Scott Reeder at the Atlantic has an article about how two sporting goods stores–Cabela’s and Bass Pro–have received massive doses of state and local taxpayer money. Basically, if these stores want to open in your town, they first demand all sorts of subsidies. Cabela’s, for instance, often gets the town to build parts of the store. And since the town owns them, the company doesn’t pay tax on those parts. In the past 15 years, Cabela’s has received $551 million, and Bass has received $1.3 billion.

I only have one thing to add to the article: Bass is a private company, so I don’t know how much it makes, but Cabela’s profits are public knowledge. Since 2003, which is as far as the data I could locate goes back, Cabela’s has made around $750 million in profits (more or less; I was eyeballing).

Now: The subsidies have averaged $37 million per year (551/15). Profits have averaged around $75 million per year (750/10). Or about twice the subsidies.

To put it another way: half of Cabela’s profit has come from taxpayers.

If you add the $400 million in Federal financing, it’s more than half.

Now: This isn’t all that unusual, and the problem is not that businesses get government help (although no business should get as much as Cabela’s gets). The problem is when we pretend that only welfare queens, unionized teachers, and Solyndra get government help, and that private enterprise is a realm of self-reliant Ayn Rand heroes who make their own way in the world.

Andrew Leonard’s review of David Wessel’s Red Ink (which I have not yet read) gets to the heart of the problem of much of our discourse on the economy: Red Ink, according to Leonard, is a very useful guide to exactly what the problems are with the federal budget, explained in an even-handed manner.

And as Leonard points out, that even-handed manner is the problem.

For instance, remember the Medicare drug benefit? It increased spending—more than it had to, because the government was not allowed to use its buying power to negotiate with the drug companies—without raising taxes or cutting other spending. Unlike Obamacare, which is actually paid for. Except that if you listen to Republicans, it’s not. Leonard writes:

It’s very difficult to dwell on this without going apoplectic. Again: Republicans passed an expansion of healthcare without any mechanism to pay for it. That’s pretty bad, from a boosting-the-deficit standpoint. But when Democrats passed their own expansion, funded by a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes that, together, lower the deficit, Republicans just dismissed the numbers as fake.

There’s a reason why we can’t seem to make any progress on our fiscal mess: One of our two political parties has gone nuts.

And then he gets to what I consider the meat of the issue:

Wessel explicitly chooses not to make this clear in his treatment of our national budget debacle. It’s easy to understand why: As soon as you position yourself on one side of the political spectrum, you completely lose the attention of everybody who is aligned on the other. Your numbers get dismissed as partisan. This review of “Red Ink” will certainly suffer that fate. And that’s a shame. But it’s not enough to merely explain why “inaction imperils our future.” You also need to explain why there’s inaction in the first place. And that requires taking sides.

In other words, Wessel provides a lot of useful information about what happened, without the why. Which, really, is a rather good demonstration of the why; as Leonard says, one of our two political parties has gone nuts, but too much of our discourse—including, apparently, Red Ink, which I’m still going to read—politely ignores the fact that they’re nuts, and treats their insane programs as if they were not, in fact, insane.

Well, y’all don’t have to worry about Economix, folks. I don’t shy away from finger-pointing.

I watched the live stream of Curiosity’s landing on Mars last night. For those of you unlucky enough to miss it, it showed the NASA Personnel at the Jet Propulsion Lab following the lander’s progress. It was incredible.

The tension as the people who’d put years of work into a daring project—throwing a complex, fragile, car-sized machine at a planet—finally waited to see if they had done every single thing right.

The small bursts of joy as preliminary stages went off without a hitch.

The final celebration when it landed perfectly.

The satisfaction on their faces as they allowed themselves to realize that they had done something nobody had ever done before. That they had done something for all of us.

And I thought: Are we really trying to cut the budget for things like this? Why?

Oh, right, we can’t afford it. Our society needs to save its resources for other things.

Things like private jets, so that rich people don’t have to go through the hell of flying first class.

Things like pills that turn your poop gold.

Things like 100,000 varieties of shampoo. (I’m not exaggerating. A search on “shampoo” on Amazon gives more than 100,000 results.)

And of course, the ads that make us care about 100,000 varieties of shampoo in the first place. God forbid we should go without those.

Seriously, when did we decide that our highest, our noblest, our only possible task is producing more consumer products?

We’re constantly hearing about how rich people are wealth creators, job creators, the most productive members of our society, a bunch of Hank Reardons, bla bla bla ad infinitum, and how we should cut their taxes so that they can unleash their productive powers.

The more intelligent-sounding purveyors of this point of view use sophisticated economic models to support their claims. But models are just that—they’re models of what should happen, given certain assumptions. And the real world is far more complex than any model can portray.

The real way to understand what cutting taxes on the rich would do is: try it and see what happens.

But I don’t recommend doing that.

Why not? Because we already freaking did it. Many times. We know what happens when we cut taxes on the rich; we just choose not to remember.

Thing is, back in the 1950s and 1960s, taxes on the rich were very high. Past a certain point, the government took almost all of your additional income—as much as 92 cents on the dollar.

Yes, there were deductions; nobody paid 92% of their income. But a rich person deciding whether or not to earn an extra dollar had presumably already found all the deductions he could, so he really was faced with the prospect of working harder in order to earn only a few more cents.

So back then when rich people said, hey, we would work harder and create more wealth if we were allowed to keep more of the reward, they were making a plausible argument.

In fact, it was so plausible that we believed them and cut taxes. First to 70%, and then way below that. Meanwhile, we accepted higher taxes for ourselves and fewer services from government.

So what happened?

Here’s the maximum tax rate—the tax paid on income in the highest tax bracket—over time. Note the big cuts in 1964 and in the 1980s, followed by Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, followed by Bush’s cuts.

Now: If low taxes on the rich do what conservatives say, GDP should have been higher when the top tax rate was low, and lower when it was high and job creators were oppressed. So here’s economic growth by year, courtesy of the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Huh? All that up and down is hard to track. So let’s average economic growth over the relevant periods, which are:

• 1951-1963, when the top tax rate was 91-92%
• 1964-1981, when the top tax rate hovered around ~70% (note the uptick for the Vietnam war—we used to actually fund our wars)
• 1982-1986, when Reagan cut the top tax rate to 50%
• 1987-1992 when Reagan cut it again to 28.6% before Bush I raised it slightly to 31%
• 1993-2002 When Clinton raised it to 39.6%, until Bush II started to cut it a bit, and finally
• 2003 on, when Bush II cut it to 35%, where it remains today.

Here’s what the averages look like.

Just to make things clearer, let’s put both lines together (ignoring the scale—we’re just looking at the pattern, not the absolute number):

Well, hell.

So low taxes for the rich haven’t been good for the economy. The association goes almost exactly the opposite way.

And still the rich say that cutting their taxes will unleash their dormant productive powers. But if it hasn’t happened yet, it’s not going to happen. The only thing we can conclude is that rich people give themselves too much credit.

Now: You can play around with the exact periods you choose to average the data over, but the overall pattern will hold.

For instance, if you say that we should exclude the current economic mess (everything after 2006, say) because its causes are clearly much bigger than just the Bush tax cut, we get this, which is even more exact:

Heck, just to show I’m not cheating, here’s every data point since 1951 (the line was drawn by Excel, not me):

[EDIT: I used Excel to get the correlation coefficient of that (0.21), transformed that into a t, and then got the p value of the t, which is apparently legit. The p value I got, assuming I did all the math correctly (it’s entirely possible that I didn’t) was 0.096 (which matches my eyeballing, more or less). That’s means that the observed correlation (high taxes are correlated with high growth) could have been just statistical noise, but there’s roughly a 9 in 10 chance that it wasn’t and that high taxes are really connected in some way with high growth. This is what statisticians call a “trend,” which is statspeak for, yeah it tends that way but you haven’t really shown anything. You need a 19 in 20 chance before a statistician will accept it as proof. [EDIT of the edit: Not “proof” exactly, as Reddit user Konchshell points out–rather, worthy of notice.]]

Other people have cut the data in different ways and gotten the same result. They shy away from concluding that tax increases help the economy, and they’re right: none of this proves that tax cuts for the rich are bad for the economy, or that high taxes are good—there may have been other factors (like oil prices) that were more important.

For that matter, it’s still possible that rich people really are job creators, and that they create more jobs when they’re motivated, but that high taxes are what motivate them. After all, rich people’s lives are almost all carrots and very few sticks; maybe the occasional blow from a stick will spur them to action more than another truckload of carrots.

But all of this is beside the point. The point is that it’s simply impossible to look at the data and honestly think that cutting taxes on the rich will help the economy.

[EDIT: user Konchshell on Reddit points out that it’s not in fact impossible, which is true–I’m overstating it. But still]

That leaves one thing we can safely predict about taxes on the rich: They will bring in revenue. We could use some revenue right about now.

No wonder conservatives always argue about what some model says should happen. The last thing they want is a discussion about what has happened.

Bill McKibben’s new Rolling Stone article: Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, is clear and chilling.

The article goes into depth, but the math is simple:

• According to our most conservative (i.e., hopeful) estimates, it’s possible that we could survive a warming of 2 degrees Celsius without catastrophe. (This is arguable—this summer, with its droughts and heat waves and freak weather, is what we see with the warming we’ve already experienced, which is only 0.8 degrees Celsius. Two degrees may well mean catastrophe anyway. But it’s certain that more than 2 degrees spells disaster.)
• To keep warming at 2 degrees, we could maybe release 565 more gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.
• At our current rate of fossil fuel use, we’ll do that in 16 years. We could cut our rate in half and still have a catastrophe before 2050.

And that’s not even the worst thing. The worst thing is:

• There are 2,795 gigatons of carbon in proven, accessible reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas that sellers are sitting on, expecting to sell us.

In McKibben’s words:

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony.

So it’s not just a matter of using less. We have to somehow convince ExxonMobil, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Shell, Lukoil, and BP to keep most of their oil—their wealth, the livelihoods of their employees and shareholders—in the ground. (And that’s just some of the oil sellers, and that’s just oil).

McKibben also makes a point I make in Economix: Don’t look to technology, like geoengineering and whatnot. We have the technology to fix our problems today. But we don’t use it, for political reasons. The solutions—if there are even solutions anymore—are political, not technological.