The Daily Parker

Stephen Wizenburg, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, bemoans his students' lack of boundaries:

Posting and tweeting intimate life details are now so normal for them that they think nothing of cavalierly giving too much information to surprised professors.

Allison walked into my classroom apologizing for missing two weeks of classes by saying she had been in rehab for alcoholism. Stan's excuse, stated in front of the class, was that drugs he was taking for a psychological disorder had caused him to oversleep. Greg said he didn't have his assignment done because he had to go to court after being arrested for punching a guy in a bar fight. Carly texted me that she couldn't make it to class that day because she was in the hospital after having a miscarriage.

A new advisee, Amy, was in tears as she asked if she could shut my office door. It was her first semester, and she had always had a bright smile on her face in the classroom. But in my office, she told me her grades were suffering because she was having an affair with a local married TV reporter.

Such intimate details used to be considered too embarrassing to share. But with Facebook and Twitter, young people think nothing of confiding in strangers. Often the less the students know the person they are communicating with the more willing they are to spill. And they do it bluntly, now that they are used to summarizing life in 140 characters.

To some extent it sounds like the usual narcissism of children. I wonder, though: what will happen to expectations of privacy 20 or 30 years from now, when these kids grow up?

A friend of mine, who lives in a sea of Tea Partiers, sent me this question today:

How would you refute/debate/argue against the following opinion:

"I think it's [Paul Ryan as Romney's VP choice] a good choice because I sincerely hope the collective national attention and focus will be on the fact that we are on the verge of becoming the next Greece. And that the only hope of prosperity for our children is massive cuts in government spending and entitlement reform. I'd even be in favor of raising taxes if we could slash government spending by > 25%. Otherwise, we should be teaching our kids Mandarin and Hindi because that's where the opportunities will be. Just like most young Greek grads have left Greece for opportunity, so I fear our kids will have to do the same."

Of course I'd be happy to help. Let me see if I can distill down how Paul Ryan is either a dangerous, right-wing radical, or a dangerous, right-wing fraud.

Essentially it comes down to your view of government. If you believe that government's job is to spread risks and benefits, in order to make life better for everyone, then vote Democratic. If you believe that people should be individually responsible for all the good and bad things that happen to them, then Paul Ryan's your man. And by "all the good and bad things," I mean that Paul Ryan believes it's OK for someone to get kicked to the street if they can't afford the medical bills they incur after their employer lets them work in toxic fumes in order to save money on safety gear so Mitt Romney can get a bigger dividend check.

Or, more simply, vote for Paul Ryan if you want to return to the good old days of feudalism.

But let me address the specific panic and obfuscation that the Tea Party is trying to spread. The argument they make is that our long-term deficits are a problem, and in order to fix the problem we need to stop spending money on the government.

First, it's not clear that our long-term deficits are a problem at all. Second, even if deficits are a problem, you can also fix a deficit by raising revenue. Third, cutting spending in a recession is like curing anemia with bloodletting.

And fourth, they're lying. The Tea Party doesn't care about deficits, they care about taxes. Paul Ryan believes that government does nothing good, and therefore paying taxes to support it is theft. (Yes, he actually believes that.) Their goal is to reduce government to almost nothing, so using deficits as a way to scare people into shrinking the government is just a means to an end.

Let me go a little more in depth.

We really do have a long-term deficit problem, mainly because we borrowed nearly $3 trillion (so far) to pay for two wars without raising taxes to cover the debt, and also because our current Social Security funding formula doesn't cover the changing demographics in this country. Now, you can have any opinion you want about wars or taxes or old people, but simple arithmetic shows that if you borrow money to pay for something because you don't have the cash on hand, then you have a debt. So Republicans are correct that if we *do nothing at all* to fix our long-term problems, in about 20 years we'll be fucked.

We Democrats think planning to do nothing for 20 years is preposterous. Of course the U.S. will fix the long-term deficit. But talking about long-term debts in the middle of a short-term disaster misses the point. We need to stop the bleeding before worrying what the scars will look like.

Right now, businesses are scared to hire because no one's buying; and no one's buying because they're out of work; and they're out of work because businesses are scared to hire; ad infinitum. In order to get out of the depression, we need get people to spend money, which will get other people to making things, which will get employers to hire people, which will get them to spend more money, which will grow our economy.

So how to get people to spend money? It turns out, there is one employer that can hire and pay people without caring about profits or where the money would come from: the U.S. government. We've done it before, in 1938. We built roads, bridges, railroads, airports, telephone lines, electric power plants, and the biggest military the world had ever seen. Once the war was over, and we wound down the military, we still had roads, bridges, etc., which improved everyone's lives.

Where will the money come from, I hear you ask? Well, we can borrow it, and pay it back later when we're earning more.

It turns out, people are not only loaning us money, they're paying for the privilege: 2- and 5-year government bonds have negative interest rates, and 10-year bonds are at zero. Usually if you loan the government $100 for two years, you get back, say, $104. Right now people are loaning the government $100 knowing they'll only get back $99 in two years or $96 in five, because it's the only truly safe investment left in the world. They know the U.S. will pay them back, but they're not sure anyone else will.

Even with the wars and the free money, U.S. government debts are only about 60% of GDP, which is roughly where they were in 1955. In 1945, our debts were almost 120% of GDP, and at the end of the war, many people, and most Republicans, predicted disaster and wondered how we'd ever pay back the money. But in the 55 years that followed (1945-2000), we had the biggest economic growth of any country in history. Our deficits disappeared completely. In 2001, the day W took office, we had a $236 billion *surplus.*

If we take all that free money and put it towards fixing our infrastructure, we'd (a) put money directly into the economy, (b) get people working again, (c) throw states and cities lifelines (all those working people will be paying taxes, after all), and (d) make future growth more likely because we'd have fixed our infrastructure.

The Republicans have blocked the President's efforts to do all that because it would remind people what government is for. Also, we'd have to raise taxes eventually, which would fall disproportionately on the people best able to pay them.

Now let me compare the U.S. with Greece, China, and India, for just a second, to show why people who worry about us turning into them are irrational or lying. (Paul Ryan is in both groups, it turns out.)

Greek government debts are 165% of GDP and rising. In the history of the U.S., we've never had that much public debt. Greece household debts are also staggering. But unlike the U.S., which gets free money from people, Greece is paying through the nose. Then they have to borrow just to pay interest, which makes the debts even higher. And Greece borrowed all this money in euro, rather than drachma, so as the value of the euro rises, Greeks have even more difficulty paying their debts.

Ordinarily when this happens, a country simply devalues its currency (or has its currency devalued by the market), which makes the debts easier to repay. That is, if I'm Greece, and I borrow 100,000 drachmas at an exchange rate of one euro to 100 drachmas, I owe €1000. As the Greek economy slows down, it costs more drachmas to buy euros, because no one wants drachmas anymore. Suddenly one euro is worth 200 drachmas. The loan that cost €1000 is now only worth €500, which is a lot easier to repay. Sure, my lenders are pissed off, and I can't afford German cars anymore, but at least people aren't starving on the streets. (Food and housing tends to rise and fall with the currency, so 500 drachmas will likely buy the same amount of food or housing in good times and bad. But that BMW that cost 2m drachmas at €1 to 100 drachmas costs 4m drachmas at €1 to 200 drachmas.)

Greece is fucked because they don't have drachmas anymore; they have euro. They borrowed all their money in euro, and they don't produce anything anyone wants to buy with euro, so they have no way of repaying the loans in euro. But they're stuck with euro-denominated loans. Oh, and food costs the same number of euro as it did before, but half the country's unemployed and has trouble paying for it. Also, Greeks refuse to pay taxes, but that's another matter.

This happened to Argentina in 2000. Argentina set the peso at one U.S. dollar per peso, so that you could walk into any Argentine bank with 100 pesos and walk out with $100. Then their economy hit a slump, their interest rates skyrocketed, people started to dump pesos and buy dollars, but the government couldn't buy dollars anymore because of the slumping economy and high interest rates, so people couldn't get their dollars, so they got fucked. The government finally removed the dollar peg in 2001. Poof! The peso fell overnight to 20c ($1 = 5 pesos), and 80% of their debt evaporated. Unfortunately 80% of people's life savings also evaporated...but they were able to start over. Now, 11 years later, Argentina is thriving again.

Greece can't do that unless until they leave the euro. Meanwhile, their college graduates are generally stuck in Greece, because unless they speak fluent German or English, no one outside Greece will hire them.

So we're not Greece. First, because our debt ratio is still sane; second, because people are loaning us more money than we want to borrow; third, because we make more shit that people will pay dollars for than any other country in the world; and fourth, because unless the Tea Party completely knock us off the rails like they almost did a year ago over our debt ceiling, our fundamentals are pretty sound.

India has a billion people, but (a) 400 million of them can't read, and (b) their economy (GDP $1,850 bn) is smaller than California's ($1,913 bn). China has 1.3 billion people, about a third of whom can't read, and their economy ($7,300 bn) is only about half as big as ours ($15,300 bn). We think. Actually, they lie about their economic numbers all the time, so even saying "their economy is big" is only a guess. China will someday overtake the US in economic output; maybe so will India. But not for a century at least, and only if they're really lucky.

I'll just skip the ignorance of Indian and Chinese linguistics for now, except to say English is one of India's two official languages, and Mandarin, while the dominant language of China, only accounts for about 60% of the country.

In conclusion: the Tea Party's talk about cutting the deficit is a smokescreen for their ideological goal of shrinking government "so small we can drown it in the bathtub," as one of them said in the 1990s.

Why this goes along with racism, misogyny, and a pathological fetish with guns, I simply don't know.

I hope this helps. :)

Via Robert Wright, National Journal's Jim Tankersley thinks choosing Ryan makes this a contest for the middle class against the poor:

Poor and middle-class workers tolerate fewer attacks on the rich in America than in other developed nations; most of them still believe that if they work hard enough, they’ve got a shot to get rich, too. Still, it’s tough to win a class war squarely on the side of the wealthy. Aspirational voters don’t like the possibility that government policy is rigged to help the rich get richer and keep the middle class from getting ahead. That’s where Obama’s attacks have connected.

That’s also why putting Ryan on the ticket is a chance for Romney to turn the class attacks back on Obama, reframing the election as a choice between a challenger who wants to boost the middle class and a president who wants to funnel hard-earned middle-class tax dollars to the poor.

I disagree. I think it underlines how the election is a choice between the strong preying on the weak vs. reducing the gap between the two in the first place. Paul Ryan is a radical right-winger, who truly believes that everyone should live and die by their own abilities. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, thinks government should provide some assistance, to everyone (by providing infrastructure, policing, education, etc.) and to the needy (through national health care, food assistance, etc.).

Paul Ryan doesn't want to help you, unless you're already well-off.

James Fallows, for his part, doesn't think Ryan is a "serious" candidate:

I mentioned earlier that if asked to choose an adjective to describe the budget plan presented by Rep. Paul Ryan, I would suggest "partisan" or "gimmicky," as opposed to "serious" or "brave." Most budget proposals are both partisan and gimmicky, so this is no particular knock against Rep. Ryan. But it's worth mentioning because so much of the pundit-sphere (excluding the Atlantic's Derek Thompson) has received the plan as a dramatic step forward in clear thinking about our fiscal future.

This will be a long 86 days to the election...

Lots of interesting articles hit my inbox today, and I don't have time to plagiarize write about them:

• Matt Taibbi takes down Sam Weill brilliantly: "Now, what Sorkin actually meant to say here was, 'Hey, asshole, we had to repeal Glass-Steagall just to make your Citigroup merger legal, remember? And now you’re pontificating, telling us we need to bring it back? Are you joking?' "
• Jared Diamond wishes Romney had read his book before talking about it.
• WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) explains how the Kennedy Expressway's reversible lanes work.
• The Atlantic Cities explores how Angkor Wat's suburbs may have destroyed it through bad planning and, no doubt, the Kennedy's reversible lanes.

That is all. I really need to work now.

As if the 10-year-long wholesale theft of wealth from the middle class to the parasite class financial services sector weren't insult enough, it turns out Mitt Romney's tax plan would injure us even more:

The study was conducted by researchers at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, who seem to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate.

His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.

“It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers,” the study concludes.

Krugman is livid:

And the Romney people respond with deep voodoo, invoking the supposed fabulous growth effects from his tax cuts. And who could argue? Remember how the economy tanked after Clinton raised taxes? Remember how great things were after Bush cut them? Oh, wait.

More seriously, we have lots of empirical work on the effects of tax changes at the top — and none of it supports the Romney camp’s claims. What we’ve just learned is that they were faking it all along. There is no plan to offset the tax cuts; Romney is just intending to blow up the deficit to lavish favors on the wealthy, then use it as an excuse to savage Social Security and Medicare.

The election, which is just 95 days away, really is a referendum on wealth inequality. Voting for Romney is voting for feudalism. Voting for the president at least keeps the middle class fingers in the dam. (And what an image that is...)

Billionaire Jeff Greene wants to pay more taxes, and wants his neighbors to do the same:

[O]ver the past few months, it’s become clear that rich people are very, very afraid. Sometimes it feels like this was the main accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street: a whole lot of tightened sphincters. It’s not a stretch to say many residents of Park Avenue harbor vivid fears of a populist revolt like the one seen in The Dark Knight Rises, in which they cower miserably under their sideboards while ragged hordes plunder the silver.

“This is my fear, and it’s a real, legitimate fear,” Greene says, revving up the engine. “You have this huge, huge class of people who are impoverished. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we will build a class of poor people that will take over this country, and the country will not look like what it does today. It will be a different economy, rights, all that stuff will be different.

“There are all these people in this country who are just not participating in the American Dream at all,” he says. This makes him uncomfortable, not least because they might try to take a piece of his. “Right now, for some bizarre reason, a lot of these people are supporting Republicans who want to cut taxes on the wealthy,” he says. “At some point, if we keep doing this, their numbers are going to keep swelling, it won’t be an Obama or a Romney. It will be a ­Hollande. A Chávez.

“Nobody gets it,” he grumbles, gunning over the boardwalk that leads from his boathouse to the beach. “I see David Koch a lot of the time. His policies are ridiculous. I don’t think he’s ever been to one of these schools where they have a rolling cart, where one computer has to go to different classrooms, and it can make so much difference, a $700 computer! I don’t think these guys realize, this is what they’re cutting off? To say to those kids, ‘Too bad, every man for himself’?”

I don't think we're that close to 1848, but typically, when inequality gets too broad, civil unrest follows. This isn't new. And while I would prefer Greene and others like him to support paying their share out of moral obligation and a belief that shared sacrifice yields shared riches—that it makes the pie higher, to quote a former president—I'll take consequence-based ethics if it gets the same result.

Krugman yesterday reminded us that people are so desperate for the security that investing in the U.S. brings them, they're paying us to take their money, at alarming rates of negative interest:

That’s right: for every maturity of bonds under 20 years, investors are paying the feds to take their money — and in the case of maturities of 10 years and under, paying a lot.

What’s going on? Investor pessimism about prospects for the real economy, which makes the perceived safe haven of US debt attractive even at very low yields. And pretty obviously investors do consider US debt safe — there is no hint here of worries about the level of debt and deficits.

Now, you might think that there would be a consensus that, even leaving Keynesian things aside, this is a really good time for the government to invest in infrastructure and stuff: money is free, the workers would otherwise be unemployed.

But no: the Very Serious People have decided that the big problem is that Washington is borrowing too much, and that addressing this problem is the key to … something.

Conservatives here and in the UK (another country with unprecedented low government interest rates) have either a delusion or a willfully dishonest belief in the dangers of deficits. Yes, both countries have long-term deficit problems that need resolution, and both countries will need lower defense and entitlement spending to close their gaps. But that's in 20 years.

Right now, we need to take this free money (five-year Treasuries are at -1.18%; ten year notes are at -0.68%) and abundant labor (nationally still around 9% unemployment) and rebuild. We need to repair our roads, upgrade our trains, fix our sewers and electric grids, and restore our countries to the economic strengths they have had in decades past.

Those on the right, however, want to continue bloodletting, draining us of our strength when we're weakest. Or, put another way, if someone is starving, withholding food won't help him. Lending him some food might just get him feeling better again.

Ten years from now we're going to look back on this period of Republican and Tory intransigence, laugh nervously, and change the subject. If we're supremely lucky, we'll be out of the economic traps that their misguided policies have created for us.

Two examples of how Europeans handle things differently than we do. First, Norway's refusal to be terrorized by lunatics with guns:

The car-bomb in Oslo designed to kill the leadership of the country, and the shootings on the island of Utoeya designed to destroy the next generation of Labour party politicians, left 77 people dead, the majority of them teenagers.

But even in the first days of shock after the attacks, it was clear the response of the Norwegian people and their government to this act of terrorism would be unique.

"The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation," [Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg] said.

A year later it seems the prime minister has kept his word.

There have been no changes to the law to increase the powers of the police and security services, terrorism legislation remains the same and there have been no special provisions made for the trial of suspected terrorists.

On the streets of Oslo, CCTV cameras are still a comparatively rare sight and the police can only carry weapons after getting special permission.

Even the gate leading to the parliament building in the heart of Oslo remains open and unguarded.

Meanwhile, just across the Baltic, Germany and the ECB seem frighteningly nonchalant about the possibility of Greece exiting the euro:

I’m not saying that Greece should be kept in the euro; ultimately, it’s hard to see how that can work. But if anyone in Europe is imagining that a Greek exit can be easily contained, they’re dreaming. Once a country, any country, has demonstrated that the euro isn’t necessarily forever, investors — and ordinary bank depositors — in other countries are bound to take note. I’d be shocked if Greek exit isn’t followed by large bank withdrawals all around the European periphery.

To contain this, the ECB would have to provide huge amounts of bank financing — and it would probably have to buy sovereign debt too, especially given the spiking yields on Spanish and Italian debt that are taking place as you read this. Are the Germans ready to see that?

My advice here is to be afraid, be very afraid.

Don't even get me started on anthropogenic climate change theory, which predicted just about everything we're experiencing in North American weather this year.

Today marks the 31st time this year Chicago's temperature has exceeded 32°C as another record falls:

The July 17 record high of 38°C for this date has stood 70 years, having been set in 1942 during World War II. Tuesday's heat gives the city a shot at replacing this record. [It was 36°C just before noon.—DB]

New USDA crop report paints bleak picture across much of the Midwest; more than half of Illinois' corn crop is "poor" or "very poor"!

Crops are struggling in many Midwest fields this year. USDA's weekly report on crop conditions released Monday indicates the condition of the corn crop continues to deteriorate. 56 percent of corn in Illinois is rated "poor"or "very poor". That percentage stands at 43 percent in Wisconsin; 27 percent in Iowa; 56 percent in Michigan; and grows to 69 percent in Missouri; and a whopping 71% in Indiana.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert points out we made this happen 30 years ago:

One of the most salient—but also, unfortunately, most counterintuitive—aspects of global warming is that it operates on what amounts to a time delay. Behind this summer’s heat are greenhouse gases emitted decades ago. Before many effects of today’s emissions are felt, it will be time for the Summer Olympics of 2048. (Scientists refer to this as the “commitment to warming.”) What’s at stake is where things go from there. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we could, without even really trying, engineer the return of the sort of climate that hasn’t been seen on earth since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

Along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, the words “climate change” have barely been uttered. This is not an oversight. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have chosen to remain silent on the issue, presumably because they see it as just too big a bummer.

And so, while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

Via Krugman, Ezra Klein reminds us of the differences between the President's and Romney's tax plans:

Note that the Tax Policy Center could only conduct a partial analysis of Romney’s tax plan. That’s because Romney’s proposal itself is incomplete. He’s said that he wants to scrap various deductions in the tax code, particularly for high earners, in order to broaden the tax base. But he hasn’t offered any details about which deductions he’d scrap or how, so there wasn’t anything for the Tax Policy Center to analyze.

As Krugman says, "[T]he next time someone tut-tuts about 'class warfare,' remember that the class war is already happening, in real policy—with the top .01 percent on offense."