Senate

Good news on the climate, for a change

pnrj macroeconomics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 7 JDN 2459799

In what is surely the biggest political surprise of the decade—if not the century—Joe Manchin suddenly changed his mind and signed onto a budget reconciliation bill that will radically shift US climate policy. He was the last vote needed for the bill to make it through the Senate via reconciliation (as he often is, because he’s pretty much a DINO).

Because the Senate is ridiculous, there are still several layers of procedure the bill must go through before it can actually pass. But since the parliamentarian was appointed by a Democrat and the House had already passed an even stronger climate bill, it looks like at least most of it will make it through. The reconciliation process means we only need a bare majority, so even if all the Republicans vote against it—which they very likely will—it can still get through, with Vice President Harris’s tiebreaking vote. (Because our Senate is 50-50, Harris is on track to cast the most tie-breaking votes of any US Vice President by the end of her term.) Reconciliation also can’t be filibustered.

While it includes a lot of expenditures, particularly tax credits for clean energy and electric cars, the bill includes tax increases and closed loopholes so that it will actually decrease the deficit and likely reduce inflation—which Manchin said was a major reason he was willing to support it. But more importantly, it promises to reduce US carbon emissions by a staggering 40% by 2030.

The US currently produces about 15 tons of CO2 equivalent per person per year, so reducing that by 40% would drop it to only 9 tons per person per year. This would move us from nearly as bad as Saudi Arabia to nearly as good as Norway. It still won’t mean we are doing as well as France or the UK—but at least we’ll no longer be dragging down the rest of the First World.

And this isn’t a pie-in-the-sky promise: Independent forecasts suggest that these policies may really be able to reduce our emissions that much that fast. It’s honestly a little hard for me to believe; but that’s what the experts are saying.

Manchin wants to call it the Inflation Reduction Act, but it probably won’t actually reduce inflation very much. But some economists—even quite center-right ones—think it may actually reduce inflation quite a bit, and we basically all agree that it at least won’t increase inflation very much. Since the effects on inflation are likely to be small, we really don’t have to worry about them: whatever it does to inflation, the important thing is that this bill reduces carbon emissions.

Honestly, it’ll be kind of disgusting if this actually does work—because it’s so easy. This bill will have almost no downside. Its macroeconomic effects will be minor, maybe even positive. There was no reason it needed to be this hard-fought. Even if it didn’t have tax increases to offset it—which it absolutely does—the total cost of this bill over the next ten years would be less than six months of military spending, so cutting military spending by 5% would cover it. We have cured our unbearable headaches by finally realizing we could stop hitting ourselves in the head. (And the Republicans want us to keep hitting ourselves and will do whatever they can to make that happen.)

So, yes, it’s very sad that it took us this long. And even 60% of our current emissions is still too much emissions for a stable climate. But let’s take a moment to celebrate, because this is a genuine victory—and we haven’t had a lot of those in awhile.

Trump will soon be gone. But this isn’t over.

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, inequality, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 8 JDN 2459162

After a frustratingly long wait for several states to finish counting their mail-in ballots (particularly Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona), Biden has officially won the Presidential election. While it was far too close in a few key states, this is largely an artifact of the Electoral College: Biden’s actual popular vote advantage was over 4 million votes. We now have our first Vice President who is a woman of color. I think it’s quite reasonable for us all to share a long sigh of relief at this result.

We have won this battle. But the war is far from over.

First, there is the fact that we are still in a historic pandemic and economic recession. I have no doubt that Biden’s policy response will be better than Trump’s; but he hasn’t taken office yet, and much of the damage has already been done. Things are not going to get much better for quite awhile yet.

Second, while Biden is a pretty good candidate, he does have major flaws.

Above all, Biden is still far too hawkish on immigration and foreign policy. He won’t chant “build the wall!”, but he’s unlikely to tear down all of our border fences or abolish ICE. He won’t rattle the saber with Iran or bomb civilians indiscriminately, but he’s unlikely to end the program of assassination drone strikes. Trump has severely, perhaps irrevocably, damaged the Pax Americana with his ludicrous trade wars, alienation of our allies, and fawning over our enemies; but whether or not Biden can restore America’s diplomatic credibility, I have no doubt that he’ll continue to uphold—and deploy—America’s military hegemony. Indeed, the failure of the former could only exacerbate the latter.

Biden’s domestic policy is considerably better, but even there he doesn’t go far enough. His healthcare plan is a substantial step forward, improving upon the progress already made by Obamacare; but it’s still not the single-payer healthcare system we really need. He has some good policy ideas for directly combating discrimination, but isn’t really addressing the deep structural sources of systemic racism. His anti-poverty programs would be a step in the right direction, but are clearly insufficient.

Third, Democrats did not make significant gains in Congress, and while they kept the majority in the House, they are unlikely to gain control of the Senate. Because the Senate is so powerful and Mitch McConnell is so craven, this could be disastrous for Biden’s ability to govern.

But there is an even more serious problem we must face as a country: Trump got 70 million votes. Even after all he did—his endless lies, his utter incompetence, his obvious corruption—and all that happened—the mishandled pandemic, the exacerbated recession—there were still 70 million people willing to vote for Trump. I said it from the beginning: I have never feared Trump nearly so much as I fear an America that could elect him.

Yes, of course he would have had a far worse shot if our voting system were better: Several viable parties, range voting, and no Electoral College would have all made things go very differently than they did in 2016. But the fact remains that tens of millions of Americans were willing to vote for this man not once, but twice.

What can explain the support of so many people for such an obviously terrible leader?

First, there is misinformation: Our mass media is biased and can give a very distorted view of the world. Someone whose view of world events was shaped entirely by right-wing media like Fox News (let alone OAN) might not realize how terrible Trump is, or might be convinced that Biden is somehow even worse. Yet today, in the 21st century, our access to information is virtually unlimited. Anyone who really wanted to know what Trump is like would be able to find out—so whatever ignorance or misinformation Trump voters had, they bear the greatest responsibility for it.

Then, there is discontent: Growth in total economic output has greatly outpaced growth in real standard of living for most Americans. While real per-capita GDP rose from $26,000 in 1974 to $56,000 today (a factor of 2.15, or 1.7% per year), real median personal income only rose from $25,000 to $36,000 (a factor of 1.44, or 0.8% per year). This reflects the fact that more and more of our country’s wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the rich. Combined with dramatically increased costs of education and healthcare, this means that most American families really don’t feel like their standard of living has meaningfully improved in a generation or more.

Yet if people are discontent with how our economy is run… why would they vote for Donald Trump, who epitomizes everything that is wrong with that system? The Democrats have not done enough to fight rising inequality and spiraling healthcare costs, but they have at least done something—raising taxes here, expanding Medicaid there. This is not enough, since it involves only tweaking the system at the edges rather than solving the deeper structural problems—but it has at least some benefit. The Republicans at their best have done nothing, and at their worst actively done everything in their power to exacerbate rising inequality. And Trump is no different in this regard than any other Republican; he promised more populist economic policy, but did not deliver it in any way. Do people somehow not see that?

I think we must face up to the fact that racism and sexism are clearly a major part of what motivates supporters of Trump. Trump’s core base consists of old, uneducated White men. Women are less likely to support him, and young people, educated people, and people of color are far less likely to support him. The race gap is staggering: A mere 8% of Black people support Trump, while 54% of White people do. While Asian and Hispanic voters are not quite so univocal, still it’s clear that if only non-White people had voted Biden would have won an utter landslide and might have taken every state—yes, likely even Florida, where Cuban-Americans did actually lean slightly toward Trump. The age and education gaps are also quite large: Among those under 30, only 30% support Trump, while among those over 65, 52% do. Among White people without a college degree, 64% support Trump, while among White people with a college degree, only 38% do. The gender gap is smaller, but still significant: 48% of men but only 42% of women support Trump. (Also the fact that the gender gap was smaller this year than in 2016 could reflect the fact that Clinton was running for President but Harris was only running for Vice President.)

We shouldn’t ignore the real suffering and discontent that rising inequality has wrought, nor should we dismiss the significance of right-wing propaganda. Yet when it comes right down to it, I don’t see how we can explain Trump’s popularity without recognizing that an awful lot of White men in America are extremely racist and sexist. The most terrifying thing about Trump is that millions of Americans do know what he’s like—and they’re okay with that.

Trump will soon be gone. But many others like him remain. We need to find a way to fix this, or the next racist, misogynist, corrupt, authoritarian psychopath may turn out to be a lot less foolish and incompetent.

Trump is finally being impeached

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Post 310 Oct 6 JDN 2458763

Given that there have been efforts to impeach Trump since before he took office (which is totally unprecedented, by the way; while several others have committed crimes and been impeached while in office, no other US President has gone into office with widespread suspicion of mass criminal activity), it seems odd that it has taken this long to finally actually start formal impeachment hearings.

Why did it take so long? We needed two things to happen: One, absolutely overwhelming evidence of absolutely flagrant crimes, and two, a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

This is how divided America has become. If the Republicans were really a mainstream center-right party as they purport to be, they would have supported impeachment just as much as the Democrats, we would have impeached Trump in 2017, and he would have been removed from office by 2018. But in fact they are nothing of the sort. The Republicans no longer believe in democracy. The Democrats are a mainstream center-right party, and the Republicans are far-right White-nationalist crypto-fascists (and less ‘crypto-‘ all the time). After seeing how they reacted to his tax evasion, foreign bribes, national security leaks, human rights violations, obstruction of justice, and overall ubiquitous corruption and incompetence, by this point it’s clear that there is almost nothing that Trump could do which would make either the voter base or the politicians of the Republican Party turn against him—he may literally be correct that he could commit a murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. Maybe if he raised taxes on billionaires or expressed support for Roe v. Wade they would finally revolt.

Even as it stands, there is good reason to fear that the Republican-majority Senate will not confirm the impeachment and remove Trump from office. The political fallout from such a failed impeachment is highly uncertain. So far, markets are taking it in stride; it may even turn out to be good for the economy. (Then again, a good economy may be good for Trump in 2020!) But at this point the evidence is so damning that if we don’t impeach now, we may never impeach again; if this isn’t enough, nothing is. (The Washington Examiner said that months ago, and may already have been right; but the case is even stronger now.)

So, the most likely scenario is that the impeachment goes through the House, but fails in the Senate. The good news is that if the Republicans do block the impeachment, they’ll be publicly admitting that even charges this serious and this substantiated mean nothing to them. Anyone watching who is still on the fence about them will see how corrupt they have become.

After that, this is probably what will happen: The impeachment will be big news for a month or two, then be largely ignored. Trump will probably try to make himself a martyr, talking even louder about ‘witch hunts’. He will lose popularity with a few voters, but his base will continue to support him through thick and thin. (Astonishingly, almost nothing really seems to move his overall approval rating.) The economy will be largely unaffected, or maybe slightly improve. And then we’ll find out in the 2020 election whether the Democrats can mobilize enough opposition to Trump, and—just as importantly—enough support for whoever wins the primaries, to actually win this time around.

If by some miracle enough Republicans find a moral conscience and vote to remove Trump from office, this means that until 2020 we will have President Mike Pence. In a sane world, that in itself would sound like a worst-case scenario; he’s basically a less-sleazy Ted Cruz. He is misogynistic, homophobic, and fanatically religious. He is also a partisan ideologue who toes the party line on basically every issue. Some have even argued that Pence is worse than Trump, because he represents the same ideology but with more subtlety and competence.

But subtlety and competence are important. Indeed, I would much rather have an intelligent, rational, competent ideologue managing our government, leading our military, and controlling our nuclear launch codes than an idiotic, narcissistic, impulsive one. Pence at least can be trusted to be consistent in his actions and diplomatic in his words—two things which Trump has absolutely never been.

Indeed, Pence’s ideological consistency has benefits; unlike Trump, he reliably supports free trade and his fiscal conservatism actually seems genuine for once. Consistency in itself has value: Life is much easier, and the economy is much stronger, when the rules of the game remain the same rather than randomly lurching from one extreme to another.

Pence is also not the pathological liar that Trump is. Yes, Pence has lied many times (only 22% of his statements were evaluated by PolitiFact as “Mostly True” or “True”, and 30% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”). But Trump lies constantly. A mere 14% of Trump’s statements were evaluated by Trump as “Mostly True” or “True”, while 48% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”. For Bernie Sanders, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 11% were “False”, with no “Pants on Fire” at all; for Hillary Clinton, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 10% were “False”, with 3% “Pants on Fire”. People have tried to keep running tallies of Trump’s lies, but it’s a tall order: The Washington Post records over 12,000 lies since he took office less than three years ago. Four thousand lies a year. More than ten every single day. Most people commit lies of omission or say ‘white lies’ several times per day (depending on who you ask, I’ve seen everything from an average of 2 times per day to an average of 100 times per day), but that’s not what we’re talking about here. These are consequential, outright statements of fact that aren’t true. And these are not literally everything he has said that wasn’t true; they are only public lies with relevance to policy or his own personal record. Indeed, Trump lies recklessly, stupidly, pointlessly, nonsensically. He seems like a pathological liar, or someone with dementia who is confabulating to try to fill gaps in his memory. (Indeed, a lot of his behavior is consistent with dementia, and similar to how Reagan acted in the early days of his Alzheimer’s.) At least if Pence takes office, we’ll be able to believe some of what he says.

Of course, Pence won’t be much better on some of the most important issues, such as climate change. When asked how important he thinks climate change is and what should be done about it, Pence always gives mealy-mouthed, evasive responses—but at least he doesn’t make up stories about windmills getting special permits to kill endangered birds.

I admit, choosing Pence over Trump feels like choosing to get shot in the leg instead of the face—but that’s really not a difficult choice, is it?

The terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad budget bill

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457005 PST 11:52.

I would have preferred to write about something a bit cheerier (like the fact that by the time I write my next post I expect to be finished with my master’s degree!), but this is obviously the big news in economic policy today. The new House budget bill was unveiled Tuesday, and then passed in the House on Thursday by a narrow vote. It has stalled in the Senate thanks in part to fierce—and entirely justified—opposition by Elizabeth Warren, and so today it has been delayed in the Senate. Obama has actually urged his fellow Democrats to pass it, in order to avoid another government shutdown. Here’s why Warren is right and Obama is wrong.

You know the saying “You can’t negotiate with terrorists!”? Well, in practice that’s not actually true—we negotiate with terrorists all the time; the FBI has special hostage negotiators for this purpose, because sometimes it really is the best option. But the saying has an underlying kernel of truth, which is that once someone is willing to hold hostages and commit murder, they have crossed a line, a Rubicon from which it is impossible to return; negotiations with them can never again be good-faith honest argumentation, but must always be a strategic action to minimize collateral damage. Everyone knows that if you had the chance you’d just as soon put bullets through all their heads—because everyone knows they’d do the same to you.

Well, right now, the Republicans are acting like terrorists. Emotionally a fair comparison would be with two-year-olds throwing tantrums, but two-year-olds do not control policy on which thousands of lives hang in the balance. This budget bill is designed—quite intentionally, I’m sure—in order to ensure that Democrats are left with only two options: Give up on every major policy issue and abandon all the principles they stand for, or fail to pass a budget and allow the government to shut down, canceling vital services and costing billions of dollars. They are holding the American people hostage.

But here is why you must not give in: They’re going to shoot the hostages anyway. This so-called “compromise” would not only add $479 million in spending on fighter jets that don’t work and the Pentagon hasn’t even asked for, not only cut $93 million from WIC, a 3.5% budget cut adjusted for inflation—literally denying food to starving mothers and children—and dramatically increase the amount of money that can be given by individuals in campaign donations (because apparently the unlimited corporate money of Citizens United wasn’t enough!), but would also remove two of the central provisions of Dodd-Frank financial regulation that are the only thing that stands between us and a full reprise of the Great Recession. And even if the Democrats in the Senate cave to the demands just as the spineless cowards in the House already did, there is nothing to stop Republicans from using the same scorched-earth tactics next year.

I wouldn’t literally say we should put bullets through their heads, but we definitely need to get these Republicans out of office immediately at the next election—and that means that all the left-wing people who insist they don’t vote “on principle” need to grow some spines of their own and vote. Vote Green if you want—the benefits of having a substantial Green coalition in Congress would be enormous, because the Greens favor three really good things in particular: Stricter regulation of carbon emissions, nationalization of the financial system, and a basic income. Or vote for some other obscure party that you like even better. But for the love of all that is good in the world, vote.

The two most obscure—and yet most important—measures in the bill are the elimination of the swaps pushout rule and the margin requirements on derivatives. Compared to these, the cuts in WIC are small potatoes (literally, they include a stupid provision about potatoes). They also really aren’t that complicated, once you boil them down to their core principles. This is however something Wall Street desperately wants you to never, ever do, for otherwise their global crime syndicate will be exposed.

The swaps pushout rule says quite simply that if you’re going to place bets on the failure of other companies—these are called credit default swaps, but they are really quite literally a bet that a given company will go bankrupt—you can’t do so with deposits that are insured by the FDIC. This is the absolute bare minimum regulatory standard that any reasonable economist (or for that matter sane human being!) would demand. Honestly I think credit default swaps should be banned outright. If you want insurance, you should have to buy insurance—and yes, deal with the regulations involved in buying insurance, because those regulations are there for a reason. There’s a reason you can’t buy fire insurance on other people’s houses, and that exact same reason applies a thousandfold for why you shouldn’t be able to buy credit default swaps on other people’s companies. Most people are not psychopaths who would burn down their neighbor’s house for the insurance money—but even when their executives aren’t psychopaths (as many are), most companies are specifically structured so as to behave as if they were psychopaths, as if no interests in the world mattered but their own profit.

But the swaps pushout rule does not by any means ban credit default swaps. Honestly, it doesn’t even really regulate them in any real sense. All it does is require that these bets have to be made with the banks’ own money and not with everyone else’s. You see, bank deposits—the regular kind, “commercial banking”, where you have your checking and savings accounts—are secured by government funds in the event a bank should fail. This makes sense, at least insofar as it makes sense to have private banks in the first place (if we’re going to insure with government funds, why not just use government funds?). But if you allow banks to place whatever bets they feel like using that money, they have basically no downside; heads they win, tails we lose. That’s why the swaps pushout rule is absolutely indispensable; without it, you are allowing banks to gamble with other people’s money.

What about margin requirements? This one is even worse. Margin requirements are literally the only thing that keeps banks from printing unlimited money. If there was one single cause of the Great Recession, it was the fact that there were no margin requirements on over-the-counter derivatives. Because there were no margin requirements, there was no limit to how much money banks could print, and so print they did; the result was a still mind-blowing quadrillion dollars in nominal value of outstanding derivatives. Not million, not billion, not even trillion; quadrillion. $1e15. $1,000,000,000,000,000. That’s how much money they printed. The total world money supply is about $70 trillion, which is 1/14 of that. (If you read that blog post, he makes a rather telling statement: “They demonstrate quite clearly that those who have been lending the money that we owe can’t possibly have had the money they lent.” No, of course they didn’t! They created it by lending it. That is what our system allows them to do.)

And yes, at its core, it was printing money. A lot of economists will tell you otherwise, about how that’s not really what’s happening, because it’s only “nominal” value, and nobody ever expects to cash them in—yeah, but what if they do? (These are largely the same people who will tell you that quantitative easing isn’t printing money, because, uh… er… squirrel!) A tiny fraction of these derivatives were cashed in in 2007, and I think you know what happened next. They printed this money and now they are holding onto it; but woe betide us all if they ever decide to spend it. Honestly we should invalidate all of these derivatives and force them to start over with strict margin requirements, but short of that we must at least, again at the bare minimum, have margin requirements.

Why are margin requirements so important? There’s actually a very simple equation that explains it. If the margin requirement is m, meaning that you must retain a portion m between 0 and 1 of the loans you make as reserves, the total amount of money supply that can be created from the current amount of money M is just M/m. So if margin requirements were 100%—full-reserve banking—then the total money supply is M, and therefore in full control of the central bank. This is how it should be, in my opinion. But usually m is set around 10%, so the total money supply is 10M, meaning that 90% of the money in the system was created by banks. But if you ever let that margin requirement go to zero, you end up dividing by zero—and the total amount of money that can be created is infinite.

To see how this works, suppose we start with $1000 and put it in bank A. Bank A then creates a loan; how big they can make the loan depends on the margin requirement. Let’s say it’s 10%. They can make a loan of $900, because they must keep $100 (10% of $1000) in reserve. So they do that, and then it gets placed in bank B. Then bank B can make a loan of $810, keeping $90. The $810 gets deposited in bank C, which can make a loan of $729, and so on. The total amount of money in the system is the sum of all these: $1000 in bank A (remember, that deposit doesn’t disappear when it’s loaned out!), plus the $900 in bank B, plus $810 in bank C, plus $729 in bank D. After 4 steps we are at $3,439. As we go through more and more steps, the money supply gets larger at an exponentially decaying rate and we converge toward the maximum at $10,000.

The original amount is M, and then we add M(1-m), M(1-m)^2, M(1-m)^3, and so on. That produces the following sum up to n terms (below is LaTeX, which I can’t render for you without a plugin, which requires me to pay for a WordPress subscription I cannot presently afford; you can copy-paste and render it yourself here):

\sum_{k=0}^{n} M (1-m)^k = M \frac{1 – (1-m)^{n+1}}{m}

And then as you let the number of terms grow arbitrarily large, it converges toward a limit at infinity:

\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} M (1-m)^k = \frac{M}{m}

To be fair, we never actually go through infinitely many steps, so even with a margin requirement of zero we don’t literally end up with infinite money. Instead, we just end up with n M, the number of steps times the initial money supply. Start with $1000 and go through 4 steps: $4000. Go through 10 steps: $10,000. Go through 100 steps: $100,000. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, until that money has nowhere to go and the whole house of cards falls down.

Honestly, I’m not even sure why Wall Street banks would want to get rid of margin requirements. It’s basically putting your entire economy on the counterfeiting standard. Fiat money is often accused of this, but the government has both (a) the legitimate authority empowered by the electorate and (b) incentives to maintain macroeconomic stability, neither of which private banks have. There is no reason other than altruism (and we all know how much altruism Citibank and HSBC have—it is approximately equal to the margin requirement they are trying to get passed—and yes, they wrote the bill) that would prevent them from simply printing as much money as they possibly can, thus maximizing their profits; and they can even excuse the behavior by saying that everyone else is doing it, so it’s not like they could prevent the collapse all by themselves. But by lobbying for a regulation to specifically allow this, they no longer have that excuse; no, everyone won’t be doing it, not unless you pass this law to let them. Despite the global economic collapse that was just caused by this sort of behavior only seven years ago, they now want to return to doing it. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if calling them an international crime syndicate is actually unfair to international crime syndicates. These guys are so totally evil it actually goes beyond the bounds of rational behavior; they’re turning into cartoon supervillains. I would honestly not be that surprised if there were a video of one of these CEOs caught on camera cackling maniacally, “Muahahahaha! The world shall burn!” (Then again, I was pleasantly surprised to see the CEO of Goldman Sachs talking about the harms of income inequality, though it’s not clear he appreciated his own contribution to that inequality.)

And that is why Democrats must not give in. The Senate should vote it down. Failing that, Obama should veto. I wish he still had the line-item veto so he could just remove the egregious riders without allowing a government shutdown, but no, the Senate blocked it. And honestly their reasoning makes sense; there is supposed to be a balance of power between Congress and the President. I just wish we had a Congress that would use its power responsibly, instead of holding the American people hostage to the villainous whims of Wall Street banks.

What just happened in that election?

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JDN 2456970 PST 11:12.

My head is still spinning from the election results on Tuesday. Republicans gained a net of 12 seats to secure their majority in the House. Even worse, Republicans gained at least 7 seats in the Senate (note that each Senate seat should count for 4.35 House seats because there are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives) and may gain two more depending on how runoffs go. This gives them a majority in both houses of Congress. So people like Republicans then? Maybe they’re fed up with Obama and dissatisfied with his handling of the economy (even though it has actually been spectacular given what he had to work with).
But then when we look at actual ballot proposals, the ones that passed were mostly liberal issues. California passed proposition 47, which will reduce sentences for minor drug and theft crimes and substantially reduce our incidence of incarceration. (There’s no sign of releasing current prisoners, unfortunately; but at least we won’t be adding as many new ones.) Marijuana was legalized—fully legalized, for all purposes—in Alaska, Oregon, and DC, further reducing incarceration. At last, the US may finally stop being the incarceration capitol of the world! We currently hold the title in both per-capita and total incarceration, so there can be no dispute. (Technically the Seychelles has a higher per-capita rate, but come on, they don’t count as a real country; they have a population smaller than Ann Arbor—or for that matter the annual throughput of Riker’s Island.)

The proposals to allow wolf hunting in Michigan failed, for which many wolves would thank you if they could. Minimum wages were raised in five states, four of which are Republican-leaning states. The most extreme minimum wage hike was in San Francisco, where the minimum wage is going to be raised as high as $18 over the next four years. So people basically agree with Democrats on policy, but decided to hand the Senate over to Republicans.

I think the best explanation for what happened is the voting demographics. When we have a Senate election, we aren’t sampling randomly from the American population; we’re pulling from specific states, and specific populations within those states. Geography played a huge role in these election results. So did age; the voting population was much older on average than the general population, because most young people simply didn’t vote. I know some of these young people, who tell me things like “I’m not voting because I won’t be part of that system!” Apparently their level of understanding of social change approaches that of the Lonely Island song “I Threw it on the Ground”. Not voting isn’t rebellion, it’s surrender. (I’m not sure who said that first, but it’s clearly right.) Rebellion would be voting for a radical third-party candidate, or running as one yourself. Rebellion would be leading rallies to gather support—that is, votes—for that candidate. Alternatively, you could say that rebellion is too risky and simply aim for reform, in which case you’d vote for Democrats as I did.

Your failure to vote did not help change that system. On the contrary, it was because of your surrender that we got two houses of Congress controlled by Republicans who have veered so far to the right they are bordering on fascism and feudalism. It is strange living in a society where the “mainstream” has become so extremist. You end up feeling like a radical far-left Marxist when in fact you agree—as I do—with the core policies of FDR or even Eisenhower. You have been told that the right is capitalism and the left is socialism; this is wrong. The left is capitalism; the right is feudalism. When I tell you I want a basic income funded by a progressive income tax, I am agreeing with Milton Friedman.

This must be how it feels to be a secularist in an Islamist theocracy like Iran. Now that Colorado has elected a state legislator who is so extreme that he literally has performed exorcisms to make people not gay or transgender (his name is apparently Gordon Klingenschmitt), I fear we’re dangerously on the verge of a theocracy of our own.

Of course, I shouldn’t just blame the people who didn’t vote; I should also blame the people who did vote, and voted for candidates who are completely insane. Even though it’s just a state legislature, tens of thousands of people voted for that guy in Colorado; tens of thousands of Americans were okay with the fact that he thinks gay and transgender people have demons inside us that need to be removed by exorcism. Even in Iran theocracy is astonishingly popular. People are voting for these candidates, and we must find out why and change their minds. We must show them that the people they are voting for are not going to make good decisions that benefit America, they are going to make selfish decisions that benefit themselves or their corporate cronies, or even just outright bad decisions that hurt everyone. As an example of the latter (which is arguably worse), there is literally no benefit to discrimination against women or racial minorities or LGBT people. It’s just absolute pure deadweight loss that causes massive harm without any benefit at all. It’s deeply, deeply irrational, and one of the central projects of cognitive economics must be figuring out what makes people discriminate and figuring out how to make them stop.

To be fair, some of the candidates that were elected are not so extreme. Tom Cotton of Arkansas (whose name is almost offensively down-homey rural American; I don’t think I could name a character that in a novel without people thinking it was satire) supported the state minimum wage increase and is sponsoring a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks, which is actually pretty reasonable, rather than at conception, which is absurd.

Thom Tillis of North Carolina is your standard old rich White male corporate stooge, but I don’t see anything in his platform that is particularly terrifying. David Perdue of Georgia is the same; he’s one of those business owners who thinks he knows how to run the economy because he can own a business while it makes money. (Even if he did have something to do with the profitability of the business—which is not entirely clear—that’s still like a fighter pilot saying he’s a great aerospace engineer.) Cory Gardner is similar (not old, but rich White male corporate stooge), but he’s scary simply because he came from the Colorado state legislature, where they just installed that exorcist guy.

Thad Cochran of Mississippi was re-elected, so he was already there; he generally votes along whatever lines the Republican leadership asks him to, so he is not so much a villain as a henchman. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia also seems to basically vote whatever the party says.

Joni Ernst of Iowa is an interesting character; despite being a woman, she basically agrees with all the standard Republican positions, including those that are obviously oppressive of women. She voted for an abortion ban at conception, which is totally different from what Cotton wants. She even takes the bizarre confederalist view of Paul Ryan that a federal minimum wage is “big government” but a state minimum wage is just fine. The one exception is that she supports reform of sexual harassment policy in the military, probably because she experienced it herself.

But I’m supposed to be an economist, so what do I think is going to happen to the economy? (Of course, don’t forget, the economy is made of people. One of the best things that can ever happen to an economy is the empowerment of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people, all of which are now in jeopardy under a Republican Congress.)

The best-case scenario is “not much”; the obstructionism continues, and despite an utterly useless government the market repairs itself as it will always do eventually. Job growth will continue at its slow but steady pace, GDP will get back to potential trend. Inequality will continue to increase as it has been doing for about 30 years now. In a couple years there will be another election and hopefully Republicans will lose their majority.

The worst-case scenario is “Republicans get what they want”. The budget will finally be balanced—by cutting education, infrastructure, and social services. Then they’ll unbalance it again by cutting taxes on the rich and starting a couple more wars, because that kind of government spending doesn’t count. (They are weaponized Keynesians all.) They’ll restrict immigration even though immigration is what the First World needs right now (not to mention the fact that the people coming here need it even more). They’ll impose draconian regulations on abortion, they’ll stop or reverse the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage.

Democrats must not cave in to demands for “compromise” and “bipartisanship”. If the Republicans truly believed in those things, they wouldn’t have cost the economy $24 billion and downgraded the credit rating of the US government by their ridiculous ploy to shut down the government. They wouldn’t have refused to deal until the sequester forced nonsensical budget cuts. They wouldn’t make it a central part of their platform to undermine or repeal the universal healthcare system that they invented just so that Democrats can’t take credit for it. They have become so committed to winning political arguments at any cost that they are willing to do real harm to America and its people in order to do it. They are overcome by the tribal paradigm, and we all suffer for it.

No, the Republicans in Congress today are like 3-year-olds who throw a tantrum when they don’t get everything exactly their way. You can’t negotiate with these people, you can’t compromise with them. I wish you could, I really do. I’ve heard of days long gone when Congress actually accomplished things, but I have only vague recollections, for I was young in the Clinton era. (I do remember times under Bush II when Congress did things, but they were mostly bad things.) Maybe if we’re firm enough or persuasive enough some of them will even come around. But the worst thing Democrats could do right now is start caving to Republican demands thinking that it will restore unity to our government—because that unity would come only at the price of destroying people’s lives.

Unfortunately I fear that Democrats will appease Republicans in this way, because they’ve been doing that so far. In the campaign, hardly any of the Democrats mentioned Obama’s astonishing economic record or the numerous benefits of Obamacare—which by the way is quite popular among its users, at least more so than getting rid of it entirely (most people want to fix it, not eliminate it). Most of the Democratic candidates barely ran a campaign deserving of the name.

To be clear: Do not succumb to the tribal paradigm yourself. Do not think that everyone who votes Republican is a bad person—the vast majority are good people who were misled. Do not even assume that every Republican politician is evil; a few obviously are (see also Dick Cheney), but most are actually not so much evil as blinded by the ideology of their tribe. I believe that Paul Ryan and Rand Paul think that what they do is in the best interests of America; the problem is not their intentions but their results and their unwillingness to learn from those results. We do need to find ways to overcome partisanship and restore unity and compromise—but we must not simply bow to their demands in order to do that.

Democrats: Do not give in. Stand up for your principles. Every time you give in to their obstructionism, you are incentivizing that obstructionism. And maybe next election you could actually talk about the good things your party does for people—or the bad things their party does—instead of running away from your own party and apologizing for everything?