I have a confession to make: in the 2004 election, I voted for George W. Bush.

At the time, I was mostly uninformed on economic issues, and everything seemed to be going OK. We were in two wars, and I felt an obligation to support a president in wartime. I believed in Jesus, that being gay was a choice, and that most of my taxes were going to lazy minorities who bred too much.

Yeah, it was that bad.

To demonstrate my commitment, when I left for college, I drove my lifted truck from San Diego to Santa Cruz, defiantly emblazoned with a Bush-Cheney sticker. I read Atlas Shrugged on the bus to and from class, and at parties, I took delight in seeing the look on people’s faces when I introduced myself as a Republican.

However, that all changed in 2008. After struggling to find a job for two years, going without healthcare, and realizing that we were duped into the war in Iraq, I had a massive change of heart and voted for Obama. Granted, I had already been softened on the social issues living in Santa Cruz and France (I guess that’s what happens when you meet people who are different from you), but the switch in party affiliation was a huge milestone in my adult development.

Now, if any of you have been following the things I post on my blog or on facebook, you probably think I’m just another firebrand liberal, but if you know me, this is only a recent development. While I used to take a lot of personal credit for this trasformation, lately I’ve realized I’m a much simpler animal than that. My political leanings are easily elucidated by the maxim “once bitten, twice shy,” and I got bitten pretty hard at the end of the Bush years.

That’s why, in 2010 when Republicans took control of the House, I remember being astonished that the rest of America hadn’t shared my deeply personal transformation; half of them still thought that conservatism was a viable option! Admittedly, since then I’ve learned a lot about ingroup loyalty, confirmation bias and selective amnesia, although I’m still surprised.

These days, I spend a lot of time listening to conservative talk radio, and it’s particularly surprising how myopic these pundits’ view on our economy is. Obama gets the brunt of the blame for everything from gas prices, to the national debt. At best, they blame him for an “anemic recovery” and at worst they fabricate lies that he’s “doubled the national debt.”

I want to use this blog post to put some of these claims in context. I’m sure these facts will be effortlessly deflected by the force-fields of cognitive bias that surround most of my conservative friends, but I have to try, since I’m living proof that the force-field is not impenetrable.

Claim #1: “Obama has made the economy worse.”

Jobs are slowly getting better:

Qualitatively — in the second graph — the rate of jobs addition (tangent line) under Obama is similar to that under Bush. This, in spite of a Republican controlled House and a filibuster-happy Senate that have stonewalled the president at every turn. Do you remember the American Jobs Act? Neither do most people, because it died the death of a thousand cuts in Congress. This makes it hard to blame him for an “anemic recovery.”

The stock market, on the other hand, has made a speedy recovery (insofar as that’s an indicator of economic health)

Claim #2: “Obama is responsible for the terrible gas prices.”

Meh, probably not. The cause of high gas prices is multifactorial. Lifting Obama’s moratorium on drilling wouldn’t have an effect for many years, and even if it did, it wouldn’t drop prices much here at home.

Slate has a really cool presentation on why, here. In it, they explain that gas is a commodity sold on a world market. So, even if we dramatically increased domestic production, it wouldn’t have that much of an effect on the going price of a barrel of oil, which is what primarily dictates what we pay at the pump.

Also, in the continuing theme of cognitive bias (perhaps Rosy Retrospection?), prices were worse at the end of the Bush presidency:

Claim #3: “Obama is responsible for the skyrocketing debt.”

True and false, but mostly false. In four years, the Obama administration has overseen nearly a $5 trillion increase in the debt, amounting to a +45% change. Bush increased the debt by almost $5 trillion over the course of eight years, amounting to an +86% increase at the time. The total debt currently stands at $15.7 trillion. Without context, that doesn’t mean much, so here’s a graph of dollar amounts, which helps to visualize:

Again, Obama’s increase happened over a shorter period of time, so it represents a more rapid accumulation of debt. This can be put into perspective by scaling debt to GDP:

However, it’s important to remember where this debt came from. The Congressional Budget Office reports that, since 2001, we’ve paid

$3.0 trillion for the Bush tax cuts
$3.6 trillion in reduced revenue (due to recessions)
$1.4 trillion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
$1.4 trillion for stimulus after 2008 crisis
$0.3 trillion in unfunded drug benefits                
$9.7 trillion attributable to Bush or his recessions

Given these numbers, it becomes unconscionably disingenuous to blame the debt on Obama. The same goes for the related criticisms about the deficit, as most of the budgetary shortfall is not due to Obama’s policies.

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Growing up, I thought the media, courts, and places of higher learning were united in a conspiracy against conservatives, but over the the last few years this veil has been lifted. I realized what these edifices have in common is that they’re institutions concerned with facts, and — as Steven Colbert says — reality has a well-known liberal bias. Most of the facts are probably going to be ignored in this election, as the Right has been phenomenally successful in hanging the albatross ’round Obama’s neck.

Personally, I’m disappointed with Obama because he hasn’t closed Guantanamo, he’s stepped up federal marijuana raids, and he blew his political load on a shitty healthcare bill, but it’s tragic how soon people forget why he was elected with a mandate, and why his predecessor shafted us all.

Sources:
1) http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/05/april-employment-report-115000-jobs-81.html
2) http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/NPPTTL?cid=32250
3) Google Finance
4) http://gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx
5) http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
6) http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/dueling-debt-deceptions/
7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
8) http://www.whitehouse.gov/infographics/us-national-debt

As you may or may not have noticed from the little “Reading Desk” gadget I added to my sidebar, I have been reading a book called Supercapitalism, by Robert Reich. This book is outstanding, and it has drastically changed my perception of what’s wrong in our economy.

Anyway, below, I have reproduced an excerpt from the book, wherein Reich opines on employment linked healthcare. I typed it by hand, so please excuse any typos.

Finally, not only are corporations unfit to decide what is socially virtuous, but under supercapitalism they are often unable to deliver services that are inherently public. Pushing them to do so begs the question of whether the responsibilities would be better undertaken by the public sector. The campaign against Wal-Mart charged in full-page advertisements that “Wal-Mart’s low pay and meager employee benefits force tens of thousands of employees to resort to Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance. Call it the ‘Wal-Mart Tax.’ And it costs you $1.5 billion in federal tax dollars every year.” The problem with this logic is that America had already decided to provide Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance to the poor–even if the poor are also working. It seemed more efficient for these benefits to flow from government, and for employers to alert their low-income employees of the availability of them, than for the private sector to provide them as conditions of employment. If we wish to change the rules an require private employers to pay wages and provide health benefits sufficiently high that no employee has to rely on government largesse, we should seek to do that through the democratic process. But it makes little sense to chastise one employer–even one as large as Wal-Mart–for playing by the rules.

A major theme in the book is that corporations are money making machines; that’s their purpose, and that’s their design. It’s therefore foolish to rail against them when they engage in socially irresponsible behavior like cutting benefits and externalizing costs to the public at large–we shouldn’t expect anything different. The solution is to use our power as citizens of a democracy to impose social responsibility, through legislation, not market choices, as you’re about to see…

Should the rules be altered, as Wal-Mart’s critics advocate? What would be a worthy political debate, but we’re not having it. I, for one, think the minimum wage should be raised to be about half of the average worker’s hourly pay. That was the ratio in the Not Quite Golden Age[*], and it seems to me a reasonable compromise. But Wal-Mart’s critics also want Wal-Mart to provide employees with good health insurance coverage, which, in my opinion, is no longer a responsibility employers should take on.

Bear with me for a moment, because this is just the sort of issue the nation ought to be debating but that the focus on Wal-Mart obscures. The reason employers got into the business of providing their workers health insurance in the first place, remember, was because it is a form of payment that avoids being taxed. This made it attractive to both employers and employees in the Not Quite Golden Age, before medical costs skyrocketed and competition intensified. Even though employer-provided health care has diminished since then, in 2006 it still constituted the biggest tax break in the whole federal tax system. According to recent estimates, if health care benefits were considered taxable income, employees would be paying $126 billion a year more in income taxes than they do now. In other words, employer-provided heath care is a backdoor $126-billion-a-year government health insurance system that’s already up and running.

But it’s a crazy system. You’re not eligible for it when you and your family are likely to need it most–when you lose you job and you income plummets. And these days, as we’ve seen, no job is safe. Why add to family anxieties by ending eligibility for this backdoor government health insurance just when an employee is shown the front door? The system also distorts the labor market. It prevents lots of people from changing jobs for fear they’ll lose their health insurance, or won’t get the benefits they do now. And it invites employers to game the system by seeking young, healthy employees who pose low risks of ill health, while rejecting older ones who are likely to have more costly health needs. The system also encourages employers to try to push married employees onto their spouse’s health insurance plan so that the spouse’s employer bears the cost.

It’s also an upside down system. The lower your pay, the less coverage you’re likely to have. Even if Wal-Mart is pressured into providing more health insurance for its lowest-income workers, this wouldn’t change the overall pattern across America. Workers in the lowest-paying jobs don’t generally get any health insurance from their employers. The higher your pay, the more health coverage you get, with top executives and their families getting gold-plated plans guaranteeing top-notch medical attention for just about every health-risk imaginable. As a result, our current $126 billion backdoor government health insurance system mainly benefits upper income people.

[Emphasis added]

That seems like a knock down argument for socialized medicine to me; in a sense, we’re already paying for it! By making it an explicitly socialized structure, we’d only have things to gain. Direct oversight of the system would guarantee that we weren’t subsidizing care for the super rich, and we could be sure we were doling out coverage to those who need it most. Decoupling healthcare from employment would increase job mobility because employees would be more confident to switch jobs knowing they wouldn’t lose health coverage. Moreover, taking healthcare decisions out of the hands of sticky fingered business managers would make the system fairer, as well as free them up to do what they should be doing: running a business.

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I highly recommend this book. It’s enlightening, and empowering, and it’s not that heavy.

*The Not Quite Golden Age is the name Reich uses to refer to the seeming boon times of the ’50s.

This is a third-hand quote, but it is amazing:

“I think there is a prudential reason for maintaining a progressive tax system (and we certainly can argue about “how” progressive it should be): namely, that if you believe, as I do, that the U.S. is best served by maintaining a capitalist system and a free market, we have to accept that one of the natural consequences of such a system is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Regardless of whether these fewer and fewer deserve the money they accumulate or are unfairly being punished by progressive taxation, the political consequence of such an accumulation of wealth is radicalism - a majority that uses its political power to destroy the system rather than simply to modify it.

In other words, progressive taxation is required to maintain the political viability of a free market.”

Original post and commentary here.

Here are some graphs I created (sources of data at the bottom):

Here you can see an overlay of both graphs, and you can compare the wealth held by the top 1% (green line) with the amount of taxes they paid. Notice the times when ‘life was good’ — the teens, and the 50’s and 60’s, the taxes on the rich were sky high, and they held the least wealth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
(an awesome source, check it out)

Cash is more than just cash, it’s opportunities. Once education or owning a shelter are commodified, they are subject to the same rules as money: he who hordes them wins. We have tried to shoehorn freedom into the mould of capitalism, but some things just shouldn’t be capitalizeD.

Sarah Palin won’t stop ranting about how Obama is going to turn the country into a communist state:

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else.”

In classic Palin style, she singlehandedly accuses liberals of advocating abolition of private property, while at the same time blurting out a completely unintegrated noun phrase “more tax agenda” that sounds like some kind of Buzzword-Tourette’s tic.

This single sentence is a scintillating example of the Republican strategy: make people fear your opponent with utterly inarticulate, nonsensical, baseless accusations, delivered with a contrived appeal to down-home sensibility. And tragically, this seems to be working.

To me, the discourse plays out as follows:

Liberals: “The rich are getting richer at expense of the poor.”
Republicans: “You are a redistributionist.”
Liberals: “No, it’s just alarming that in 1980, the top 7% owned 20% of the wealth, and today the top 1% owns the same amount. We need to rebuild the middle class.”
Republicans: “You are a socialist.”

Republicans are just calling names, they aren’t offering any real solutions to the problem that our country is becoming a plutocracy.

Well let me make a radical claim: redistribution is exactly what we need right now. At times, that word has been (rightly) treated as a profanity, but today it shouldn’t be. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of plutocracy, and it’s time that it swing back towards fairness. You may call that change in direction “socialism”, but we have to pull to get back to center.