livin'_Large_CoverartIf I never hear the phrase “live within our means” in the context of the federal budget again, it will be too soon. The great myth that drives both the Village and the media narrative—a myth easy enough to buy into for a bunch of privileged goons who would still have a comfortable retirement to look forward to if Social Security evaporated entirely—is that Americans have been living large, that we’ve come to expect too much from our government.

Come to expect too much? What have we been getting? One of the worst qualities of life in the developed world, gun violence and incarceration rates that even Russia would consider ridiculous, crumbling infrastructure, expensive and inefficient profit-driven healthcare, ballooning costs for increasingly ineffective higher education… if this is living large by modern standards, the people of Northern Europe must be living on the set of Star Trek.

The truth is that America has been living large, but Americans have not, with the obvious few exceptions. We’re an empire with military force projected all over the globe, after all, and empires project their military force to gain tangible material and cultural benefits. Instead of tea and spices, of course, our main import is economic and military acquiescence, which may not sound tangible, but I assure you it has the power to make Dick Cheney rock hard. (We get the tea and spices, too, of course, but that’s a secondary perk at this point.)

Just to fill in the gaps a little, let me remind you that despite conservatives generally being big fans of hard currency, it was Nixon who finally detached the US Dollar from gold, and also add as a hint that one of Saddam Hussein’s last acts as a sovereign leader was to make some offhand comments about maybe starting to sell his oil in euros instead of dollars. America’s great imperial project, one apparently so subtle that modern gold-obsessed libertarians are too dense to notice it, has been to transform the US Dollar into the world economy’s new gold, because as the sovereign issuer of said US Dollar, that gives the US government some enormous advantages.

If these things seem rather high-level, that’s sort of the point: as Americans, we certainly benefit greatly from them—it would be grossly disingenuous to pretend that we do not—but they’re not for us. We might generally prefer the peace of mind of affordable healthcare that doesn’t constantly threaten to bankrupt us, or financial systems that don’t put us at the mercy of Mitt Romney’s colleagues, rather than the more profitable adventures in supplying terrorists and drug runners with guns so that we can later bomb them and any children who happen to be in their vicinity, but nobody cares what we prefer. At any rate, while we’re certainly in the top tier of quality of life in the world, we’re scraping against the very bottom of that tier. We know what a modern industrialized society is capable of providing for its citizens, and we’re not getting it.

So this persistent myth that we’re demanding too much of our government and living large off of it is irritating and infuriating. If the fat trimmed from America’s exorbitant lifestyle must come from our pantry rather than from our imperial playroom, we’re looking at a banana republic quality of life, because there’s not as much buffer between that and where we are now as Obama seems to imagine. My only question is this: why is it becoming conventional wisdom that we don’t have a right to expect anything better?

We can all be capitalists! and other fuckwitted ideas

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A couple weeks ago, Wonkette covered the wingnut antitruth, popular among the various faux-intellectual right-wing think tanks, that Thanksgiving is a celebration of the triumph of capitalism over socialism. As the story goes, the Pilgrims tried the whole socialism thing, nearly starved, then realized the folly of their ways and finally got their invisible hand out of their pants and got to work like good capitalists.

It’s probably obvious enough why this whole notion is fuckheaded, but you should read the article either way because it’s great. But what strikes me most about this whole revisionist history is that, as an anarcho-socialist linked to in the Wonkette piece points out, the glorious free market utopia the Pilgrims build in the wingnut tale isn’t actually capitalist.

Let’s look at the setup again: each family has its own farm and each family keeps the fruits of its labor. And that’s basically it. Now, if that sounds like capitalism to you because of all the mumble mumble bootstraps mumble mumble, ask yourself this question: who, in this scenario, are the capitalists?

Syndrome

“And when everyone’s a capitalist… no one will be.”

If you answered, “Everyone,” congratulations! That’s a really dumb answer! Such an arrangement cannot, by definition, be capitalistic. Just as you can’t be a predator without prey, and you can’t be a salesperson without a customer, you can’t be a capitalist without laborers. Capitalism is, by definition, a system wherein the means of production are owned by somebody other than the people who do the actual labor of production.

“But wait,” you might say. “Couldn’t that also describe feudalism?” Yes, yes it could. Congratulations, you’ve just spotted the man who’s been behind the curtain for the past 600 years. You know, the one who hides his uselessness by handing out worthless facades of fulfillment.

The notion that even ordinary Joes and Janes like you and me can be capitalists too is merely the latest con job used to keep the laborers from noticing that they’re being screwed. 401(k)s, the widespread availability of credit, and the push for universal home ownership are all Reaganomics-era innovations designed to give you the illusion of control over your financial life while, hilariously, actually serving as yet more vectors by which to transform you into a serf. You may also recognize these things as being major factors in the recent economic crisis.

Anyway, it’s that particular con that the narrative of Pilgrims as Noble Capitalists was designed to serve. The fact that it’s incoherent and ahistorical, not to mention the fact that you’ll never see Warren Buffet subsisting entirely on the produce of his own two hands, is irrelevant. The fact that these supposed champions of capitalism don’t even seem to understand what capitalism is is also irrelevant, because what they’re actually championing is class inequality and the suppression of labor rights. So yeah.

Give me your tired, your poor, so they can scrub toilets for $7 an hour

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Perhaps the key difference between Republicans and Democrats at the moment is that Republicans want to make America even shittier for people who aren’t rich white straight Christian males, while Democrats feel that we’re at about the right level of shittiness right here. The notion that America could perhaps be made not shitty for the majority of Americans is an idea that appears to have died sometime in the 70s. “A chicken in every pot” has transformed into “well, sorry you weren’t born rich, but we really do admire all the backbreaking work you do for less than a living wage!”

This is what passes for Democratic rhetoric in 2012:

The bad news is that as emotionally compelling as many of the speeches were tonight, the key themes almost all centered around equal access to opportunity. Over and over again, the theme was that success should be available to those who work hard. Michelle Obama celebrated her father who went to work every day despite physically devastating illness just to pay for her college education, and even took out loans to make it happen. She said that it mattered less how much you made, and more how hard you worked.
And all I could do at certain points was sigh and shake my head.

And this:

Last night at the Democratic convention, Michelle Obama defined “the very best of the American spirit” as “teachers in a near-bankrupt school district who vowed to keep teaching without pay.”

Why are we celebrating that teachers are willing to work without pay in a near-bankrupt school district, instead of questioning why a school district in a nation with a GDP of $15 trillion has been allowed to descend to the brink of bankruptcy? Why are we praising a state of affairs in which employees, with no alternatives left to them, will allow their employers to run roughshod over them? Why are megabanks deemed so essential to our country that hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money is handed to them when they nearly destroy themselves, but school districts are left floundering? And why isn’t Michelle Obama asking these questions instead of praising the teachers who are being asked to work without pay while Jamie Dimon takes home a $23 million paycheck as CEO of a bank that is posting record profits a mere five years after nearly destroying the economy?

Obama is spitting all over the Wisconsin teachers who were willing to stand up against this plutocratic arrangement—teachers who received no assistance from the national Dems even as Republican money poured in to support Governor Walker’s campaign of suppression—when she ignores them and instead praises the teachers who keep their heads down in the face of such injustice.

This is the party workers and disadvantaged people used to look to to protect their interests, and now the best they can muster for workers is, “We know you’re working longer hours for worse benefits, if you’re lucky enough to have a job at all. Keep it up!”

The real message coming from the Democrats this year is: get used to this. It’s not going to get better. And if they have their way, it certainly isn’t.

Those damn kids with their… iPods, and their… socialism… *grumble grumble*

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The more I re-read this article, the readier I am to dismiss it as just another entry in the “those damn kids” genre of editorial. (It also mentions the TV show Girls at the beginning, evidently striving to also reach out to fans of the “this recent bit of pop culture demonstrates why our society is falling apart” genre. The main thing Girls demonstrates in reality is that Hollywood still hasn’t gotten the hang of this whole “non-white people exist” thing.) I mean, they make a show of trying to be even-handed, tossing in some backhanded compliments about the Millennial generation like “they think following the model of that wave of dot-com entrepreneurship in the 90s that caused a recession is somehow a good idea” (not an exact quote), although these get a tad incoherent when put together:

3. They’re natural entrepreneurs
Call it “Generation Sell” — Millennials are less inclined to join a commune or a movement, and would rather start a small business, says William Deresiewicz at The New York Times. Brought up in the “heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship” that defined the 1990s, and distrustful of “large organizations, including government,” the Millennial views small business as “the idealized social form of our time.”

4. They’re socialists
Looks like the “right-wing cries of ‘socialist takeover!’ may be based in more than paranoia,” says Nona Willis Aronowitz at Good. Polls show that 49 percent of Millennials “view socialism in a favorable light,” compared with 43 percent who view it unfavorably. Millennials are also the generation of Occupy Wall Street, the anti-corporate movement, and “it’s not hard to figure out why our generation isn’t so gung-ho about capitalism — it has disappointed and, in some cases, straight-up failed us.”

They’re natural entrepreneurs… and they’re socialists. You understand why these two things are incompatible, right? More to the point, the notion that socialism is catching on in any real sense is laughable. So no, the right-wing cries of “socialist takeover!” are not based on more than paranoia.

The media likes to point out this trend, amidst the Great Recession, of increasingly favorable views of socialism. Such views are understandable, given that the failure of capitalism is growing more evident every day. But while many young Americans might say to a pollster that they think the idea of socialism sounds pretty cool, most of them don’t actually know jack shit about socialism or have any genuine desire to see it implemented. For them it’s akin to thinking, “It’d be pretty cool if I had a lightsaber.” Sure, the idea can be conceived in some abstract sense, but most Americans ultimately don’t know how to separate capitalism from their fundamental assumptions about reality. It’s not something that comes easily to me, either. We’ve been trained from birth to view capitalism as the natural state of affairs, and the only rational way to organize human relations. At the end of the day, this favorable view of socialism that’s on the rise lately isn’t some genuine social or intellectual movement, so much as just a bunch of young people shrugging and saying this thing they’ve vaguely heard of sounds kind of interesting. More’s the pity.

Of course, we’re also talking about an article that can’t maintain a logical connection within a single bullet point, much less between two of them:

5. They’re narcissistic
Millennials “may not be the caring, socially conscious environmentalists some have portrayed them to be,” says Joanna Chau at The Chronicle of Higher Education. One study says that Millennials are more narcissistic than their elders, and increasingly value “money, image, and fame more than inherent principles like self-acceptance, affiliation, and community.” While college students in 1971 ranked “being very well off financially” as their number-eight concern, for Millennials it’s consistently at “the top of the list.”

I don’t get it. Millennials are narcissistic because… they want money? Sure, one is bad and the other is (arguably) bad, but that doesn’t mean they’re related. They might as well have said, “Millennials are more sociopathic than their elders, because they don’t clean the shower as often as they should.”

But let’s address the actual point here, which is that their desire to be financially well off is evidence of a character failing on their part. Now, you know me. I hate capitalism. So yeah, I think the pursuit of money as an end in itself is bad. But the reality here on the ground is that pursuit of money is not, for the vast majority of us, an end in itself. Pursuing money is a means to other ends, such as, y’know, eating.

The difference between 1971 and 2012 isn’t that everyone suddenly turned into big ol’ assholes. The difference is that fewer and fewer people are able to take for granted that they’ll be able to afford food, rent, healthcare, etc. It’s easy to rank acquisition of money as a low priority when you’re pretty sure your college degree will translate into a living wage. That’s no longer something we can assume.

So you can grumble about “kids these days” if you want. I just think it’s more accurate to grumble about “the economy these days.”

Republican spokeswoman: A vote for the GOP is a vote for unemployment, recession

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Apparently Alexandra Franceschi, Specialty Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, came out and said that the Republican Party wants to push economic policies that are demonstrably bad for the economy and workers. I think such a gaffe speaks more to the tone-deafness of the GOP than anything else. They can spout a few stock lies about trickle-down effects and such, sure, but at the end of the day, they still don’t get what was so bad about the Bush years.

Which is why, on a radio show last week, after Franceschi explained the GOP’s economic platform—which you’ll be surprised to hear primarily involved tax cuts and austerity and at least one reference to the mythical “deficit crisis”—this revealing exchange occurred:

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

“So it’s like that time when the economy sucked and nobody could get a job?”

“Yeah, like that! ROMNEY 2012 WHOOO!”

Well, Bush’s policies didn’t turn out badly for anyone who mattered, after all, so Republicans just can’t figure out why they’re so unpopular.

Probably because of this:

As a result of the Bush economic platform, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” Meanwhile, the deficit and debt exploded. It would have to be quite the update for the GOP to make anything better happen this time around.

Welcome to the Post-Labor Era

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The driving force of the capitalist labor market, in the simplest possible terms, is that capital owners need people to operate their capital, and the rest of us need to eat. (Capital owners derive nutrition from the racking coughs of underage coal miners and thus do not need to eat.) The only kind of capitalist labor market that approaches any degree of justice and fairness is one in which there are enough jobs for all the people who need to eat. Anything less is unsustainable, at least depending on your definition of unsustainable. Certainly you can have a capitalist economy in which all the jobs are filled by a small portion of the population while the rest starve in the streets – at least, until the starving people revolt, France-style.

But that’s the situation the US may face if we don’t change course: a situation in which there simply aren’t as many jobs that the capitalists need done as there are people to do them. The era of labor will be over, supplanted by the era of efficiency and profit maximizing.

This is an enormous problem, because all of the gains made for workers’ rights in the past century or two have been made possible by the fact that the capitalists need the workers, no matter how much they don’t like to admit it. If they feel they don’t, they feel free to treat the workers like shit. We’ve seen this already in our current economic climate – wage workers deprived of benefits like health insurance, salaried workers forced to work longer and longer hours without any increase in pay. Wages aren’t going up and unemployment isn’t going down. This will become the permanent reality of the United States if we let it.

The conservative punditry senses this, too, because they’re now starting to spin the lack of available jobs in a “don’t worry, the capitalist system totally isn’t broken!” direction. Conservatives have been infamous for blaming the poor for being poor, the unemployed for being unemployed, the hungry for being hungry: Work more! they shout, get a job! Have a job? Get another one! Go to college, impress your boss! There’s nothing wrong with doing those things, but people already do them when possible, and conservatives use them as a red herring to draw attention away from the fact that the system itself needs to be fixed.

But that red herring no longer works, because while some of the more stalwart conservative pundits are still singing the “get a job!” tune, it’s just getting too obvious to the general public that in this economic climate, such a thing is far, far easier said than done. And so you have this bizarre column from Ann Althouse, who wonders:

Why should we all have to join what they used to call the “rat race”? Is life about having a job? Some people need jobs, but why have we come to believe that every adult must have a job?

Sure, yeah, agreed in general principle. I would love to not have to work, to lead a life of wild hedonism with no responsibilities, but that desire rather collides with the fact that, again, I have to eat.

But the issue here is that Althouse is a conservative pundit, and this is a full 180 from the usual conservative position, which is, broadly, that an adult who doesn’t have a job is lazy. Conservatives have spent decades – ever since the Reagan Revolution, essentially – convincing us that working long, grinding hours for less and less real pay is great for us peons, but as this jobless recovery continues, I predict that Althouse’s spiel here will become a trend, and conservatives will be eager to tell us why unemployment is great for lower-class homes. Whatever it takes to maintain the crumbling facade of general public good that capitalism tries to wear.

Of course, Althouse’s primary thesis is this:

I want to challenge liberals, left-wingers, feminists, progressives — all those folks — to see why they should want to actively promote the single-earner household.

I don’t have a strong opinion about this; I view neither a single-earner nor double-earner household as morally superior to the other. But what I do feel strongly about is that if you want to promote single-earner households, you’re going to have to fix this little situation first:

Wages

See, a single income just doesn’t go as far as it used to. That’s one reason double-income households are so ubiquitous now in the first place. So before you go championing the single-income household, make sure it’s actually feasible for working Americans – tips about tightening up your budget sound pretty hollow coming from a tenured law professor like Althouse.

But that’s rather a tangent, because the core point is that Althouse is suddenly pushing the notion that it’s peachy keen to not have a job, when the economic reality for the vast majority of Americans is that it’s not. She probably knows this on some level, but if the God of Capitalism has decreed that millions of formerly hardworking people must now be unemployed, we must scry our oracles and determine why unemployment is actually awesome for the working class, because the system is never wrong.

And as I said, this will probably become an important theme for conservative pundits as the reality of post-labor America sinks in. Post-labor America is the inevitable result of our economy’s drive toward profits and efficiency, because people just aren’t that efficient for the 21st century corporation. But such priorities are short-sighted and destructive even for the 1%. As Adam Smith said:

But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.

And the reason for this is that, in a capitalist exchange, profit is essentially just wealth that is extracted from the lower classes and not returned. Or, it can be returned, via taxes, increased wages, or certain kinds of investments, but in America’s current state of affairs, with historically low corporate taxes, little to no wage growth, and little investment going on, in general it’s not.

So post-labor America really is unsustainable, and if we don’t reshape our economy to focus on employing as many people as possible and producing real goods rather than faux wealth, it’s going to fall apart.

Next stop Pottersville!

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Oy, Roy Edroso’s rather amusing peek into right-wing umbrage at Earth Hour takes a sobering turn at the end:

But that doesn’t matter — not in the long run. Sure, Earth Hour gets more press than Human Achievement Hour gets now (despite the assistance of Fox News). But consider: Until a few decades ago, Americans believed that everyone who worked hard deserved a decent home, a decent salary, and the possibility that their kids could get an education and do better than their parents. Now no one believes that — or, at least, they consider it so far-fetched that there’s no question of believing it; you might as well ask them if they think they deserve pet unicorns.

Conservatives expect to do the same thing with the environment. Sure, now people act as if they expect clean air and water — but once conservatives have abolished the EPA, overturned environmental regulations, and turned large swaths of America into toxic waste dumps, citizens will quickly forget that they ever had a right to anything better.

Shit status: Still fucked up and bullshit

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Obama’s presidency has been a rollercoaster ride, I tell you what. One almost feels a little embarrassed about the elation one experienced when Obama took the Republicans to task over health insurance mandates for women’s reproductive healthcare. “Here’s the Obama we’ve been wanting all along!” is what was said about this pleasant surprise. And indeed what Obama did for women was excellent and good, and the only damn shame of that whole situation is that it’s the 21st century and we still have to have this debate at all, that contraception is a good thing and women’s genitals need medical care, too.

But the soul is crushed – crushed I tell you – if it had let itself be fooled by the notion that this signaled a paradigm shift for Obama’s administration. Matt Taibbi explains the emotional shellshock:

Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I’ve been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.

Then the JOBS Act happened.

Ah, the JOBS Act. Because if anything will prevent this economic catastrophe from happening again, it’s more of the same. Yessir, if there’s one thing we need in this country, it’s less business regulation, especially for Wall Street.

So Obama gave the Republicans what they wanted, to a deeper and more complete degree than ever before, and the best part is that a month from now, they’ll still be decrying what an anti-business socialist he is.

Now, there’s no question in my mind that President McCain would have been far worse for America. And even less question that President Romney will be astoundingly worse should he win in November (prediction: he will not). But that doesn’t excuse what Obama’s done here, which is to essentially spit in the face of the non-millionaires among his constituents and boldly announce that he’s siding with Wall Street, because after all what can go wrong when the government does that?

Obama confuses me. A lot of people wanted – some particularly stalwart people still want – to believe that Obama isn’t just another politician. And there was reason to believe this. He’s been out there in the world, working as a community organizer, dealing with downtrodden people on the streets of Chicago. He’s not a Bush or a Romney, spending his entire life isolated in the Rich White Guy bubble, with virtually no experience of the real world. He’s lived in the real world.

But I just don’t understand how you go from community organizer to someone who signs the JOBS Act. I don’t.

Krugman reveals math’s insidious liberal bias

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In a post yesterday, Krugman took apart the irritating right-wing “job creatorz!” argument against high top marginal tax rates. He begins by describing reality:

The way Diamond and Saez do the analysis is to argue that because the rich are rich, their marginal utility of income is very low, which means that at the margin their income doesn’t matter for social welfare. So they should be taxed at the rate which maximizes revenue, which is 1/(1+ε) — where ε is the elasticity of labor supply from the rich. And since we have a lot of evidence suggesting that ε is quite low, the appropriate tax rate for the rich is quite high — 70 percent or more.

Krugman also has empirical evidence on his side, since a look back at the last half-century of American taxation shows little relationship between the top marginal tax rate and the rate of unemployment:

Unemployment and Taxes

Source: US Department of Labor

So the notion that it would be in our – the non-filthy-rich’s – best interests to keep slashing taxes for the filthy rich simply doesn’t comport with what actually happens when we do that.

But just for funsies, Krugman also calculates what the ideal top marginal tax rate would be even if it were true that the 1% are benevolent and wise job creators:

But what if the rich in their Galtian goodness supply something nobody else can? Call it J, for jobcreation. Doesn’t the imperative to encourage J mean that we should keep their taxes low? Actually, no.

[...]

The optimal thing, from the point of view of the non-rich, is to set a tax that makes the cost of hiring rich people to produce J equal to the true marginal cost of that J, a cost that includes the fact that buying more drives up the price of inframarginal purchases. And if you grind through, you find that the optimal tax is … 1/(1+ε). Even if the rich are uniquely able to supply the magic of jobcreation, they should face much higher taxes than they do.

And this is all perfectly standard economics — indeed, Econ 101.

Needless to say, the conclusion that we should draw from all this is that Jesus hates Paul Krugman.

The Wall Street Journal’s kowtowing to the plutocrats reaches farcical levels

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Last month the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed signed by “sixteen concerned [mostly non-climate-related] scientists” entitled No Need to Panic About Global Warming.

Now, I could point you to ThinkProgress’ thorough debunking of that op-ed and its tiresomely predictable collection of falsehoods (if you were guessing that the words “Climategate” and “politically incorrect” come up, you sure do know climate change denialists). In fact, I just did. Go read that.

But let’s talk about the headline here. Murdoch’s media empire, whose “news” outlets serve quite blatantly as a mouthpiece for the plutocrats of the world, is telling us not to panic. The image that immediately popped into my mind was this:

I mean, you really can’t be too cynical about News Corp.