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America Is a Dystopian Hellhole and Don’t You Forget It

by TeganHentze Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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It is, of course, normal for Republicans to claim that Democrats have screwed everything up and vice versa. That’s what political parties do. But as I (and many others) have noted before, it’s remarkable just how apocalyptic Republicans are this year. Listening to the GOP debate last night, you might have barely avoided slitting your own throat in despair over the destruction of a once-great country that we’ve all witnessed over the past seven years.

As a public service, I figured I would collect the most ominous statement from each candidate last night. Obviously this is a judgment call in some cases, since there were so many to choose from. But there’s also a surprise. Here are my choices:

Bush: The idea that somehow we’re better off today than the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States is totally an alternative universe. The simple fact is that the world has been torn asunder.

Carson: You know, when you go into the store and buy a box of laundry detergent, and the price has gone up — you know, 50 cents because of regulations….And everything is costing more money, and we are killing our people like this….It’s the evil government that is putting all these regulations on us so that we can’t survive.

Trump: Our military is a disaster. Our healthcare is a horror show….We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people….Those two young people — those two horrible young people in California when they shot the 14 people….Many people saw pipe bombs and all sorts of things all over their apartment. Why weren’t they vigilant? Why didn’t they call? Why didn’t they call the police?…We have to find out — many people knew about what was going on. Why didn’t they turn those two people in so that you wouldn’t have had all the death? There’s something going on and it’s bad. And I’m saying we have to get to the bottom of it.

Rubio: This president is undermining the constitutional basis of this government. This president is undermining our military. He is undermining our standing in the world….The damage he has done to America is extraordinary. Let me tell you, if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.

Kasich: In this country, people are concerned about their economic future. They’re very concerned about it. And they wonder whether somebody is getting something to — keeping them from getting it. That’s not the America that I’ve ever known.

Christie: When I think about the folks who are out there at home tonight watching….They know that this country is not respected around the world anymore. They know that this country is pushing the middle class, the hardworking taxpayers, backwards, and they saw a president who doesn’t understand their pain, and doesn’t have any plan for getting away from it.

And the surprise? There’s nothing on this list from Ted Cruz. He had plenty of criticisms of Obama, but I looked at everything he said last night and there was really no hint of America going to hell in a handbasket. I didn’t expect that, but I’ll bet it’s deliberate. Maybe he knows something the rest of field doesn’t?

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America Is a Dystopian Hellhole and Don’t You Forget It

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Charts of the Day: Which One Do You Believe?

by MinervaShuman9 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the motherblog, Kristina Rizga has an interesting piece about what happens when you try to integrate majority-black schools. Basically, nobody likes it. The poorer (mostly black) parents don’t like the idea of a bunch of rich folks coming in and pushing them around. The richer (mostly white) parents don’t like the idea of their kids going to a low-performing school. But Kristina points to a substantial body of research showing that, in fact, white kids do fine when they move to schools in poorer black neighborhoods. In fact, they might even do better on a variety of metrics.

The whole piece is worth a read, but because I’m a nerd I going to use it as an excuse for a statistics lesson. One of the links in the piece is to a recent report from the federal government about the black-white achievement gap. It contains three charts of note. The first is on the right, and it shows white test scores in schools with different densities of black students. Basically, it confirms the worst fears of white parents: as the percentage of black kids goes up, the test scores of the white kids go down.

But wait. Maybe the white kids in majority-black districts are lower performing to begin with. So let’s control for income. That gets you the chart on the bottom left. Not so bad! Then let’s control for some other characteristics. Bingo! If we do a proper job of comparing apples to apples, white kids actually do better when they go to schools with very high densities of black students. White fears turn out to be entirely unfounded.

So here’s the question: which chart do you believe? The one with the raw data? Or the ones with all the fancy-pants statistical controls? Are the controls legitimate? Or are they just the result of a bunch of liberal analysts in the Department of Education torturing the data until they get the politically correct result they want?

Even statisticians might disagree about this. So how are laymen supposed to understand it? If you were a parent and these were your kids we were talking about, which chart would you believe?

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Charts of the Day: Which One Do You Believe?

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Poor People Really Get Screwed By Ben Carson’s Tax Plan

by SherleneThurgood Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back in the day—meaning approximately 2008 or so—Republican presidential candidates made a big mistake. They released their tax plans without bothering to figure out anything other than the average tax cut each one provided. The frequent result was that taxes went up on the poorest people and down on the richest. That’s bad optics.

By 2012 they’d all wised up. Their tax cuts might be bigger for the rich, but they made sure everyone got a cut.

When I was looking at Ben Carson’s plan last night, I realized that the poor guy hadn’t been paying attention. He figured that by setting a zero percent tax rate on income up to $36,000, he’d be guaranteeing that the poor would get a tax cut. Unfortunately, his actual knowledge of the tax code is so shallow that he didn’t realize what he meant when he said his plan eliminated all credits and deductions. That means he’s getting rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which often amounts to a negative tax rate for the poor. In other words, paying $0 is a tax increase for a lot of them. Citizens for Tax Justice provides the details:

Under Carson’s plan, the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers would receive an average annual tax increase of $792 and the second 20 percent would get an average annual tax increase of $447, while the top one percent would receive an average annual tax cut of $348,434. The main reason Carson’s plan would increase taxes on low-income families is that it would eliminate all tax credits, including the highly effective Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC).

There’s still no reason to care about this since Carson is obviously doomed to return to the book promotion racket at this point. Still, just for the record, I figure this deserves a chart to memorialize it for posterity. So here it is.

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Poor People Really Get Screwed By Ben Carson’s Tax Plan

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Just Because Donald Trump Says It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Report It

by VictorXbocivluud Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stop it, stop it, stop it, STOP IT! Just because Donald Trump says something calculatingly stupid and provocative doesn’t mean it has to be reported as front-page news. Everyone knows that his “Cruz is a Canadian” thing is ridiculous—and he wouldn’t bother saying it if he didn’t know that it was going to get loudly amplified by a media that just can’t say no to him.

Look: he’s a candidate. He’s in the lead. Reporters have to report what he’s doing. I get it. But stuff like this is such obvious media bait that it should be treated as such. It should get one line at the end of the day’s campaign roundup: “In other news, Donald Trump tried to gain attention once again with a goofy claim that Ted Cruz might not be a natural born citizen.” That’s all it really needs.

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Just Because Donald Trump Says It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Report It

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Lots of Rich People Seem to Be in Tough Financial Straits

by AltonDeyoung Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s a fairly remarkable poll from Gallup about financial well-being. The direction of the answers is unsurprising: if you earn more, you’re more likely to have enough money to buy the things you need, and less likely to be cutting back on spending.

And yet, of those making over $240,000, a full 10 percent say they don’t have enough money to buy the things they need. And an astonishing 37 percent say they’re cutting back.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Either there are a whole lot of rich people who manage their money really badly, or else this is some kind of statistical artifact. Or maybe rich people consider separate summer and winter getaway homes to be among the things they “need.” It’s a headscratcher.

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Lots of Rich People Seem to Be in Tough Financial Straits

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Ted Cruz Is Doing Great in Iowa

by MerlinAviles Posted on January 5, 2016

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Yesterday I forgot to put up my weekly reminder of how Republicans are doing in the latest polls, so here it is today. Ol’ Ted is doing pretty well among the evangelical cornfields of Iowa, and he didn’t even have to root for the Hawkeyes in the Rose Bowl to do it. His scheme of waiting for either Trump or Carson to implode and then picking up their votes seems to have been pretty shrewd.

Of course, the winner of the last two Iowa caucuses were Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, and look where they are now. There’s still a bushel of campaigning left.

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Ted Cruz Is Doing Great in Iowa

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Enough With the Middle-Age Whites, Already

by TiffaniDdr Posted on January 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a Washington Post column over the weekend, Fareed Zakaria wrote this:

In a well-known paper, economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case found that over the past 15 years, one group — middle-age whites in the United States — constitutes an alarming trend. They are dying in increasing numbers.

I suppose I’m tilting at windmills here, but this misconstrual of the Case/Deaton paper really bugs me. It’s not “middle aged” whites who are dying of drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver disease in vastly greater numbers. The chart on the right is taken directly from data in the Case/Deaton paper, and it shows two groups with outsize increases in mortality: 30-34 year olds and 50-59 year olds. So there are three age cohorts here. Roughly speaking, one cohort was born in the early 50s and shows big problems; another was born in the 60s and shows only moderate problems; and the third was born in the early 70s and once again shows big problems.

These cohorts might change if you examine the data using different age buckets, different diseases, and a different timeframe. Who knows? Regardless, if you’re going to put forward an explanation about why this is happening, it better account for all three age groups. You can’t just pretend the data points only to “middle-age” whites and then spin your theories from that.

Oh, and the paper is by Case and Deaton, not Deaton and Case. Either way, though, I sure wish one of them would step in to correct this.

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Enough With the Middle-Age Whites, Already

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Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Is Far More Sensational Then Jeb Bush’s

by TressaLowin Posted on December 24, 2015

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The folks at the Tax Policy Center have spurned my advice to spend more time with their families, instead spending their holiday weekends beavering away on an analysis of Donald Trump’s tax plan. And the important news is that it’s bigger, more energetic, and altogether more taxerrific than Jeb Bush’s weak-tea excuse for a tax plan. Bush would increase the national debt by 28 percentage points over the next decade. Trump kills it with a 39 point increase in red ink. Bush raises the federal deficit by $1 trillion in 2026. Trump goes big and increases it by $1.6 trillion. Bush’s plan costs $6.8 trillion over ten years. Trump’s plan clocks in at a budget-busting $9.5 trillion. And Bush reduces the tax rate of the super-rich by a meager 7.6 percent. Trump buries him by slashing tax rates for the Wall Street set by 12.5 percent.

Once again, Bush has brought a knife to a gun fight, and Trump has slapped him silly. This is why Trump is a winner. Merry Christmas, billionaires!

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Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Is Far More Sensational Then Jeb Bush’s

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Obama Ruined the Tea Party for All of Us

by RomeoPeakahbxr Posted on December 23, 2015

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A friend draws my attention today to a piece by National Review editor Rich Lowry about—of course—the wild popularity of Donald Trump among tea partiers. Lowry waxes nostalgic for the early tea party days of 2010, when being a “constitutional conservative” was all the rage, and wonders where it all went:

Trump exists in a plane where there isn’t a Congress or a Constitution. There are no trade-offs or limits….He would deport the American-born children of illegal immigrants. He has mused about shutting down mosques and creating a database of Muslims. He praised FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

You can be forgiven for thinking that in Trump’s world, constitutional niceties—indeed any constraints whatsoever—are for losers….For some on the right, clearly, the Constitution was an instrument rather than a principle. It was a means to stop Obama, and has been found lacking.

My friend snickers at Lowry’s use of some, which does a whole lot of heavy lifting here. Technically, though, 95 percent is still some, so this is accurate. But a wee bit misleading, no? Anyway, this leads Lowry into an argument that, really, Trump is just Obama 2.0:

Trump is a reaction to Obama’s weakness but also to his exaggerated view of executive power….Whereas Obama has a cool contempt for his political opponents and for limits on his power, Trump has a burning contempt for them. The affect is different; the attitude is the same.

….A hallmark of Obama’s governance has been to say that he lacks the power to act unilaterally on a given issue, and then do it anyway. Progressives have been perfectly willing to bless Obama’s post-constitutional government. Trump’s implicit promise is to respond in kind, and his supporters think it’s about time.

Uh huh. So far, Obama has done OK in the Supreme Court, but no matter. Tea partiers believe Obama goes to sleep each night not by counting sheep, but by counting bonfires of Constitutions. Or, as Lowry admits, they pretend to believe this. In reality, it’s just a handy way to oppose Obama’s liberal policies.

Now, it’s never been clear to me why you need this kind of charade. Why not just oppose Obama’s liberal policies because they’re no good? I suppose it’s mainly a palliative for the rubes, who don’t like to think of themselves as meanspirited folks who dislike paying taxes to help the less fortunate. Instead, they can complain that Obama’s policies are unconstitutional; or that he’s running up dangerous levels of debt; or that he’s turning America into sclerotic old Europe. That sounds a lot nicer.

Anyway, Lowry’s actual goal in this piece is to come up with conservative arguments against Trump. That’s the Lord’s work, even if “Obama 2.0” seems a little unlikely to catch on. What’s more, I seem to recall that he’s a cat person in an office jampacked with dog people. And Christmas is right around the corner. So I’ll call a truce. No more writing about Donald Trump until Christmas is over. We all deserve a break.

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Obama Ruined the Tea Party for All of Us

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

by RitaCantor Posted on December 18, 2014

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In his yearly press conference, Vladimir Putin appeared to be trying to cool down the rhetoric over Ukraine:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict….“We hear a lot of militant statements; I believe President Poroshenko is seeking a settlement, but there is a need for practical action,” Mr. Putin added. “There is a need to observe the Minsk agreements” calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of forces.

Russia has toned down its talk on the Ukraine crisis in the past month, and some of its most incendiary language, like “junta” and “Novorossiya,” a blanket term used for the separatist territories, is no longer used on state-run television news. Mr. Putin also notably omitted those terms, which he had used in other public appearances, on Thursday.

So does this mean Putin is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the West? You be the judge:

In general, he blamed “external factors, first and foremost” for creating Russia’s situation — accusing the West of intentionally trying to weaken Russia. “No matter what we do they are always against us,” Putin said, one of a series of observations directed at how he said the West has been treating Russia.

Putin attributed Western sanctions that have targeted Russia’s defense, oil and gas and banking sectors for about “25 percent” of Russia’s current difficulties.

But Putin stood firm over the actions that brought on the Western backlash, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula after pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine began an uprising earlier this year….“Taking Texas from Mexico is fair, but whatever we are doing is not fair?” he said, in comments seemingly directed at the United States.

Putin also suggested that the West was demanding too many concessions from Russia, including further nuclear disarmament. Likening Russia to a bear — a longtime symbol of the country — he chided the West for insisting the Russian bear “just eat honey instead of hunting animals.”

“They are trying to chain the bear. And when they manage to chain the bear, they will take out his fangs and claws,” Putin said. “This is how nuclear deterrence is working at the moment.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say Putin is probably right about sanctions being responsible for around 25 percent of Russia’s economic problems. As for his guess that those problems will last two years before Russia returns to growth? That might not be far off either, though I suspect growth will be pretty slow for longer than that.

It’s hard to render a real judgment here without being fluent in Russian and watching the press conference in real time, but based on press reports I’d say Putin’s anti-Western comments were milder than they could have been. My guess is that events in Ukraine really haven’t worked out the way he hoped, and he’d be willing to go ahead and disengage if he could do so without admitting that he’s conceding anything. The anti-Western bluster is just part of that. (Of course, the bluster is also partly genuine: Putin really does believe, with some justification, that the West wants to hem in Russia.)

Oddly, then, I’d take all this as a mildly positive sign. The rhetoric seemed fairly pro forma; Putin obviously knows that sanctions are hurting him; and there were no serious provocations over Ukraine. I’ll bet there’s a deal to be made with Putin as long as it’s done quietly.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

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