PASS THE POPCORN

With a week to go, Trump and his entire legal defense team have gone their separate ways. According to the reporting I heard, the problem was that Trump wanted them to argue that he had really won the election and it had been stolen from him. One can only hope that he decides to represent himself. It is cold and wet in North Carolina right now and I need something to cheer me up. This is a truly bizarre time. Marjorie Taylor Greene is now the face of the Republican Party – not Ronald Reagan, not George W. Bush, not Mitch McConnell, not even Richard Nixon but Marjorie Taylor Greene! I did not get any presents for Christmas, not even a lump of coal, but this is better than a pony (with or without the horse shit.)

ASIDE FROM THAT, MRS. LINCOLN, HOW WAS THE THEATER?

These days I am suffering the effects of political whiplash. The new Biden administration seems to me to be proceeding in a much more favorable manner that I had any reason to hope for. It is handling the pandemic quite as well as one could ask, despite troubling news about new variants of the virus. The flood of executive actions not only reversed a number of appalling actions by Trump but also staked out new ground economically (mandating a rising minimum wage in jobs controlled by the federal government), as well as in such areas as gender rights. All of us lost sleep over the prospect of Biden pursuing the mirage of bipartisan legislation, only to see him make clear moves toward enactment through reconciliation procedures after only 10 days in office. Commentators reading tea leaves suggest that the opposition of Manchin and Sinema to the ditching of the filibuster is soft enough perhaps to permit even statehood for DC. In short, the early signs are far more promising than I could have dreamed.

 

At the same time, the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams. Since the election of Biden, I have not seen a single coherent statement by any prominent Republican of what legislative alternatives they would prefer to Biden’s huge recovery bill. Instead, the news is filled with the craziness of Marjorie Greene, the attacks by Matt Gaetz on Liz Cheney, speculation about which foot McCarthy kissed when he went to see Trump, and reports of the belief in Republican circles that the California fires were caused by space lasers controlled by George Soros. Since a large enough section of the faithful Republican electorate is completely in thrall to Trump, there is no coherent political resolution of this civil war.

 

If I were Joe Biden (how is that for a counterfactual conditional, you logic buffs!), I would send out very delicate feelers to several Republican senators inviting them to leave the party and declare themselves Independents, consulting with Schumer about plum committee assignments and some hand in drafting bits of legislation near and dear to their hearts. The quid pro quo would be their willingness once and for all to kill the filibuster. This would make radicals like me scream bloody murder but it might very well consign the Republicans to permanent minority status and turn the United States into one great big California.

 

All of this assumes that we do not experience a series of political assassinations like those that made the 1960s so horrific.

 

As I say, I find this head spinning.

LET US ALL JUST HAVE A LAUGH

One of the reasons that I have posted so little in the last several days is that I have been consumed by anger and a feeling of depression at what is happening in America these days, even though I am only a fortnight away from my second vaccine shot, which you would think would cheer me up. So I thought I would spend today giving you one example of the wit in movies and then invite any who wish to post comments to give us other examples that they like.

 

My example comes from an old Clint Eastwood movie. All of us are familiar with the movie cliché of the couple who, consumed by desire for one another, stumble into an apartment and start tearing their clothes off, dropping them on the floor as they make their way to the bed. In the non—R-rated versions, we never see them naked on the bed making love. We simply see the trail of clothing leading up to the bed: a shoe, a bra, a sock, an undershirt. I have no idea what imaginative director created this trope but it is now so stale that one yawns when it begins and it no longer has the power to arouse.

 

In the Clint Eastwood movie, he plays a Secret Service agent tasked with defending the president (I think, I may misremember that). His partner is a female Secret Service agent and sure enough, they get the hots for each other and go to his or her apartment. The scene starts conventionally enough but the director, with what I consider a marvelous wit, shows us a somewhat different trail of dropped accoutrements: a side arm, a pair of handcuffs, a bra, a bit of body armor. When I saw it I laughed out loud. It was such a lovely bit of inter-textual critique, as the lit crit people say. I do not remember much else about the movie but I will never forget that scene.

 

Okay. That one is mine. I invite you to contribute yours for the general amusement of the readership and to lighten the burden under which we all labor these days.

I HAVE A FAVOR TO ASK

If I include the time I spent as a graduate student teaching fellow, I taught for 54 years. During all of that time I would meet my students face-to-face, get to know them as best I could, lecture to them, respond to their questions and comments, meet them during office hours, and in general interact with them in a way that people did, at least in those days. I had the same relationship with my colleagues at the various institutions where I taught. When I retired 12 ½ years ago I waited a bit and then started this blog as a way to continue my lifetime of teaching and discussing.

 

The blog has been great fun but in one important respect I have found it unsatisfying. I cannot really consider blogging a form of conversation because I never see the people with whom I am talking and all too often I have no way of knowing the identity of the people who comment on the blog, even those who comment almost daily. I find this very strange, I confess, but more than that deeply troubling. Blogging is in this way more unnatural than emailing or even engaging in that most recent of modes of communication, zooming.

 

So I have a request to make of all of you who comment on the blog. I would like you please to identify yourselves by your real names when you post comments – not by initials, like “LFC” or by what I assume is a nom de plume, “Marcel Proust,” but by your actual names. This is not the same thing as the two of us being in the same room talking to one another but it is a step in that direction. Some of you do this of course. S. Wallerstein and David Palmeter and Chris Mulvaney and Warren Goldfarb, for example.

 

I gather, though I do not understand such things, that in some cases Google does not permit you to put your name on the comment but you can always add it to the end of a comment.

 

Some of you may be hesitant to put your name to politically charged comments which can then follow you for a lifetime in the cloud. As someone who achieved life tenure at the age of 30, I am in no position to be critical of such hesitancy. But I really would prefer whenever possible to know with whom I am talking. 

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE

There are two possibilities and I have not the slightest idea which one of them is correct, but we will find out quite soon. The first possibility is that Biden genuinely believes that he can reach out across the aisle and legislate in the way that he did 30 years ago, continuing to believe that despite the experience of the Obama administration in which he played a central role. If he believes that, then he will continue futilely to reach across the aisle and get his head handed to him again and again until it is too late to accomplish what he needs to accomplish in order to win the midterms.

 

The second possibility is that he quite well understands how little he can get done in a bipartisan fashion and has decided to make an enormous show of trying for a short period of time before “his hand is forced” by the virus and the economic crisis and he is “compelled” to opt for killing the filibuster, after which he can give statehood to DC, enact the progressive program of legislation that he is laid out, and leave the Republicans to stew in their own juices.

 

As I say, I do not think we will have to wait months and months to see which way this plays out. Biden is not stupid and he may have understood from the start that the pandemic was politically a blessing in disguise precisely because it would make it possible for him to appear to be doing things out of necessity that he actually wants to do. We shall see.

 

While I have your attention, let me note on another matter that if Dr. Anthony Fauci is correct that we need to vaccinate 75% or 80% of the population by the end of the summer to go back to something resembling normal, then that means (the arithmetic is simple) 2 million vaccinations a day from now until then. We are currently above 1 million a day before any of Biden’s bold plans have been put into effect at all so 2 million a day is, I believe, quite achievable. It irritates me to see the White House spokespersons continue to describe 100 million vaccinations in 100 days as a brave, bold initiative when that level has already been achieved, but I grant that it is good politics so I will grumble on my little blog but otherwise keep my mouth shut.

DEEPLY DEPRESSING

This essay published five days ago by Anne Applebaum is deeply depressing and very persuasive.  If she is right, and it is hard to disagree, this country has a far larger problem than even I realized.

A LITTLE SPECULATION WITHOUT BENEFIT OF MODERN MONEY THEORY

Biden wants to spend $1.9 trillion to address a variety of problems caused by the vaccine. Needless to say, Republicans are now objecting to spending so much money that the federal government does not have. It is worth asking what such an expenditure will actually cost the government.

 

Since the government does not have the money, it must borrow it. It does this by issuing IOUs which are called treasury bills and treasury bonds. In order to entice people with money to lend it to the government, the government must offer to pay them. Since the gimlet eyed wonks who handle these matters are constitutionally stingy, they pay as little as they can get away with. Currently the U.S. Treasury is paying a rate of 0.13% on two year treasury notes. That means that to borrow $1 trillion, it must promise to pay back $1,001,300,000,000 in two years.

 

However, there is a catch. The treasury borrows the money in January 2021 dollars, but it does not pay the lender back two years from now in 2021 dollars. Instead, it pays the lender back in 2023 dollars. So we have to factor in the rate of inflation to see whether those future dollars are worth more or less than current dollars and if so by how much.

 

Well, as Yogi Berra noted wisely, it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future but we can at least ask what the current rate of inflation is. That is something we know, and with a little searching around on the web we find that the current rate of inflation is 1.4%.

 

This means that lenders around the world are actually paying the U.S. Treasury 1.27% of their money for the privilege of being permitted to lend it to the United States! Unless the United States goes into a serious depression economically (I am of course not speaking about emotions) and suffers a negative rate of growth, the United States can make out like gangbusters by borrowing money at these rates.

 

We have not yet asked what the US government plans to do with the money it is being paid to borrow. If it invests that money productively by giving it to individuals who will go out and spend it or to small businesses that will use it to generate revenue by staying open, then some of what the government spends will come back to it in the form of tax revenues. It is above my pay grade to figure out how much that is likely to be, but since the government is already been paid to borrow, any tax revenues that are generated by its expenditure of the money it has borrowed is just gravy.

 

I know next to nothing about these matters and yet even I can figure this much out, so why is Mitt Romney, who made a fortune at Bain Capital, complaining that it is too soon for the federal government to undertake such large expenditures as those proposed by Biden?