Month: July 2020

The Republican leadership thinks the recession can be ended by rousting lazy employees from the hammock of dependency and forcing them back to work. That’s stupid. The recession is being driven by a lack of demand, not supply, and the supposedly lazy workers don’t have jobs waiting for them.

That said, there is something basically obnoxious about paying people more to stay home than to work. It sounds like something from a Marx Brothers movie. To that end, I would suggest the following changes to the system:

1. CUT OFF FEDERAL FUNDS IN STATES WHERE THE MARKET IS WORKING PROPERLY: Not every state has huge virus problems or high unemployment. Based on historical averages, I think 6 or 7 percent should be the threshold, but that is open to debate.
2. REDUCE THE PAYMENTS SOMEWHAT: Logically, the payments should be tied to previous wage levels, but most state unemployment compensation systems aren’t sophisticated enough to deal with that amount of data with the speed required under the circumstances. That means using an axe when a rapier would be more appropriate. $400 a week in federal benefits should give the vast majority of the unemployed enough to live on, when combined with state benefits.

Trump has no musical talent.

Did you wonder why the Republicans are having trouble agreeing on a stimulus package? Here’s why we’re about to go off the cliff:

1. CLs: The horror! The horror! The deficit is exploding! Cut spending immediately!
2. CDs: Do whatever you have to do to avoid widespread misery.
3. PBPs: Keep those business subsidies coming! But we also want liability protection, and the extra unemployment benefits have to go. They are effectively a minimum wage of $15 per hour. We can’t have that.
4. Reactionaries: Spend whatever is necessary to keep Trump in office, so he can keep fighting the culture wars.

The upshot of this is that the Reactionaries will flip and become adamantly opposed to deficits if Biden wins the election. They only support spending that primarily benefits white Christians in one way or another.

I usually find Thomas Friedman to be a bit of a pompous bore, but he hit the bullseye today with his column about America and Syria. Trump’s arsonist as fireman routine is, in fact, the precise approach taken by Assad to what was initially moderate and reasonable opposition. We know how that has turned out.

To extend the analogy a bit, Trump clearly doesn’t mind burning down the country any more than Assad did, and both rely on Putin to save their bacon. As to Assad’s Iranian friends, however, they will only come to Trump’s rescue by engineering some sort of stupid provocation. That is unlikely, but not impossible.

At first glance, the white Navy pilot and the black civil rights leader had little in common. But on what really mattered, they were the same. Both were plainspoken men with minimal tolerance for fools who loved their country and suffered greatly for it. Both of them believed passionately in liberal democratic values and the possibility of progress. And so, John Lewis, like John McCain, was an American hero; the mural in Atlanta got it right.

Lewis performed one final service for his country by dying when he did. He reminded us that the struggles of the present have their roots in what is now a less controversial past. The other side used “law and order” as a rallying cry back then, too. It should be dismissed now as it was then.

I didn’t agree with John McCain very often, but his patriotism and commitment to liberal democratic principles were beyond question. He understood that white supremacists were traitors, not patriots. He saw Trump as a potential authoritarian, and couldn’t stand him. He would have spoken out against Trump’s increasingly desperate efforts to win re-election by dividing the country and trashing the Constitution in the name of “law and order.” I’m sure of it.

How many prominent members of the current GOP are willing to stand up and oppose Trump for his destruction of democratic norms? Mitch McConnell? Lindsey Graham, supposedly an acolyte of McCain’s? Marco Rubio? Please. Give them tax cuts, conservative judges, and a ticket to re-election, and they will do anything the man on golf cart asks.

Mitt Romney. That’s it. If things get worse, and they probably will, he’s the only one who will be on our side.

Federal agents in unmarked cars kidnapping protesters with no connection to violence against federal property and detaining them without charge. It’s the American equivalent of Putin’s “little green men” in Ukraine. Or, to put it another way, it looks like the domestic version of the wag-the-dog war I’ve long feared with Iran. Either way, it is a dangerous escalation of Trump’s arsonist-as-fireman campaign.

This could just be a typical attempt to change the subject that blows over in time. Alternatively, it could be the start of an attempt at a genuine constitutional coup. Most likely, Trump hasn’t thought that far ahead, and will be driven by events and the advice of people like Barr and Steve Miller. We’ll know soon enough.

One thing is for certain: he’s determined to prove correct my statement that he would gladly leave half of America in ashes to retain control over the other half.

Homeland Security doesn’t have enough agents available to implement a coup. Keep your eye on the military. That’s where the danger really lies.

Chances are that you don’t think providing liability protection to employers relative to the virus is a high priority item at this stage of the pandemic, but it is for Mitch McConnell. A payroll tax cut, on the other hand, is at the top of Trump’s list. What does that tell us about the GOP?

In McConnell’s case, he always carries water for the donor class, because he thinks raising money and winning elections are the same thing. If you want to convert the GOP to “national conservatism,” you’re going to do it over his dead body. In Trump’s case, like most Republicans, he thinks tax cuts and deregulation are the solutions to every economic problem; he doesn’t have the mental agility to come up with anything else when conditions change. The payroll tax cut idea was positively demented when the country was locked down; today, it is merely stupid, because it would do nothing to address the lack of consumer confidence arising from the pandemic.

What does this mean for the next few days, and the economic cliff to come? Chaos, of course. That’s the GOP’s stock in trade.

Life in the time of Trump.

Convention’s getting near.

We’ve all seen this act before.

It’s full of hate and fear.

He moved the thing to Jacksonville

Which proves he has no brains.

Summertime in Florida?

I just hope it rains.

Assuming that the narrative is accurate, it raises the following questions:

1. WHO LEAKED THE INFORMATION?: Dr. Fauci is the only person who comes out looking good, and he has plenty of motive, so the initial reaction is that it must have been him. The article preemptively tells us that he didn’t speak to the authors, however. I’m guess that it was a friend or associate of his.
2. IS BIRX TO BLAME?: Her models clearly played an important role in this farce, but they assumed that Trump and the other politicians would behave responsibly and stay the course. Garbage in, garbage out.
3. IS TRUMP THE ONE PRIMARILY AT FAULT?: Leave aside the fact that he is ultimately responsible for his own government, and that he repeatedly undercut the message by encouraging irresponsibility. As with the Russian bounty story, the real problem here is that the people around him have learned not to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear in order to maintain their influence. That’s a real danger for our country. If you don’t believe it, just show me where the WMD were in Iraq.

Trump has told something like 20,000 lies while in office, according to the WaPo. Relatively few of these were intended to deceive anyone; more typically, he does it either to pump himself up or to create loyalty tests for the people around him. How does this translate to the campaign?

He will try to use lies (e.g., on defunding the police) to redefine Biden to the American public. This, of course, requires deception. The problem is that no one outside of his base will believe his commercials. Given his record, why would they?

The bottom line is that lying only works if your word has credibility. No one has less credibility that the man on golf cart, except maybe Larry Kudlow.

It’s not Donald Trump. It’s not even Greg Abbott or Ron DeSantis, although they would surely be contenders in better days. It’s–wait for it–Brian Kemp, the estimable governor of Georgia, by a landslide.

Why? Because his political identity, for better or worse (well, just worse) is tied in with Trump’s, and he can’t even get that right. The first episode, when he reopened too fast even for the man on golf cart, could be excused as an understandably overzealous attempt to implement his master’s get back to work rhetoric. But Kemp’s new war on masks comes at a time when even Trump has acknowledged that masks can help revive the economy and thereby save his bacon. He has even worn one on camera himself!

Bet Stacey Abrams can’t wait for the rematch.

The green left seems to have reached a consensus on a program that includes massive subsidies and regulations, but no carbon tax. One assumes this was prompted largely by political pragmatism, and particularly by the experience of the French government with the gilets jaunes. Can a program without pricing truly work?

Not completely, because it doesn’t address the retrofit problem. Without carbon pricing, millions of cars run on gasoline that are currently on the road will remain there until they fall apart, and existing buildings will never be upgraded to the new standards. Over a decade or two, the car problem will go away, as cars depreciate relatively rapidly, but buildings are a completely different story. The inventory of new buildings will never be anything more than a small fraction of the whole.

Environmentalists don’t typically settle for half a loaf. Are they even really aware of this issue? We’ll see.

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

Watch out!

You might get what you’re after.

Cool, righties!

Strange but not a stranger.

I am an extraordinary guy

Burning down the house.

________________

Hold tight!

Wait till pandemic’s over.

Hold tight!

We’re in for nasty weather.

You all know that I will find a way

Burning down the house.

_________________________

Here’s your ticket; pack your bag.

We’re all going overboard.

The transportation is here.

Close enough but not too far

Masks will show us who you are.

Fighting fire with fire!

_________________________

Not yet; the party’s still not over.

Shakedown; you know I’ll win them over.

365 degrees

Burning down the house.

_______________________

It was once upon a place

Back when I could bare my face.

Gonna come in first place.

Liberals watching on TV say “Baby, what did you expect?”

Gonna burst into flame!

____________________________

Parody of “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads

McConnell has to know that his party’s slim chances of winning in November will disappear without additional stimulus. So why is he playing hard to get? Partly due to ideology, but mostly because he’s engaging in his usual tactic of threatening to shoot hostages. In the end, he thinks the Democrats will make concessions to him in exchange for stimulus that also primarily benefits him, because the alternative would be horribly damaging to the American public, and the Democrats–the party of adults–would never let that happen.

Except that this time, the political stakes are extraordinarily high, and the election isn’t far away. The Democrats hold all of the cards except indifference to the national welfare. I suspect, and hope, that they will drive a tougher bargain this time.