• Freddie Gray and the Real Lesson of Urban Policing


    The Washington Post features a simple headline today that encompasses decades of personal tragedy and public policy disaster:

    Freddie Gray’s life a study in the sad effects of lead paint on poor blacks

    When Freddie Gray was 22 months old, he had a tested blood lead level of 37 micrograms per deciliter. This is an absolutely astronomical amount. Freddie never even had the slightest chance of growing up normally. Lead poisoning doomed him from the start to a life of heightened aggression, poor learning abilities, and weak impulse control. His life was a tragedy set in motion the day he was born.

    But even from the midst of my chemo haze, I want to make a short, sharp point about this that goes far beyond just Gray’s personal tragedy. It’s this: thanks both to lead paint and leaded gasoline, there were lots of teenagers like Freddie Gray in the 90s. This created a huge and genuinely scary wave of violent crime, and in response we turned many of our urban police forces into occupying armies. This may have been wrong even then, but it was hardly inexplicable. Decades of lead poisoning really had created huge numbers of scarily violent teenagers, and a massive, militaristic response may have seemed like the only way to even begin to hold the line.

    But here’s the thing: that era is over. Individual tragedies like Freddie Gray are still too common, but overall lead poisoning has plummeted. As a result, our cities are safer because our kids are fundamentally less dangerous. To a large extent, they are now normal teenagers, not lead-poisoned predators.

    This is important, because even if you’re a hard-ass law-and-order type, you should understand that we no longer need urban police departments to act like occupying armies. The 90s are gone, and today’s teenagers are just ordinary teenagers. They still act stupid and some of them are still violent, but they can be dealt with using ordinary urban policing tactics. We don’t need to constantly harass and bully them; we don’t need to haul them in for every petty infraction; we don’t need to beat them senseless; and we don’t need to incarcerate them by the millions.

    We just don’t. We live in a different, safer era, and it’s time for all of us—voters, politicians, cops, parents—to get this through our collective heads. Generation Lead is over, thank God. Let’s stop pretending it’s always and forever 1993. Reform is way overdue.

  • Here’s What Economists Cheering For The Pacific Trade Deal Are Missing

    <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-153836018/stock-photo-large-container-ship-arriving-in-port.html?src=pd-same_artist-153836042-1">hxdbzxy</a>/Shutterstock


    While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Matt Yglesias, currently the executive editor of Vox.

    There is almost nothing in the whole wide world that economists like better than recounting David Ricardo’s basic case for free trade. And this is sort of understandable. It’s a really cool idea!

    If you don’t believe me, check out Paul Krugman’s 1995 essay on the subject. But for the dime store version, what Ricardo showed—and what economists have been enthusing about ever since—is that Country A benefits (in the sense of what’s nowadays known as Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency) from opening up its domestic producers to competition from imports from Country B, even if Country B is better at producing everything.

    It’s a cool result.

    But oftentimes enthusiasm for this result seems to lead Ph.D. economists into all kinds of wild irrelevancies like former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Greg Mankiw’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Mankiw focuses on Adam Smith rather than Ricardo, but in both cases the point is the same—18th-century economists showed that the efficiency of an economy can be improved by opening itself up to imports from abroad.

    This is very true, but it also tells us very little about the merits of a 21st-century trade agreement.

    One huge flaw is that while classical economics has a fair amount to tell us about the wealth of nations, it doesn’t say much at all about the wealth of the individual people inside the nations. A trade deal that enriches Americans who own lots of shares of stock and Central Americans who own lots of plantation land could easily pass the (low) economic bar of efficiency while still making most people worse off.

    But an even bigger problem is that many of the biggest barriers to international trade don’t come conveniently labeled as barriers to international trade.

    Take the Jones Act here in the United States, which says that if you want to ship goods on a boat from one American port to another American port, you need to do so on boats constructed in the United States and owned by US citizens, staffed by US citizens and legal permanent residents, and crewed by US citizens and US permanent residents. Common sense says that this is protectionism for American ship owners, shipyards, and ship crews.

    But the actual text of the Jones Act says otherwise. What the 1920 law says is that a merchant marine “sufficient to carry the waterborne domestic commerce…of the United States” is “necessary for the national defense.” In other words, we dare not let foreign-owned ships outcompete domestic ones as a matter of national security.

    Conversely, if you look at Japan’s legendarily protected domestic automobile market you will find essentially nothing in the way of formal barriers to foreign trade. Tariffs on imported automobiles, for example, are currently at zero. The way it works, according to the American Auto Council, is that “Japan has used automotive technical regulations as a means to protect local markets by creating excessively difficult and costly regulatory and certification requirements, with little or no safety or emissions benefits.”

    That these regulations are mere protectionism is overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States. But of course, proponents of the Japanese status quo no more see it that way than do proponents of the Jones Act here at home. These are necessary regulations! This is the dilemma of the modern trade agreement.

    Smith and Ricardo never imagined a world in which governments routinely regulated large classes of products to promote consumer safety, workers’ rights, environmental goals, or national security goals. But lurking behind every regulation is potentially a barrier to trade. What the US Food and Drug Administration sees as public health regulation of dangerous cheese bacteria looks like protectionism to French cheesemakers, and what European Union officials see as public health regulation of hormone-treated beef looks like protectionism to American ranchers.

  • Tales From City of Hope #9: Day +6 Update

    My white blood count has plummeted to 0.2, my immune system is all but destroyed, and I feel terrible.

    In other words, everything is going perfectly. My white blood count will probably drop a bit more tomorrow and then plateau for a day or two. Around Saturday or so new cells will start engrafting and my counts will start to rise fairly quickly. That’s the road to recovery, and so far there have been no hiccups at all.

    Until then, endless fatigue is my fate. But it will improve soon enough, I hope. In the meantime, the video clip on the right pretty much captures my current mood.

  • How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

    Ted S. Warren/AP


    “We focus on the proceedings. We focus on the death penalty. We focus on the perpetrator. But we don’t focus on the people affected.”

    That was how Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was among the 12 people murdered in a movie theater in July 2012, described the American public’s perception as the trial of mass shooter James Holmes got underway on Monday in Aurora, Colorado. It’s a fair point given the inordinate attention that such killers crave, and tend to get, from the media. Yet as Phillips also noted, “that ripple effect of how many people are affected by one act by one person, one animal, is incredibly large.”

    She’s right—not just in terms of the trauma and suffering borne by the victims (an additional 58 wounded and 12 others injured in the chaos), their families, and their communities, but also in terms of the literal cost. The price tag for what was one of the worst mass murders in US history is in fact stunningly high: well over $100 million, according to our groundbreaking investigation into the costs of gun violence published earlier this month.

    For a quick explanation of the data behind the large sums our country pays for this problem, watch the following 90-second video, with more details on the Aurora tally continuing just below:

    The economic impact of Aurora: For starters, long before the attorneys gave opening statements this week, legal proceedings for Holmes had already topped $5.5 million back in February, including expenses related to the unusually large pool of 9,000 prospective jurors called for the case. Add to that the total costs for each of the 12 victims killed: At an average of about $6 million each, that’s another $72 million. For the 58 who survived gunshots and were hospitalized, with an average total cost for each working out to about $583,000, add another $33 million. (Costs for some of the gunshot survivors may have varied widely, of course.) And these figures don’t even begin to account for what the city of Aurora, the state of Colorado, and the federal government have since spent on security and prevention related to the attack.

    Indeed, a mass shooting like the one in Aurora doesn’t just have an outsize psychological impact but also a financial one. And these days, fiscal conservatives may want to note, we’re paying that price more often.

  • How Many Like Baltimore’s Freddie Gray Have Been Killed in Police Custody?

    A protester at a Baltimore PD building on April 21Patrick Semansky/AP


    For many in Baltimore, Freddie Gray’s death was shocking but came as little surprise. It was only a matter of time, some said, before Baltimore erupted the way Ferguson, Missouri, did last summer. While no one knows exactly how many Americans die in police custody each year, limited data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics starts to give some sense of scale: At least 4,813 people died while in custody of local and state law enforcement between 2003 and 2009, according to the latest available report, published in 2011. Sixty-one percent of those deaths were classified as homicides.

    As I reported last August in Mother Jones, the BJS collects data on what it calls “arrest-related deaths” that occur either during or shortly after police officers “engage in an arrest or restraint process.” The agency reports that 41.7 percent of those who were deemed to have been killed by police while in custody were white, 31.7 percent were black, and 20.3 percent were Hispanic. (Others died from intoxication, suicide, or by accidental, natural, or unknown causes.)

    But you could be forgiven for suspecting that’s not the full picture: There were an estimated 98 million arrests in the United States by local, state, and federal law enforcement from 2003 to 2009, according to FBI statistics. Fifteen states, plus the District of Columbia, did not consistently report deaths in police custody during that period—and Maryland, along with Georgia and Montana, didn’t submit any records at all.

    In other words, as the turmoil in Baltimore continues, what the data seems to tell us at this point is just how much we still don’t know.

  • Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses


    Matt Yglesias says that becoming a new father has changed his mind about genetic engineering:

    The main thing is that I now have an instinctive, gut-level understanding of what it is I want for my kid as a parent. And the main thing is that my parental aspirations are very asymmetrical. You want the kid to grow up to be basically happy and healthy. Anything beyond that in terms of genuinely noteworthy achievements would be nice, but honestly not that much nicer than “basically happy and healthy.” By contrast, falling significantly short of “basically happy and healthy” would be really bad.

    ….Long story short, while I used to think of genetic engineering as primarily about making future generations “better” on average, with my dad-glasses on I think it would be largely about making them more mediocre. You would curtail the left end of the distribution curve, but also the right end. Fewer tortured geniuses and alienated, awkward loners who push the boundaries of society and technology.

    The image of the tortured genius is rife in Western literature, but in real life it’s basically a myth. Are there tortured geniuses among us? Sure. Vincent van Gogh was famously tortured. Kurt Cobain. Georg Cantor.

    But the boring truth is that geniuses, on average, are about the same as everyone else aside from being geniuses. Einstein was perfectly well adjusted. Ditto for Shakespeare, Edison, Picasso, Maxwell, Newton, etc. They all had their own quirks and foibles, and were maybe a bit more driven than average, but fell well within the usual norms for healthy and happy. Historical studies of geniuses have all confirmed this. Being unhappy just doesn’t have any effect on being a genius.

    So no worries on that score, though there are plenty of other things to worry about in the brave new world of human genetic engineering—including the fact that not all parents share Matt’s value system in the first place.

    Besides, my guess is that trying to engineer geniuses is a dead end anyway. Artificial intelligence will get there first. By the the time we’ve finally figured out how to reliably produce the next baby Einstein, the machines will just be tittering at us behind our backs.

  • One Last Fundraising Pitch for Our Spring Drive


    Editor’s note: Kevin asked us to repost his message below if we thought it would help in the final days of our Spring Fundraising Drive—and we sure do, the response has been great and we want to be sure everyone sees it. Read his touching letter and pitch in a couple of bucks—or more—via credit card or PayPal if you can swing it.

    Our annual Spring Fundraising Drive is wrapping up at the end of the month, but as you all know, I’ll be recuperating from my final round of chemotherapy in lovely Duarte, California, right about then. But I didn’t want to be left out, so I asked if I could post my note a little earlier than I usually do.

    I figure if there’s ever been a time when I’m allowed to get slightly more maudlin than usual, this is it. (But just slightly. I have a reputation, after all.) I’ve been writing for Mother Jones since 2008, and it’s been such a great job that it’s almost getting hard to remember ever working for anyone else. They’ve provided me with more freedom to write whatever I want than anyone could hope for. That’s been great for me, and I hope for all of you too.

    Writing for the print magazine has been a huge gift as well, and it’s something I dearly hope to return to when all the chemotherapy is over and my strength is back to normal. It’s been a privilege to share pages with such an amazingly talented bunch of journalists.

    Truthfully, I’ve been blessed to have such a great editorial team over the past few months, as well as such a great readership. You guys are truly the best to go through something like this with.

    So here’s the ask: Mother Jones has done a lot for me and a lot for you over the past few years, and when I get back they’re going to keep right on doing it. That makes this fundraising request a little more personal than usual, but if there’s ever been a time for you to show your appreciation, this is it. If you can afford five dollars, that’s plenty. If you can afford a thousand, then pony up, because you’re pretty lucky, aren’t you? Either way, when I get back I sure hope to see that my readers have really stepped up to the plate.

    Readers like you are a big part of what makes Mother Jones such a unique place. Your support allows me to write about what’s truly important, rather than obsessing over whatever generates the most clicks and advertising revenue. And it’s not just me. It gives all of us the independence to write about issues that other places won’t touch. It means that we ultimately answer to you, our readers, and not a corporate parent company or shareholders (and you’ve never been shy about letting us know what you think!).

    Thanks for helping make Mother Jones what it is, and for making the last seven years some of the best of my life. And thanks in advance for whatever you can give to keep both me and Mother Jones going strong. Here are the links for donations:

    Donate by credit card here.

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  • Politics Is Theater—and Sometimes We Need to Cover it That Way

    Reporter hands: <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-235103881/stock-photo-live-report-concept-live-news-hands-of-journalists-with-microphones-and-tape-recorders.html?src=pd-same_artist-232678501-W2bn7pRiKSmxLpscDq6jOg-7">microvector</a>/Shutterstock; Curtain: <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&searchterm=election%20theater&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=101417185">Lightspring</a>/Shutterstock


    While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from BloombergView‘s Jonathan Bernstein, who began his career as political scientist. Since launching his blog in 2009, he’s gone on to write about politics and government for the American Prospect, the Washington Post, and many other outlets.

    I write today in defense of the theater criticism style of campaign reporting, which took solid hits from Derek Thompson and (in somewhat different wording) Paul Waldman this week. Thompson puts it this way:

    A great deal of political writing these days is indistinguishable from theater criticism: Its chief concerns are storyline, costumes, and the quality of public performances….

    To state the obvious: This is a really dumb way to try to cover elections. Theater-critic journalism is certainly not as substantive as policy analysis. It’s also neither as meaty as terrific behind-the-scenes reporting, nor as harmless as anodyne horse-race coverage. It is, rather, personal opinion about a candidate’s authenticity masquerading as nonpartisan analysis of their ability to connect with voters, often detached from any analysis of whether the candidate is really connecting with voters. It is a popular critic, in the orchestra section, writing in the first-person plural.

    Sure, there’s some terrible theater criticism stuff out there, and if we retired debates about “authenticity” today, it would be a great victory for common sense.

    But the problem isn’t reporting on candidate rhetoric as if it was theater. In many ways, it is theater! General election debates or official declarations of candidacy, for example, mostly do not affect election outcomes or reveal who candidates truly are. But that doesn’t mean they should be ignored.

    Let’s start over. The real problems come when reporters go beyond what they know, and sometimes beyond what they can know.

    That’s the case when they use candidate performances to try to figure out who the “real” person underneath the candidate persona might be. In politics, it’s the persona that counts. Politicians, when elected, try to keep their promises. But that includes more than policy promises. It also means that they try to “be” the person they promised to be on the campaign trail—and they’re often punished if they try to deviate from that (so, for example, Barack Obama is punished when he acts as a partisan cheerleader in part because he promised to be a more unifying figure).

    It’s also the case in “game changer” journalism, when reporters insist that whatever they are covering is important because it will have a direct effect on election outcomes. The brutal truth is that most campaign events don’t have much to do with winning and losing. But they can still be important because they might affect how the winner will govern. Or they may not be “important” at all, but are still interesting in the way any human interest story can be interesting. If politics is important—and it is—then there’s nothing wrong with wanting to know what it’s like to be at events, or in the back rooms.

    Good (regular) theater criticism doesn’t usually focus on what an actor’s choices mean about who he really is; nor does it primarily concern itself with whether a particular bit of staging will turn a show into a hit or a flop. If theater-critic political journalism can avoid those traps, I’m all for it.

  • Good Luck Going After the Pope, Climate Deniers

    Pope Francis in Tacloban, PhilippinesWally Santana/AP


    If you write about climate change for a living, you get used to being on the receiving end of tweets, emails, and comments explaining why manmade global warming is a colossal hoax. But it turns out that if you’re the pope, the trolls take things a bit further. From our partners at the Guardian:

    A US activist group that has received funding from energy companies and the foundation controlled by conservative activist Charles Koch is trying to persuade the Vatican that “there is no global warming crisis” ahead of an environmental statement by Pope Francis this summer that is expected to call for strong action to combat climate change.

    The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative thinktank that seeks to discredit established science on climate change, said it was sending a team of climate scientists to Rome “to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science.”

    “Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president, said in a statement.

    Jim Lakely, a Heartland spokesman, said the thinktank was “working on” securing a meeting with the Vatican. “I think Catholics should examine the evidence for themselves, and understand that the Holy Father is an authority on spiritual matters, not scientific ones,” he said.

    The pope and his aides have publicly embraced the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet, and tomorrow the Vatican is putting on a summit entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.” Heartland beat them to the punch, setting up a “prebuttal” event on Monday in Rome. Heartland seems especially upset that the Vatican summit will feature two notable figures—UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and economist Jeffrey Sachs—who, it says, “refuse to acknowledge the abundant data showing human greenhouse gas emissions are not causing a climate crisis.”

    Heartland is also encouraging its followers to send letters and emails to the pope and to spread the gospel of global warming denial to their local church officials. “Talk to your minister, priest, or spiritual leader,” advises Heartland’s website. “Tell him or her you’ve studied the global warming issue and believe Pope Francis is being misled about the science and economics of the issue.”

    As my colleague James West reported, a sizeable majority of US Catholics actually share the pope’s belief the climate change is a serious threat. Heartland seems to be trying to shift their views on the issue by portraying climate activists as hostile to Catholic values. In an American Spectator op-ed today (headline: “Francis Is Out of His Element”), Heartland research fellow H. Sterling Burnett writes:

    Those pushing for bans on fossil fuel use think too many humans are the environmental problem. Many of them worship the creation, not the Creator. The same people pushing the pope to join the fight against climate change support forcible population control programs such as those operating in China. That is not a Christian position.

    On its website, Heartland goes even further, writing that “climate alarmists have misrepresented the facts, concocted false data, and tried to shut down a reasonable, scientific debate on the issue of climate change. This conduct violates the Eighth Commandment: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'”

  • Republicans Painting Hillary Clinton As a Tool of the Superrich Forget One Little Thing

    duncan1890/iStockphoto; Maya Alleruzzo/AP; Natykach Nataliia/shutterstock


    While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, whose writing on politics has been published by the New Republic, the American Prospect, and the Los Angeles Times.

    Barack Obama was raised by a financially struggling single mother, and Mitt Romney was the son of an auto executive turned governor who grew up to be a gazillionaire in the financial industry. This made biographical populism an unfruitful subject for the right in 2012. But circumstances have changed a bit. Hillary Clinton and her husband have grown extremely rich in their post–White House years, and the Republican Party is cultivating at least a couple of potential candidates, like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio, who boast of their modest backgrounds. Republicans are licking their lips for a year and a half of Hillary-as–Leona Helmsley, flying around in private jets, luxuriating in wealth, and disingenuously pretending to care about the struggles of average Americans. There is, however, one wee problem in the Republican populist plot. That is the policy agenda.

    Conservative writer Jay Cost is already looking ahead to this problem, which he presents as a kind of dodge. After flaying Clinton for her wealth, he fumes, “Really, the only claim Clinton can make to understanding the travails of everyday Americans is her party’s platform,” writes Cost, “Endorsement of that document is a kind of sacrament that bestows the power of empathy upon every Democratic pol. This is perhaps the most absurd premise of the Clinton candidacy.”

    This is a strange and revealing passage. He argues that Clinton is a tool of the rich, and the only possible fact undermining this otherwise obvious reality is her party’s platform, i.e., the stuff she would do as president. This is an “absurd” premise upon which to cast her as a populist if you think of elections as a soap opera drama between two individuals. It makes a lot of sense if you think about the presidency as a vehicle to change public policy.

    And the cardinal fact of the modern political age is that the two parties are primarily fighting over redistribution. Democrats want the government to tax the rich at higher levels and spend more to support the poor, and Republicans want the opposite. The major political fights of the last three decades, from the Reagan tax cuts to the Clinton tax hikes to Clintoncare to the Bush tax cuts to Obamacare to the Ryan budget, have all been centered on the redistributionary principle.

    And yet some conservatives don’t want the Republican Party to invest its political capital so heavily in this fight. Maybe they don’t care that much about overtaxing the rich. Or maybe they believe, accurately, that the political price of having to defend tax cuts for the 1 percent crowds out policies that appeal to the 99 percent, who have a lot more votes.

    One of the distinctive qualities of this group of populist conservatives is that they seem unable to distinguish between the hope that the Republican Party will adopt their policy vision and the belief that it already has. They have a habit of invoking the GOP they wish existed as though it were the real thing.

    Cost falls into this category. In the same piece, he describes a different kind of political debate, one which pits the Republicans against the economic elite, rather than on its side. He describes this alternative debate is if it were the real one:

    The GOP ostensibly stands for smaller, more efficient government—but it allows the Democrats to define just what sort of government we are talking about. The debate always seems to be about Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment insurance, Pell grants and Head Start. In other words, by the very terms of the conversation, big government works for the benefit of the downtrodden. Even as they defend big government, the Democrats identify themselves as the champions of the downtrodden and the GOP as their hardhearted assailants.

    But what about corporate tax payouts? Or farm subsidies for the largest agribusinesses?

    The debate “seems” to be about Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Pell grants, and Head Start because the Republican platform is to slash those programs deeply. Those are not things Democrats have defined as the “sort of government we are talking about.” Those are programs Republicans have decided to make the focal point of their economic program (along with deep cuts in taxes for the highest earning Americans, a point Cost is too embarrassed to raise in this context).

    What about corporate tax payouts and subsidies for the largest agribusinesses? Well, that would be a great debate for our hypothetical populist Republicans. The actual Republicans defend corporate tax loopholes. They will sometimes invoke them in general, as an argument for a generalized reform that lowers tax rates, but when faced with proposals to eliminate even completely egregious corporate loopholes (like the faster depreciations rate for private jets), they refuse. When Dave Camp went off the reservation before his retirement and designed a tax reform that did not give rich people a huge tax cut, his party abandoned him en masse and never mentioned his plan again.

    Farm subsidies are an issue that somewhat divides the parties, since rural members tend to support them regardless of their affiliation. Neither party will forthrightly eliminate them altogether, which is the position I’d favor. But the actual political divide in Washington confounds Cost’s idealized one. It is the Obama administration that wants to reduce agriculture subsidies, and House Republicans fighting to keep them at a higher level.

    So, “what about corporate tax payouts? Or farm subsidies for the largest agribusinesses”? Well, those issues underscore the same conclusion as the issues Cost doesn’t want to talk about. It would be wonderful if Republicans stopped being a party whose most despised spending programs benefit the poor and whose most acceptable spending programs benefit the middle class or even the affluent. It would likewise be nice if the Republican Party wasn’t most determined to reduce (or, if possible, eliminate) the taxes paid most heavily by the rich, while also being most willing to raise the taxes heavily paid by the poor. The world would be a much better place. It is not, however, the world we inhabit.