We have just received yet another confirmation of the virtual uselessness of the Ames Straw Poll. The proud winner of the straw poll, Michelle Bachmann came in sixth in the Iowa caucuses (and in fact finished dead last among all serious contestants–Jon Huntsman just ignored Iowa). Furthermore, she only managed to win just slightly more votes in the caucus than in the straw poll, even though the turnout was seven or eight times greater!

In the four and a half months between the straw poll and the caucuses she, unlike some other fellow candidates, did not have a brain freeze in a debate, was not accused of any sexual misconduct, did not have a barrage of negative ads targeted at her and did not have any other obvious reason for a dramatic collapse of her support in the state.

The winner, Mitt Romney received an eight times greater share of the vote in the caucuses than in the straw poll (in which, incidentally, he won the seventh place) - and he did not even do much campaigning in Iowa except for the last few weeks!

The (very close) runner-up, Rick Santorum, increased his share of the vote by a factor of two and a half.

Romney and Santorum together won half of all votes in the caucuses – but only 13% of all votes in the straw poll.

In fairness, it can be argued that the straw poll correctly predicted that Ron Paul would do much better this year than in 2008. But even then, he was a close runner-up in the straw poll but finished third in the caucuses and his vote share has declined by about a quarter, so it is impossible to tell whether the straw poll was actually an early indication of a real surge in his support or just a statistical coincidence.

The recent fight over the extension of the payroll tax holiday has once again shown that the Republican Party does not particularly care about the middle class tax burden. The party is quite interested though in cutting taxes on the highest earners. What gets completely ignored is the fact that most billionaires already have lower effective tax rates than some segments of the middle class.

Warren Buffet reports paying about 17% of income in taxes. And according to the IRS, 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income are subject to the effective tax rate about 18%. How do these numbers compare to those of the middle class?

Let us consider a hypothetical not-so-average Joe. Not Joe the Plumber, but Joe the Scientist. Suppose Joe earned his PhD in a STEM field a couple years ago and last year was earning a salary of $9,000 a month. Furthermore, let’s suppose that Joe is single, lives in a rented apartment and has a sizable student loan, just a few thousand dollars in savings and no other assets to speak of except for a nice (but not too fancy) new car (which, alas, comes attached to a car loan with the principal currently exceeding the realistic resale price). In other words, Joe has a negative net worth. Joe is certainly in the middle class and not rich by any stretch of the imagination (in fact, if he lives in a place with very high cost of living like New York City or San Francisco, I’m not even sure he qualifies for the upper middle class).

Finally, let’s suppose that Joe was not yet making any 401(k) contributions last year and that his health insurance cost $500 a month of which $400 was paid by his employer and the other $100 was deducted from his pay (so Joe’s 2010 W-2 showed $108,000 Medicare wages and $106,800 taxable wages). So, what was Joe’s effective tax rate last year?

In order to determine it, we need to calculate both the total taxes and total compensation. The latter needs to include not only all money paid to Joe by his employer but also all money paid on Joe’s behalf by his employer. The employer paid $4,800 for health insurance, $108,000 x 1.45% = $1,566 for the employer’s share of Medicare taxes and $106,800 x 6.2% = $6,621.60 for the employer’s share of Social Security taxes. That brings the total compensation to $120,987.60. Let’s just ignore negligible additions like unemployment insurance and workers comp premiums, interest on Joe’s savings account etc.

Now, the taxes. The employer’s share of FICA taxes was $1,566 + $6,621.60 = $8,187.60. Joe paid the same amount (remember, we are talking about last year, when there was not payroll tax holiday). So the total FICA taxes were $16,375.20.

And then there’s income tax. Joe was considered too rich to be allowed to take any student loan interested deduction, so his adjusted gross income was $106,800. Since Joe is neither old nor blind and has no dependents, he can take only one personal exemption, $3,650. Joe does not have any mortgage interest to deduct, and let’s suppose that he paid $5,000 in state income taxes and $200 in personal property taxes (on his car) and also had documented charitable donations totaling $500. His potential itemized deductions amounted to a total of $5,700, which also happened to be the standard deduction, so itemizing did not actually make any sense.

Subtracting the personal exemption and standard deduction from the adjusted gross income, we arrive at the taxable income of $97,450. The income tax table shows us the amount of tax due: $21,002.

The addition of the FICA taxes and the federal income tax gives us the total federal taxes paid by Joe in 2010: $37,377.20.

Finally, dividing this amount by total compensation of $120,987.60, we obtain Joe’s effective tax rate – 30.9%. Wow! The federal government took over 30% of Joe’s earnings! Just as a reminder, typical Joe the Billionaire pays 18%.

We constantly hear lamentations over the low number of Americans pursuing doctorate degrees in STEM fields. Perhaps this hypothetical example of Joe the Scientist might suggest one of the reasons?

When people invest in their education, our human capital increases. But do taxes discourage such investments? Let’s not forget that getting a doctorate degree does not only require a big investment of time and effort – it can also be a very substantial financial investment. When people think of really expensive graduate education, they think along the lines of the Harvard Law School. But a doctorate degree in science, math or engineering at a modest public university can cost a fortune too – because of opportunity costs. A bright young person with a BS in, say, chemical or computer engineering can earn a pretty good salary straight out of school and still higher salary after gaining a couple years of experience. Spending several long years in grad school instead can mean foregoing hundreds of thousands of dollars in gross earnings. Sure, an advanced degree means higher income after graduation, but the reward is not all that high (especially when we compare workers with PhD with workers with BS and several more years of experience).

And how is that return on investment in human capital taxed? Well, the top portion (last $15,000) of Joe’s earnings is taxed at 28% plus there’s a total of 15.3% in FICA taxes. So the federal government alone takes 43.3%, and there are quite a few states with income tax rates over 7%. So depending on which state Joe lives in, the government may well receive higher reward for Joe’s educational investment than Joe himself!

If any investment in financial markets received such tax treatment, supply-siders would scream bloody murder. But they seem to be curiously uninterested in other, equally important, kinds of investment.

And while the case of somebody in the middle class with an effective tax rate over 30% is rather rare (although far from impossible, as I have shown), there are millions of people in the middle class with effective tax rates above 20%. The GOP needs either to give them some really good arguments for further cutting taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers who already pay less than 20% – or come up with a different party platform.

The Republicans have finally found a tax increase many of them can get behind. Unfortunately it’s the first middle class tax increase in decades. Make no mistake, failure to renew the payroll tax cut would mean a significant tax increase.

If nothing is done, then starting next month everybody who works for a living will have an extra 2% of their pay deducted from each and every paycheck, and everybody will surely notice that.

Someone with a modest salary of $30,000 will lose $50 per month and someone making $60,000 will take home $100 less each month. These are not trivial amounts. The consequences to the GOP will be catastrophic, especially when it still insists on tax cuts for the wealthy.

It is also deliciously ironic that many Republicans are now fighting against something that looks a little bit like the George W. Bush 2005 Social Security privatization plan with the libertarian twist (added by ”Kenyan socialist” Obama) in which workers are allowed to take the same portion of their Social Security tax as under the Bush plan and either invest it in their own pension plan or use it in any other way they want (the Bush plan would not allow the latter option).

Opposition to the payroll tax cut extension is not only bad politics but also bad policy. Not only do Republican objections reveal astonishing double standards, but they are also wrong, and most of them are not very serious.

The only serious objection is that the extension would further increase the already huge budget deficit. Of course, the deficits never stopped Republicans from pushing their own tax cuts, but at least this is not a frivolous argument, even if not entirely sincere (the budget impact is over 3% of the federal budget, i.e. just a bit greater than the combined budget of the three departments that Gov. Perry so famously wants to abolish).

However the biggest problem right now is not the deficit but the economic crisis. Ending the crisis is a much higher priority than reducing the deficit. Incidentally, the impact of the crisis on tax receipts is about four times greater than the revenue that the government will forego if the tax cut in question is extended.

Another version of this objection is that the Social Security tax cut is not offset with spending cuts. Did the Republicans ever insist that their tax cuts could not go into effect unless they are offset with budget cuts? More importantly, spending cuts would offset not only the tax cut but also its stimulating effect on the economy and thus defeat its very purpose.

Many Republicans argue that payroll tax cuts do not create jobs. Once again, do the conservatives have rigorous proof that each and every tax cut enacted by Republicans created jobs? Of course, the objection is blatantly untrue. Workers mostly use their extra income due to the payroll tax cut in two ways. They use the money to deleverage themselves. That’s good since household debt holds the economy down, and full recovery will not start until it is reduced a lot further. And they use the money to increase consumption. That’s great since low consumer demand is precisely what keeps the economy in the moribund state right now and prevents hiring more workers.

Consumption and debt reduction are right now more desirable than savings and investments, and that makes payroll tax cuts a lot more effective than tax cuts on high earners who would use their windfall quite differently than people with moderate incomes.

Another variation of this objection focuses not on the content of the tax cut but rather on its temporary nature, which allegedly prevents it from being effective. OK, then what exactly were Republicans trying to accomplish by temporarily abolishing the estate tax for just one year? The theory that only permanent tax cuts stimulate the desired taxpayers’ behavior is quite popular among conservatives, but it is just an ideological assertion, not a proven fact.

There’s simply not much meaningful distinction between “permanent” and “temporary” tax cuts. Reagan’s top marginal tax rate of 28% was officially “permanent” and lasted for all of three years. The “temporary” Bush tax cuts were enacted over a decade ago and are still with us. In fact the longest lasting tax cut ever is the temporary “one year only” AMT patch. (This nicely demonstrates the fact that in budget matters the word “temporary” is often not a status qualifier but a shorthand for “Yo, CBO! You must pretend that the budget busting spending increases and/or tax cuts we just passed never happened”).

But it is not enough merely for a clear distinction between permanent and temporary tax cuts to exist – the taxpayers need to be aware of them! And here we have a problem. Ordinary Americans do not follow politics very closely, and one of the best informed and politically active demographics happens to be the elderly who do not work and thus do not get any payroll tax cut.

Among people who actually enjoy this tax cut, roughly half never or almost never vote, and either a very significant percentage cannot name the House Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader,  cannot name their own Representative, cannot identify their own income tax bracket etc. It is a safe bet that a majority of them do not know that the Social Security tax cut is temporary.

Inasmuch as people are going to be aware of the fight over extending the payroll tax cut, it is necessary to remember that we are in the first half of the all important Christmas shopping season and people are trying to figure out how much they can afford to spend and what credit card balances they can cope with come January. Telling them now that starting in January an extra 2% of their pay will be deducted from their paychecks could seriously reduce sales and damage the economic recovery. Would not doing so be, to borrow a word from Rick Perry, really be “treasonous”?

David Frum recently asked: “Who Burned the GOP Brand?” In that blog post, he lamented that voters overwhelmingly believe that Republicans in Congress favor the rich.

Well, I think the divide between sane conservatives and the Tea Party is that the former want the GOP to be the party of free markets and the latter want it to be the party of the rich.

Some very rich people own right of center media outlets while other very rich people generously finance right of center think tanks and political activism (including the activism of the Tea Party). Furthermore, the party as a whole is unproportionally financed by rich people. So it is no surprise that the outlook of the Republican Party is heavily influenced by the rich people’s perspective.

Furthermore, the left often attacks the rich either because of envy and hatred or simply in order to attack the market economy by proxy. Such proxy attacks are more effective than actually arguing about the comparative economic merits of socialism and free markets, since, as Willi Schlamm famously observed, “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” So it is a natural reaction for Republicans to rise to counter those attacks. For the same reason it is also a mistake for them to defend their economic ideals by such a proxy.

On a practical political level it is a lot simpler to defend the free market ideas themselves rather than the rich, particularly specific individuals. The late Steve Jobs was probably the most popular billionaire in the country in recent years. Yet his new bestselling biography clearly shows that on a personal level he was a nasty man. The same is true for a lot of the rich. While nice guys don’t always finish last, it usually takes certain personality traits to make a lot of money, and those traits do not look pretty upon close inspection.

On a philosophical level the enrichment of the rich is merely a byproduct of the market economy rather than its goal. In fact if that were the goal then the free markets would not even be best for achieving it – other types of economic arrangements may perform better. E.g. Russia managed to produce a whole bunch of billionaires within a span of just several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, Russia has also never in history managed to provide decent life for the majority of its population. A

nd herein lies the best reason for Republicans to support free markets in this country - they have generated unprecedented amounts of wealth for the vast majority of Americans. That is also why supporting the market economy (rather than the rich) is a winning proposition for Republicans. At least as long as the economy continues to deliver.

Unfortunately, that has not been the case in recent decades, and most of the benefits of the economic growth accrued to the rich rather than the middle class. Incidentally, the GOP was also doing quite poorly in the presidential elections for the last 20 years (the average Republican share of the two-party vote dropped from 56% between 1970 and 1990 to 48% between 1990 and 2010). Conservatives need to figure out why this is happening and what to do to reverse the trend.

Allowing it to continue is simply not an option. 1) If the GOP continues to be perceived as a party which cares only about the rich (and is willing to do anything – even a government shutdown or national default – to prevent the rich from paying one penny more in taxes), it may eventually go the way of its predecessor, the Whigs. 2) Increasing capital clumping may decrease our economic performance, and that in turn may eventually cause all sorts of nasty problems – from not being able to cope with rapidly aging population to being overtaken by China. 3) Emulating wealth distribution of Russia and Latin America may eventually cause us to emulate the politics of those places as well, with the conspiracy theorists’ vision of the American politics as a Honduras style proxy fight between George Soros and the Koch brothers for control of the country inching closer and closer to reality.

Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic about the GOP starting to focus on the middle class prosperity very soon. Its reigning orthodoxy is expressed in the Ryan Plan which proposes to cut taxes for the rich (even though they already pay lower effective tax rates than some segments of the middle class) and abolish Medicare for everybody else.

The more I think about the Rubio scandal, the more I am troubled by it. It’s not just that having lived in the Soviet Union for a quarter century, I find it offensive when people falsely claim themselves or their families to have been victims of Communist oppression. I am really concerned about the “Palinization” of the political right.

If you are a politician caught in a lie, I want you to take it like a man, show some humility, admit the lie in a straightforward manner and apologize as sincerely as you can, then just move on (unless some more drastic step – e.g. resignation – is warranted).

In this particular case a 50-word statement from Sen. Rubio would have sufficed and the whole scandal could have been a one day affair. Instead the senator went on the attack, continued lying, feigned outrage, accused the fact checkers of lying and insulting his family (although at the same time he quietly rewrote his official biography on the Senate website).

What’s much worse, conservative media immediately jumped to his defense and joined him in his attack on the Washington Post. They ridiculously claimed that the only reason for the article was the leftist media’s fear of Hispanic conservatives and that the Post would never have done that to a liberal (at the same time they cheerfully reported that the very same newspaper had just given Joe Biden its Four Pinocchios award for lying about potential effects of Republican opposition to the Obama jobs bill). So you see, Marco Rubio is a victim here, not a perpetrator.

The Right has to break with the relatively recent tradition of treating any inconvenient facts as outrageous attacks. It also has to come to grips with the fact that one of its rising stars has lied about an important matter and keeps on lying and ponder what all this may tell us about his character.

First of all, we need to recognize that Rubio lied. Until more than a day after the publication of the story, his biography on the Senate website contained this sentence: ”In 1971, Marco was born in Miami to Cuban-born parents who came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.” It is not an embellishment or exaggeration – it’s a lie. There’s no way to spin it. At the time his parents came to America Castro was living in exile in Mexico. He had not even started his takeover yet. In his counter-attack Rubio suggests that he made an honest mistake rather than lied: “My understanding of my parents’ journey has always been based on what they told me about events that took place more than 50 years ago — more than a decade before I was born. What they described was not a timeline, or specific dates.” With all due respect, this tortured explanation is itself a lie.

I can tell you from personal experience that if you come to America as an immigrant you never forget the moment. I immigrated two decades ago. My first child was born just two weeks ago. But you can bet that when he’s old enough to understand dates he’ll know the “timeline” and ”specific dates”. And Marco Rubio expects me to believe that his parents never told him anything and that he never ever was curious enough to ask them when they immigrated or how long they have lived in America?

Furthermore, the Cuban revolution was the central event for his family and families all around him when he was growing up. That event was constantly talked about, and Rubio himself admits that when he claims having a deep understanding of what it means to lose one’s country (never mind its total irrelevance to American politics). Yet he never asked his parents what it was like to live under Fidel Castro, or how long they lived under him, or what it was like to leave Cuba at that time, or any other question that might possibly give him a clue that his parents never actually lived in Communist Cuba?!

We also need to recognize that it was a substantial lie. Rubio is often called “Republican Obama”. There are in fact many similarities between them. Each of them had a very thin record of actual accomplishment before getting elected to his current office. Neither of them has ever been a policy wonk. Neither is very effective in office. Each of them got nominated thanks to the same lucky break: even though a stronger and better qualified rival was favored to win the nomination, a significant segment of the party base was very eager to punish that rival for some highly symbolic ideological transgression (voting for the Iraq war in case of Hillary Clinton, giving Obama a hug in case of Charlie Crist).

But the most important common factor is identity politics. Obama would not have become a senator, let alone president if his father had been a graduate student from, say, Switzerland rather than Kenya. Rubio would not have become the Florida House speaker (especially at such a young age), let alone senator if his parents had immigrated from Ireland rather than Cuba.

And since identity politics has been central to Rubio’s political career, his lying about his identity is a much, much more serious matter than a typical run of the mill white lie in politics, like the first lady telling New Zealanders that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary.

I completely agree with Eli Lehrer that the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee will be Romney. I also agree with his analysis of the reasons Republican nominations are decided on the question “Whose turn is it?” But what is completely lost in all the excitement over watching Mitt Romney vanquish one opponent after another is the intriguing question of who the next runner up will be.

Since President Obama is still more likely to be reelected than not and 2016 is likely to be a better year for Republicans, the real prize in 2012 Republican primaries may be not winning but rather coming in second. If the Republicans stay true to form, the current presidential field contains not one but maybe even two future Republican nominees! Is it too wonkish to start speculating over the identity of the 2012 runner up and 2016 presidential nominee? Is it too early to start asking bookies for odds on Jon Huntsman’s inauguration on January 20, 2017?

Does anybody want to start a pool on how long it will take for Republicans to denounce the IMF as a bunch of French socialists?

At a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the new IMF head Christine Lagarde called on advanced economies to avoid drastic spending cuts and to print more money (“as the risk of recession outweighs the risk of inflation”), i.e. to reject economic policies advocated by the GOP. (This makes me wonder who we should trust on this matter - American and European finance experts or someone whose only encounter with economic theory amounted to earning ‘D’ in economics at Texas A&M).

No word yet of any presidential candidate threatening to treat her ugly….

I received The Call exactly a year ago at 11:30 a.m. EDT. That was a bit early. For almost nine years I had worked from my home in Charlotte, NC for a small company in California, so calls from the office before noon my time were not frequent. When I heard that my boss, his boss and the HR director were on the phone, I did not need to hear another word from them to know that my life was about to change.

It did not exactly come as a surprise, since we already had a mass layoff in late 2008, and when several scientists left on their own in the spring and summer of 2010, there was no visible effort to replace them. Furthermore, several important projects fell through as our customers (mostly pharmaceutical companies and health plans) were sitting on piles of cash but refused to spend it on anything.

And so I got to share the experience of millions of Americans in the Great Recession. I am sure many of my early experiences were typical – dealing with severance paperwork, signing up for LinkedIn, shipping company computers back to the office (well, this may be less typical), composing a resume and browsing ads on the Internet. I am also sure some of them were nearly unique.

My top priority in the first month and a half was actually wedding and honeymoon planning. I proposed on top of the Eiffel Tower in late April, we came back from Europe in early May, booked the earliest available church date – early October, and thus had less than five months to plan everything. For various reasons (including health scares with our parents) we were seriously behind by the second half of August (in fact none of the honeymoon arrangements had been made). So having plenty of free time was a pretty substantial silver lining.

The wedding went well (I must say that I actually consider myself better off than a year ago – a good wife is a lot harder to find than a good job) and the next day we flew to Rome. I had some secret hopes of having some job interviews via Skype while sitting on our room’s balcony in Sorrento with the Gulf of Naples and Mt. Vesuvius in the background or in Agrigento with the Concord Temple in the background, but, alas, that was not to be (in fact I did not score any interviews for months). After 25 days, we came back (just in time for Halloween) and I completely focused on the job search (except for an occasional weekend in Las Vegas or on the Atlantic Coast).

All through the winter, the job market was frozen. I would apply around New Year’s and get and interview in March! In the spring there clearly was a thaw, but summer has brought a drought. I’m not an economist (although I occasionally play one on FrumForum), but I think we may well be headed for a double-dip recession.

Another observation I can report is that being overqualified for most positions is no fun. On the other hand, employers are now much pickier about skills and experience. Back in 2000 the interviews went: “You don’t know Java? No problem! Are you at least willing to learn?” A couple weeks ago I got a call about a PhD level position which overall looked like a good a fit. The HR screener asked me how much SAS experience I had, and when I replied “light”, that was it – they wanted intermediate or advanced.

I don’t even know whether with employer attitudes like that I should still bother applying for any quantitative finance positions – I don’t have any experience in that field (only book knowledge). In my opinion, that is actually a good thing, since the existing financial models were proven spectacularly wrong in September 2008, and a fresh unbiased look would be beneficial. But the employers have their own opinion.

Longtime readers probably think that it would not be like me to write a long article on any topic without any political angle, and I am not going to disappoint them. So here goes.

Unemployment insurance is not well designed (and if it was voluntary, I would not bother paying the premiums). The cap is low, and I get less in a week than I used to earn in a day. It can cover my mortgage payment and some of the utilities, but that’s it. If not for a nice severance package and my savings and investments, I would be in serious trouble and definitely could not keep my home (while selling it quickly would be quite a challenge nowadays).

On the other hand, it discourages me from even trying something less conventional, e.g. getting a temporary contract for a couple months in another city, since I would not save much over that time and might still be jobless for months afterwards, but without the benefits. I can only imagine that people with average incomes who get unemployment benefits equaling half of their previous pay, but without any FICA taxes or commuting costs, have a much stronger incentive not to work until the benefits run out, especially if due to falling demand for some of their skills new jobs are likely to pay somewhat less. The system really needs to be overhauled.

The political system also needs to be overhauled. We should scrap the primaries and start from scratch. We may eventually come up with a similar system, but first we must acknowledge fully that the grandiose experiment in democratizing the nomination process has completely failed (does anybody think for a moment that in the bad old days of smoke-filled rooms Christine O’Donnell would be nominated for Senate in Delaware, even if the smoke in the room was from some illegal substance?!).

Special interests (often amounting to little more than a handful of politically active billionaires) manipulate the primaries and exercise a chokehold on both parties. This results in a situation where we have the worst economic and unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, but neither party cares at all about either the economy or the jobs, while each party is obsessed with ideology. Let’s review the tape.

President Obama was inaugurated four months after the start of the financial crisis. He had plenty of time to revise his priorities and come up with some new plan. But what did he actually do? He did his best to just ignore the crisis and instead he focused mostly on his pre-existing ideological priorities – such as universal health care and global warming. Sure, both are important issues, but neither was an immediate crisis.

Obama just claimed – quite implausibly (e.g. does anybody really think that raising energy prices is a sure way to improve a fragile economy?) – that tacking those issues would help solve the crisis. Sure, he also had a half-hearted stimulus. But it was very ineffective, since the bulk of it financed either pre-existing priorities of congressional Democrats or the priorities of special interests, such as public sector unions. Furthermore, Obama did some damage to the economy by circumventing bankruptcy laws to reward his allies in UAW. Now he finally promises to present a jobs plan – after he comes back from vacation.

The Democrats’ insouciance about the economy and jobs created an opening for Republicans who seized the opportunity and took control of the House of Representatives. But did they proceed to advance serious proposals to improve the economy and create jobs? No! They immediately started fighting for their own pre-existing ideological priorities, such as smaller government. Nothing wrong with it, but that’s not exactly what’s on my mind most of the time.

Furthermore, all that unusually fierce fighting led to a debt downgrade and destabilized the markets – just as I have to keep selling my stocks and bonds in order to pay the bills. There will be consequences. In the last decade I donated at least several thousand dollars to various Republican causes. This decade, Republicans can forget about it (they should count themselves lucky if I still vote for them). Let them solicit donations from those whose economic interests they represent. That’s certainly not me.

And so it looks like neither political party is going to offer solutions any time soon. The unemployed just have to wait until at least 2013. The problem is, I can’t wait till 2013.

I have been quite critical of Michele Bachmann lately, but I will defend her whenever she is attacked unfairly. She has just promised that if elected she would bring the price of gas below $2 per gallon. This promise has been met with widespread derision, and even conservative outlets such as National Review doubt whether she can achieve this.

But I have no doubt: yes, she can!

Bachmann’s economic policies (such as immediate drastic cuts in federal spending) would surely cause a new recession, the recession would also affect Europe, China, India and other major oil consumers. Oil prices would collapse and gas prices would indeed plummet below $2 a gallon (just as they did in late 2008). So if you want cheap gas (and absolutely don’t care about anything else), vote for Bachmann!

Fresh from her win at the Ames Straw Poll, Michele Bachmann went on Meet the Press Sunday morning.

I cannot understand how any conservative can watch her and not be appalled by Rep. Bachmann’s decidedly unconservative approach to governing. She ignores basic civics and doesn’t understand that our country is a representative republic rather than a direct democracy.

David Gregory patiently kept asking Mrs. Bachmann about her vote against raising the debt ceiling. He asked:

The entire Republican leadership thought that was the wrong thing to do. Major members of the business community in this country thought that was the wrong thing to do. Why should we trust your judgment that that was the right thing to do and not a reckless act?

In summary, the response was:

Because that’s the judgment of the people of this country. The people of this country would love to weigh in, and they would love to say, “Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, you’re wrong. Mr. President, you’re wrong.”

Gregory objected:

But this is why we have elected representatives, Congresswoman, who actually know the true financial impact of a step like this. Maybe people are against raising the debt ceiling, but the reality is, bipartisan agreement, in the business community, is saying you don’t do that — you don’t mess with the full faith and credit of the United States.

Bachmann countered with:

… let me just answer your question because you said, well, all the people in Washington said we had to raise the debt ceiling, all the people out in America said don’t raise the debt ceiling. That’s the problem with Washington.

She then proceeded to explain her civics views:

…representatives are supposed to represent the people that they serve. The people that they’re serving are saying, “You guys don’t have it figured out. Stop spending money you don’t have.”

This is just wrong. Besides the fact that only a plurality of voters (rather than “all the people out in America”) were objecting to raising the debt ceiling, a very large percentage of people in all polls actually admitted that they did not know enough to form an opinion.

That is precisely the problem with governing by opinion polls as advocated by Bachmann. We, the people of the United States, go about our busy lives. We don’t have time or other resources to learn enough about all important issues of the day to have well informed opinions. That’s why we have adopted the Constitution and delegated all legislative power to Congress. That’s why we elect representatives to a fixed term, pay them nice compensation packages, provide them with staff, the Library of Congress and the power to summon witnesses to their hearings. We expect them to use all those resources to educate themselves on the issues and make carefully considered decisions. Yes, we love to weigh in from time to time — that’s why we have regular elections! But we don’t actually want to weigh in all the time — that’s why the Constitution has no provision for any referendum under any circumstances.

But, perhaps instead of explaining all this, I should have just quoted the great conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.