All posts by John Casey

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It belongs to him

In the "can't tell if troll category" here is Michelle Bachmann on taxation:

KELLY: Thanks, Bret.

Congresswoman Bachmann, after the last debate, a young member of the California Tea Party said he didn’t feel he had had his question fully answered. And it’s a question that received the most votes on Google and YouTube on the list, as well. The answer his question is a number. And the question was, quote, “Out of every dollar I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?”

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN, R-MINN.: And after the debate, I talked to that young man, and I said I wish I could have answered that question, because I want to tell you what my answer is: I think you earned every dollar. You should get to keep every dollar that you earn. That’s your money; that’s not the government’s money.

(APPLAUSE)

That’s the whole point. Barack Obama seems to think that when we earn money, it belongs to him and we’re lucky just to keep a little bit of it. I don’t think that at all. I think when people make money, it’s their money.

Obviously, we have to give money back to the government so that we can run the government, but we have to have a completely different mindset. And that mindset is, the American people are the genius of this economy. It certainly isn’t government that’s the genius. And that’s the two views.

President Obama has embraced a view of government-directed temporary fixes and gimmicks. They don’t work. He’s destroyed the economy. What does work is private solutions that are permanent in the private sector. That gives certainty; that will grow our economy.

(APPLAUSE)

This is idiocy of the highest order–both question and answer.  For the idiocy of the question, listen to Elizabeth Warren.  Concerning Bachmann here, three obvious–and I think disqualifying for the job of Congressional janitor–logical problems.  (1) Obama doesn't think anything like what she alleges and (2) she thinks there ought to be taxation but people should keep all of the money they earn; (3) the red herring at the end urging that the private sector ought to fix the economy.

Sadly, over at TPM, a site I can't figure out, here is the headline: "Michelle Bachmann: Taxpayers Ought to Keep Every Dollar They Earn."  She does not actually put the matter in this obviously self-contradictory way ("taxpayers should not be taxpayers").  But she does say something idiotic.  And the most idiotic thing I think is the last bit about how doing nothing about the economy is what ought to be done.  Yet, sadly again, in most of the stories I surveyed this morning about this quote (googling the quote that is), the end bit was cut off. 

My own view is that the straw manner (such as Bachmann obviously is) deserves no charity; but that I'm going to predict is what people will object to about this story–"Bachmann misquoted!"  This misquote will justify the iron man in their mind.  And this is sad, I think. 

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Coffee achievers

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By all accounts, whereby I mean, his own, Bill O'Reilly has achieved a lot.  But all of that now is in danger.  Behold:

O'REILLY: Here's the unintended consequence of Mr. Obama's revenue enhancing plan, and I must tell you, I want the feds to get more revenue. I don't want to starve them, as some people do. We need a robust military, a good transportation system and protections all over the place. But if you tax achievement, some of the achievers are going to pack it in.

For the uninitiated, he's threatening to "go Galt," which means he'll take his ball and go home.  We won't have the benefit of his genius anymore.

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Ponzi inception

In the movie "Inception," Leonardo di Caprio led a gang of mind-soldiers who, with the help of explosions, torture, and snowmobiles, planted ideas in people's heads.  IRL, in real life for the uninitiated, those people are pundits, who repeat stuff that's nuts, in hopes it will catch people unawares and find fertile ground in the public consciousness. 

Among the many examples of this sort of dishonest activity is the claim that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme."  For those who haven't paid attention, the argument goes something like this.  Way back, a guy named Ponzi claimed to have an investment fund that paid rich dividends.  It sort of did, but it wasn't an investment fund.  He took money from new investors to pay off the old one, all the while not actually investing anyone's money. 

By contrast, Social Security is a "pay as you go" plan.  People working now pay for the people retired now.  This has led people to claim that it is a "Ponzi scheme."  Such a claim is obviously ludicrous.  Two obvious reasons.  First, the Ponzi scheme was a swindle perpetrated on investors by Ponzi, not a transparent system of social insurance and retirement; second, the Ponzi scheme was illegal, and not the purposefully-designed plan of a duly-elected representative body. 

These two key differences (explained here with lots of references) escape the subtle mind of Charles Krauthammer, who redefines, or tries to redefine, the illegality and fraud out of the phrase "Ponzi Scheme." 

The Great Social Security Debate, Proposition 1: Of course it's a Ponzi scheme.

In a Ponzi scheme, the people who invest early get their money out with dividends. But these dividends don't come from any profitable or productive activity — they consist entirely of money paid in by later participants.

This cannot go on forever because at some point there just aren't enough new investors to support the earlier entrants. Word gets around that there are no profits, just money transferred from new to old. The merry-go-round stops, the scheme collapses and the remaining investors lose everything.

Now Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program. A current beneficiary isn't receiving the money she paid in years ago. That money is gone. It went to her parents' Social Security check. The money in her check is coming from her son's FICA tax today — i.e., her "investment" was paid out years ago to earlier entrants in the system and her current benefits are coming from the "investment" of the new entrants into the system. "Pay-as-you-go" is the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

So what's the difference? Ponzi schemes are illegal, suggested one of my colleagues on "Inside Washington."

But this is perfectly irrelevant. Imagine that Charles Ponzi had lived not in Boston but in the lesser parts of Papua New Guinea, where the securities and fraud laws were, shall we say, less developed. He runs his same scheme among the locals — give me ("invest") one goat today, I'll give ("return") you two after six full moons — but escapes any legal sanction. Is his legal enterprise any less a Ponzi scheme? Of course not.

So what is the difference?
 

It's the fraud, of which illegality is a consequence, that makes something a "Ponzi scheme."  A Ponzi scheme and Social Security may involve some of the same methods, but so does check fraud–they both involve writing checks. 

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Today’s utes

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Kids today, they suck at moral reasoning.  I know this because David Brooks told me so.  He read a book by some Domers about it.  He takes this as his starting point.  He then concludes:

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

Way back, "cultures shaped people's imaginations and imposed moral disciplines" but now, "people are led to assume that the "free-floating individual is the essential moral unit."  Sorry for retyping those two sentences, but together they sound kind of funny.  On the one hand culture has no more moral force, but, on the other, in a masterwork of passive voice construction, people are "led to assume" stuff about morality.  By whom? I wonder.  Since we're talking about free-floating individual units, I imagine that Brooks is talking about Kant, or maybe John Rawls, whose views must have percolated down into the brains of the young ones these days.  Whatever is doing the assumption leading, after all, it's not culture.

It's silly.  The whole thing is even sillier.  Better just to read this blog: Shut up David Brooks.    

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Tax code

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There is probably an explanation for this, but this is one of those sentences that makes one giggle.  From NPR:

"If Google paid taxes at the full 35 percent rate on all of its profits, it would lose almost a quarter of its total profits," Bloomberg reporter Jesse Drucker tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

35 percent is the new 25 percent.

category mistake

The sleep of the just

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Over at Fox News, Chris Wallace is complaining about liberal bias.  He does so in a way that reminds one of Steve Colbert's allegation that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."  Here's how Talking Points Memo reports it:

Chris Wallace appeared on Friday's Fox and Friends and assailed NBC's Brian Williams over his question to Rick Perry about whether he ever struggled to sleep at night over the potential innocence of one of his many executed inmates, calling it an example of a "liberal bias."

"Would you ask a liberal politician about sleeping at night if they favored abortion or choice? " Wallace argued. "It is so built into the drinking water, if you will, in some of these liberal outlets that they don't even understand it happens."

To be fair, Wallace was merely agreeing with the even more clownish Bernie Goldberg on the idea of persistent liberal bias in the media; and the video at the link makes this claim even more obviously silly.  The difference, in case you don't just grasp it out of hand, concerned whether Perry worried about the actual non-guitiness of anyone convicted of the death penalty in his death-penalty granting state.  Up or down innocence of an actual convicted criminal can be determined in a rather different manner than whether the fetus has moral personhood.  While the latter might be a true or false question, one must at least admit that it is not super obvious how one might determine that–i.e., in a way strictly analogous to whether someone committed a crime.

Had, of course, Williams asked Perry about whether the death penalty was just, that would have been different.  But he didn't.
 

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That’s what he said

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It's the tenth anniversary of the atrocity of September 11 (I like this way of describing it).  Nothing to add, except that Paul Krugman's sentiment seems (partially) right to me:

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

Sure, they're just pundits.  Here is Krugman's colleague Thomas Friedman (again, sorry to those who had mercifully forgotten these lines) on the relation between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq:

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
…
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
…

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

Suck.On.This.  Indeed.  Now we are all sucking on it.

General discussion

Can’t tell if trolling

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Via the whole of the internet, here is the worst analogy in a long time:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

Can't tell if trolling or if just profoundly evil.

Happy Labor Day. 

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7 years

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Today is the seven-year anniversary of this blog.  I used to hate calling it a blog.  But that's what it is.  As far as I can tell–and you can correct me if I'm wrong–there are not a lot of blogs like this.  That is, there are not blogs that have argument per se as their sole subject matter.  I wonder if this is because for the most part people think they are just fine at argumentation.  My sense was, when we started this, was that they are not in fact very good at it.  That's pretty much how I feel today.  Sad, this is, because with a little effort we could have something closer to the public discourse our country ought to think it deserves.

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Definitional hackery

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A hack is someone who can be relied on to make any argument–sound or not–for his preset view and against any perceived opposition.  Somehow our media and political culture relies in large part on this sort of person's insights, however completely predictable and frequently unreasonable or irrational.  Here is a fun case in point. 

Obama was photographed on vacation riding a bicycle with one of his daughters.  This provoked the following comment from Jay Nordlinger at the National Review Online:

I’m sorry, but a grown man wearing a bicycle helmet, when he’s not training or racing like LeMond, is just — is just . . . Well, I think Dukakis looked better in his tank, is all I’m saying.   

In the first place, he's not really sorry.  Second, Greg LeMond has long retired from cycling.  So has Lance Armstrong.  I'd suggest in the first place that this jack ass update his references.  I'll suggest "Andy Schleck" because (1) he's currently a famous cyclist; (2) he's got a cool-sounding name.  Third, this is completely asinine.  As anyone who rides a bike ought to know, you're wearing a helmet because someone might run into you.  If you fall from your bike going slow, you might end up as brain damaged as someone going a whole lot faster.  Finally, Dukakis?

via Sadly, No.

And by the way, helmets off to the commenters at NRO online for pointing out the stupidity of Nordlinger's argument.