Why the Moronic Moralists Will Win This Election, Why They'll Make the Economy Worse, and Why This Candidate Doesn't Care If You Vote for Him or Not

If you've already voted for me or will vote for me tomorrow, thank you. I appreciate it very much although certainly there's no way that career politician Jeff Flake can lose his seat in Congress. A vote for me -- or for the fine Democratic candidate, Rebecca Schneider -- is basically a protest vote by someone who's actually living in the real world.

However, most of you who live in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District -- the East Valley cities of Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Apache Junction and Queen Creek -- are ignorant morons. That's why I don't give a fuck if anyone votes for me or not.

That gives me the freedom politician candidates don't have. I can say what I feel and do what I think is right without having to care about whether the unwashed masses agree. Maybe I'll get 100 votes or so, votes for which I'm grateful, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

The overriding issue in this election is the terrible economy. Unfortunately, morons like most Sixth Congressional District voters will just make things worse. In his New York Times column today, the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman explains why. It's essentially Macroeconomics 101 for Dummies, and so most East Valley residents can use it:

“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” That’s the question CNBC’s Rick Santelli famously asked in 2009, in a rant widely credited with giving birth to the Tea Party movement.

It’s a sentiment that resonates not just in America but in much of the world. The tone differs from place to place — listening to a German official denounce deficits, my wife whispered, “We’ll all be handed whips as we leave, so we can flagellate ourselves.” But the message is the same: debt is evil, debtors must pay for their sins, and from now on we all must live within our means.

And that kind of moralizing is the reason we’re mired in a seemingly endless slump.

The years leading up to the 2008 crisis were indeed marked by unsustainable borrowing, going far beyond the subprime loans many people still believe, wrongly, were at the heart of the problem. Real estate speculation ran wild in Florida and Nevada, but also in Spain, Ireland and Latvia. And all of it was paid for with borrowed money.

This borrowing made the world as a whole neither richer nor poorer: one person’s debt is another person’s asset. But it made the world vulnerable. When lenders suddenly decided that they had lent too much, that debt levels were excessive, debtors were forced to slash spending. This pushed the world into the deepest recession since the 1930s. And recovery, such as it is, has been weak and uncertain — which is exactly what we should have expected, given the overhang of debt.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

But the moralizers will have none of it. They denounce deficit spending, declaring that you can’t solve debt problems with more debt. They denounce debt relief, calling it a reward for the undeserving.

And if you point out that their arguments don’t add up, they fly into a rage. Try to explain that when debtors spend less, the economy will be depressed unless somebody else spends more, and they call you a socialist. Try to explain why mortgage relief is better for America than foreclosing on homes that must be sold at a huge loss, and they start ranting like Mr. Santelli. No question about it: the moralizers are filled with a passionate intensity.

And those who should know better lack all conviction.

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness? Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Meanwhile, the administration’s mortgage modification program — the program that inspired the Santelli rant — has, in the end, accomplished almost nothing. At least part of the reason is that officials were so worried that they might be accused of helping the undeserving that they ended up helping almost nobody.

So the moralizers are winning. More and more voters, both here and in Europe, are convinced that what we need is not more stimulus but more punishment. Governments must tighten their belts; debtors must pay what they owe.

The irony is that in their determination to punish the undeserving, voters are punishing themselves: by rejecting fiscal stimulus and debt relief, they’re perpetuating high unemployment. They are, in effect, cutting off their own jobs to spite their neighbors.

But they don’t know that. And because they don’t, the slump will go on.

¿Comprende?

Jeff Flake, Arizona Is in an Economic Depression and You Do Nothing But Extol Free Markets and Ask for Tax Cuts for Millionaires

Tomorrow's New York Times features a very long front-page story by our friends Michael Powell and Motoko Rich, "Across the U.S., Long Recovery Looks Like Recession." For those of us in the East Valley and in Pinal County, where our house is, the Great Recession's sputtering recovery seems more like the Great Depression:

Florence, Ariz.

In 2005, Arizona ranked, as usual, second nationally in job growth behind Nevada, its economy predicated on growth. The snowbirds came and construction boomed and land stretched endless and cheap. Then it stopped.

This year, Arizona ranks 42nd in job growth. It has lost 287,000 jobs since the recession began, and the fall has been calamitous.

Renee Wheaton, 38, sits in an old golf cart on the corner of Tangerine and Barley Roads in her subdivision in the desert, an hour south of Phoenix. Her next-door neighbor, an engineer, just lost his job. The man across the street is unemployed.

Her family is not doing so well either. Her husband’s hours have been cut by 15 percent, leaving her family of five behind on water and credit card bills — more or less on everything except the house and car payment. She teaches art, but that’s not much in demand.

“I say to myself ‘This can’t be happening to us: We saved, we worked hard and we’re under tremendous stress,’ ” Ms. Wheaton says. “My husband is a very hard-working man but for the first time, he’s having real trouble.”

Arizona’s poverty rate has jumped to 19.6 percent, the second-highest in the nation after Mississippi. The Association of Arizona Food Banks says demand has nearly doubled in the last 18 months.

Elliott D. Pollack, one of Arizona’s foremost economic forecasters, said: “You had an implosion of every sector needed to survive. That’s not going to get better fast.”

To wander exurban Pinal County, which is where Florence is located, is to find that the unemployment rate tells just half the story. Everywhere, subdivisions sit in the desert, some half-built and some dreamy wisps, like the emerald green putting green sitting amid acres of scrub and cacti. Signs offer discounts, distress sales and rent with the first and second month free.

Discounts do not help if your income is cut in half. Construction workers speak of stringing together 20-hour weeks with odd jobs, and a 45-year-old woman who was a real estate agent talks of her job making minimum wage bathing elderly patients. Many live close to the poverty line, without the conveniences they once took for granted. Pinal’s unemployment rate, like that of Arizona, stands at 9.7 percent, but state officials say that the real rate rises closer to 20 percent when part-timers and those who have stopped looking for work are added in.

At an elementary school near Ms. Wheaton’s home, an expansion of the school’s water supply was under way until thieves sneaked in at night and tore the copper pipes out of the ground to sell for scrap.

Five miles southwest, in Coolidge, a desert town within view of the distant Superstition Mountains, demand has tripled at Tom Hunt’s food pantry. Some days he runs out.

Henry Alejandrez, 60, is a roofer who migrated from Texas looking for work. “It’s gotten real bad,” he says. “I’m a citizen, and you’re lucky if you get minimum wage.”

Mary Sepeda, his sister, nods. She used to drive two hours to clean newly constructed homes before they were sold. That job evaporated with the housing market. (Arizona issued 62,500 housing permits several years ago; it gave out 8,400 last year.)

“It’s getting crazy,” she says, holding up a white plastic bag of pantry food. “How does this end?”

You put that question to Mr. Pollack, the forecaster. “We won’t recover until we absorb 80,000 empty houses and office buildings and people can borrow again,” he says.

When will that be?

“I’m forecasting recovery by 2013 to 2015,” he says.

Hmm, Jeff Flake will be his seventh or eighth term in Congress by then. Till that time, he'll continue his crusade against any government spending to stimulate the economy, he'll continue voting against unemployment insurance and any "safety net" for the middle class-turned-poor, and he'll continue his fight to make sure that comfortable millionaires and billionaires pay no taxes.

And of course he'll take credit for the eventual economic recovery although he did everything he could -- deregulate and let the money men run wild on Wall Street -- to create the Great Recession.

And of course you, the asshole voters of the Sixth Congressional District, will just keep voting for him and the other right-wing Republicans.

Crabby, Constipated Congressman Jeff Flake Calls These Generous, Patriotic Alabama Schoolchildren "A Bunch of Little Jerks"

Congressman Jeff Flake's perverted values were on full display in yesterday's New York Times, in an article on how patriotic Americans like the Montgomery, Alabama, sixth-graders above, are donating to help pay down the national debt:

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — In a fifth-floor cubicle in a federal office building here is a wire-frame basket labeled “Gifts.”

Every few days, an envelope arrives, and a Treasury Department employee opens it. Inside, usually, is a check, often with a letter explaining why the sender wants to do his or her part to help reduce the federal debt of the United States.

A very small part, to be sure.

Last year, the Bureau of the Public Debt recorded $3.1 million in gifts, more than has been usual since the government began accepting such donations in 1961. At that rate, it would take millions of years to retire the $13.4 trillion the country owes its creditors, foreign and domestic.

While concerns about the economy, especially taxes and spending, have dominated the midterm election, it is hard to find officials who have made voluntary contributions to improve the nation’s balance sheet.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has not pulled out his checkbook, and fiscal conservatives, for whom the record debt is a rallying cry, have hardly mentioned the idea of giving.

Since the program began, Americans have given about $80 million. Recent donors include a class of Alabama sixth graders who raised $324.50 by selling cookies; a Maryland man who learned of the program in an evening accounting class; and Margaret E. Taylor, 98, of Findlay, Ohio, who died in 2006 and bequeathed $1.1 million to the cause.

“I get mixed reactions,” said John W. Krupansky, 56, a software developer in Midtown Manhattan who started reading about economics during the dot-com crash a decade ago, and has blogged about his tax deductible gifts, nine so far, of $25 each. “Some people are annoyed; they think the right thing to do is complain about the debt, not actually do something about it. Other people are amused that anyone would waste their time to do such a thing.”

This fiscal year, through July, the bureau has logged $2.7 million, about 9 percent less than at the same point last year.

Donors can send in a check or money order, or give online using a credit or debit card. The government does not advertise the program, and officials avoid drawing attention to it. The program tends to come up, they said, only when journalists ask about it.

Van Zeck, the commissioner of the bureau, oversees sales of Treasury securities and savings bonds; accounts for the debt to the penny; and ensures that the debt does not exceed the statutory limit, which Congress raised in February to $14.3 trillion.

Asked why the program was little known, he said soliciting donations might “seem straightforward and benign” but could rub taxpayers the wrong way.

“Whether to advocate that people do more financially to help the government than they already do — that’s not the kind of question that’s mine to answer,” he said.

The program was the idea of Representative Charles E. Bennett, a Florida Democrat who served 44 years in the House. Mr. Bennett, who died in 2003 at age 92, also wrote the law requiring that currency bear the motto “In God We Trust.”

He was known for public spiritedness. A World War II veteran, he returned his military disability and Social Security checks to the government. When he retired, he gave most of his campaign funds to charity and the Treasury.

Mr. Bennett’s law helped clarify the government’s authority to accept gifts dedicated to debt reduction.

While the White House believed that “such authority almost certainly already exists,” the legislation was “intended to encourage such gifts” and to create a way to accept them, according to a 1961 memorandum, now in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

But although the memorandum confirms that the gifts are counted toward debt reduction, the amount of giving has no real impact on government spending and borrowing.

“There does not appear to be any intention to put control of the actual level of the debt in private hands, although those who make such gifts may be under the impression that they are exercising such control,” Phillip S. Hughes, an assistant budget director, wrote in advising President Kennedy to sign the bill.

For some people, that makes the program toothless.

“It’s just good money after bad,” said Representative Jeff Flake, who with Senator John McCain, a fellow Arizona Republican, has introduced legislation that would let taxpayers designate up to 10 percent of their federal income tax for debt reduction and require Congress to come up with an equal amount in spending cuts.

Mr. Flake said he had only a “vague recollection” of the gifts program, but that he did not support it. “I don’t think taxpayers should be on the hook more,” he said. “We already pay enough.”

But contributors have argued that shared sacrifice is what is most needed to revive the economy.

Teri Gisi, a teacher at Dalraida Elementary School in Montgomery, Ala., who coordinated the bake sale that sixth graders held last year after learning about the debt in class, said the recession was on their minds.

“We’ve had some students who’ve had to move in with their grandparents, students who’ve lost their homes to foreclosure,” she said. “Some of them didn’t even have new shoes for the start of school.”

Despite hardships, the students made debt reduction their cause. “Three hundred dollars to them is a large amount,” Ms. Gisi said. Even when a math teacher explained how large the debt was — “he showed them all the zeros,” she said — “they didn’t get discouraged.”

Treasury officials said they were prohibited from identifying donors. But in Parkersburg, a few employees shared stories.

A widow turned over the estate of her late husband, who had made regular gifts to express patriotism. Naturalized citizens, thankful for the opportunities afforded immigrants, have contributed. A man sent in a trove of rare coins, which were auctioned for far more than their face value.

Many taxpayers have simply signed over and mailed in their rebate checks, including members of Amish and Mennonite communities who have explained that their religious beliefs do not permit them to accept government assistance.

The bureau tries to make donors feel appreciated. Anyone who mails a check receives a thank-you form letter from Sherlyn West, a manager here.

“Your contribution will help ensure that we do not burden future generations with a huge debt,” it says.

As a little boy, I remember hearing a dispute between my millionaire grandfather - my father's father - and my millionaire great-grandfather, my mother's mother's father. They were bragging about who paid the most taxes and which one thus gave more support to the country they both loved.

They would have honored the Alabama schoolkids and spit in Congressman Jeff Flake's smug, self-satisfed, selfish face.

Jeff Flake is so un-American and has such crabbed, constipated values, he thinks he has nothing to give to his country. But he takes plenty, living the high life of a millionaire in Washington on his Congressional salary. He's selfish, just like most of you voters in the district who grew up learning how to be morons like Jeff Flake. That's why Nate Silver's blog Five Thirty Eight lists Jeff Flake as having a 100% chance for election.

America would be better off if there were more members of Congress who were Alabama sixth-graders than comfortable, I'm-all-right-Jack jerks like Jeff Flake.

A Sane Voice on Immigration from Pinal County

For Pinal County's sensible voters and residents, it was heartening to see this letter in today's New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Judge Blocks Arizona’s Law on Immigrants” (front page, July 29):

Americans should applaud Judge Susan Bolton’s rejection of the more inflammatory parts of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law and the racist undertones it represents.

Gov. Jan Brewer’s groundless generalizations about the undocumented population foment fear of the unknown among her constituents, making for good politics but bad policy. The sudden surge in scapegoating of undocumented immigrants diverts attention from the real, well-documented problems currently facing the nation.

Rather than using money and sound bites to take aim at a demographic that boosts economic development and has no correlation with criminal activity, Ms. Brewer and other governors should be rallying support to address issues that actually pose a threat to the stability of American democracy: an eroding public education system, unprecedented global climate change and, perhaps most important, a broken political system that prizes sensationalism over sensible reasoning.

Jeffrey D. Stein
Florence, Ariz., July 29, 2010

Congratulations to Mr. Stein on his articulate, intelligent letter.