If you’re in New York, I’ll be speaking on the interrelations of economics and food at the First Circle series on December 14th in midtown Manhattan.

I’ll post more about this as the time approaches, and the info is here.

It’s impossible to keep track of all of the falsehoods that circulate in the right-wing echo chamber, but when one threatens to escape that rarefied world and join the conventional wisdom, it’s worth trying to stomp it.

The falsehood du jour is the idea that Republicans should dig in their heels when negotiating with Democrats, because when Ronald Reagan made a deal with Congressional Democrats back in the day, the Democrats reneged.

This has been a right-wing meme since at least the debt limit negotiations of last year; Here’s Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s attorney general, writing back in 2011:

The ratio in the final deal — the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) — was $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. . . . The tax increases were promptly enacted — Congress had no problem accepting that part of the deal — but the promised budget cuts never materialized.

See? Republicans can’t trust Democrats to keep to their promises, so they shouldn’t make any sort of deal with them that doesn’t give them everything they want up front.

Although Meese’s bare facts are true—there was a deal, and the cuts never materialized—Meese is being extremely misleading. And to get the real story, we don’t even have to look outside the Reagan administration. Here’s David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director at the time, on what happened to the TEFRA spending cuts:

Of the spending cuts allegedly owed, $100 billion consisted in savings in debt service that Congress couldn’t do anything about. $40 billion was management savings that we had promised to come up with, and hadn’t; another $30 billion had actually been delivered in Medicare reimbursement reforms and other measures. Most of the remainder was the $50 billion in three-year defense cuts Howard Baker was proposing to cut again–and which [Secretary of defense Caspar] Weinberger was refusing to accept again.

—Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, p368-369.

So: only a small part of the spending cuts was under the Democratic Congress’s direct control. And that part was the only part that was delivered. The rest was either not deliverable, or was lost in the miasma of the Reagan administration’s dysfunction, described eloquently by Alexander Haig, another Reagan insider:

The [Reagan] White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm?… It was impossible to know.…

The real lesson here is the opposite of what Republicans take from it; making concessions to them will never create any sort of goodwill on their part; they’ll just make shit up to justify their own spectacular bad faith.

Lance Eaton of Byanyothernerd interviewed me (Mike) and will soon be interviewing Dan; The interview with me is here.

And, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel points out, Economix would make a great gift!

I especially like that Economix made it onto their list for a reason other than its Wisconsin connection (artist Dan E. Burr being from Milwaukee).

So if you plan to participate in the grotesque orgy of consumption that is the modern Christmas (and if you don’t, what are you, a commie?), get Economix for your family, friends, colleagues, and random people on the street!

So in a previous post I argued that Romney is a gullible guy, and that if he somehow pulled off a victory he’d soon lose his grasp on reality in the world of lies, half-truth, and flattery that is Washington. I asked:

In the not-yet-impossible case that Romney is elected (or becomes President through fraud), how many months will he survive in Washington before he retreats into a fantasy world where he only hears what flatterers tell him, while the country outside his bubble falls apart?

That was a rhetorical question, but check out this article about the Romney campaign’s response to the election (h/t to Kos at Daily Kos). The title (“Advisors: Romney ‘shellshocked’ by loss”) conveys the point, but here are some choice quotes to drive it home:

After Ohio went for Mr. Obama, it was over, but senior advisers say no one could process it. “We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory,” said one senior adviser. “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.”

And

“There’s nothing worse than when you think you’re going to win, and you don’t,” said another adviser. “It was like a sucker punch.”

Their logic, apparently, was that the polls were wrong because Republicans would come out while Democrats didn’t. And keeping hope alive in a close election is one thing. But ignoring harsh facts is another. It really seems like Romney, Ryan, and everyone in the top levels of the campaign had convinced themselves that their longshot path to victory was a done deal.

So the answer to the question, “If Romney is elected, how many months will he survive in Washington before he retreats into a fantasy world” was negative three months (at least). If Romney had won, he wouldn’t have gradually withdrawn into la-la land; he was already there.

This country just dodged a bullet.