The Tea Party

The original Tea Party was a response to a very specific, particularly galling act by the English government.  The present Tea Party is fairly close to the exact opposite.

England's American colonies were becoming more and more populated, with more and more agriculture, business, shipping, manufacturing, etc.  They had noticable participation in the 7 years war (known by Americans as the French and Indian War).  They had proven capable of significant independent action and self government, yet the English seemed to only see them as a source of resources and money.  They had bans on American manufacture of tools and many finished products.  It was galling to have to send raw materials across the ocean only to buy some of them back as finished products, which they could have made themselves perfectly well, for a lot more money.  But the English wanted their monopoly.  Tea was specifically protected: Americans could only buy it from certain distributors.  The shipowners and sailors that lived in Boston and the communities around it were the ones who were doing all this shipping, but they had to go through a middleman who took a very large share for doing nothing but being friendly with the King or some MP, while they were doing all the work.  The last straw was when a tax was imposed on this tea.  While they did have a few friends there, such as William Pitt, the Americans had no explicit representation in Parliament at all.  Taxation without representation! Yet even then, it wasn't so much the taxes as being cut out of most of the profits of all this trade.  They wanted a freer market, with no monopolies, or at least a fair chance of being one of those monopolies.

So one night a few of them dressed up as Native Americans and threw a bunch of it into Boston Harbor.

The new Tea Party also likes dress up, but their goals are almost the opposite.  They have, and have had through the entire history of the country, extensive representation.  Their ideological ancestors were the ones who didn't want to give the vote to slaves, but did want to count them for purposes of representation in congress.  They were the ones who murdered the inventor of our countries economic system in a duel while serving as vice president.  They were the anti-immigrant "Know Nothings", they blocked acceptance of the 14 points and the League of Nations, they made the Great Depression much worse by blocking Roosevelts stimulative and social and economic programs, and they cheered as Ronald Reagan and George W Bush destroyed them and brought our country back to depression.    It was only when they were rightly voted out of office for their misdeeds that they started their dressup.  Even then, they still had a strong enough hand in government to cause all sorts of mischief.  There is no possible interpretation by which they can be viewed as being without representation.  What they want is for people to do what they want, without going through the representative process.

The more interesting opposite is that they are mostly funded by would-be monopolists: The Kochs and their Cato Institute, the Murdoch press, Pete Peterson, The Heritage Foundation.  Without Fox News egging them on, there would be no Tea Party.  They like to think of themselves as grass roots, but they really aren't.  They are puppets--astro-turf.    Their funders are very  wealthy businessmen, who are tired of this whole competitive, free market thing and would like to have a monopoly.    Where the original Tea Party was largely a strike against monopoly, these guys are, whether they know it or not, in favor of it.

And yes, they are against taxes.   The American middle class pays among the lowest overall tax rates of the middle class of any advanced country, and tax rates are lower now, during this recession, than they were in any of the economic booms of the past 80 years.  They get a lot for their taxes, and they are extremely unwilling to give any of it up, yet they still want their taxes to be lower.  Although they are very willing for people that they don't like to give things up, things like eating and being able to go to school.    The original tea party wasn't so much against taxes, they were against not having any representation or even a chance at representation, while still having to pay them.

Macroeconomics versus Business

One of the standard lines about the national debt is that it's saddling our children and grandchildren with backbreaking debt, and that cutting programs that feed today's children and grandparents will somehow alleviate that.  Uh, no.  Or only if you figure by cutting these people off, they will die and stop being a burden.  Debt is only a burden if interest rates on it are high, or if its existence or level will prevent you from doing something you want to do, like borrow more money.   Interest rates on present federal debt are well below inflation, and the only people that are even suggesting that there might be a problem with the creditworthyness of the national treasury are the very people who are trying to wreck its creditworthness:  the Tea Party and their backers.

All of these backers are fabulously wealthy businessmen.  These are people who have built, or more often, inherited a business built by exploiting the labor or naivety of those much less well off, often by mining a resource they were given by the same federal government they are now trying to weaken.  What they want is to be able to exploit at will--to pay people such low wages and benefits that when they become unable or unwilling to work, they can simply be discarded and replaced with someone even more desperate for a job.  To mine and pollute and lay waste to the environment and either ignore the cost or foist it off on somebody less able to resist having to pay for their carnage.

Individually, each of these businessmen (and a few businesswomen), is making a rational business decision.  If they cut costs by paying less, by evading or overturning regulation, they are able to outcompete their competitors and gain a larger piece of the regional or global economic pie.  Many of these people went to business school.  One of the fields they studied there was called economics.  Economics is split into two broad sub-disciplines, called Microeconomics (the study of individual businesses and their individual interactions with their neighboring businesses), and Macroeconomics, which is the study of entire systems of businesses as a whole--regions, countries, the whole planet.  Business students generally spend a few weeks in a freshman economics course learning Macro, and after the final in that course, proceed to forget it all, focusing exclusively on Micro and other aspects of business.

Macro is a very different field than Micro, in the same way that structural engineering is a very different field than chemistry.  The chemistry of concrete and steel are important and fundamental to whether the bridge will hold up, but they are only a small part of the picture.   Here's an example of how they are different:  to an individual business, gaining market share is a good thing: more customers, more employees, the chance at better profits.  But what if that bigger business is undermining the overall market.  A community that once had a thousand individual businesses employing five thousand people, finds them replaced by WalMart, employing 1000.  During the transition, it seems like a great deal: prices are better and lots of jobs were created, building and working in the new store, but before long, most of the old businesses are gone and the profits are mostly going to Bentonville, not staying in the community as before.  And to compound the injury, the community probably gave WalMart a big tax break to get them into their town instead of the neighbors.

At the microeconomic level, money is an immutable, powerful thing: you are competing with your rivals for it, and it feels like the only thing that matters.  At the macroeconomic level, money is an illusion.  Money is a token, representing goods and services, no more.  The only thing that matters to the economy is goods and services.  If there's demand for those, then the economy does well and lots of people have jobs.  Extracting money by taking it to Bentonville or Wall Street and burying it there, means that those people own that fraction of your labor--before you even get paid.   That money, and therefore that part of the work people do, is gone from the real economy, it's now part of Wall Street schemes, and stuck there, producing little or nothing. MBAs by and large do not understand this: they only see the world through their myopic lens of individual competition.  The price of inequality is a smaller economy.

Right Turn Lanes

A recent visit to California reminded me how differently they handle right turns there.  At nearly every intersection where there are multiple lanes, there is a dedicated right turn only lane.  Here in Washington state, there are a few such lanes, but not many.

Prior to 1 Jan 1980, most of the country did not have "Right Turn on Red".  This meant that if you were stopped at a traffic light, you had to wait for the light to turn green, whether you were going right, left, or straight.   California and a few other western states, however, allowed you to treat a red light as a stop sign, provided you were turning right (or left onto a one way street from a one way street).  In other words, come to a full stop, check for traffic, and then proceed when it's safe.  During the OPEC oil embargoes of the 1970s, a few states experimented with this and found a noticeable improvement in gas mileage, and the federal government tried to pressure the rest to join in, but many refused, claiming it wasn't safe.  So starting on the 1st of January 1980, every state in the country was mandated to adopt this rule.   Was it safe?  For the first few years, there were on average 84 fatalities a year involving such intersections.  This is a small enough number on the scale of traffic fatalities (about 40,000 a year) as to suggest it was never really a problem.

(I happened to be living in Massachusetts when the change was mandated.  Many right turns, such as ones that cross another street, are not safe to do this on, so signs that specified "No Turn on Red" could be placed at such location.  On New Years Eve 1979 (it was a monday), essentially every traffic light in Massachusetts gained such a sign.  There weren't many state highway workers leaning on their shovels that day.  The feds caught wind of this and made them take about 90% of them down.)

The traffic flow efficiencies come not from idling less, but from more cars being able to make it through the intersection over a given time.  If, say, 20% of cars don't have to wait for the light, that's 20% less time the light needs to be green to allow the same number of cars through.  That means the chance of cars on the cross street having to wait for a red light are reduced by that much.

One consequence of this notion about right turns is that many traffic engineers haven't quite grasped the idea that a busy intersection needs a dedicated right turn lane in order to gain the traffic flow efficiencies.  To some degree this is understandable: when many streets were built, they weren't all that wide, and buildings were placed close to the right of way.  If there's only room for one turn lane, they chose to make it a left turn lane because those cars actually do have to wait for oncoming traffic...the right decision.

But there are lots of places that they have the room and in surprisingly many they have actually gone out of their way to block it. There used to be a right turn lane in the picture to the right, but they actually added the little bumpout about 5 years ago to block free rights.  Are they thinking they're protecting the crosswalk?  That's a bus stop just to the east--but why shouldn't cars use it when buses aren't?

To their credit they are fixing some:  this intersection in Ballard, which I go through almost every week, was improved a few months ago:  That maroon car is parked, the front car in the eastbound right lane is going straight, and probably half the cars waiting behind are turning right, so they are stuck. Since this picture was taken, about 4 cars of parking have been converted to right turn only lanes.  It's still got looonnnnng lines,  but it's a huge improvement.