The clueless public, part MCXXI

Kevin Drum highlights this seeming contradiction from a recent opinion poll:

Greg Sargent notes a contradiction:

The poll finds that 63 percent of independents support dealing with the deficit by raising taxes on those over $250,000. It also finds that only 23 percent of independents support cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, versus 75 percent who oppose such cuts. Indys are far more in agreement with Obama than with Republicans on the two core questions at the heart of the fiscal debate right now.

Yet the poll also finds that only 28 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the deficit, versus 68 percent who disapprove.

How can this be? What explains such odd behavior?

This will probably satisfy no one, but I think the answer is pretty simple. First: the vast, vast majority of independents don’t really have any idea what Obama’s plan to handle the deficit is. They just know that (a) the deficit is high and (b) Obama is president. Beyond that, there are kids to get to school, laundry to be done, bosses to be pleased, and leaky faucets to be fixed. The details of the deficit debate are just a bit of partisan background noise that they haven’t really parsed yet.

Agreed, but I think even that goes too far.  Asking people what they think about how “Obama is handling the deficit” or cuts to Medicare, which they have absolutely no clue about, makes about as much sense as asking them to explain the Higgs Boson.   Who they are going to vote for and whether they approve of the president– I’ll take those– most anything more complicated is little more than noise.

Let my people go

So, every year one of my favorite things to teach to David’s “Elementary Faith Formation” class at our church is the story of the 10 plagues.  Gotta love the boils, locusts, flies, river of blood, etc.  One part has always bothered me, though, God “hardens Pharaoh’s heart.”  Of course, I could have investigated just what scholars and theologians think is going on here long ago, but sometimes it takes a writer going to the trouble in Slate, so I really enjoyed this article.  Here’s the crux of the issue:

Towards the beginning of the story, Pharaoh hardens his own heart (or it “is hardened” in the passive voice). Following the sixth plague, however, Pharaoh seems to lose his nerve and God steps in, hardening his heart for him. “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh,” Exodus 9:12 reads. “And he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had spoken unto Moses.”  Ultimately, Pharaoh appears to be little more than a puppet, his refusals not his own, his obstinacy nothing but a foil for God’s awesome power. The story ends after 10 plagues with Moses leading the Hebrew people out of Egypt and Pharaoh drowning in the Red Sea along with his army. If Pharaoh’s heart was in God’s control, was it fair to drown him? And what about the rest of his people? What was the point of hardening Pharaoh’s heart, anyway? Why not just let him let the Hebrew people go?

Damn good questions.  The article looks at a number of posited explanations.  I found this most interesting:

As theologians attempt to justify God’s behavior, some secular biblical scholars posit that the God of Exodus simply isn’t concerned with free will. For although the story’s moral logic, with “heart-hardening” leading inexorably to punishment, troubles modern readers, it is not inconsistent with other ancient texts.

Anyway, Happy Passover to my Jewish readers.

Flat tax lies

What does it say about the modern conservative moment that one of their leading intellectual lights is so shamefully dishonest?  Arthur Laffer, the godfather of “supply-side economics” took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to argue for a flat tax.  Basic principle– one tax rate for all taxpayers, no matter how much money you make.  We currently have a progressive rate structure, ranging from a low of 10% to a hight of 35% for the wealthiest Americans.   There’s nothing at all complicated about this.  You figure out your taxable income–which can be very complicated– and look at the tax tables to figure out what you owe.  Takes about a minute.  Whether we all pay a single rate, or there’s 100 different rates, has essentially nothing to do with how complicated our tax system is.  Arthur Laffer surely knows this, yet:

A tax reform to a simple flat-rate tax with no deductions would significantly reduce the current complexity inherent in our progressive tax system, which is full of loopholes, exemptions and special interest carve-outs. Based on the estimates from our new study, if a static, revenue-neutral flat-tax reform were to reduce the tax complexity in half, the long-term growth in our economy would increase by around one-half of 1% per year.

Yglesias quite succinctly explains what’s going on here:

All the work here is being done by the proviso “with no deductions.” It’s quite true that a flat rate tax with no deductions would significantly reduce complexity. By the same token, a progressive tax with no deductions would reduce complexity. So would a calculus-based system with an infinite number of brackets and no deductions. That’s because eliminating deductions reduces complexity and economic distortions. Moving to a straight proportional tax is just something rich people like because it means they’ll pay less. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Yet, you’ll frequently hear conservatives who think they know what they are talking about advocate for a flat tax rate structure as a meaningful way to simplify and improve our tax system.  Nope.  But again, these people are being horribly misled (i.e., lied to) by conservative “intellectuals” who presumably know better.