Ooh, ooh! Pick me, pick me!
Ladies and gentlemen, I somehow convinced my bosses that I am not incompetent and that I can actually run a small business. My position was written into the 2012 budget (not that it matters much since we’re all doomed by the Mayans, BUT STILL), and I won’t have to go job hunting this December.
It’s going to be one hell of a merry Christmas, motherfuckers. EGG NOG FOR EVERYONE! MAZEL TOV AND SHIT!
Despite the tilting at windmills aspect to the proceedings, I am pleased that Reid & cohorts are engaging in a little bit of the old “class warfare” on behalf of regular people for a change:
Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday proposed a 5 percent surtax on people with incomes of more than $1 million a year to pay for the package of job-creation measures sought by President Obama and to quell a brewing revolt among Democrats against the White House plan
[snip]
The approach is unlikely to win any backing from Republican leaders who strenuously oppose increases in tax rates, saying they would put a damper on the economy and penalize “job creators.” But the plan, which Senate Democrats had aired last year to a cool response from the White House, is seen by party strategists as having appeal with the public.
Of course, it would’ve been nice if they had proposed this back when they had the Congressional majorities to maybe, possibly, in an ideal world, I dunno, get the damn thing passed (not that it ever would have with Vice-Chancellor Max Baucus chairing the Finance Committee, but hey, a brother can dream, right?). Still it’s better late than never, I suppose, and it’s good politics, as the Times notes.
Of course, you can always count on Chuck Schumer to make a boneheaded comment when he’s asked to weigh in on economic matters:
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, said Wednesday that he hoped the new proposal, with its $1 million threshold, would deflect criticism aimed at the financing proposed by the president.
In general, Mr. Schumer said, the Senate Democrats’ proposal would not increase taxes for households with incomes of $200,000 or $300,000. “Many of them are not rich,” Mr. Schumer said.
Because being in the 94th percentile of wage earners doesn’t make you rich; it puts you solidly in the middle class, according to Chuck Schumer.
I wish to subscribe to his newsletter. And his tax bracket.
And he’s concern-trolling like a champion over at Tucker Carlson’s vanity project (Wha? Kaus works there now? I guess it was only a matter of time.) Anyway, since the unemployed apparently have TOO MUCH POWER (!!!!!!!!!!) in this country, Mickey Kaus wants to make sure that they never have the option to sue employers who discriminate against them on the basis of their unemployment. Because, heaven forbid, what kind of message would that send to our Galtian overlords?
Worst Idea in the Speech? Charles Lane notes that, to ease employers’ fears of regulatory and legal uncertainty, Obama wants to create another dubious grounds for people to sue employers. The provisions of the law “[p]rohibiting employers from discriminating aginst unemployed workers” seem almost reasonable until you realize that all those reasonable provisions have to be litigated by well-paid lawyers at someone’s expense. A museum-quality case of liberal legalism ignoring the economic cost of the mechanisms of liberal legalism. ….
You know why the Job Creators aren’t creating any jobs? It’s because they’re worried about a law that does not exist’s potential to one day exist, which would obviously carry a huge “economic cost” because trial lawyers and John Edwards and lawsuits, oh my. I mean, so what if unemployed people get fucked in the ass every day in this country. If they had the legal means to address some of their grievances, “someone” would have to bear an “expense.” Mickey Kaus himself might go Galt. WHAT WOULD BECOME OF OUR DEAR, DEAR NATION THEN?
(via Tyler Cowen, who cites this drivel… approvingly?)
Tom Friedman is a hack. I have pointed this out before. It is time to point it out again.
He opens today’s most emailed NYTimes.com article with a block quote from some Financial Times shill (who, when I read the words ” retired Singaporean” I knew — just fucking knew – would be a “taxi driver,” but who instead turns out to be a an ex-diplomat; you can’t always be right):
Kishore Mahbubani, a retired Singaporean diplomat, published a provocative essay in The Financial Times on Monday that began like this: “Dictators are falling. Democracies are failing. A curious coincidence? Or is it, perhaps, a sign that something fundamental has changed in the grain of human history. I believe so. How do dictators survive? They tell lies. Muammar Gaddafi was one of the biggest liars of all time. He claimed that his people loved him. He also controlled the flow of information to his people to prevent any alternative narrative taking hold. Then the simple cellphone enabled people to connect. The truth spread widely to drown out all the lies that the colonel broadcast over the airwaves.
“So why are democracies failing at the same time? The simple answer: democracies have also been telling lies.”
Coulda fooled me. I thought that dictators survived by being ruthlessly violent against dissenters and competitors within their populations. And by having imperial allies who want to extract their natural resources at favorable prices. But, whatevs. Tom Friedman is about to talk about our democracy gap, and how to solve the problem of “telling lies.” YES! Preach it, Tom Friedman!
Mahbubani noted that “the eurozone project was created on a big lie” that countries could have monetary union and fiscal independence — without pain. Meanwhile, in America, added Mahbubani, now the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, “No U.S. leaders dare to tell the truth to the people. All their pronouncements rest on a mythical assumption that ‘recovery’ is around the corner. Implicitly, they say this is a normal recession. But this is no normal recession. There will be no painless solution. ‘Sacrifice’ will be needed, and the American people know this. But no American politician dares utter the word ‘sacrifice.’ Painful truths cannot be told.”
Jesus, when did Friedman become a blogger/aggregator? Okay, okay. This isn’t really Friedman’s bad, except in the sense that he’s quoting it and stroking his caterpillar approvingly, but it still deserves to be trashed.
All we hear about from national politicians — all that we dealt with the whole summer with the debt deal debacle — was how we needed to tighten our belts and share the sacrifice in order to get us back on track to prosperity and debt reduction and grandma and apple pie. It was a fucking meme on the liberal blogosphere to make fun of the “shared sacrifice” bit, because, implicitly, this “sharing” of the “sacrifice” was understood to be, in real policy terms, undertaken by the poor and the middle class. You see, all people share equally, but some people share more equally than others. And since the rich have orders of magnitude more money than the poor and the middle class, it was understood by the chattering classes that they would share a teeny tiny bit more than those groups, and save the rest for “job creation.”
Get it? No? Good. It never made a damn bit of sense.
Of course, there is a big difference between America and Libya. We can vote out our liars, unlike certain Arab — and Asian — countries. Still, Mahbubani’s comparison warrants some reflection this week, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the president’s jobs speech. It is a great week for truth-telling.
9/11 wuz an inside job!!!!!!!!
But seriously, what did you just say, Tom Friedman? When have we ever voted out liars in this country? I mean, we vote out liars every few years during election season, but — this is the important part — we just replace them with more liars! I prefer some liars to other liars, surely, but to pretend that we’re going to find a legion of Pinnochios to rescue our political system is… childish? Has Tom Friedman never seen a campaign advertisement? What the hell kind of political observer is this guy?
MOAR!
Can you remember the last time you felt a national leader looked us in the eye and told us there is no easy solution to our major problems, that we’ve gotten into this mess by being self-indulgent or ideologically fixated over two decades and that now we need to spend the next five years rolling up our sleeves, possibly accepting a lower living standard and making up for our excesses?
For me, this is the most important thing to say both on the anniversary of 9/11 and on the eve of President Obama’s jobs speech. After all, they are intertwined. Why has this been a lost decade? An answer can be found in one simple comparison: How Dwight Eisenhower and his successors used the cold war and how George W. Bush used 9/11. America had to face down the Russians in the cold war. America had to respond to 9/11 and the threat of Al Qaeda. But the critical difference between the two was this: Beginning with Eisenhower and continuing to some degree with every cold war president, we used the cold war and the Russian threat as a reason and motivator to do big, hard things together at home — to do nation-building in America. We used it to build the interstate highway system, put a man on the moon, push out the boundaries of science, teach new languages, maintain fiscal discipline and, when needed, raise taxes. We won the cold war with collective action.
He answers his own question (George Bush was the cause of the “lost decade”) and then ignores it in order to pivot into… collective action? Where is this going exactly?
George W. Bush did the opposite. He used 9/11 as an excuse to lower taxes, to start two wars that — for the first time in our history — were not paid for by tax increases, and to create a costly new entitlement in Medicare prescription drugs. Imagine where we’d be today if on the morning of 9/12 Bush had announced (as some of us advocated) a “Patriot Tax” of $1 per gallon of gas to pay for education, infrastructure and government research, to help finance our wars and to slash our dependence on Middle East oil. Gasoline in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, averaged $1.66 a gallon.
But rather than use 9/11 to summon us to nation-building at home, Bush used it as an excuse to party — to double down on a radical tax-cutting agenda for the rich that not only did not spur rising living standards for most Americans but has now left us with a huge ball and chain around our ankle. And later, rather than asking each of us to contribute something to the war, he outsourced it to one-half of one-percent of the American people. Everyone else — y’all have fun.
We used the cold war to reach the moon and spawn new industries. We used 9/11 to create better body scanners and more T.S.A. agents. It will be remembered as one of the greatest lost opportunities of any presidency — ever.
“And I advocated for all of it right up until, oh, I dunno, 2007 or so.”
The finale:
My fervent hope is that on Thursday Mr. Obama will set an example and tell the cold, hard truth — to parents and kids. I know. Honesty, we are told, is suicidal in politics. But as long as every solution that is hard is off the table, then our slow national decline will remain on the table. The public is ready for more than Michele Bachmann’s fairy-dust promise that she can restore $2 a gallon gasoline.
For once, Mr. President, let’s start a debate with the truth. Tell us what you really think will be required to get us out of this stagnation, what kind of collective action and shared sacrifice will be needed and why that can lead not just to muddling through, not just to being O.K., but to restoring American greatness.
A leading columnist in the country’s most important newspaper is seriously calling on the president to stop hurting his feelings and use his jobs speech to heal the nation. Never mind that Republican obstructionism will prevent anything from being accomplished legislatively until at least the end of this Congress (and possibly forever). What galls me is this: “For once, Mr. President let’s start a debate with the truth.” It is a journalistic atrocity along the lines of Peggy Noonan’s famous “Would it be irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.” What kind of formulation is that? Does this guy even read his own newspaper? He seems to be under the impression that the onus is on the president — not the climate change denialists, or the anti-evolution crowd; not the abortion-is-murder party, or the “Founding Fathers were all religious zealots” set, or the “ACORN killed my grandma and is racist” folks; nope, the president — to be the truthful party here. To finally stand up and defend the truth! The troof! Proof! Just like that, and America will be saved. If President Obama gives a really cool and awesome and THATWASDEEPMAN and radical (but not in the Bill Ayers way) speech, Friedman sez, we can haz national unity. Or something. He never really explains how it will come about. Presumably, it just will.
This kind of faux-naive political dialogue, unfortunately, is the norm in this country. And I’m afraid that as long as it remains so, we’re essentially fucked. See you kids in the soup line.
Here’s a happy-go-lucky bit of news to warm the cockles of ye olde blood pumper. According to the New York Times,
The economy failed to add new jobs in August, the first time there has been no increase in net jobs in the United States in 11 months.
Now, we all know that the reason the jobs market is stuttering is because taxes are too high to allow businesses and rich people to start hiring and investing again (even though both individuals and companies are actually hoarding cash to an unprecedented degree). But here’s an idea: why not take the billions that the government has to spend restoring power in the wake of even moderate storms every year and preemptively spend some of that to put the whole damn system underground? Yes, yes, I know, it would increase TEH DECIFIT!!! (as Tom likes to render it), but it would also put tens of thousands of people back to work for years to come, doing something that, in the long run, would actually save us money. And the beauty of it all is, you can apply the concept to hundreds of different projects and make an immediate (well, as immediate as government work projects go) and dramatic impact on the national un- and underemployment rate. But again, only if you’re willing to extend the deficit in the short term in order to address basic infrastructural concerns that will save us time, money, and even lives in the long term.
Alternately, you can simply wait for Amazon to hire the entire country, which may not be as far-fetched as it sounds, considering they’ve already
promised to hire 7,000 more people in California if the state puts a recently enacted online sales tax on hold for two years
Sigh…
It’s kind of a cop-out to post clips from The Daily Show since it doesn’t exactly need the exposure (not that that’s ever stopped me before), but after Tom pointed out the flaw in my Dragon Tattoo citation from Tuesday…
Me [paraphrased]: stock markets are irrelevant poopy heads
Tom [not paraphrased]:
I think the problem with the Larsson thing is pretty clear, though, right? He’s dead on with regard to what the stock market actually produces (not much of value), but completely wrong with the way in which the economy actually functions. A collapse of confidence can have huge effects on the real-world, day-to-day economy, despite the fact that, as Ben’s quote demonstrates, trading stocks and bonds is pretty much just a poker game (see, for example, Brothers, Lehman, circa 2008).
Moreover, with more and more people tying themselves to the performance of the stock market via 401ks and the like, it’s taking up an ever greater share of our “wealth,” broadly construed. In other words (tl;dr): it’s all a giant game, of course. But its effects play out nationwide.
I needed something to raise my spirits. Enter, Ali Velshi, making a shit-ton of sense in a short tin of time:
When I can’t tell what political party someone belongs to after reading their article, that’s when I start to take them seriously. Case in point: Joe Nocera’s column in the NYT on Monday entitled What Is Business Waiting For? It’s short, but here are some of the salient grafs to get you started:
President Obama’s idea of job creation is extending unemployment insurance, on the one hand, and painting grandiose pictures of far-off “green jobs,” on the other. He is bereft of ideas for creating jobs in the here and now. Meanwhile, the Republicans insist — despite mounds of evidence to the contrary — that more tax cuts would create jobs. By now, most Americans have lost hope that our current government will come up with a viable jobs program. It won’t.
I am coming more and more to think that with the government essentially paralyzed for the foreseeable future, the only way we’re going to get jobs is by turning to actual job creators: business itself. With all their cash, companies shouldn’t be waiting for Congress to give them tax incentives to hire people. They should be trying to jump-start the economy — and fend off another recession — by making investments, and hiring workers, that will lead to renewed prosperity.
So why the eerily accurate sloth imitation, fellas?
What makes that hard for executives is that they’ve spent the last 30 years having it beaten into them that the only thing that matters is delivering “shareholder value.” Over time, this phrase has become code for focusing on short-term profits — and chief executives who have ignored this mantra have often found themselves kicked to the street by impatient investors like Carl Icahn.
But fuck short-term profits, says Nocera (though not in so many words).
Indeed, it turns out that the focus on short-term profits is nowhere enshrined in the law. On the contrary: Delaware law, where many big companies are incorporated, gives directors enormous leeway to ignore short-term gain if they believe that doing so would ultimately benefit the corporation.
Of course, if you’re the only company in your industry willing to sacrifice in the near future to ensure stability in the medium-to-distant future, you’re probably going to be operating under somewhat of a disadvantage. Perhaps what is needed, then, is an approach akin to the one Tom described last week involving the hoped-for obliteration of the electoral college.
Marc Groz, a financial risk expert I’ve gotten to know, has what I think is a more intriguing approach, which he calls a “contingent commitment facility.” “Everyone is waiting for someone else to go first,” he told me the other day. Using his facility, a company would agree to hire X number of new workers. But the commitment would only become binding if certain conditions were met — such as having other companies in the same industry agree to do likewise. Once that happened, all the companies would have to do what they’d promised.
Groz’s idea is new and fresh and untested. It could fail. In other words, it is exactly the kind of out-of-the-box “job creation” idea that our stymied government no longer has the ability to come up with. The ball’s in business’s court now.
I realize that I use this weekly space to talk about my personal life too much, and I frankly don’t care. Because today, before I disclose the most wonderful things you missed on the blog this week, I would like to discuss books. And I would particularly like to discuss the newfound joy I feel when I throw books the fuck away.
It is a very deep metaphor, to be sure!
Perhaps I should preface this with the following, so no one misunderstands: I LIKE BOOKS, AND I LIKE HAVING THEM! But I realized when I moved across the country that I have about a 14 X 14 X 14 box’s worth of books that I’m actually willing to cart around with me to whenever life demands that I relocate. I can read Shakespeare and Plato online; I can, in fact, locate exactly what I wanted to cite or re-read much more efficiently than a librarian, since I can just type in, “All the world’s a stage…” on Google and be directed to a website with a citation and a full quote with my first result. I don’t need Shakespeare or Plato, because they’re everywhere. Do I get the fascinating annotations and notes that come with reading the Oxford edition of Macbeth? Do I get my own marginalia — my underlines, chickenscratch, emphases? Well, no. But I also didn’t go to college to become a book collector, and I don’t read to re-read. I read to read. The number of books — full books — I’ve read more than once is less than one hundred. (Articles, chapters, essays, and passages would number in the hundreds, if not thousands, but those don’t count.) Why should I bring them all with me everywhere I end up living? To showcase my erudition? To maybe — one day, possibly, with a little luck — look something up that I couldn’t look up online?
Again, I’m really not knocking people who feel otherwise. Maybe I just don’t understand the concept of the personal library, in general, never mind the mobile one. Let me explain:
Today I drove a big van — a miniature bus, really (Part of my job — the job that was advertised and the job I applied for, as a matter of fact — is driving old people from Point A to Point B. Driving those Old People Buses is pretty cool, is what I’m saying. Also, I want to have business cards made up that say, “Tom O’Hare: Back-up Bus Driver.” That is all.) — to a lovely old woman’s house in Peabody, Massachusetts. My task? To take 60 boxes of books from her garage, from which boxes I would cull the good books (Pro-tip: lovely old women don’t have any) to re-sell for the benefit of my non-profit organization, while the remainder would be recycled by the industrial fiber recycling people. So I get there with my hand truck and my youthful vigor, and an hour later, the books loaded into miniature bus, driven to book recycling HQ, and Thrown. The. Fuck. Away. Honestly. I’ve been doing this for three months now — dealing with you people’s shit, your discarded books, your personal libraries; re-purposing your trash to benefit the lives of senior citizens — and I have never seen a more thoroughly terrible batch of books than the one I pulled today. Smelly, yellowed, decaying. Were there classics? There were a great number of them. Did I give a single shit when I threw them into the big blue recycling bins along with the cookbooks and the encyclopedias? Not a single shit was given.
“What’s your point?” you’re saying. HOLD ON A SECOND, JESUS.
The point is that books are just words written on paper. They’re not fundamentally different from blogs or newspapers, except for the fact that both of those media lend themselves quite a bit more easily to the process of a) consumption and b) immediate disregard. In other words, you buy a book and you’re expected to keep it. Even after it’s gotten all of the use it’s ever going to get, you’re expected to keep it. Display it. Put it on your bookshelves and watch the gawkers gawk. Even if 90+% of those books will never be touched again, we feel a compulsion to hold onto them. To forefront them. To amass them, even though nobody will ever read them again.
It’s more likely than not that this is a generational phenomenon, which both heartens and disheartens. I mean, I won’t lie: throwing a thousand Reader’s Digest books the fuck out — just, “Oh, this box doesn’t look good,” *crashbangboomgoesthedynamite* all day long — that felt good. Some half-assed novel of some striver from the 70′s trying to make it, just going right into the proverbial dumpster (as I keep emphasizing, we RECYCLE these things). No guilt. Absolutely none. The larger part, in fact, is some sort of odd schadenfreude. As in, “No one will remember you either, pal. Not even now, when we have the chance.” And then, boom. Another box of books, disregarded. Trashed. Junked. Crashing to the bottom of a big blue bin. I can’t explain why it is exactly that I feel so immediately content to hear that sound. A brief, quiet thunderclap of books, hitting the ungodly hollow and solipsistic shell of a big ass blue bin. On wheels.
(When they’re empty, they roll a little bit with each memoir I throw in, which adds a nice thunder-y echo effect. When I’m doing the actual work of scanning the books, I literally shoot baskets all day long — into [practically] un-missable-sized baskets [namely, the blue bins]. My rule of thumb being that if the book has an Amazon sales ranking of over one million, it’s junk [unless it's collectible, in which case I'll try to sell it to another seller]. Anyway, that’s when the shooting baskets comes in. “Oh, this Danielle Steele novel isn’t selling well… Into the trash with you!” Crashcrashblamblam, you get the picture: it’s fun. It’s how I stay in shape anyway.)
Hahaha. Where was I going with this?
Books are the ideas contained within them. When you’ve stopped caring about those ideas, it’s time to get rid of the books. Give them to people who might care, or donate them to charity (not Got Books). I can assure you that you will probably never care again. Just set aside a couple of boxes for the ideas you’re not sure you’ve quit yet, and you’ll be fine.
Here are some ideas that you probably won’t care about forever, but that you might care about right now:
