What Is Democracy?

I don't get it. Republican voters select a presidential nominee, and no fewer than fifty members of Republican "leadership" say that they will reject the choice made by the voters and will vote for the Democrat. Not that I hold any brief for Donald Trump, but who do these "leaders" think is supposed to be in charge in a democracy?

Barack Obama and others say that Trump is "temperamentally and intellectually unfit," apparently not caring that in doing so they are insulting millions of citizens who chose him to represent them. To disagree with policies is one thing, but a campaign that abandons persuasion for this flood of personal character assassination is divisive and, in the end, accomplishes nothing useful.

Does anyone seriously think that you are going to get me to vote for your candidate by personally insulting mine? Do you really think that by telling millions of people that they voted for a man who is "temperamentally and intellectually unfit" you are going to change their votes to Clinton?

What are we doing? What is all this rhetoric about?

The Sky Is Falling

Democracy Now warned us on Thursday that, “First Evidence Surfaces of Foreign Money Pouring into U.S. Elections After Citizens United.”

Citizens United, you may recall, is the Supreme Court decision based on the premise that a) corporations have the same rights of free speech as persons, and that b) money is the same as speech and that therefor corporations may donate money to the campaigns of politicians. It caused all sorts of alarm to the effect that money would corrupt our elections beyond redemption.

Democracy Now is sounding the alarm over the contribution of some $1.3 million by a Chinese couple to the campaign of Jeb Bush, six years after the court decision in question

But, Jeb Bush? Given the nature of Jeb Bush’s campaign, Democracy Now seems to have missed the point just a bit. If Bush’s campaign was an airplane, it not only would not have gotten off the ground, it would not have gotten to the runway. It never, as it turned out, even left the gate.

If the Jeb Bush campaign is what results from the influx of foreign money, then I think we should encourage a vast flood of foreign money and destroy a few more campaigns.

Nature Can Be Interesting

We have an African Tulip tree in our front yard, which is supposed not to be deciduous but is – sort of. It stays fully green and lush all winter, but then in May or so it produces a prolific and dramatic crop of reddish orange flowers and sheds about 80% of its leaves. It is native to Africa, southern hemisphere, and that may have something to do with the timing, although I’m inclined to doubt it.

So far this is not all that interesting, nor is it particularly interesting that in late July the tree starts vigorously putting out new leaves. What’s interesting is the degree to which that new leaf growth initially occurs on the top and South (sunny) side of the tree and not on the North side.

The top and South side of the tree right now are covered with new growth, and not just buds but fully developed leaves, while the North side is not even setting buds yet. If you think that the angle of the Sun (which is much higher here than it would be in, say, Minnesota) doesn’t make a difference, think again.

And Somewhat Less Interesting

Comes from ESPN.COM which tells us that (are you ready?), "Danica Patrick continues to amaze us with her yoga skills." There are pictures. Of her doing yoga. Go look if you want, but be warned that if you do you cannot unsee them.

Pop Goes Another Bubble

Dean Baker yesterday refutes a claim made by the New York Times, and in doing so pops a bubble that is a favorite of Paul Krugman. That’s the problem for economists. Their little theories are such exercises in fantasy that when they prop one up, they always manage to do damage to another one.

The Times claims that the federal deficit is projected to increase by 2020 “as increasing entitlement costs for retiring baby boomers take their toll on federal coffers." Dean Baker says that is untrue and that the projected deficit increase is due to the “Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projection that interest rates will rise.”

He seems to have no argument with the CBO’s projection that payments of interest will rise to about $800 billion per year just four years from now. That’s a pretty big jump from the $223 billion we spent on interest payments in 2015, and it should be receiving a lot of discussion in the presidential campaign. It’s not mentioned at all, of course.

Anyway, Paul Krugman is fond of repeating that the government should be borrowing a lot of money right now because interest rates are low and “debt is cheap.”

Borrowing money merely because the interest is low is a stupid move under any circumstances. My family doesn’t, for instance, need a new car; we don’t want a new car; we can’t afford a new car; we can’t afford to put gas in a new car; but we buy a new car because we are offered one at a good price. Stupid.

But borrowing money merely because the interest rate is low is particularly stupid when the interest rate is not going to remain low.

The government secures debt in the form of fixed rate bonds, but many of them are short term bonds and none of them are of indefinite term. All of them must be either repaid or rolled over into new debt at whatever interest rate prevails at the time. Since Krugman also promotes the theory that governments “never pay off debt” (which is another discussion), and our government has not done so in any meaningful amount since World War II, that means in effect that the government has a variable rate loan.

Remember all those people in 2000 through 2006 who bought houses using the wonderful adjustable rate mortgage loans? They were so happy that, because the interest rate was only 2%, they could afford to buy a much bigger house. Right? They must all have been reading Paul Krugman.

Government, that is taxpayer’s, payment of interest on the debt was $223 billion last year and is objectively forecast to increase to $800 billion in just four more years, even if the government does not borrow any more money. That’s a 259% increase, or more than tripling the expense. Somebody please ask Paul Krugman if that borrowing still sounds like a real bargain.

Question

How do Democrats reconcile their new "America is already great" mantra with their claim to being the country's "progressive party?"

Dean Baker is an Idiot

Dean Baker repeated yesterday the absurd claim which Keynesians are fond of repeating that, “We got out of the last Great Depression by spending lots of money on fighting World War II.”  He obviously wasn’t around during that war, as my parents were, or he would know that World War II merely changed the form of depression from one where many people had no jobs to one where they had jobs but there were no goods to buy with the income they were making.

He would also know that we actually got out of that depression by rebuilding a world destroyed by war, and that we had no competition while doing it because we had bombed our competition into rubble. We also provided college educations for much of the generation which fought that war.

He goes on to say that, “the economy doesn't care what we spend money on, it responds in the same way.” Actually, that’s not even close to being true, because when the money winds up being spent on consumer goods manufactured in other economies, that spending merely increases the trade deficit and does essentially nothing for our economy. When we spend it on fighting wars in foreign countries it is money gone forever and we have nothing to show for it.

When, on the other hand, we spend it on building roads, bridges, water and sewer systems and energy production and transmission, we grow our economy, provide meaningful employment for our working class, and we still have the money in the form of infrastructure because we have invested the money instead of merely spent it. We have not, however, done anything meaningful in this arena in more than fifty years.

Hopefully that spending is done in a manner which reduces our impact on the planet, but that’s a different topic.

Dean Baker is an idiot, as are all economists by definition, because we cannot grow our economy from within like some sort of self licking ice cream cone, we can only do so from without by means of a positive trade balance as we did from the end of World War II until the 1970’s, and when we do spend money it matters very much how and on what we spend it.

Also Interesting

The San Diego Chamber of Commerce has taken a position supporting the Chargers bid to build a stadium downtown, financed in part by a 32% increase in the city's hotel tax. What's interesting is that the Chamber apparently did not reach out to any of the downtown businesses it represents to obtain their opinions before taking this position. If they had, their position might be a bit different, since the business owners downtown almost universally oppose the plan.

Seems that the Chamber of Commerce represents its constituents in much the same manner that the United States government does.

Interesting

Donald Trump "invites" the Russians to hack Clinton's email server, which no longer exists, and there is a massive freakout from the entire Democratic party and the media, who think he's serious.

It's going to be an interesting political campaign year.

Well, That Was A New Low

America's Got Talent: Results was a one hour show. It took about four minutes to announce which five acts will go on to the semi-finals, and the rest of the time was... I don't know what it was. It was just nonsense and crap.

Happily, the ninety-year-old stripper has reached the end of her road and, even more happily, the Philadelphia Eagles football player will continue. "Thank you America," he said, "and thank you Eagles for allowing me to do this."  I've always been an Eagles fan; more so now.

Distraction Continues

The by now infamous emails are homophobic, anti-Semitic and betray both Democratic and democratic principles, and of course Obama does not even address, let alone condemn that content, but merely condemns Russia for the act of illegally obtaining and releasing the emails. He says that the Russian purpose in doing this was to “interfere with US elections,” which is precisely what the DNC was doing.

That is the “politics of distraction,” practiced by politicians for many decades, but perfected by Obama's predecessor, Bill Clinton. It is also what psychologists call, “projection;”  accusing someone else of having certain character flaws so that you do not need to acknowledge the presence of those same flaws in your own character.

That’s why we should never elect to any office anyone who has expressed a desire to hold that office.

Delusion, Delusion

Paul Krugman posted a thought piece yesterday saying that Trump is a candidate that “Putin is aiding because he knows Trump is close to, probably financially entangled with friendly oligarchs.” Seriously? The use of popular cant verbiage detracts from one’s believability a bit, but when Putin was asked if he was “aiding Trump” he didn’t even bother to answer, merely laughed in the reporter’s face.

Krugman goes on to say that this controversy about Putin aiding Trump is timely because it is “dovetailing with my bedtime reading,” which is about the Roman Empire. I’m not sure what foreign leaders were nefariously aiding the Roman emperors in their bids for power, but…

To dovetail with my bedtime reading we would have to have combat troops actively engaged at brigade strength in Columbia, so… Who knows? Maybe we do.

Anyway, he compares Trump’s claim of making NATO allies pay their fair share of the cost of common defense, which Krugman describes as “a protection racket, in which countries get defended only if they pay up,” to the Roman Empire’s looting and sacking which, even for an economist, is quite a stretch.

Dean Baker says, also yesterday, that “Glass-Steagall would not have prevented the economic crisis in 2008. The problem was allowing a massive housing bubble to grow unchecked.” The first is debatable, while the second is utter bullshit.

The housing bubble was a symptom to begin with; the real problem being far too much wealth accumulating with no place available to invest it at reasonable rates of return due to the Fed’s low interest rates. That wealth was the fodder for those loans, and the failure to repay those loans was merely the trigger for the collapse.

The meat of the collapse was not the housing loan money itself, but a huge pyramid of “funny money” financial instruments that had been sold based on those mortgage loans and which had face values orders of magnitude larger than those loans.

And because Glass-Steagall had been repealed, money in deposit banks was available for the purchase of these “funny money” financial instruments. Would the collapse have happened without the money which came from the deposit banks? Possibly, but it would have been much less severe.

Economics is not actually a science. It is a profession that allows you to just make up shit as you go along.

Um, Okay? Again

Message from Elizabeth Warren, "Donald Trump’s Divisive Tactics Empower Those At The Top." This from the party that just rigged the primary election in order to assure the nomination of the establishment candidate.

Shoot the messenger, or... Shoot whoever is accused of being the messenger, even if he isn't, but in any case, ignore the message. Democrats are utterly focused on proving that it was Putin who released the emails, and are totally ignoring the fact that the emails reveal a rigged election. Contents, apparently, are irrelevant, their illegal release is all that they care about.

And Democrats accuse Republicans of being deranged.

Um, Okay?

I will doubtless be castigated as a misogynistic pig for this, but Hillary Clinton and her campaign are beginning to make me question their contact with reality.

Hillary Clinton said on CBS Sixty Minutes that she faces more scrutiny than other top-level politicians, saying, “I often feel like there's the Hillary standard and then there's the standard for everybody else.”  Shades of her earlier complaint of a “vast right wing conspiracy.”  Her supporters will doubtless claim something to the effect that being paranoid does not disprove the presence of someone following you.

Then Clinton’s campaign manager claims that Vladimir Putin released the emails which revealed that the DNC had deliberately sabotaged the candidacy of Bernie Sanders; emails with sufficient level of evidence to force the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He claims at considerable length that Putin did so as a deliberate effort to damage Clinton’s election chances and to bolster Donald Trump.

He may, of course, have done that without Clinton’s knowledge or approval, and I may have won the San Diego 10K last month. But I didn’t and neither did he.

Then, after Wasserman Schultz resigns from the DNC, Clinton praises her leadership (yes it is specifically her leadership that Clinton admires) and names Wasserman Schultz as a member of her campaign staff. Why? Well, apparently because the principles revealed by the emails that forced her resignation from the DNC are precisely the principles that Clinton admires and wants to use in her campaign.

The San Diego Union Tribune comments, in an article which is not online, that, “Two years ago it was almost unimaginable that she [Hillary Clinton] would be campaigning on debt-free college, expanding Social Security, breaking up ‘too big to fail’ banks and all these other progressive issues.”

Yes, and it still is. When someone says and does something for decades and then suddenly reverses that position for an election, what kind of person actually believes that reversal? Democrats mock Republicans for believing that dinosaurs coexisted with mankind 6000 years ago, and yet they believe that Hillary Clinton is going to…   Oh never mind.

Smug Word Games

Now here’s a stunningly dishonest piece of opinion from Forbes, a supposedly legitimate economic journal. It is, at least, presented as the opinion of one Tim Wortstall, a “Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London” and apparently a complete idiot.

The headline, “As We've Been Saying, California's Minimum Wage Rises Increase Unemployment,” doesn’t define who “We” is, so one has to assume that it means the staff at Forbes, since writers don’t write their own headlines. Please note the implication of consensus as the piece begins.

This is an interesting little tale which illustrates the other side of the minimum wage story. Around here at least the standard side is that when you raise the price of something people buy less of it. Increase the minimum wage and employers will economise on minimum wage labour. This is a terribly simple point and yet people will twist themselves into ever more improbable positions to try to deny it.

Actually, of course, it’s not a “terribly simple point” at all, because it has been proven repeatedly that employers have not reduced the number of such jobs when the minimum wage was increased. The current increase is larger than past ones, and such a reduction may happen this time, but it’s unlikely, and it certainly has never happened in the past.

The piece babbles some nonsense about “seasonal adjustments,” which has nothing to do with the subject at hand, and then admits that “seasonal factors” are not pertinent to the issue, which makes you wonder why the idiot brought them up in the first place and makes you question his economic bona fides. As if you hadn’t done that already when you read the “Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute” thing.

He then goes on to discuss the way that unemployment is reported, namely that only people who are actively looking for work are counted as unemployed. He tells us that the increase in minimum wage has caused people to resume looking for work, and that since more people are looking for work the unemployment number reported as a percentage of the workforce has increased.

He makes the claim that even though thousands more people are employed rather than fewer, the fact that 27,000 more people are looking for work means that, “higher wages have called more labour supply into the market,” which is true enough. He then concludes that, “unemployment is defined those looking for a job but cannot find one. Thus an increased labour supply at this higher labour rate leads to more unemployment.”

In reality, of course, we know that those not previously looking for work were actually unemployed before they were drawn back into the workforce, and that this smug bastard’s word games prove nothing.

Baton Rouge

I am not a fan of LSU because I like their colors. My parents met when my father was in medical school at Tulane in New Orleans. My grandmother grew up in Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana and once worked as a dietician at LSU.

CBS ran an interview with two women whose husbands were among the police officers killed in Baton Rouge a few days ago. I usually have little patience with these productions, which normally involve much display of weeping and self pity, but this was Southern Louisiana. These women spoke of deep love and respect for their husbands. There was great sadness, and there was dignity that just tore the heart right out of my chest.

This is Cajun country; a people who have a inner core strength that puts the rest of us to shame. They are why Katrina did not beat New Orleans. They are of French heritage by way of Canada, and arrived in southern Louisiana when even native Americans disdained it, making their homes in an uninhabited and formerly uninhabitable swamp.

Cajuns look adversity in the eye, turn it around and kick its ass, and they don’t cry while they are doing it. These women will not raise damaged children. They will raise kids into healthy and happy adults unharmed by the adversity of their childhoods.

But I do like purple and gold.

Hello, Pot. Nice to meet you.

CBS Evening News responded to Trump's speech last night by saying that he stressed "gloom and doom"  too much, that he talked too much about what is wrong in the nation. Right, because their nightly news segment only reports unicorn sightings and rainbows over mountains.

Capitalism, What Capitalism?

Capitalism: an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit

I started to listen to a discussion on the problems of modern capitalism, held by “great thinkers on the economy,”  and turned it off after just five minutes, having found out why our economy is sinking under its own weight.

The first exercise in lunacy was a discussion was about how “every problem has become a financial problem,” citing the example that if there is not enough energy then we must invest in more energy.

That would be a problematic approach if we were following it, because eventually we would be consuming more energy than the planet has resources to produce, but with a population increasing by 20 million every decade when was the last time we invested in new water supplies of any significance? When have we invested in transportation in any real sense?

Then they begin discussing the financial sector, the trading of financial instruments, as if it was part of capitalism, when in fact it is entirely artificial and is destructive to capitalism. It allows capital to become stagnant and to do nothing more than to produce more artificial capital in the form of debt not backed by any real or economic property.

The discussion was rapidly moving toward proof that finance has overtaken capitalism as the basis of our economy, to the almost complete destruction of the latter.

Back to the “energy problem;”  we should, of course, be designing a social model that consumes orders of magnitude less energy, but no one is talking about that.

Why Nucs In Turkey?

In all of the blathering about the attempted coup in Turkey, one thing that was largely ignored by the mainstream American media was that the US has a fairly large collection of nuclear weapons stored at Incirlic Air Base in Turkey. This is a base which is inside Turkey, belongs to Turkey, and which they are permitting us to use.

I have been asking sources, mostly retired military and some former intelligence, why we still have nuclear weapons in Turkey, and have not gotten any really meaningful answers. No one, for instance, is willing to say that we might use them on Middle East nations because they are “harboring terrorists” or because we fear that they might be “building a nuclear bomb.”

One suggestion was to the effect that it is simply inertia; that we needed them during the days of the Soviet Union and have never gotten around to taking them out. That may be the most frightening thought I have encountered.

One person made my question more specific and raised a question of principle. What, he asked, is their purpose there; are they serving as a counter to the nuclear capabilities of others, or are they intended to counter non-nuclear threats?

If the former, it makes no sense whatever and they should have been removed several decades ago. If it is the latter, then it reflects a refusal to rule out the ”first use” of nuclear weapons, in which case that policy should be reversed, a policy of “no first use” should be reinstated and the weapons should be removed.

I recall a time when this country had a clearly stated policy that our nuclear arsenal was strictly a deterrent and that we would never again be the initiator of the use of nuclear weapons. I have not been able to track down precisely when that policy was abandoned, or who it was who first threatened to use “the nuclear option,”  but that threat has become common today. It should be banned, and any question about the use of nuclear weapons should be met with a restatement of the “no first use” policy.

Oh, Please

No fewer than 23 headlines on my news feed to the effect that Melania Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's speech. Turns out she is actually only acused of plagiarizing part of said speech, but so what if she did?

Her husband is running for president, not her, and she will do nothing in the future other than decorate the White House. Of what real import to the Trump campaign is her speech in real terms? None. Our obsession for trivia...