Oh jeez. David Brooks is giving Obama advice again.

And don't get me wrong, Obama could use some advice. But sadly, Brooks' current advice does not involve inventing a time machine and going back to February 2009 to fire Tim Geithner. Because that's really the only advice at this point that would do Obama any good.

At any rate! Brooks is once again upset that the President has, for the time being at least, decided that allowing the Republicans to defecate on his face is not a winning political strategy. In fact, he thinks that Obama learn from Bill Clinton circa 1995 and start focusing on school uniforms:

But Democrats can win elections in this climate if they defuse the Big Government/Small Government ideological debate. With his Third Way approach, Bill Clinton established that he was not a Big Government liberal. Once he crossed that threshold, he could get voters to think about his individual policies, which were actually quite popular. Clinton made a national election feel like a state election (state and local governments are still trusted and voters are less ideological when voting for those offices).

Well, OK, but Brooks seems to be forgetting that the big reason that Clinton actually won the election: The economy, stupid. Unemployment was coming down from its peak in the early '90s and people were feeling pretty good about their financial situations.

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If I had to sum up the general theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it would go something like this: "We have to stop pretending that it's okay to screw people over in the name of making money."

Now before some people start jumping up and down and yelling, "Straw man, straw man! Nobody believes it's okay to do that," let me present you with this delightful post written by ex-Goldman employee Matt Levine. Here is the actual title of the piece:

So Maybe Citi Created A Mortgage-Backed Security Filled With Loans They Knew Were Going To Fail So That They Could Sell It To A Client Who Wasn’t Aware That They Sabotaged It By Intentionally Picking The Misleadingly Rated Loans Most Likely To Be Defaulted Upon, So What?

Yeah, so what? It was just fraud! What kind of loser is opposed to fraud?

Levine's post is largely an attempt to counter arguments that it's wrong to screw people over in the name of making money. Most of his points rely on the tried and true "sophisticated investor" defense, which is basically akin to that scene in "Animal House" where the guys from Delta House have just destroyed Flounder's car and Otter tries to console him by saying, "Hey, you f***ed up! You trusted us!" In other words, it's your fault that you got the shaft since you should have known we were going to shaft you. Take a look:

There are five points to which your free-floating rage could maybe attach:

1. You were shorting a thing that you were selling to your customers! This is what drove Congress bonkers. But that’s what selling is. If you have 20 apples and sell me 15, you now have fewer apples, and I have more. If apple prices decline, I am worse off, and you are relatively protected. Banks, which are always long some risks and short some others, don’t see zero as a particularly interesting point on this continuum – if you have 20 apples and sell me 30, and apple prices decline, you make money, but that’s different only in degree, not in kind, from selling me 15 and reducing your risk to 5.

The apple analogy is sorta funky since most normal human beings buy apples to, uh, eat them instead of using them as long-term investment strategies. But let's roll with it! Let's say Matt sells me a crate of apples that he thinks is overvalued and that I think I can sell at a profit. I understand that there are certain risks in such transactions: The apples might have worms in them. There might be a surplus crop of apples that will diminish my selling power. Or people might just decide apples suck and not want to buy them. These are all risks I'm willing to assume when I buy apples from Matt.

But what I'm not willing to assume when I buy apples from Matt is that he might have personally embedded hand grenades in 80% of them that will blow up my truck when I try to drive them off the lot. Because that's pretty much what Citi's bad apples did to the people on the other side of the trade:

After the deal closed on Feb. 28, 2007, more than 80 percent of the portfolio was downgraded by credit ratings agencies in less than nine months. The security declared “an event of default” on Nov. 19, 2007, and investors soon lost hundreds of millions of dollars, the S.E.C. said, while Citigroup gained.

Among the losers was Ambac of New York, which insured financial instruments and was the largest investor in the deal, according to the S.E.C. Ambac’s role in the transaction was to assume the credit risk associated with a $500 million portion of the portfolio. When the value of the portfolio fell, Ambac had to make payments to those who had bet against the bonds, as Citigroup had.

In part because of losses tied to the financial crisis, Ambac filed for bankruptcy last year.

Neener, neener, neener, Ambac! How do you like them $500 million apples, losers?

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So professional kvetcher Erick Erickson has a new project up called "We are the 53%" that purports to speak on behalf of the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income tax. As per usual with these sorts of things, Erickson fails to note that while many Americans pay no federal income tax, they do pay payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes... well you get the idea. But for professional propagandists such as Erickson, only federal income taxes count as Real Taxes because... well, who the hell knows at this point? Payroll taxes pay for Social Security and Medicare, which are two of the biggest items in the budget, while federal income taxes pay for the military, which you'd think Erickson would be happy to fund.

But anyway! As is his wont, Erickson has posted his own comical self-pity pic bemoaning the fact that he "works" three "jobs" (presumably as an Internet gasbag at RedState, as a radio gasbag on his talk radio show and a TV gasbag on CNN) and is thus one of the Randian Supermen who is supporting all the unwashed losers protesting Wall Street.

This type of weapons-grade st00pid demands a response, of course. And as someone who does in fact pay federal income taxes I've decided to make myself the de facto spokesperson for the 53 percent Who Hate the .000000001 percent that is Erick Erickson.

Of course, I do not have the final say in all this. I encourage all of my fellow federal income tax payers to post similar messages to Erickson. We can make a collage out of 'em if you want. We could even get out own Tumblr: "We Are the 100 Percent Who Think Erick Erickson is a Tool." Revolution, baby. Revolution.

Good news, my fellow Americans: You don't have enjoy drum circles or want to free Mumia to support Occupy Wall Street! And there's a simple reason for this: Our political and economic elites have screwed all of us, not just out-of-work twenty-somethings.

How have they done this, you ask? Let us count the ways:

• First, our political and business leaders have cheered on the decimation of America's manufacturing industries through trade pacts that open up American workers to competition from countries where workers have no rights and are paid something like negative-five billion cents per year. This has not only led to the destruction of millions of middle-class jobs but has given America an absurd current-account deficit where we basically import cheap crap from China and don't make much of anything ourselves anymore. See this graph:
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Let's get this out of the way: David Brooks and his colleague Tom Friedman are two of the biggest frauds in the world of punditry. Anyone who claims to speak on behalf of "moderate" and "independent" voters has no idea what they're talking about and are only using the mantle of "moderation" to advance their own personal views. You see this every three weeks or so when Friedman claims that America is just on the cusp of forming a new radical centrist party that just-so-happens to believe everything that Tom Friedman believes.

The reality, of course, is that actual independent voters don't give a damn about what David Brooks thinks and only care about whether they have jobs and whether they feel economically secure. You can read John Judis, who breaks this down pretty well in his piece debunking the myth of independent voters from late last year:

The two other groups, the Disaffected Republicans and the Doubting Democrats, who make up 36 percent of Pew’s sample, are swing voters who are not dependable partisans. They are overwhelmingly white. They are not likely to have graduated from college and many of them have not attended college at all. Most of them make less than $75,000. It’s fair to characterize them as white working-class voters. Why are they independents and not Republicans and Democrats? According to the Pew poll, both groups believe that “parties care more about special interests than average Americans.”

And this is generally true! Actual swing voters generally support parties based on whatever special interest they happen to be angrier at any given time. As I've said in the past, a lot of blue-collar swing voters will support Republicans when they want lower taxes and tough-on-crime/family values sorts of policies while they'll support Democrats when they want to protect middle-class entitlement programs and to kick Wall Street's ass. Most importantly, they vote based on how well the economy happens to be doing. They do not, repeat, not, pick up their copies of the New York Times every day and say to themselves, "Wow, David Brooks and Tom Friedman are reading my mind! We need a third party that coincidentally conforms to every one of their ideas!"

Anyway, back to Brooks. Today he's upset because it seems, it least for the time being, that Obama has realized that taking David Brooks' advice is not actually the key to win over independent voters.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

But here's the thing: Obama really tried doing all that crap. He did! I remember slapping myself in the forehead all summer (and being too depressed to even attempt blogging) reading about it! Don't you remember that column you wrote this past July hilariously titled "The Grand Bargain Lives" where you said that Obama and Boehner were "close to a deal" that would cut Medicare and Social Security in exchange for some tax increases? Let's use the wayback machine to find it:

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Tim Noah today makes an excellent point that it's become perfectly acceptable for elected officials to claim that showering already-wealthy people with even more money is the only way to create jobs since they otherwise might feel sad and lose their will to work. He also notes that as recently as the 1980s, Republicans had to at least pretend that supply-side doctrine was about broad-based tax cuts when in reality it was targeted at increasing wealth among the top 1 percent of earners:

Back in 1981 Republicans might not have liked a proposal to tax millionaires to at least the same extent that we tax mere mortals, but they would have been reluctant to oppose it on the grounds that our economy depends entirely on rich people maximizing their incomes. You could believe that, but you couldn't say it out loud. This inhibition no longer burdens the GOP. "When you are raising these top tax rates," Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) said on Fox News Sunday, "you're raising taxes on these job creators where more than half of Americans get their jobs from in this country."

The most frustrating aspect of modern political life is the fact that the American public has internalized the (false) idea that magical self-made rich supermen don't owe anything to the society that nurtured them because they've earned every dime of their fortunes all by themselves without any help from the government. The reality, of course, is just the opposite.

Let's take a well-known Galtian Overlord such as Steve Jobs, truly one of the most inventive CEOs of our generation. Contrary to what you may have heard, Jobs did not, in fact, teach himself how to read and do math. Rather, he attended a public high school, just like the vast majority of looters American children. The young Jobs was able to attend school in the first place because of government regulations that barred child labor and mandated schooling. Added to this, the young Jobs benefited from having publicly-funded police and fire departments that ensured that he survived until he was rich enough to afford his own private security detail. If Rick Perry had been governor of California and had dramatically slashed funds to first responders, then our budding young Galtian Overlord might have died in a wildfire instead of inventing the iPhone.

And of course there are other ways Jobs has benefited from the government, from a legal system that protects his company's intellectual property to a military that prevents the Queen of England from coming into his home and bossing him around to a social safety net that insured that even if he had never been a success, he wouldn't have died destitute in the street and unable to pay his medical bills in his old age. And that's not to mention that Steve and his fellow Galtians also used to benefit from now-repealed banking regulations such as Glass-Steagall that ensured financial stability and dramatically lessened the chances that a financial crisis would cripple the economy.

So yes, I would say that Steve Jobs and his fellow Galtians owe a lot to an American government that offers some of the lowest personal income tax rates in the industrialized world and that produces educated workers to help them build their companies. Mark Cuban, of all people, seemed to understand this in a blog post today where he implored his fellow Galtians to recognize that there is such a thing as society and that having a lot of money doesn't separate you from it:

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There are times when the leading intellectual lights of the Right get so cocky of their own victory that they unleash an ideological stinkbomb so rank that it will give pause to even the most enthusiastic Tea-Aid drinker. George Will tossed one of these out there yesterday with his column celebrating the infamous Lochner Supreme Court ruling that barred states from creating 60-hour work weeks:

Liberal certitudes continue to dissolve, the most recent solvent being a robust new defense of a 1905 Supreme Court decision that liberals have long reviled — and misrepresented. To understand why the court correctly decided Lochner v. New York and why this is relevant to current arguments, read David E. Bernstein’s “Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform.”

Since the New Deal, courts have stopped defending liberty of contract and other unenumerated rights grounded in America’s natural rights tradition. These are referred to by the Ninth Amendment, which explicitly protects unenumerated rights “retained by the people,” and by the “privileges or immunities” and “liberty” cited in the 14th Amendment. Progressivism, Bernstein argues, is hostile to America’s premise that individuals possess rights that preexist government and are not fully enumerated in the Constitution. This doctrine stands athwart liberalism’s aspiration to erase constitutional limits on government’s regulatory powers.

An 1895 New York law limited bakery employees to working 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. Ostensibly, this was health and safety legislation; actually, it was rent-seeking by large, unionized bakeries and the unions. Corporate bakeries supported the legislation, which burdened their small, family-owned competitors. The bakers union hoped to suppress the small, non-unionized bakeries that depended on flexible work schedules.

I must admit that I find it surprising that an entire ideological movement exists that pines for a past time that none of its adherents were alive to see, but that's pretty much how modern conservatives feel about late-19th Century America. They're sort of like people who go to Renaissance Fairs, except they celebrate Social Dawrwinism instead of swords and sorcery. I wonder if Will dresses up as Andrew Carnegie or J.P. Morgan when he attends his little Gilded Age Reenactment Society gatherings?

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One of the conservative baloney machine's greatest triumphs has been to convince a sizable portion of the country that states such as Massachusetts (which I proudly call home) are decrepit urine-soaked wastelands whose streets are overflowing with junkies and hookers living inside million-dollar public housing units that are paid for on the backs of the few hard-working Real Americans who haven't fled for the greener pastures of Rick Perry's free market paradise down South. You've probably heard quite a bit about the "Texas Miracle" in the press a lot and I'm sure you'll be surprised to know that it's a longhorn-sized pile of poop.

First, let's just consider that the unemployment rate in the free-market paradise of Texas stands at a freedom-y 8.4 percent. For contrast, the unemployment rate in my socialist hellhole of Massachusetts stands at communist-like 7.6 percent. Poverty rates are also intriguing, since 10 percent of Massachusetts residents live below the poverty line while 15.8 percent of Texas residents live below the poverty line.

But that's not all! My evil job-killing state has the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country, at 5.3 percent. Texas, on the other hand, has left a whopping 27.1 percent of its population uninsured. I'm not sure what's quite so miraculous about not having access to health care but then again I'm just a commie pinko. What the hell do I know?

And there are other things too. Like, education. In Massachusetts, 85 percent of eighth graders scored at or above basic in the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam, while 52 percent scored at or above proficient. Texas' eighth graders scored 78 percent at basic, 36 percent at proficient. You see a similar trend for reading: 83 percent of Massachusetts eighth graders scored at basic in reading, with 43 percent at proficient. In Texas, 73 percent of eighth graders scored at basic in reading while 27 percent scored at proficient.

"OK, OK," you say. "So Massachusetts has a better economy, education and health care than Texas. But all those big government programs are surely sapping Massholes of their precious moral values and leading to crime running rampant in the streets and a breakdown in family values! DON'T YOU READ DAVID BROOKS!?!!?!"

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Hoo lordy, Brian Beutler has done us all a grand service today by actually asking Republicans what sacrifices, if any, the rich should make to close the deficit. The answers, as you'd imagine, are quite comical. Here are some of the choicer morsels:

"Millionaires can contribute to deficit reduction by spending part of their millions," said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). "I agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial this morning: We should cut the corporate income tax from 35 to 25, and close loopholes that are in, and make sure that everything is revenue neutral, and that is a great approach."

I do love how McCain makes sure to cover his ass by saying only that they should spend only "part" of their millions. Wouldn't want to get too pushy, now, lest our sensitive rich folks decide to go Galt, and then we'd be sorry, oh yes yes we would! I also love how simply spending part of their millions counts as an actual "sacrifice" that our Galtian overlords should make. Ergo, going to a high-end strip club and making it rain now counts as a sacrifice, according to John McCain. Or when they blow thousands of dollars on a gold-plated trashcan, they're making a vital contribution to deficit reduction.

Lindsey Graham is even funnier:

"Create jobs, hire more people that pay more taxes, grow the economy, stay in America, don't leave, hire people -- that's how millionaires can help, is create more workers, and if you raise taxes you're gonna make it harder to keep the job you got," explained Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

If a big-name CEO stepped into Graham's office and said to him, drill sergeant-like, "Graham! Hump my leg on the double, maggot!" you know he'd do it without hesitation.

Graham's jobs plan reminds me a lot of Ohio's attempts at begging LeBron James to shun the beautiful beaches of Miami in favor of the home town that had loved him since draft day:

And, well, we all know how well that worked out.

The point, my friends, is sometimes it seems as though much of our country has internalized "Atlas Shrugged" to such an extent that we've come to believe that it's our fault that our corporate overlords aren't hiring more people. Clearly, the thinking goes, we have not done enough to appease them.

"Another tax cut, m'lord? Oh yes, right away! Those pesky and out-dated child labor laws? You bet, they'll be scrapped tomorrow! You want to... sleep with my spouse? Uh... and you swear you'll consider hiring me to work at the local Taco Bell? Sounds like a fair trade to me!"

At some point I'd like to believe that basic human dignity will kick in and we won't feel the need to kiss rich peoples' asses anymore. But I've been waiting for this to happen for a long, long time now.

I try not to post when I'm upset about something because I prefer to write semi-reasoned analysis instead of crazed emotional heaving. But there comes a time when crazed emotional heaving is a perfectly rational thing to do. We are now in one of those times.

Why am I so freaked out, you ask? Because I think the GOP is really, really, really going to let the United States default. They've figured out that holding the debt ceiling hostage is the perfect way to achieve all of their ideological goals. This is their big shot to drown government in a bathtub and they are not going to miss it. And the only reason they can get away with this is because our supposed Democratic "leadership" does not have the guts to come right out and say that the Republicans are threatening to destroy the economy unless they get everything they want. You know that things have gotten bad when David Frum actually wishes Obama would be a more forceful in standing up to the GOP:

“Call me naive,” President Obama invited viewers of today’s press conference.

Mr. President, invitation accepted: Unless that performance today conceals some unimagined occult plan, yes, you are naive.

Congressional Republicans have refused to raise the debt limit unless the Obama Administration agrees to large and immediate spending cuts. They have their finger on the nuclear button and are threatening to detonate unless they get their way. It seems crazy that they would actually do it, but congressional Republicans have done a pretty good job of convincing the Administration (if not yet the financial markets) that they just might do it.

Obama has responded by entering into negotiations with the congressional Republicans. These negotiations have not gone well, largely because Republicans are united upon an all-spending-cuts, no-tax-increases approach to deficit reduction.