Tag Archives: people

Who’s Afraid of an Itsy Bitsy Bit of Inflation, Anyway?

by LydaMcCorkindal Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why are so many people obsessed with “hard money”? Why the endless hysterics about the prospect of inflation getting higher than 2 percent? Paul Krugman, like many others, thinks it’s basically a class issue. If you have a lot of debt, inflation is a good thing because it lowers the real value of your debt. But if you’re rich and you have lots of assets, the opposite is true. Here’s Krugman using data from the Census Bureau’s SIPP database:

Only the top end have more financial assets (as opposed to real assets like housing) than they have nominal debt; so they’re much more likely to be hurt by mild inflation and be helped by deflation than the rest.

Now, it’s true that some of these financial assets are stocks, which are claims on real assets. If we only look at interest-bearing assets, even the top group has more liabilities than assets.

But the SIPP top isn’t very high; in 2007 you needed a net worth of more than $8 million just to be in the top 1 percent. And since the ratio of interest-bearing assets to debt is clearly rising with wealth, we can be sure that the truly wealthy are indeed in the category where they have more to lose than to gain by a rise in the price level.

Brad DeLong isn’t buying it:

It is true that the rich do have more nominal assets than liabilities….But it is also true that America’s rich have a lot of real assets whose value depends on a strong and growing economy.

I find it implausible to claim that the net gain is positive when we net out the (slight) real gain to the rich from lower inflation with the (large) real loss to rich from lower capital utilization. It’s not a material interest in low inflation that we are dealing with here…

I don’t think I buy Krugman’s claim either. He’s basically saying that hard money hysteria is driven by the material interests of the top 0.1 percent, but even if you grant them the clout to get the entire country on their side, do the super rich really love low inflation in the first place? Do they own a lot of long-term, fixed-interest assets that decline in value when inflation increases? Fifty years ago, sure. But today? Not so much. This is precisely the group with the most sophisticated investment strategies, highly diversified and hedged against things like simple inflation risks.

Plus there’s DeLong’s point: even if they do own a lot of assets that are sensitive to inflation, they own even more assets that are sensitive to lousy economic growth. If higher inflation also helped produce higher growth, they’d almost certainly come out ahead.

So what’s the deal? I’d guess that it’s a few things. First, the sad truth is that virtually no one believes that high inflation helps economic growth when the economy is weak. I believe it. Krugman believes it. DeLong believes it. But among those who don’t follow the minutiae of economic research—i.e., nearly everyone—it sounds crazy. That goes for the top 0.1 percent as well as it does for everyone else. If they truly believed that higher inflation would get the economy roaring again, they might support it. (Might!) But they don’t.

Second, there’s the legitimate fear of accelerating inflation once you let your foot off the brake. This fear isn’t very legitimate, since if there’s one thing the Fed knows how to do, it’s stomp on inflation if it gets out of control. Nonetheless, there are plenty of people with a defensible belief that a credible commitment to low inflation does more good than harm in the long run. After all, stomping on inflation is pretty painful.

Third, there’s the very sensible fear among the middle class that high inflation is just a sneaky way to erode real wages. This is sensible because it’s true. There are several avenues by which higher inflation helps weak economies that are trapped at the zero bound, and one of them is by allowing wages to stealthily decline until employment reaches a new equilibrium. I think that lots of people understand this instinctively.

Fourth, there’s fear of the 70s, which apparently won’t go away until everyone who was alive during the 70s is dead. Which is going to be a while.

It’s worth noting that hard money convictions are the norm virtually everywhere in the developed world, even in places that are a lot more egalitarian than the United States. Inflationary fears may be irrational, especially under our current economic conditions, but ancient fears are hard to deal with. As it happens, the erosion of assets during the 70s was unique to the conditions of the 70s, which included a lot more than just a few years of high inflation. But inflation is what people remember, so inflation is still what they fear.

Bottom line: Even among non-hysterics, I’d say that hardly anyone really, truly believes in their hearts that high inflation would be good for economic growth. It’s the kind of thing that you have to convince yourself of by sheer mental effort, and even at that you’re probably still a little wobbly about the whole idea. It just seems so crazy. Until that changes, fear of inflation isn’t going anywhere.

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Who’s Afraid of an Itsy Bitsy Bit of Inflation, Anyway?

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New Conservative Meme: Migrant Children Aren’t Children

by LouisDossett Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have found a new line of attack on the ongoing refugee crisis along the southern border: The children who are migrating en masse from Central America and crowding into detention centers are not children.

“I realize that in Barack Obama’s America we now classify anyone under the age of 26 as a child eligible for their parent’s healthcare insurance,” writes Red State‘s Erick Erickson. “But I’m pretty sure a normal person would not classify these men as children.” He links to this tweet:

Erickson’s analysis is correct—the people in this photo are not children. The way immigration detention works is that children are separated from adults and then sorted by age and gender. This is noted in nearly every single story on the subject. Just because more than 48,000 minors have been detained crossing the border in 2014 doesn’t mean adults have simply stopped coming over.

Lest you think that the administration is inventing this influx of young migrants, here is a photo of migrant children crowded into a single room. I found it on Breitbart:

Big Government

You could also read my colleague Ian Gordon’s wrenching story for the magazine on 17-year-old Adrián’s flight from Guatemala City to the United States.

Link:

New Conservative Meme: Migrant Children Aren’t Children

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British Brewer Still Bitter Over American Revolution

by Unacoomt Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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British actor and writer Stephen Merchant, who you can thank in-part for creating the original version of The Office, has a challenge for you this 4th of July: imagine if his people had won the war for independence. He’s tired of acting like he’s not bloody pissed that each year we celebrate beating his little country. He’s so pissed in fact that he’s made the following ad for Newcastle Brown Ale. Watch his plea, as he begs of you to image how “great” Great Brtiain 2 would be. And then, enjoy a hoedown, just to spite him:

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British Brewer Still Bitter Over American Revolution

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“Snowpiercer”: The Best Post-Apocalyptic Film About Class Warfare You’ll See All Summer

by FayOtoolesz Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Chris Evans, is an ambitious, critically acclaimed new thriller. “While Transformers mucks up cineplexes with its ugly bombast, here, as an alternative, is something truly special, a unique and bracing science-fiction film that stirs both heart and mind,” raves Vanity Fair.

Like so many action films that came before it (both the smart and the monumentally silly), Snowpiercer has political relevance pumping through its veins. In the future, a corporate attempt to reverse the devastating effects of global warming goes horrifically wrong: The experiment ends up murdering most of the planet. Survivors live aboard the Snowpiercer, a train—equipped with a perpetual-motion engine—where the rich and pampered live at the front and the poor and unwashed at the rear. Bloody class warfare ensues.

You get the message.

Here’s Bong discussing the corporate critique and climate-change angle of his film, in an interview with CraveOnline:

In Snowpiercer, it’s more about how big business tries to both use and control nature. And how it backfires on them. Nature takes its revenge and sends them back to the ice age. This is an aspect that is different from the graphic novel source material (by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette). I wanted to make a story change because I felt that climate change is more current of an issue and will continue to be, because it’s not in the interest of big business to change, but to control.

Basically, it’s an action movie in which corporate power takes extreme measures to attack the climate, instead of overhauling the way they do business for the sake of the world. They screw over human civilization, and the rest of the film goes the class-division route. “The poor are in the back and the rich are in the front,” Bong told CraveOnline. “So this created an opportunity to talk about the political ideas involved and really examine human nature and why those systems exist. What would we actually discover if they were taken on? We don’t know because it’s so large and affects billions of people. Having a few survivors is a sci-fi element that makes it easier to explore these ideas.”

On that note, here’s a trailer for Snowpiercer:

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“Snowpiercer”: The Best Post-Apocalyptic Film About Class Warfare You’ll See All Summer

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

by MarilynFortney Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber has a piece in the current issue of the New Republic about Hillary Clinton’s imminent takeover of the Democratic Party, and today Ezra Klein interviewed him about it. Klein was especially interested in the argument that Obama’s 2008 supporters were so disillusioned by Obama’s failure to change Washington that they’re now eager to support an old-school politico like Hillary. Here’s Scheiber:

Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton made this kind of snide, but in retrospect apt, critique of Obama where she said that Obama thinks he’ll get to Washington and the heavens will part and the Republicans will cooperate, but that just won’t happen. So I asked some of these Obama supporters if she was right. And a lot of these people remembered those comments and being annoyed by them. But they all said she was actually a bit right. We were a bit naive then, they said. People used the word naive a lot in these conversations.

I’m not sure I’ve ever fully fessed up to this, so this is as good a time as any. For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible. Did Obama give soaring speeches? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to change the way Washington works? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to pass historic legislation in dozens of different areas? Sure, he’s a politician.

It just never occurred to me that anyone took this stuff seriously. It’s a presidential campaign! Of course he’s promising a chicken in every pot. That’s what presidential candidates do. I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental. In fact, that seemed so obvious to me that I never really credited the idea that anyone could seriously see him any differently.

Well, I guess that was naive on my part. By now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric. Naturally, then, they’re bitterly disappointed at the real-world Obama. Well, I’m disappointed in some ways too—mostly in the areas of foreign policy and national security—but I continue to think he’s a pretty good president because my expectations were tempered to begin with.

Nor do I think Hillary would have done any better. Probably worse, I’d say. After all, once he was in office, it’s not as if Obama acted like he believed his campaign-trail rhetoric. He hired a bunch of pretty ordinary staffers and got to work passing pretty ordinary legislation. Is the theory here that Hillary would have figured out some magical points of leverage that Obama didn’t? That she would have done better because Republicans like her more than Obama? Please.

I have pretty mixed feelings about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. On the one hand, I’ve long admired her obviously sincere dedication to public service in the face of abuse that would destroy a weaker person. On the other hand, another Clinton? This is no fault of hers, but I’m not sure I’m any more excited about that than I am about the prospect of another Bush. Maybe it’s time to move on.

Either way, though, I sure hope all those folks who are disappointed by Obama don’t think that Hillary is some sort of silver bullet either. If she runs and wins, she’ll be dealing with exactly the same kind of Republican obstructionism as Obama—and she’ll have just as much trouble getting anything done.

If disappointed Dems really want to change things, they have only one option: figure out a way to take back Congress in 2016. That’s it. Until and unless that happens, George Washington himself wouldn’t be any more effective than Obama has been.

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

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Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

by JamaalChampagne Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest from the Supreme Court:

Police may not search the smartphones of people who are put under arrest unless they have a warrant, the Supreme Court has ruled, a unanimous and surprising victory for privacy advocates.

The justices, ruling in cases from California and Massachusetts, said the 4th Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” prevents a police officer from examining a cellphone found on or near a person who is arrested.

See? I told you the Supreme Court was a remarkably agreeable place. And in this case, they were remarkably agreeable even though lower courts had split on this issue and it could easily have broken down along normal left (yay civil liberties!) and right (yay law enforcement!) lines. Instead, all nine of the justices did the right thing. For a brief moment, we can all celebrate.

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Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

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Yet Another IRS Scandal That Isn’t

by CorneliMeaux Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg is outraged that there continues to be no outrage over the endless IRS “scandal.” Most of his column is the usual collection of misleading innuendo, but there is one new item: the IRS’s claim that Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011 and thousands of her emails were lost. That does sound pretty fishy:

So now the IRS claims that a computer crash has irrevocably erased pertinent emails (an excuse I will remember when I am audited). National Review’s John Fund reports that the IRS’ manual says backups must exist. If emails — which exist on servers, clouds and elsewhere — can be destroyed this way, someone should tell the NSA that there’s a cheaper way to encrypt data.

Far be it from me to doubt the word of John Fund, but perhaps Goldberg should instead have read the Washington Post yesterday. The explanation for the crash, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to sound pretty plausible. Basically, the IRS keeps six months worth of email backups on tape, so when congressional investigators started asking for email records in mid-2013, backups were available only through late 2012. Lerner’s computer crashed in mid-2011, so everything prior to that was lost because it existed only in local files on her PC. The IRS has since tried to recover Lerner’s emails from the PCs of people she sent emails to, but that was only partially successful.

Nothing here sets off alarm bells to me. The key question, I think, is whether the IRS has contemporaneous documents showing that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011 and attempts to recover her hard drive failed. And they do. This is well before the scandal broke, so it would take a pretty Herculean brand of conspiracy theorizing to imagine that this was somehow related to the scandal. Either Lerner deliberately crashed her hard drive because she suspected her actions might prompt an investigation two years later, or else the IRS has faked a bunch of emails from 2011 between Lerner and the IT team trying to recover her hard drive.

There’s also, as Steve Benen points out, the fact that Congress is mostly concerned with Lerner’s behavior in the election year of 2012. If the IRS were involved in a cover-up, faking a hard drive crash that destroyed emails from 2010 and 2011 is a pretty incompetent way of doing it.

So, anyway, that’s where the outrage is. Most of us concluded long ago that regardless of whether IRS policies were correct, the evidence pretty strongly suggests that they were bipartisan, targeting political groups on both left and right. There’s just no scandal there. At most there’s bad judgment, and probably not even that. Likewise, Lerner’s hard drive crash might turn out to be a scandal, but so far it sure doesn’t look like one.

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Yet Another IRS Scandal That Isn’t

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Adding a Private Option to VA Health Care Is Going to Cost a Bundle. We Should Study Whether It Works.

by GuillerIpu Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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As part of the deal to fund new VA facilities in underserved areas, Democrats agreed to a Republican proposal that would allow veterans to seek private health care if they live more than 40 miles from a VA facility or if they have been waiting more than 30 days for an appointment. Here’s what the CBO has to say about that:

Maybe this is a good thing. Better access to health care means more people will sign up for health care, and they’ll do it via private providers. That’s the basic idea behind Obamacare, after all. Of course, it’s also possible that this might be a bad thing. As Phil Longman points out, outsourced care lacks the very thing that makes VA care so effective: “an integrated, evidence-based, health care delivery system platform that is aligned with the interests of its patients.”

Because the VA truly is a system, it can coordinate among all the different specialists and other health care providers who are necessarily involved in patient care these days. And because it operates as a system, the VA can also make sure that all these medical professionals are working from a common electronic medical record and adhering to established, evidence-based protocols of care—not inadvertently ordering up dangerous combinations of drugs, or performing unnecessary surgeries and tests just to make a buck.

So which is it? Beats me. That’s why I sure hope someone is authorizing some money to study this from the start. It’s a great opportunity to compare public and private health care on metrics of both quality and cost. It’s not a perfect RCT, but it’s fairly close, since the people who qualify for private care are a fairly random subsegment of the entire VA population. If we study their outcomes over the next few years, we could learn a lot.

And that’s important, because this isn’t cheap. As CRFB points out, if this policy is extended beyond its initial pilot period it will cost more than we saved from the entire defense sequester and more than Medicare Part D. This is an opportunity that shouldn’t be passed up.

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Adding a Private Option to VA Health Care Is Going to Cost a Bundle. We Should Study Whether It Works.

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Contact: Producer Joe Henry on Long Marriages and Short Recording Sessions

by StantonHsz Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Joe Henry at the Greenwich House Music School in New York City. Jacob Blickenstaff

Since the mid-’80s, Joe Henry has alternately worked as a musician and producer in a career that encompasses soul, avant-garde jazz, country, R&B, rock, and folk. The range of artists he’s produced—Allen Toussaint, Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Aaron Neville, and Mose Allison among others—and the styles he has incorporated into his own music speaks to his reverence and broad understanding of American popular music as an art form.

Invisible Hour, out this week, is Henry’s 13th solo album and his first independent release since departing his long-time label Anti-. In a statement on his website, Henry says the album is about marriage and “the redemptive power of love in the face of fear.” He elaborated on the theme, and his career, during a recent chat in New York City. The following is in his words.

Just like being a musician, marriage is a constant engagement. There are moments where you have to care more about it than how either of you feel. When you commit spiritually and psychically, it doesn’t mean that you don’t make mistakes all over the place. People are seduced into thinking on that beautiful day that you’ll never have any significant problems. You think, “That couple over there, that won’t be us.” You have to let go of the idea that having a problem means somehow you’ve been betrayed. Otherwise you cut yourself off from your greatest resource, which is acceptance that you are going to encounter obstacles.

I have come to recently understand that I am not betraying the great mystery and poetry of song tradition to deliver the music as candidly as I can. With this album, I’m more consciously devoted to a particular sort of emotional clarity. I wanted to create the illusion, even if it is just an illusion, that nothing stands between the listener and the songs. I was working from an orientation of playing along with an acoustic guitar and being very orchestral in open-tunings, in real time on one instrument, enamored by the immediacy of that. I don’t think it is more authentic; I just mean there is a rumble, and weather in the air happens with the overtones of vibrating instruments in a room. I find that incredibly evocative and I wanted the record to have as close to that sensation as possible.

T-Bone Burnett was one of the first people I ever reached out to as a completely naïve singer-songwriter living in Ann Arbor. I made my first demos and was literally taking addresses off of the back of records: “T-Bone Burnett c/o Warner Brothers Records, Hollywood.” He wrote me back nonspecifically, “I lost your letter that came with this tape. I’m not really sure what you’re looking for, but it’s really great and you should keep going.” That was really what I needed, to have reached outside of my small frame and get some kind of response.

When you are just beginning, it’s amazing how little affirmation you really need, just the tiniest scrap. You’re in the desert and it’s a drop of water and you can keep going. To this day, when I get letters from people, I’m powerless not to respond. I feel like I have to let them know that they’ve been heard.

When all of us are starting out, we measure ourselves against the icons and we aren’t always aware of the ways in which we adopt somebody else’s posture. It’s like you want to be in the Boy Scouts, you think you have to put on that uniform to be authentically recognized. You live long enough and you realize, “I am part of the troop if I decide I am.” And that’s something you come to out of maturity—you can’t pregame it. The real trick is, how do you survive long enough to actually get good?

As a producer, some of my most meaningful work has come not from just sitting at home and the phone ringing one day but writing to people I’d like to work with. That’s how I wound up working with Bonnie Raitt. I sent a cold letter through her manager and I said, “If you don’t know, here’s who I am, here’s what I do, if you ever want to have a conversation or try something with no obligation, I’d be wide open to it.” I’ve gotten a lot of really meaningful work that way. I’ve had very few people who I’ve reached out to just not respond. The only people who categorically told me no were Kenny Burrell and Dr. Dre, who I wanted to produce a record of mine. I couldn’t get him to talk to me, but fair enough. I knew it was a long shot.

I make records quickly and affordably, because I believe in it. Not just because it’s economically expedient, but because I think making a record in three or four days invites a particular kind of focus and commitment that is almost invariably positive. I work with musicians who are not only willing to work that way, but love working that way, who appreciate the fact that right now this song gets revealed, conjured into the room, like a séance. It’s an exciting way to work it’s a sacred way to work, and as it turns out it’s also a really affordable way to work.

I’m stunned at how many people who live and breathe and admire the records from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s quickly forget that that’s how they got made. I don’t want to call out any names, but I could tell you a story of somebody revering a record from that period, pulling their hair out about their own record they spent a year and a half making. I’m saying, “You know that record that we were talking about the other day? Five of the ten songs on were recorded in one afternoon. And you are not going to get there if you are laboring over it to the point where you can’t stand the sound of it anymore. No one else is going to be able to stand the sound of it either.”

Putting this album out myself came down to this: I have had a great association with my former label, but I believe absolutely that artists should own their masters. They don’t share that view. I have nothing but respect for Brett Gurewitz, the owner of Anti-, but he has a band, Bad Religion, and I guarantee that Brett would not put out a Bad Religion record that he didn’t own the master for.

How I take a record into the world needs to be as unique as how I think about writing a song. It’s laziness or cowardice on my part not to, and then be sour at someone else when the record doesn’t do better. Bonnie Raitt—we made her last record together—she put that out on her own record label and she could’ve gone anywhere with it. I know for a fact because I had labels coming to me saying, “Is there any way you can get a meeting with her? Because she won’t talk to us.” I know she won’t. She’s not going to. This is a grand experiment for her and she is thrilled about it. At a certain point you start asking, “What am I getting for an advance that wouldn’t put me in an economy car? I am turning over my masters in perpetuity that my children ought to own. I’m better off taking out a home equity loan on my house, making my own record, and paying it off when I sell 10,000 of them, which I can.”

Everybody is trying to rebuild the model because it is not music that is broken down. People consume music more than they ever have. What is corrupt and failed is the delivery system. Good riddance to the very few labels who tell artists they aren’t allowed to work until we ordain that your work has value. When I was first starting out and there was no such thing as sitting at home with a computer with a great microphone, I sat on my hands until a label would give me the tiniest scrap to go try to do any goddamn thing. The thought takes root is that you don’t matter and your work can’t possibly matter. People say now any kid with a laptop can go sit in his basement and make a record. Yeah! How about it? It doesn’t have to sell 10 million copies to be meaningful.

“Contact” is an occasional series of artist portraits and interviews by Jacob Blickenstaff.

Continued here – 

Contact: Producer Joe Henry on Long Marriages and Short Recording Sessions

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Californians Want to Fix the Drought—Without Spending Any Money

by 4q4cv8v Posted on June 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Californians agree their state’s drought is a big problem, but they’re not enthused about spending money to alleviate it. That’s one of the takeaways from a just-released University of Southern California/Los Angeles Times poll. Some other findings:

Big problem, getting bigger

Just prior to California’s last gubernatorial election in November 2010, 46 percent of voters agreed that “having enough water to meet our future needs” mattered “a great deal.” The proportion of people who care a lot about water issues has crept up a lot since then:

Last September, 63 percent of voters called the drought a “crisis or major problem.”
89 percent of voters call the drought a “crisis or major problem” now.

Save us some water, just don’t send us the bill

Californians are notoriously tax averse, but even what may be the worst drought in 500 years is apparently not enough to get most voters to agree that the state should improve its water infrastructure:

36 percent of voters said the state should improve water storage and delivery systems, even if it costs money.
52 percent said the state should address these problems without spending money, by taking measures like encouraging conservation.

Poorer people and Latinos are feeling harder hit

The poll found:

11 percentof people making more than $50,000 annually said the drought had a “major impact” on their lives.
24 percent of people making less than $50,000 annually said the same.
29 percent of people making less than $20,000 annually said the same.

It’s worth noting that some of California’s poorest people are Hispanic farm workers. While 25 percent of Latinos surveyed said the drought had a “major impact” on teir lives just 13 percent of people from other racial groups said the same.

Climate denial

A recent study has linked the drought to climate change, but some Californians still aren’t so sure about the connection. While 78 percent of Democrats said climate change was “very or somewhat responsible” for California’s water trouble, only 44 percent of Republicans agreed.

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Californians Want to Fix the Drought—Without Spending Any Money

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