Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

The Monday Morning Teaser

April 29, 2013 – 8:45 am

The featured article this week is a review of Tom Allen’s recent book Dangerous Convictions: What’t really wrong with the U.S. Congress.

I don’t usually like books by out-of-office politicians. Most of them are either revising history to make their mistakes go away or polishing their rhetoric for a comeback. But ex-Maine-congressman Allen has done something thoughtful here. He’s taken his impressions from 12 years in the House and combined them with a lot of background reading on how Americans think and talk about politics. I found the result both enlightening and thought-provoking. (And now I have to go repeat Allen’s reading project, starting with Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and Robert Putnam’s American Grace.)

His diagnosis, in brief, is that the fundamental cause of the polarization in Congress is a deep worldview difference between Democrats and Republicans that makes them unable to take each other’s points of view seriously, much less find common ground or work out compromises. He goes a long way towards tracing the roots of that worldview difference. Almost accidentally, he ends up tracing out a Republican reform agenda far better than anything Republicans have come up with.

In the weekly summary, the Boston bombing conversation has shifted towards discussions about Islam and conspiracy theories. I’ll give my advice for dealing with the conspiracy theorist in your life.

Also, the George W. Bush Presidential Library opened, and lots of people bent over backwards to say nice things about the Bush legacy. But when the worst presidents in American history are discussed, George W. Bush will always be part of that conversation.

In the shorter notes: Obama may be looking for a way out of the War on Drugs. Attempts to defend austerity are still falling flat. And Medicare is about to end a program that cuts costs and improves care.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Unaffordable Luxuries

April 22, 2013 – 11:39 am

In the immediate wake of great disasters — a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse — people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. 

— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

This week everybody was talking about the Boston Marathon bombing

Living 30 miles from Boston, I had a hard time finding anybody who wanted to talk about anything else.

Here’s my hope for the long-term effect of the Marathon bombing: Maybe this will undo some of 9-11’s impact on the American psyche. That’s the point of this week’s lead article: “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now“.

The way everybody pitched in reminded me of the David Graeber quote at the top of the post. (I reviewed his book in 2011.) In Copley Square and Mass General Hospital, nobody was worrying about how they would get paid. For a few hours it was just “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The first responders did a great job. The hospitals did a great job. (New Yorker columnist Atul Gawande is both a great writer and a doctor at a Boston hospital, so his account of the symbiosis between systemic planning and individual initiative is particularly insightful.) The police did a great job. (Esquire columnist Charles Pierce is a great writer from Watertown. His account is worth reading too.)

The big corporate media did not do a good job. CNN had that horrible afternoon where it reported an imaginary arrest.

Comedian Andy Borowitz nailed them:

Authorities who have spent the past forty-eight hours combing CNN in the hopes of finding any information whatsoever have called off their search, they confirmed today.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post was even worse: It put photos of the wrong suspects on its front page. (Thank God those two guys weren’t lynched.)

Some alternative media did better. TPM assembled a useful chronology of what happened when. And Wikipedia continues to be an under-appreciated resource for staying on top of current events.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth about whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be read his Miranda rights or whether the public-safety exception applies. ThinkProgress explains the history of the exception pretty well. As I get it, officials would be justified in asking something like “Are there any more bombs out there?” to protect public safety. But if they’re asking questions to build a criminal case, Miranda applies.

A lot of Muslim-haters — people who still probably can’t find Chechnya on a map — have been using this event as a new excuse to hate Muslims. Cartoonist Clay Bennett expresses my point of view:

and the Senate filibuster that defeated the gun bill

The background-check amedment, already watered down from a proposal that has consistently polled at around 90%, failed to get past a Republican filibuster Wednesday.

The New Yorker’s Alex Koppelman wrote about how depressingly unsurprising this was:

it wasn’t just the vote to block Toomey-Manchin that was so disheartening—that a minority of the Senate, representing a minority of Americans, was able to vote down legislation that had been so watered-down as to make it utterly unobjectionable. It wasn’t just that the Republican-controlled House would never have passed the bill, even if there had been sixty votes for background checks in the Senate. It was watching the whole process, realizing again so vividly and on an issue that matters so much, that the people who make the laws for three hundred million people are often cowards or fools or both.

The most blood-boiling thing was Mitch McConnell crowing about his ability to thwart the public will, emphasizing that no compromise had ever been possible. (See photo, posted to Facebook by McConnell.)

And satirist Andy Borowitz was having a good week:

In the halls of the United States Senate, dozens of Senators congratulated themselves today for having what one of them called “the courage and grit to stand up to the overwhelming wishes of the American people.”

and the Texas fertilizer explosion

The owners of the West Fertilizer Company caught a break this week. Yeah, their Texas plant blew up Wednesday, killing at least 14 and injuring hundreds, but it didn’t fit into the terrorism narrative established in Boston on Monday, so hardly anybody paid attention.

Nobody knows yet exactly how the blast happened, but on the surface the situation resembles the Upper Big Branch mine disaster of 2010: insufficient inspections, safety violations, and wrist-slap fines that the company treated as a cost of doing business. Congressman Bennie Thompson:

It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid. This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up.

The Nation’s Richard Kim does an interesting thought experiment: What if we took this kind of violence and innocent death as seriously as we take terrorism?

Let’s imagine that the question—Why?—became so urgent that the nation simply could not rest until it had overdetermined the answers. We’d discover that OSHA hadn’t inspected the plant in 28 years—did this play a role in the disaster? If it’s found that the company that owns the plant, Adair Grain, violated safety regulations, as it had last year at another facility, we might call it criminal negligence and attribute culpability. But would we ascribe ideology? And which ideology would we indict? Deregulation? Austerity? Capitalism? Would we write headlines that say—Officials Seek Motive in Texas Fertilizer Explosion? And could we name “profit” as that motive in the same way that we might name, say, “Islam” as the motive for terrorism? Would we arrest the plant’s owners, deny them their Miranda rights and seek to try them in an extra-legal tribunal outside the Constitution, as Senator Lindsey Graham has suggested we treat US citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

and the debunking of an influential economics paper

which (believe it or not) you should care about. That’s my second featured article this week: “Why the Austerity Fraud Matters“.

and you also might be interested in …

I have heard from my own high-school-student sources about pro-abstinence assemblies, where outside speakers mix sexual misinformation with conservative religion. So I can’t say I was shocked by the descriptions of the West Virginia assembly that  Katelyn Campbell protested.

Apparently she protested so well that her principal resorted to threats: He said he would call Wellesley College, where Campbell has been accepted to study in the fall, and give her a bad character reference. Campbell refused to be intimidated, and Wellesley appears to be impressed, as they should be.

If you want to discourage something, tax it. So these six states tax poverty.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

Why the Austerity Fraud Matters

April 22, 2013 – 10:41 am

When disputes break out among academics, most people don’t care. For good reason: Academic controversies are usually hard to follow, and concern topics that wouldn’t matter to most of us even if we understood them. (I was in an academic dispute once, and my side won. Trust me, you don’t want to hear about it.)

But this week a controversy broke out in economics, and it actually deserves your attention. A paper that has had a major influence on public policy around the world turns out to be wrong. And not just wrong in a subtle way that only geniuses can see, or even wrong in an everybody’s-human way that you look at and say, “Oh yeah, I’ve done that.” This one was wrong in three different ways that make you (or at least me) say, “That can’t be an accident.”

The bogus paper came out in 2010: “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Carmen Reinhardt and Ken Rogoff (both from Harvard). The paper that refutes it appeared last Monday: “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff“ by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin (all from the University of Massachusetts).

Before I get into the back-and-forth of it, let’s return to why you should care. It has to do with whether the government should be trying to create jobs or cut spending.

Stimulus vs. austerity. Many countries came out of the Great Recession with a much larger national debt, but persistent unemployment and slow growth. And that led to a debate: The usual thing a government does when it has high unemployment and slow growth is spend money. (People need jobs and the private sector is skittish about expanding, so the government hires people to do things that need doing: building highways, fixing sewers, insulating homes, and so on. Or maybe the government boosts the economy by subsidizing certain kinds of consumption, like the popular cash-for-clunkers program that got a bunch of old gas-guzzling cars off the road.)

But maybe this time the thing to do was to cut spending, because of all that debt. Maybe spending more, and so increasing the national debt, would just make things worse.

The same debate was happening in all countries, and none of them went completely one way or the other. But the poster child for austerity has been the United Kingdom, where it hasn’t worked. Here’s how British economic growth has compared to the projections made by the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility. Austerity has brought the UK essentially no economic growth for three years.

The US has had its own stimulus/austerity debate, which has kept the Obama administration from spending as much as it wanted (or as much as Paul Krugman wanted, which was even more). But compared to the other major economies, the US has been on the stimulus side of the debate, which is probably why (disappointing as our economy has been these last few years) we’re doing better than most other countries. (This graph is scaled so that all countries are equal when austerity-loving David Cameron became the UK’s prime minister.)

Basically, the US and Germany are the only countries in that group that have seen any net growth since 2008.

The gist of what we’ve seen since 2008 is: Keynes was right. In the long run you probably want to keep your national debt under some kind of control, but not when you have high unemployment and slow growth.

How Reinhart/Rogoff leads to Ryan. Now, obviously, the budget debate we keep having in Washington doesn’t acknowledge this reality at all. Conservatives like Paul Ryan and Rand Paul, who want drastic cuts in government spending  (to them, the sequester is just a down payment), somehow get away with claiming to have a “pro-growth” agenda.

How is that possible? Well, partly it’s just dogma. The Gospel According to Ayn Rand states that government is always and eternally bad for the economy — she called for “a complete separation of state and economics” — and no accumulation of facts can outweigh holy writ.

But also, a handful of economists provide academic cover for the “pro-growth” austerity nonsense. And the biggest fig leaf in the bunch is the Reinhart/Rogoff paper. In his 2013 budget proposal, Ryan wrote:

Even if high debt did not cause a crisis, the nation would be in for a long and grinding period of economic decline. A well-known study completed by economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart confirms this common sense conclusion. The study found conclusive empirical evidence that gross debt (meaning all debt that a government owes, including debt held in government trust funds) exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth.

More precisely, R/R found a “threshold” that gets crossed when a nation’s public debt exceeds 90% of the annual GDP. (The United States currently has  a debt-to-GDP ratio around 100%. It was comfortably below the 90% “threshold” until almost exactly the moment the R/R paper appeared.) In other words: All your economic intuition and experience might tell you not to cut spending in a slow-growth environment, but something magic happens when debt crosses 90%. Beyond that point, debt suddenly becomes toxic.

Jared Bernstein comments on the significance:

Those whose goal is severely shrinking the size of government in general and social insurance in particular need hair-on-fire results like this from established experts to keep the fire going,  even in the face of statistics that lean strongly the other way

What they did and why it’s wrong. Reinhart and Rogoff looked at 20 industrialized countries year-by-year and divided the country-years into four bins: years when the national debt was 0-30% of GDP, 30-60%, 60-90%, and over 90%. They found significantly lower average economic growth in the over-90% bin. The average annual growth rates for the four bins in the 1946-2009 (post-WW2) period were 4.1%, 2.8%, 2.8% and negative .1%.

Now, if you look at those countries and years one-by-one, the case isn’t always impressive. For example, 1946 in the US. We had a lot of debt because we’d just fought World War II, and we had a recession because all the discharged soldiers and laid-off tank-factory workers hadn’t found new jobs yet. So high debt and negative growth were happening at the same time, but not because government debt was killing the economy.

Those are the kinds of one-off situations that you hope cancel out in the averages. And they kinda-sorta do, if you assemble your data honestly and do the math right. Unfortunately, R/R did neither. When Herndon/Ash/Pollin go back and do the analysis right, growth in the over-90% bin jumps from negative 0.1% to positive 2.2%.

So what mistakes did R/R make? Well, one was really stupid: They plugged the wrong row number into a formula on their spreadsheet, so their average skipped a bunch of rows, representing 6 of the 20 countries. (They’ve confessed to that mistake.)

Second, their data-set didn’t really include all the country-years it should have. So, for example, New Zealand only has one year in their average, when it ought to have five. Unfortunately, that makes a huge difference in the country average, because that one year NZ had -7.9% growth, when the five-year average was +2.6%.

And third, they made the bizarre choice to average by country rather than by country-year. So that one anomalous year in New Zealand ended up constituting 1/14th of the entire average rather than the 1/110th it should have.

Why it’s so bad. The significance of the R/R paper comes entirely from those mistakes.

Yes, an honest and accurate accounting still shows a negative correlation between growth and debt-to-GDP ratios, but everybody would have expected that anyway, because there’s well-known causality in the other direction: recessions cause debt/GDP ratios to rise*. (GDP goes down because that’s the definition of a recession. Debt goes up for two reasons: Revenue drops because there’s less income to tax, and spending rises to pay for more unemployment insurance and food stamps.)

The only significant part of R/R was the threshold, and that was wrong: The something-magic-happens-at-90% was just a spreadsheet typo plus statistical sleight-of-hand.

So the data R/R assembled provides absolutely no reason to have some special fear about the current level of debt in the US. We haven’t just passed through some economic equivalent of the sound barrier. To the extent that debt was bad before, it’s still bad, and to the extent that it didn’t matter before, it still doesn’t matter.

Fraud. I anticipate taking heat for using the word fraud in the title. The Herndon/Ash/Pollin paper doesn’t use it, and to fully justify fraud you’d have to see into the hearts of Reinhart and Rogoff. Responsible academics are slow to use words like fraud, because academics are cautious in general. You’re not supposed to publish something you can’t fully prove, even if your rivals do.

But I’m not an academic any more, so I’m using a preponderance-of-evidence standard, not a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard. Let’s look at the three mistakes.

The spreadsheet error shows an unbelievable level of negligence, but if that were the only mistake I’d be inclined to give R/R some benefit of the doubt. The original mistake was almost certainly honest, but not finding the mistake is the real culpability. They didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth; the mistake gave them the result they wanted, so they didn’t check too hard.

They claim to have filled in the missing data in later research, but they’ve done nothing to point out what a difference it makes. And they defend their weighting scheme — an argument I could buy if they had defended that scheme in the original paper while pointing the major difference it made in the result. But they didn’t. They were hoping the readers wouldn’t notice.

In their response to H/A/P, Reinhart and Rogoff, defend their non-spreadsheet errors “in the strongest possible terms”.

But surely the authors do not mean to insinuate that we manipulated the data to exaggerate our results.

I can’t speak for H/A/P, but I won’t insinuate anything, I’ll say it outright: Yeah, R&R, you manipulated the data to exaggerate your results.

R/R’s response. One proof of the fraud is that they’re still doing it. Their response claims:

We do not, however, believe this regrettable slip [the spreadsheet error] affects in any significant way the central message of the paper or that in our subsequent work.

And that’s just flatly false.

Do Herndon et al. get dramatically different results on the relatively short post war sample they focus on? Not really. They, too, find lower growth associated with periods when debt is over 90 per cent.

And that’s sophistry. The “relatively short post war sample” are the economies that happen to resemble the United States today. And “lower growth” is not the result the paper is noted for; no one would care if that were the whole message, because that is completely explained by the well-known recession-causes-debt relationship. The 90% threshold is the paper’s claim to fame, and that result has blown up completely.

And finally, while they don’t explicitly claim that they’ve found a debt-causes-slow-growth relationship, they keep using their result as if they had. They do so even in their response:

There is also the question of whether these growth effects can be economically large. Here it is very misleading to think of 1 per cent growth differences without recognizing that the typical high debt episode lasts well over a decade (23 years on average in the full sample.)

It is utterly misleading to speak of a 1 per cent growth differential that lasts 10-25 years as small. If a country grows at 1 per cent below trend for 23 years, output will be roughly 25 per cent below trend at the end of the period, with massive cumulative effects.

That point is utterly meaningless if the causality works in the other direction, if the slow growth is causing the debt rather than the other way around. And another re-analysis of the R/R data shows that’s what’s happening. That analysis also was simple to do. As Matt Yglesias comments:

it’s striking that R&R didn’t even check this. I don’t begrudge any academic’s right to rush into publication with an interesting empirical finding based on the assembly of a novel and useful dataset. I don’t even begrudge them the right to keep their dataset private for a little while so they can internalize more of the benefits. But Reinhart and especially Rogoff have spent years now engaged in a high-profile political advocacy campaign grounded in a causal interpretation of their empirical work that both of them knew perfectly well was not in fact supported by their analysis.

Buying apples, selling oranges. And that’s the important point. The biggest reason R/R’s paper has been so badly misused in our political debate is that they have been out there misrepresenting their results. Senator Coburn described their testimony to 40 senators a few months before the debt-ceiling debacle in 2012. After listening to their initial testimony,

Senator Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, then offered his own stern warning to the assembled senators. Turning around in his chair in the middle of the room, he explained to his colleagues that when our high debt burden causes our economy to slow by 1 point of GDP, as Reinhart and Rogoff estimate, that doesn’t slow our [economic growth] by 1 percent, but by 25 to 33 percent, because we are growing at only 3 or 4 percent per year.

Did either professor interrupt to say, “Wait, Senator, we’re not saying the debt causes a slowdown. Our data just shows a correlation that could be explained by slowdowns causing high debt.”? No.

Reinhart echoed Conrad’s point and explained that countries rarely pass the 90 percent debt-to-GDP tipping point precisely because it is dangerous to let that much debt accumulate.

Fraud. Fraud, fraud, fraud.

* A point I often make when numbers appear in the Sift: Correlation is not causation. Correlation just means that two things tend to go together; causation means that one causes the other. A very common fallacy is to display a graph showing that A and B go up (or down) together, and then say that A causes B.

My favorite way to demonstrate the fallacy: Birthdays are good for you; people who have a lot of birthdays tend to live long lives.

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Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now

April 22, 2013 – 8:23 am

Here’s my hope for the Boston Marathon bombing: Maybe it can mark the end of the 9-11 Era. It feels so different from 9-11. Maybe it can exorcize the demons that have haunted us these last dozen years.

9-11 was a wound that refused to heal. I think that had something to do with the kind of story it was and the way we told it: It was a tragedy, and the many heroic individual stories that came out of 9-11 just served to make the larger story that much more tragic.

The greatest heroes of 9-11 all died. They were the first responders who charged up the burning towers only to be crushed in the collapse. They were the passengers of United Flight 93, who crashed their own plane rather than let it become a bomb. We could not identify with them or feel connected to their courage, because we lived. To have survived on a day when the real heroes died … it felt almost shameful.

The villains — the men who hijacked the airliners and slammed them into the Twin Towers — were likewise dead. They died on their own terms, as martyrs and victors in their own eyes, and they were beyond our reach now.

So in spite of all the people who did the best they could that day, the overwhelming emotions of 9-11 were shame, depression, anger, and fear. As a country, America came out of 9-11 looking for somebody to blame, and wanting to mess them up as badly as we could.

We could not let the story end this way, so we took it to Afghanistan and Iraq. We took it to Bagram and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. If some of the people we killed or maimed or tortured were innocent, so be it. Collateral damage. Our people had been innocent too.

9-11 was a monstrous act that we couldn’t resolve in our hearts, so it turned us into monsters.*

But we will tell the Boston Marathon bombing story as a challenge that Americans rose to. Not years later in another country, but as it was happening. Not by dying or killing, but by living and saving lives. This time, the tragedy sets up the stories of heroism, not the other way around.

It started immediately, with the ordinary people, the runners and their friends and families, who raced into danger to help the wounded. But unlike the 9-11 first responders, they did not become martyrs or victims. They continue to walk among us like the typical Americans they are.

EMTs and police were already present at the finish line, and their performance will be a model for the rest of the world for years to come. Their story is a victory, not a tragedy. It is a tribute to them that only three people died on the scene.

Everyone who made it into an ambulance is still alive a week later, because hundreds more nurses and doctors became heroes by saving lives, not by dying or by taking lives in revenge. Like the runners and the EMTs, they did not vanish into a martyr’s Heaven, but melted back into the general population. Maybe you pass them on the highway or stand in line with them at the supermarket. Maybe you are one of them.

Our leaders expressed sorrow, promised justice, and asked for our cooperation. They got it. People sent in their photos, and studied photos taken by others. Asked to stay off the streets or keep to their homes, we did.

Police swarmed in from all over the area, and worked together under federal leadership without visible rancor. They did their jobs, protecting the public without becoming our masters. They did not create more victims by rounding up hundreds of innocents. A policeman died, a fourth victim, but no more civilians.

And they caught the bad guys. One died in a suburban shootout that miraculously killed no bystanders. The other was wounded, but managed to hide for most of  the next day. He was found by a citizen who did not kill or get himself killed. He called the police, who captured the suspect alive and took him to a hospital.

That night, the convoy of police leaving Watertown became a spontaneous victory parade, and the citizens (who had been cooped up in their houses all day) streamed out onto the streets to cheer.

Unlike 9-11, it was over.

This time, like the aid-giving marathoners, like the EMTs, like the hundreds of doctors and nurses and police, at least one perpetrator will live and not become a martyr larger than life. We may get what we never had for 9-11: an explanation and a motive. We may come to look on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a troubled teen-ager, rather than a demon we see whenever we close our eyes and keep trying to kill by projecting him onto others.

Along the way, we may exorcize another demon who has haunted us too long: the Terrorist Superman, who desires nothing but mayhem and can be stopped by nothing but death. Who requires superhuman security measures and inhuman methods of interrogation. The monster who can only be fought by other monsters.

And that forms the essence of my hope: Maybe the events of this week have shown us that we don’t have to be monsters any more.

Maybe we can just be people who help other people, workers who save lives by doing our jobs, citizens who respect our authorities and get respect in return. Maybe we can seek justice without losing our human compassion. Maybe we can stand for values higher than mere survival. Maybe we can once again be part of a nation that is admired rather than just feared.

9-11 will never be forgotten, but I think it is time for it to be over. Maybe now it can join the Kennedy assassination and Pearl Harbor and the other great sorrowful events of our history. A scar, a memory, but not a wound.

So this is my post-marathon-bombing hope: That now we can stop being the frightened, angry, shamed survivors of 9-11 and go back to being Americans. It’s been a long time.

* In an earlier version of this article that I posted on Daily Kos, some commenters were inclined to absolve everyday Americans and put the blame on President Bush. I’m not going to make excuses for Bush, but he didn’t create the widespread post-9-11 desire for violence, he just channeled it. By the time the Iraq invasion rolled around, I and many other people were opposed. But I definitely felt the fear and anger it was based on.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

April 22, 2013 – 7:22 am

It’s been one of those weeks: At last count, 14 people were dead and dozens still missing in the Texas fertilizer explosion, and that event could barely stay on the front page with all the Boston coverage.

The Sift isn’t a breaking-news kind of blog, so my coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing is to take a step back and wonder what it might mean to the country long-term. The thing that stands out to me is how the narrative hooks of 9-11 got reversed: In 9-11, heroism set the stage for greater tragedy, symbolized by the first responders who charged up the burning tower and died when it collapsed. In Boston, the initial tragedy set the stage for greater heroism.

So I wonder if Boston can be the first step in undoing some of the mistakes we justified by pointing to 9-11. And so the first featured article this week is: “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now”.

The second featured article is longer, because the topic is more complicated. In “Why the Austerity Fraud Matters” I try to explain why you should care about an academic dispute between economists: The case for focusing on the national debt rather than unemployment is based on a highly influential paper that is simply a fraud.

That doesn’t leave much space for a weekly summary, but there’s still that Texas thing to deal with. And the Senate siding with the NRA over the American people.

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Buying Civilization

April 15, 2013 – 10:50 am

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

This week everybody was talking about Margaret Thatcher’s life and death

The Iron Lady hasn’t been prime minister since 1990, so you might think the old wounds would have scabbed over by now. Apparently not. After Thatcher’s death was announced, “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” went to #1 on iTunes-UK. Not to defend her, but do I have to point out how sexist that is? If she were male, maybe opponents could be satisfied with Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down“.

When her death was falsely reported in 2008 and plans for a 3-million-pound state funeral came out, Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle commented:

For 3 million, they could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we would dig a hole so deep that we could hand her over to Satan personally.

To put her impact in American terms, Thatcher was the anti-FDR. By the time she left office, the union-dominated Britain of the 1970s was as hard to remember as the Roaring Twenties were when Roosevelt died in office in 1945.

She inspired the Reagan Revolution in the US, and symbolized the plutocratic and plutolatric trends that today make the US and the UK (plus Italy, for some reason) the rich countries with the greatest inequality and the least economic mobility.

I guess that’s hard to forget.

and taxes

It’s April 15, time for my annual attempt to popularize the term work penalty — the extra tax you pay because you work for a living rather than having money that works for you: How Big Was Your Work Penalty in 2012?

Of course, we can’t tax wealthy heirs, and we can’t tax their dividend or capital gain income because … well, just because. They’re “job creators” or something. There’s a word for this, plutolatry. It usually means “worship of wealth”, but it could also mean “worship of the rich”. I’m looking for ways to work it into conversations, like I did in the previous section.

Another Tax Day point worth making: Americans would save a lot of time and money if the IRS would use the information it has and just mail us a bill. If your tax situation was simple, you could pay the bill and be done with it, but if you wanted to itemize or claim some complicated tax break, you could file a return the way you do now.

Why doesn’t that happen? Two reasons: The tax-prep industry makes money from the current arrangement, so they lobby Congress to keep things the way they are. And anti-tax conservatives want Tax Day to be painful so that the public will resent paying taxes.

and Obama’s budget

which included a proposal to figure the cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security using the stingier chained CPI. I discuss this in Four Things I Know About Social Security. #3 is “Chained CPI is a way to cut Social Security benefits, not a way to measure inflation more accurately.”

and (oddly) a C&W song

For some reason I haven’t fathomed, this week all sorts of people were moved to comment on Brad Paisley’s new song  “Accidental Racist” (performed with black rapper L L Cool J). The song has a why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along theme, but annoys blacks and liberals by (among other things) making a false equivalence between whites judging a black man by his gold-chain bling and blacks not forgiving whites for the iron chains their ancestors wore.

In my terminology, Paisley is expressing privileged distress: His song’s main character (never assume a song is autobiographical) suffers because blacks now feel empowered enough to object to racist crap (like a confederate-flag t-shirt) that he used to get away with. He then imagines that his suffering is comparable to what blacks suffer from racism, so he’s ready to call it even and wipe the slate clean.

The debate basically amounts to: Yeah, the song raises the race issue in a pretty clueless way, but if it were any more clueful, Paisley’s fans wouldn’t listen to it and so wouldn’t be thinking about overcoming racism at all. Half a loaf.

While we’re on the subject of racial cluelessness, Rand Paul spoke at historically black Howard University. Paul treated the Republican Party’s dismal performance among black voters as some of kind of mystery. He reviewed the party’s stellar racial record from Lincoln through the 1950s, and then skipped completely over the last 50 years, when Republicans courted the racist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party after it embraced the Civil Rights movement. (Charles Blow filled in that history for Paul. I reviewed it in detail in December.)

Jon Stewart summarized:

You can’t just yada yada yada the last 60 Republican years: “A Republican freed the slaves, gave black people the vote, yada yada yada, and now all blacks vote Democratic. I mean, what the hell?”

Josh Marshall commented on Paul’s shock that his audience already knew the history he was trying to tell them and still wasn’t sold:

When you look at who’s the bamboozled and who’s the bamboozler in this part of the GOP subculture you see that it’s not so clear cut. … The GOP is so deep into its own self-justifying racial alternative reality that there’s some genuine surprise when the claptrap doesn’t survive first contact with actual black people.

and you also might be interested in …

An unplanned consequence of putting armed police in public schools: Incidents that used to send you to the principal’s office now send you to court. The NYT reports:

Joshua, a ninth grader who lives south of Houston, got into a brief fight on a school bus in November after another boy, a security video showed, hit him first. The principal called in the school’s resident sheriff, who wrote them both up for disorderly conduct.

Charges were eventually dismissed, but Joshua had to find a lawyer and miss class for two court appearances. “I thought it was stupid,” he said.

Harvard’s Jal Mehta proposes a really radical change in education policy: Train teachers rigorously and well, and then let them do what they’re paid to do.

Show this to the next person who tells you about “liberal media bias” on climate change.

Number of climate scientists participating in discussion: zero.

Exxon’s pipeline spill in Arkansas is much smaller and less messy than a Keystone XL spill would be. Imagine this in your back yard.

Yet another sad story about a teen rape victim getting hounded by her peers.

You’ve got to wonder if this is finally the right place for a “Just Say No” approach. As we saw in the Steubenville case, a lot of teen guys seem not to realize (at least not until after the fact) that it’s wrong to take advantage of a girl who can’t resist. That’s why I like this video:

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Four Things I Know About Social Security

April 15, 2013 – 10:05 am

1. It’s not going bankrupt in seven years.

Stephen Moore shouted this popular-but-bogus claim (over Bernie Sanders’ objections) on the April 5 episode of Real Time with Bill Mahr. It’s a common conservative talking point often put forward in publications like the Washington Times.

2020 is when the Social Security is projected to start paying out more than it takes in. (It already pays out more than it collects in taxes, but interest will make up the difference until 2020, according to the current Trustees’ Report.) This has to do with the retirement of the baby-boomers, and has been foreseen for decades. (If you’re a baby-boomer with an IRA, at some point you plan to start taking money out rather than putting money in. You don’t become bankrupt at that moment.) That’s why Social Security has been taking in more than it paid out since it was reformed by President Reagan and a Democratic Congress in 1983. (Then, the Social Security Trust Fund was only months away from hitting zero.) That’s how the Social Security Trust Fund accumulated its $2.7 trillion surplus.

The claims Moore shouted were “That money’s been spent already.” and “You can’t spend the same money twice.” He’s referring to the fact that the government-as-a-whole has not been building up a surplus (other than briefly at the end of the Clinton administration), so what the SSTF holds is not a stash of dollars or a pile of gold, but U.S. government bonds. In other words, the SSTF loaned its surplus to the rest of the government, which spent it. This has been demagogued as “raiding the trust fund” and somehow is supposed to make the whole idea of the SSTF illegitimate.

But nobody applies that logic to any other situation. When private pension funds hold big chunks of their assets in U.S. government bonds, or when individuals have government bonds in their IRAs, that’s considered the safest possible investment; nobody claims the money is “already spent”. Ditto for corporate bonds. Hasn’t the corporation “already spent” that money too? Or bank CDs — that money isn’t sitting in the vault; the bank loaned it to people who “already spent” it by starting businesses or building houses.

In short, “you can’t spend the same money twice” is flim-flam, and Stephen Moore and the Washington Times know it. (That’s why Moore had to shout. If people examine what he’s saying calmly and rationally, they’ll see through it.) The SSTF is holding $2.7 trillion in the safest possible investments. That stash will keep increasing until 2020, when the program will begin to tap it the way President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill pictured back in 1983.

2. It’s not a “Ponzi scheme”.

Shortly after World War I, Charles Ponzi opened an investment company that promised large returns from a murky investment strategy, and his early investors seemed to get the returns he promised. That drew in more investors, who also got big returns, and so on.

The secret was that Ponzi was using the new investments to pay the returns to the current investors, creating the appearance of profits that didn’t exist. Bernie Madoff used the same trick just a few years ago. Both schemes collapsed, as such schemes eventually must, because they require more and more investors to keep going.

In an ideal Ponzi scheme, the schemer disappears with the money at precisely the moment when investors start trying to cash out, but neither Ponzi nor Madoff was able to time it correctly. Both went to jail.

Calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” (as Rick Perry and other conservatives have done) is a pejorative way to point out something everybody knows: The program relies on current workers paying taxes in order to finance the pensions of retirees. If the economy collapsed to the point that no one could pay taxes, the SSTF would drain out and benefit payments would stop. (Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano presented these well-publicized facts as if they were some top-secret revelation.)

But the differences dwarf the resemblances:

  • Social Security has no schemer who plans to run away with the money.
  • The finances are public. Everyone can see what is happening.
  • It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme that appeals to people’s greed. It’s a social contract between generations that appeals to our desires to (i) not let our elders starve, and (ii) not starve when we get old.
  • The assumptions Social Security depends on are a continued healthy economy and continued faith in the social contract. A Ponzi scheme depends on an exponentially growing pool of suckers that eventually has to exceed the population of the world.
  • Consequently, a Ponzi scheme inevitably collapses, at great loss to the last round of investors. Social Security can keep going as long as its two underlying assumptions hold.

In short, anybody who refers to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme is just trying to piss people off, and has no intention of discussing the program seriously.

3. Chained CPI is a way to cut Social Security benefits, not a way to measure inflation more accurately.

Chained consumer price index is an alternative to the consumer price index (CPI), which is how the government measures inflation for purposes like the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in Social Security. The original selling point for chained CPI was that it is a more accurate measure of inflation, because it allows for the way that people change their decisions as prices change. That’s the point made in this video by Fix the Debt (a “non-partisan” billionaire-funded organization that coincidentally wants “lower tax rates” that increase the debt, but benefit billionaires).

Chained CPI produces with a slightly lower measure of inflation, which results in lower COLAS than the CPI we use now, and — given time and the magic of compound interest — substantially lowers Social Security benefits down the road. Those lower benefits happen gradually, so we can tell ourselves it will be painless for the elderly.

We can also tell ourselves that it won’t “cut” benefits. As the FtD video says:

Benefits won’t be reduced, they’ll continue to grow over time, and they’ll do so more accurately. Furthermore, what the critics aren’t seeing is that the current system pays everyone more than it intends to. So instead of overpaying everyone, perhaps it makes more sense to focus on the people that need the additional help.

Here’s the problem with that: If you really wanted Social Security COLAs to be “accurate”, you’d base them not on the basket of goods and services tracked by either the CPI or the chained CPI, but on the goods and services seniors actually need and buy (i.e., fewer baby diapers and more adult diapers). Economist Dean Baker explains:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has constructed an experimental elderly index (CPI-E) which reflects the consumption patterns of people over age 62. This index has shown a rate of inflation that averages 0.2-0.3 percentage points higher than the CPI-W.

The main reason for the higher rate of inflation is that the elderly devote a larger share of their income to health care, which has generally risen more rapidly in price than other items. It is also likely that the elderly are less able to substitute between goods, both due to the nature of the items they consume and their limited mobility, so the substitutions assumed in the chained CPI might be especially inappropriate for the elderly population.*

While the CPI-E is just an experimental index, if the concern is really accuracy, then the logical route to go would be for the BLS to construct a full elderly CPI.

So the CPI-calculated COLAs have probably been too low, not too high. Rather than “overpaying everyone”, we’ve been letting inflation slowly whittle Social Security benefits away. Switching to chained CPI allows inflation to whittle faster.

If the way we want to reduce the deficit is by cutting Social Security benefits gradually over time, let’s argue that case on its merits. Let’s not kid ourselves about “more accurate” measures of inflation.**

4. We could keep the program solvent far into the future by raising the cap on taxed wages.

Unless you’re in the the upper or upper-middle class, you may not realize that not all wages are subject to the Social Security tax. In 2012, any wages over $110,100 were not charged Social Security tax. As a result (according to economist John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute), 6% of wage-earners exceed the cap, and because some of them exceed it by quite a bit, the percentage of income untaxed by Social Security is much larger and growing:

Due to growing income inequality, the share of earnings above the cap has risen from 10 percent in 1982 to over 16 percent in 2006. This is because incomes have grown strongly at the top while middle incomes have stagnated.

This trend is expected to continue, meaning that a growing share of earnings will remain outside the tax base.

The cap also means that higher-income individuals pay a smaller share of their income in Social Security taxes than middle-class employees. Including the employee and employer shares of Social Security and Medicare taxes, earners in the middle fifth of the income distribution pay an average effective payroll tax of about 11 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners pay just 1.5 percent on average.

… According to the Social Security Administration, fully eliminating the cap on taxable earnings would be sufficient to fully close the projected shortfall.

* People who talk about changing your buying habits have clearly not dealt with any actual seniors. When doctors suggested my 89-year-old father was developing a peanut-butter allergy, I bought him jars of soy and almond butter to try instead. While cleaning out his cabinets after he went to a nursing home, I found them unopened.

** I wouldn’t tie benefits to inflation at all. I’d tie them to the median wage.

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How Big Was Your Work Penalty in 2012?

April 15, 2013 – 8:38 am

The screwiest thing about the American tax system is its work penalty: If you earn your money by working, you may well be paying higher taxes than somebody who makes the same amount of money without working, via dividends or capital gains. You’re certainly not paying less.

A simple example shows what I’m talking about: Suppose a single person has $40,000 of taxable income. (That’s the amount on  line 43 of the 1040 or line 6 of 1040EZ; in other words, you’ve already subtracted all your exemptions and deductions and you’re down to the amount you take to the tax table to figure out what you owe.) If s/he got that income without lifting a finger, say by letting dividends and capital gains distributions accumulate in a brokerage account, then the federal income tax bill is $6,000. (15%, in other words.)

But if that money came from working for wages, then the bill is $36 higher: $6036. So our hypothetical worker pays a $36 penalty for working rather than living idly off investment income.

The simple work penalty. That may not sound like much — unless any work penalty riles you as much as it riles me — but so far we’re just talking about the simple work penalty; as you’ll see, it gets worse the more things we take into account.

Here’s how you figure your simple work penalty: Multiply your taxable income by 15% to see what you’d pay if you made that money without working, then check your tax return to see how much you paid. (Or look up your income on the tax tables that start on page 79 of the 1040 instructions.) We’ve already seen that a simple work penalty starts at $40,000 for single people. It starts at $53,500 for a head of household or $80,000 for a joint-filing married couple.

No matter how little you make, you will never pay less than the idle guy who made the same amount from investments. When he figures his tax (on, say, the worksheet in the Schedule D instructions), one of the last lines has him figure how much he’d pay if he just used the regular tax tables like you do. If that amount is less, that’s what he owes.

Even the simple work penalty turns into real money if your wages are high. Say you’re a salesman working on commission and you had a really good year: Your taxable income is $100,000. If you’re single, you owe Uncle Sam $21,460. But the idle guy with $100,000 of taxable income from dividends and capital gains is still just paying 15%, or $15,000*. You’re penalized $6,460 because you made your money by working.

It gets worse. Anybody who has money to invest knows that the game is rigged even worse than that, because investors don’t owe any capital gains tax until they sell the thing that increased in value. So if an investor doesn’t want to pay tax, he just doesn’t sell.

Again, an example makes it real: Suppose a guy bought $10,000 of stock in Walgreens back in 1990 when it was selling at (a split-adjusted price of) $2.75. Ignore the dividends he’s been making all those years; the value of the shares themselves has gone up more than 17 times, so his 10K is now worth $177,300, making a gain of $167,300. How much tax has he paid on that gain over the last 23 years? Zero, because he hasn’t sold. If he never sells, and his heirs sell when they inherit, the tax is never paid. Even if he does sell and pay his 15% eventually, it doesn’t even out, because his money has been compounding tax-free all those years.

And what about payroll taxes? Payroll taxes apply to wages, but not to investment income. In general, wage-earners pay 1.45% of their wages in Medicare taxes and 4.2% in Social Security taxes**, for a total of 5.67%.

If you think of all that as just “taxes”, as money hoovered up by the government never to be seen again, then the work penalty is much higher. Let’s go back to our single guy with $40,000 of taxable income. Say he took the standard deduction of  $5950 and had no dependents other than himself, so he had $3800 of exemptions. So his gross wages were somewhere around $49,750 and he paid $2821 in payroll taxes. The investor paid zero, so that would make the gross work penalty $2857 — a much bigger chunk of change than the $36 simple work penalty. (Under the same assumptions, the $100K worker makes $109,750 gross and pays $6223 in payroll taxes, raising his gross work penalty to $12683.)

But that’s not really the right way to think about it, because some payroll taxes are social insurance payments that you will see direct benefit from. Unless you’re planning to have a fatal accident before you get old, paying money into Social Security now increases the benefits you will receive later, because (in spite of what conservatives tell you) Social Security is not going away. So the investor pays less Social Security tax than you, but he’ll also see less benefit down the road.

The same may not be true of Medicare, though, because it has all-or-nothing eligibility. In order to get coverage after 65, either you or your spouse has to pay into the program for ten years. After that, you get no additional coverage for paying in more.

So that 1.45% in Medicare taxes you paid in 2012 may well be garnering you no additional benefits over the non-paying investor (if, say, either or both of you already have your ten years in). So I think it’s entirely legitimate to include that in what we might call an adjusted work penalty. If we do, then the $40K worker pays a $757 work penalty and the $100K worker’s penalty is $8051.

By that definition, all workers, no matter how little they make, pay an adjusted work penalty. The investor with the same income will never pay a higher amount of income tax, and the worker pays an additional 1.45% in Medicare tax that may provide him/her no additional benefits down the road.

So suppose you work 30 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, at the $7.25 minimum wage, and you’ve been working for ten years or more. You have gross wages of $11,310. An investor whose only income is $11,310 of dividends and capital gains pays the same income tax you do, and in addition you pay $164 of Medicare taxes that provide you no additional benefit.

End the work penalty. Is that crazy or what? Why does our tax system penalize people for working rather than idly collecting dividends or sitting around owning things that go up in value?

Conservatives are always talking about ways to make the tax system “fairer”, by which they usually mean “flatter” —  they want to lower the tax rates paid by people who make the highest wages. (Why that is “fairer” is a mystery to me. I think a progressive tax system is fair.)

But eliminating the simple work penalty absolutely would make the system fairer: Stop treating different kinds of income differently. Wages, dividends, capital gains — they’re all income. Tax them the same. And beyond that, why not tax investment income for Social Security and Medicare?

* I know what you’re thinking: Wouldn’t the alternate minimum tax kick the investor’s taxes up? No, it wouldn’t. The AMT counter-acts excessive deductions and tax-free income, but doesn’t affect the advantages of dividends and capital gains.

** Until their wage income hits $110,100. In 2012, earnings higher than that paid no additional Social Security tax. The 4.2% was a special rate for 2012, temporarily reduced from the ordinary 6.2% (matched by another 6.2% from the employer).

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The Monday Morning Teaser

April 15, 2013 – 7:46 am

It’s Tax Day, so it’s time to ask the annual question: “How big was your work penalty in 2012?”

As you may already know, investment income like dividends and capital gains is taxed at a flat 15% rate, which is lower than the rates paid by many people who work for wages. Plus, payroll taxes don’t apply to investment income, and there are a number of other advantages.

Usually, this gets described in terms of the virtues of investment: capital formation, job creation, and so on. But once upon a time, work was considered virtuous too. So I prefer to describe this situation as a work penalty. You pay more tax because you work for a living rather than watching your money work for you.

The simple version of the work penalty is not hard to figure if you have your 1040 handy, and if more people knew their work penalty, we might raise enough outrage to do away with it.

Obama’s budget has put Social Security back in the news, so the second featured article is “Three things I know about Social Security”.

In the weekly summary, everybody was also talking about Margaret Thatcher and (for some reason I can’t fathom) a country-western song.

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No Argument

April 8, 2013 – 11:58 am

Straight couples write their own ticket. That’s why they can’t craft an argument to justify excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. It’s not because we want to redefine it. It’s because straight people redefined it to an extent where there’s no argument that can be made to exclude same-sex couples.

— Dan Savage (December 9, 2012)

These last few weeks everybody was talking about same-sex marriage

which was argued before the Supreme Court. (Full transcript and audio at NPR.) More specifically, the Court is considering the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (which tells the federal government not to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in the states that allow them) and California’s Proposition 8 (which made same-sex marriage illegal in California by constitutional amendment).

There’s been an element of triumphalism in the liberal coverage of the hearings, as it became clear in the verbal arguments that the pro-DOMA, anti-marriage-equality side is really straining to find any legal-sounding fig leaf to justify its position.*

This lack of a leg to stand on vindicates Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall’s ground-breaking opinion in 2003 (the first case I ever blogged about). Marshall wrote that a same-sex marriage ban had “no rational relationship” to any legitimate goal of the state. At the time, conservatives were greatly offended by the implication that they were irrational, but now that they have to spell out that rational relationship, all they can do is huff and puff.

The other reason to feel triumphant is the parade of Democratic politicians flipping to support marriage equality. Arguably, the recent trend started with Joe Biden, who seemed to be pushing President Obama last May. (Obama got on board a few days later.) In the last month, Bill Clinton renounced DOMA, which he signed, and Hillary Clinton has also endorsed marriage equality. Every day or two, a new Democratic senator joined the chorus, until last Monday there were just eight Democratic senators who have not. Wait, make that seven. No, six. Sorry, four: Manchin of West Virginia, Pryor of Arkansas, Landrieu of Louisiana, and Johnson of South Dakota. All are from states Obama lost handily in 2012, and all but Manchin are up for re-election in 2014.

Even the occasional Republican has flipped, like Ohio Senator Rob Portman and Illinois Senator Mark Kirk. Bill O’Reilly now says “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals”, and Rush Limbaugh admits that the issue is “lost”.

This is all in line with my post “Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030” last May. The trends are clear and politicians of both parties can read them. So Biden jumped before Obama because Obama focused only on the 2012 general election, while Biden was also looking at the 2016 Democratic primaries. Claire McCaskill flipped because she doesn’t run again until 2018, by which time the issue will work in her favor, even in Missouri.

It will be a few elections before that logic takes hold on the Republican side, but by 2030, even Republican candidates for local offices in Alabama won’t take an openly anti-gay position and expect to win on it, just as they don’t take openly racist positions now.

The religious right is not folding, though, and this sets up a libertarian vs. theocrat battle that will probably divide the Republican party for years to come. Libertarians and corporatist Republicans will want to play the issue down to win elections, while theocrats will be looking for an Alamo they can defend to the last man.

*All of which raises the question: What really does motivate opponents of marriage equality?

Well, there’s the obvious “Gay sex is yucky”, which wouldn’t be very compelling in court. Also, “My religion requires me to be a bigot”, which likewise has no legal heft. And there are people who just dislike change in general. But none of that really explains the opponents’ sky-is-falling urgency.

Tiffany Wayne suggests something deeper that I find more likely: Defense of “traditional marriage” is really about defending traditional gender roles. Same-sex marriage is threatening because it frames marriage as a negotiated relationship between equals, not as the divinely mandated submission of a wife/mother to the authority of a husband/father, each of whom has a well defined, divinely mandated role in the household.

I am struck in listening to the opposition to same-sex marriage by the persistent denial that gender is a socially constructed role. This is a “traditional” view of marriage in the sense that it is grounded in “biology is destiny,” or specific roles assigned based on sex. It is an extremely narrow view of “marriage” based on specific roles assigned by sex, rather than marriage as an emotional and physical and social partnership between two individuals.  Most telling, it is a view that denies that heterosexual people can be in egalitarian marriages, or should be. It is a belief in “traditional” marriage as hierarchical. Not as a true partnership of equals, but as a microcosm of society with a power structure that flows from husband to wife to children.

I’m reminded of this exchange between Chris Hayes and Dan Savage last December:

SAVAGE: We only hear that monogamy or children or religion are defining characteristics of marriage when same-sex couples want to marry.

Straight couples write their own ticket. That’s why they can’t craft an argument to justify excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. It’s not because we want to redefine it. It’s because straight people redefined it to an extent where there’s no argument that can be made to exclude same-sex couples.

It is the legal, romantic, hopefully sexual union of two legally autonomous individuals, period, the end. They get to write their own ticket, they get to write their own vows. They can, you know, assume all in their relationship and their marriage, all the typical things people might expect a marriage to be.

HAYES: Or not.

SAVAGE: Or they can write — they can be something very different. Marriage is very subjective and interesting and new. And redefined by straight people.

That is a more compelling reason to oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples: opposition to the equality-within-marriage that is becoming the new norm for straights and gays alike. It also explains why the religious right can’t make its case openly: That argument was already lost years ago.

and Mike Rice

I don’t usually do sports stories here, but the firing of the Rutgers basketball coach turned into something larger when conservative pundits framed Rice’s abusive behavior as “old-fashioned discipline”. What I find weird in the conservative focus on “discipline” is that they always think the people on the bottom need more discipline, never the people at the top. I elaborate in Mike Rice, Sean Hannity, and the Real American Discipline Problem. If you’re talking about bankers, billionaires, and CEOs, then I totally agree: America needs more discipline.

If this article reminds any of you of One Word Turns the Tea Party Around, where I made sense out of Tea Party rhetoric by changing the word government to corporations — yeah, me too.

and North Korea

All kinds of saber-rattling has been coming out of North Korea lately, and there’s a big debate on about whether this is business-as-usual, the new ruler trying to build respect inside his country, a predictable test for the new South Korean president, or something to worry about.

I have never pretended to understand North Korea, so I went looking for people who think they do. Foreign Policy has a worry-but-don’t-panic article. I also found this video dialog between Economist editors to be instructive.

and guns

This Dan Wasserman cartoon pretty well covers it: The Senate looks like it might not even pass the universal background check provision that 90% of the country supports. But substantial new gun laws have gotten through in Connecticut (Sandy Hook) and Colorado (Aurora, Columbine), as well as New York and Maryland.

One thing I think all the NRA-cowed politicians are forgetting: Yes, the wave set off by any particular massacre eventually dissipates, but what about the next one?

That’s why it’s important to bring anti-gun-violence measures to a vote, even if it’s obvious they won’t pass. If Sandy Hook turns out to be the last massacre, great. But if it’s not, and if the next one could have been prevented by the measures being debated now (as Sandy Hook could have been prevented by renewing the assault-weapon ban in 2004), we want a clear record of who was responsible for defeating those measures.

and you also might be interested in …

A serious polling group just polled a bunch of conspiracy theories the mainstream doesn’t usually take seriously. PPP finds that 37% of the public (and a majority of Republicans) think global warming is a hoax. 28% (and 36% of Romney voters) still think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11, which 11% of the public believes the government knew about in advance, but allowed to happen. And is Obama the Anti-Christ? 22% of Romney voters say yes.

A lot of people got excited Monday about a bill introduced in the North Carolina legislature to let the state establish a state religion. (See the 19,000 comments on this HuffPost article.) I don’t think it was an April Fool’s joke, but it didn’t matter: By Thursday the NC Speaker of the House said the bill will never come to a vote — so never mind.

Clearly, not enough people have read Cracked.com’s 5 Ways to Spot a Bullshit Political Story in Under 10 Seconds, which I linked to shortly after it came out last year. Way #2 is: “The headline is about a ‘lawmaker’ saying something stupid.” Cracked editor David Wong points out: There are 7,382 state legislators in the U.S.; any group that size is bound to have some whackjobs in it; and any one of them can introduce a bill.

So it would really be newsworthy if some week no crazy-assed bills were proposed.

Rule of thumb: Don’t waste your outrage. Unless your representative is the one embarrassing himself, pay no attention to a crazy-sounding bill in your own state legislature until it has gotten out of committee. Pay no attention to a crazy bill in some other state until it has passed one house.

Homework: The next crazy NC bill, to put a two-year waiting period on divorces. Is it time to get upset or not?

National Review and I have different visions of Wonderland.

The Kentucky legislature just passed a “religious freedom” bill over its governor’s veto. The bill is short, and the key sentence is:

Government shall not substantially burden a person’s freedom of religion. The right to act or refuse to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief may not be substantially burdened unless the government proves by clear and convincing evidence that it has a compelling governmental interest in infringing the specific act or refusal to act and has used the least restrictive means to further that interest.

Religious conservatives have been moving in this direction for several years, with bills that allow medical service providers to refuse to provide services that violate their conscience (i.e., druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions for an abortion-inducing drug like RU-486), and with the court case challenging whether health insurance provided by private employers has to provide the contraception coverage mandated by ObamaCare. (As far as I know, no EMT has become a Jehovah’s Witness and refused to give blood transfusions, but I believe he would have that right in Mississippi.)

As much as I dislike this bill, part of me is glad it passed, because I can stop making slippery-slope arguments now that Kentucky has slid all the way to the bottom. Now, if you don’t want to hire women, you can invoke this law and your sincerely held religious belief that a woman’s place is in the home. If you don’t want to serve blacks, invoke this law and your sincere belief that God doesn’t want the races to mix.

Of course, I don’t recommend you try to invoke this law if your sincere beliefs are Muslim or atheist. As we’ve seen in neighboring Tennessee, religious freedom is for Christians — you knew that, right?

But anyway, run free, religious Christian Kentuckians!

This message from “your high-speed internet and cable provider” isn’t safe for work, but it’s funny and true.

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