I don’t believe I’m overstating things much in saying that when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, low wages – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.Biggs gets points for admitting liberals can be men-on-the-street, and not exclusively pointed-headed college professors, union thugs, and homosexual activists, as they are normally portrayed at National Review. But as to that "someone else's fault"... wait for it:
Progressives’ job, in this mindset, is to find that person-at-fault and make him pay. In this case, progressives blame the employers of low-wage workers, who they assume could easily afford to pay more but choose not to.
Now, progressives could make their emotional impulses consistent with economic reality by placing the blame on, say, liberal social policies that encourage single-parent families...Turns out it is someone else's fault, but the culprit isn't McDonalds or Wal-Mart -- it's Hugh Hefner! Also "teachers' unions."
The marriage-makes-you-rich argument explained here, here, here, and especially here.
*UPDATE. It should be noted that Biggs doesn't mention abolishing the minimum wage, but that's what the Greg Mankiw article on which he based his own is about ("a good case can be made for eliminating Plan B entirely by repealing the minimum wage"). For the moment they're playing it cagey, lest the "progressive" "man on the street" catch on. There must be more of us than I thought.
"In this case, progressives blame the employers of low-wage workers, who they assume could easily afford to pay more but choose not to."
ReplyDeleteYep, funny how when publicly-traded companies report record profits we liberals "assume" that they could afford to pay more. Clearly arithmetic has a liberal bias. ;)
Affluent people get married, therefor getting married will make one affluent?
ReplyDeleteIs the inability to distinguish cause from effect a qualification to work at a conservative 'news' site, or a super power one gains as a result of employment there?
Well, when two spouses each work for minimum wage, that means they're making twice the minimum wage. And when Junior is old enough and he works for minimum wage, they'll be making three times minimum wage. That's what, about $25 an hour? It's the new American dream!
ReplyDeleteThe modern American right is pretty keen on magical thinking. Some examples: supply-side economics, abstinence-only sex ed, the Laffer curve, Hayek, WMD in Iraq, dhimmitude, welfare queens, compassionate conservatism, the efficacy of stand your ground laws, Just Say No, and tax cuts fix everything.
ReplyDeleteOnce you've denied reason itself, you can argue for anything.
Progressives’ job, in this mindset, is to find that person-at-fault and make him pay
ReplyDeleteWhy, yes, we do want to make him pay.
Of course, in most parts of the country, two married people making minimum wage don't make as much money as one person making $15/hour. How would marriage make those people rich? Even the tax benefits wouldn't provide them with middle class assets.
Repeat again slowly, for the 2,397th time, correlation does not equal causation.
ReplyDeleteThere's an endless supply of ancedata over at National Review.
this puts a whole new spin on 'wolf of wall street' kvetching. if the welfare state had been totally destroyed by tipandronnie, jordan belfort wouldn't have fucked all those hookers.
ReplyDelete...in this mindset, is to find that person-at-fault and make him pay
ReplyDeletei think this is an appropriate trade-off for 'citizens united.'
I'm uncomfortable applying the word "modern" to any aspect of the American Right...
ReplyDeleteThe part that really gets me clutching my poor head is that every last one of these anti-minimum-wage dimbulbs is even more pissed off at the 47% of households that don't pay federal income tax*. And why don't they pay federal income tax? Because they don't earn enough income. And now Biggs is arguing that they should be earning even less! I mean, you can sit down with a napkin and a pencil and graph out the financial territory where there geniuses want to go: exempt the rich from more and more tax on the upper end, while simultaneously eroding the tax base from the bottom up by deflating wages. Instant Haiti!
ReplyDeleteWhere do they expect the money for the Department of Defense to come from? All the Kochs put together could buy two carrier groups and operate them for a couple years. We have seven. A single soldier in Afghanistan costs a cool million a year. Jamie Dimon's salary will keep a small platoon going, and he can sleep on Biggs' couch, right?
Wishful thinking and economic incoherence are no strangers to our political discourse. Andrew Biggs is trying to convince us that we can stay warm by lighting our own farts.
*Lots of other taxes: excise, sales, real estate, SSA, and MedicAid, to name a few.
Since, as we all know, Liberals all live in big cities, and by this "logic", if you live in a big city, you'll become Liberal, these guys should all be living in Frostbite Falls (Pop 23), right?
ReplyDeleteAll the Kochs put together could buy two carrier groups and operate them for a couple years. We have seven.
ReplyDeleteThere's a couple inches of sea level rise, right there, that TEH LIBERASL* blame on TGCCH.
*I miss MERKIN PATRIOT, I do...
Shorter Greg Mankiw & Andrew Biggs: Individuals* and businesses that reap enormous profits from underpaying and overworking their employees should not be burdened by the costs of paying a fairer wage. That burden should be borne by the American taxpayer.
ReplyDelete*The Waltons, for example, who are collectively worth more than $100 billion, more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
I don’t believe I’m overstating things much in saying that when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, low wages – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don’t believe I’m overstating things much in saying that when the conservative man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, murder charges, rape charges, divorce, or job loss – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.
Before the Soviet Union disintegrated, there was a credible challenger to American political and cultural hegemony. The GOP kept the gold bugs and blatant racists and dominionists well away from the levers of power, because letting them drive could well result in those filthy commies winning.
ReplyDeleteThis sanity check no longer exists, and as such ideas that were laughable in the sixties and seventies are being wheeled into the arena and proudly displayed.
TL;DR: "recent" might have been a better choice.
Well its part and parcel with their whole idea that rich people hire the rest of us out of some sense of charity.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, conservatives never believe someone is always at fault. They all know that economic and social problems are the result of impersonal natural phenomena, and would certainly never blame them on a sinister conspiracy aligned against them. (Makes face like Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.)
ReplyDeleteThey don't just believe it's "someone's" fault. They know it's the fault of whoever suffered the most and has the least power.
ReplyDeleteGreg Mankiw has a pretty nice gig. Like Chuck Krautenhammer (and Fred Hiatt), he keeps getting paid in spite of never being right about anything.
ReplyDelete~
"She was asking for it."
ReplyDeleteThe latest talking points emailed to conservative pundits must have told them to focus their arguments against minimum wage increase on the "Small business owner" who can't afford to to pay more.
ReplyDeleteOf course, genuine small busineses could be exempted, and McDonalds raise their slave-starvation-wages, but that's too complicated for conservatives to understand, plus the Bill Of Rights says NO.
I keep seeing that statistic and it keeps bothering me. The fact that around a large fraction of American families have a negative net worth means that a debt free homeless guy with a nickel in his pocket has more net wealth than @23%* of Americans. I agree with the central point which is that the Waltons accumulated a mind boggling fortune on the backs of underpaid employees.
ReplyDelete*the best estimate I could find in 5 minutes of google searching from: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/06/10/america-is-richer-than-ever-most-americans-are-not.aspx#.Us2gveJTPKI
Why, No True Progressive would believe that economic injustice is someone else's fault! He'd believe that it's fundamentally his own fault, due to insufficient effort in opposing The Man, and resolve to redouble his slogan-chanting, giant puppetry, protest-sign-scrawling, etc.
ReplyDeletetwo married people making minimum wage don't make as much money as one person making $15/hour
ReplyDeleteWorse than that, if you factor in daycare, so's the wife can work, too...
I don’t believe I’m overstating things much in saying that when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, low wages – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.
ReplyDeleteOh YEAH? Well, progressive woman-on-the-street Patti Smith once said "Jesus died for someone's sins, but not mine." Which totally goes to show you that you really should blow it out your ass, you bootlicking moral cripple.
You have channeled the apogee of American political thought that is Paul LePage.
ReplyDeleteWith Gingrichian brilliance, he favors changing child labor laws to improve Maine's economy. "There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store, sorting bottles, at 12 years old."
Apparently, with unemployment in the state being only 6.7%, bottles are going unsorted for lack of willing hands and newspaper delivery is being effected by grownups with vans instead of children with bikes as it should be when it's winter in the mountains.
Why Paul skipped the school-cleaning duties Newt knows to be good for America, I don't know, but maybe Maine's bottle and newspaper situation is too much of a crisis to allow for diverting children to toilet cleaning at the present time.
As I understand it (haven't tried this myself, mind you), married people get rich because two can live as cheaply as one -- and the two stay home together cheaply painting their charming cottages and cheaply rethatching their roofs rather than swanning around all night in expensive fashionable togs, sipping expensive fashionable cocktails, and snorting expensive fashionable drugs the way single liberals always do until they're impoverished and take up economic terrorism.
ReplyDeleteLook at Pajama Boy, for instance. If he were married (TO A WOMAN, TO A WOMAN), he wouldn't be sitting around in his onesie waiting for John Galt to buy him medical treatment for his sin-induced herpes. Nay, nay, he would instead be wearing a manly polyester polo shirt while enjoying the wholesome meatloaf made by the frugal little woman and planning their weekend project to make the bubble wrap from their Amazon packages into attic insulation.
"Now, progressives could make their emotional impulses consistent with
ReplyDeleteeconomic reality by placing the blame on, say, liberal social policies
that encourage single-parent families..."
Biggs, you lying sack of shit... when the AFDC program was initiated, it was CONSERVATIVES who insisted on the "No Man In The House" rule as a condition of eligibility for Black single mothers, and it took liberals more than thirty years of fighting to get to the point where the Supreme Court finally struck it down in 1968. Jesus... if these guys couldn't argue in bad faith, they'd have no argument at all.
Still, that doesn't explain why minimum wage workers who think they're not earning enough for whatever reason always fail to take Mitt Romney's advice: Why not sell some bonds if you don't have enough cash - or borrow from your parents to start a business?
ReplyDeleteIMO, the objection to including those who have negative net worth in the aggregate in this stat is bogus, since they are still Americans whether they have any worth or not.
ReplyDeleteThis guy explains it a lot better than me: (And it should be noted that the Walton heirs are worth a whole lot more than when this was written.)
Let’s take these critics’ suggestion and remove all the negative values at the bottom of the distribution, extinguishing the value of their debts that exceed their assets and assigning them a zero net worth instead. What does the comparison look like then? Not that different: After making this adjustment, about 15.4 million families (13.1 percent of the population) have zero net worth, no small number to be sure. But the Walmart heirs’ $89.5 billion is still equal to the combined net worth of the bottom 33.2 million families (about 28.2 percent of the total), even after extinguishing all negative net worth values in the SCF.
why don't they pay federal income tax? Because they don't earn enough income.
ReplyDeleteThey don't pay federal income tax largely because of Reagan and Bush Jr. tax changes. All of the reforms I can think of that lowered tax burdens for poor/middle class people in this country in recent memory were put in place by Republicans.
In the compassionate conservative years, Republicans were proud of the fact that 47% didn't pay income tax -- the attitude was "now we just need to get the other 53% off the hook, too".
It's kind of amazing the transformation that happened. The tea party movement solidified talk about "moochers" as part of the mainstream Republican style. Maybe it's rose-colored glasses, but I have a hard time imagining McCain, Bush Jr, Dole, Bush Sr. or Reagan trotting out the 47% thing. They all did use "welfare queen" type language or decried specific programs, but getting more people paying income taxes wasn't the goal of any of them.
Ha ha, Biggs, you genius, yes, progressives think "low wages" are bad, so we're out for revenge! We're not actually thinking about the long-term stability of the nation in the face of 30 years of an expanding income gap, we're just mad that some people get paid less than others! So true. Now let's drape your premise around things not made of straw:
ReplyDeletewhen the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, losing health insurance and going bankrupt because of a diagnosis of cancer – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.
when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, a man being banned from marrying the man he loves – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.
when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, getting sent to prison over minor drug violations in disproportionate numbers because he's black – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.
Now let's talk, you smarmy little jackass.
Every single person in the United States should be made to go Harvard or Yale - that way they can all become President.
ReplyDeleteWhen conservatives see someone making low wages, well, its obviously his/her own fault for being lazy. Never mind the low wage jobs are usually the physically hardest, and often very dangerous.
ReplyDeleteSup Kat...you have some edge. With regard to is lazy you know the fascists have sent those jobs Comunist China. Right?
ReplyDeleteIf we did nothing other than fire the worst 5 percent of public-school teachers and re-allocate their students to other classrooms, the average lifetime earnings of their students would rise by around $250,000.
ReplyDeleteHey, heads up, everybody! It turns out that we can objectively determine which 5% of teachers suck the most ass. And their students aren't considered damaged goods or anything, so the good teachers who are left over will be happy to have them reassigned to their classrooms. Once we do this, these kids are pretty much guaranteed to walk away with a cool quarter mil.
This is a really awesome thing to learn, especially from someone lecturing me about basing policy on wishful thinking.
Now let's drape your premise around things not made of straw:
ReplyDeleteHow do you plan to keep the premise in place? It's pretty fuckin' wispy.
Proving the interconnectedness of all things, Jill Melchior, star of the next Edroso Epistle, herself favors having students clean schools. In the third grade at her church-run school:
ReplyDeleteI once spent a recess scrubbing out my desk after I’d forgotten an apple in it over break. It had molded and liquefied, and it smelled terrible. It was my fault, and because it was my problem to deal with, I was more responsible in the future.
Unfortunately, as Roy will soon show us, she went on to accept unemployment insurance payments nonetheless. Perhaps if, as one of her commenters suggests, she had cleaned her desk with her tongue, she would have grown into a better American.
I wrote an article recently about how an increase in the minimum wage rate increases unemployment. You can read it here: http://wp.me/p3N9zD-4e
ReplyDeleteSo, what replaces "the worst 5 percent of public-school teachers"? Or is this another conservative backdoor-privatization scheme, as usual?
ReplyDeleteYes it's about privatization. And yes it's backdoor, meaning that someone is gonna get buggered.
ReplyDeleteI would like to snort expensive fashionable drugs with this comment, even if it is, or is not, A WOMAN.
ReplyDeleteYou paint a vivid picture! But there's one contradiction in this Rightwing fantasy scenario that really jumps out at me.
ReplyDeleteIf the married couple is doing the right thing and getting rich because of it, and the sinful single Liberals AREN'T doing the right thing, then how are they affording those expensive fashionable togs, expensive fashionable cocktails, and expensive fashionable drugs?
I know, the whole thing is nonsense. Rightwingers who claim to see "the real world" sure do have a lot of gall.
Mr. Biggs contrasts the progressives' ideas with the conservatives' ideas by describing one as "emotional impulses" and the other as based on "economic reality."
ReplyDeleteI hear this sort of thing quite often on Rightwing media. Liberals supposedly think with their emotions, and Conservatives don't.
However, I notice that most of what I hear on their media is based on fear, anger, and/or a misty-eyed nostalgic gaze on what used to be. All of those things are emotions, and arguments based on those things are not rational.
Yep, throw this one on the heap of RW shibboleths and record it as another galloping case of projection.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but although you're supposed to get married, don't you dare have kids; you can't afford them.
ReplyDeleteSense? When did this ever make sense?
Unless of course the something in question happens to someone they don't happen to like, in which case nobody ever is to blame, it's just something that happens, like some kind of natural law or something. (Hell, the one dude up there even said poverty was more or less a law of physics.)
ReplyDeleteThat is unless they think they can get away with blaming the victim. Anything to avoid putting the blame where it belongs. For people who are always yammering on about "responsibility," they're not really into taking it.
You know, these guys used to be the villains in Dickens stories.
ReplyDelete