One thing that’s frustrating to me about the immigration debate is the extent to which it’s driven by sincerely believed, but quite clearly false, factual ideas about immigration and immigrants. Dana Milbank’s latest column is a great exercise in exposing how far the paranoia runs:

The Arizona governor, seemingly determined to repel every last tourist dollar from her pariah state, has sounded a new alarm about border violence. “Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,” she announced on local television. [...] But those in fear of losing parts north of the neckline can relax. There’s not a follicle of evidence to support Brewer’s claim. [...]

Brewer’s mindlessness about headlessness is just one of the immigration falsehoods being spread by Arizona politicians. Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world’s No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.

The upshot of this is to create a toxic cycle of misinformation. Conservative politicians and media celebrities spread these ideas. Their fans believe them. Then when Dana Milbank or I or anyone else tries to set the record straight, that just goes to show that we’re liberals. So anyone who wants to be seen as credible in conservative circles doesn’t want to take these ideas on. So people become even more entrenched in the view that illegal immigration is causing a plague of violence. Which makes it even harder for anyone to bring some facts to the table.

Excellent parody from Conor Friedersdorf:

I just wanted to highlight one brief dig he gets in there at the beginning that people may miss. One of the stranger attributes of journalism is that the tendency is for people who are good at writing newspaper or magazine articles to be promoted to become managers of writers of newspaper or magazine articles, even though “running a newsroom” and “writing an article” are very different things.

This is hardly the only source of Greece’s fiscal woes, but via Tyler Cowen this kind of thing can’t be helping: “Greece, with a population of just 11 million, is the largest importer of conventional weapons in Europe—and ranks fifth in the world behind China, India, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. Its military spending is the highest in the European Union as a percentage of gross domestic product.”

The thing about military spending that I don’t think is properly understood is the extent to which if it’s not necessary it’s truly wasteful. Building a mag-lev train from Chicago to Milwaukee would be a “waste of money” but if you did it, the resulting train would still be useful to people and lead to some increased value. But a tank you don’t need just does nothing. An extra brigade of soldiers consumes resources and doesn’t produce anything. Of course if your tanks and soldiers produce “Nazis don’t conquer Europe” then it’s valuable indeed. But if you don’t need them, you really don’t need them. Consequently, for countries like Turkey and Greece it’s extremely costly to pursue these long-term military rivalries.

I’m all for rooting against the new look Heat, but it is worth saying that a lot of the anti-LeBron commentary of the past couple of days bespeaks a major anti-labor bias in our popular culture. The guy had an offer from one employer and a competing offer from another employer—he took the offer he preferred. Is that really so terrible? Does he really have a moral obligation to work for Dan Gilbert’s for-profit firm indefinitely? Would you like to be told that if you get offered a better job, it’s unethical for you to accept it? I wouldn’t.

What would be best would be for the NBA to do away with the absurdity of the maximum individual salary. Let some team offer James such an astronomical sum of money that it’s not feasible to add other quality players. Let some team pursue a counter-strategy of assembling 7-9 evenly matched players. Let someone offer a star player an equity stake in the team and a low salary.

Meanwhile, recall that Gilbert had the option of trading Wally Szczerbiak’s $13 million expiring contract before the 2009 trade deadline to improve the quality of his team, increase the odds of Cleveland winning a ring in 2009 or 2010 and increase the odds of LeBron James choosing to resign with the Cavs. He chose not to do so. It’s his team, he can do what he wants. But his employees aren’t obligated to continue working for him past the expiration of their contracts if they’re not satisfied with the way the organization is run.

Felix Salmon says I was too quick to assert that the Fed’s response to the crisis involved a sharp increase in M2:

Yes, M2 rose in the wake of the crisis. But the sharp rise in M2 dates back much further than that — in fact, you can trace it all the way back to the mid-1990s. The red line doesn’t start rising more sharply when the crisis hits, nor do the blue lines get noticeably larger. There’s one big jump in M2 between August 2008 and January 2009, right at the height of the Lehman collapse, during which it rises from $7.79 trillion to $8.32 trillion, a rise of just under 7%. But we’ve seen that kind of thing before: between November 2000 and May 2001, M2 grew by more than 5%, and then between May 2001 and October 2001, it went on to grow another 4% on top of that.

Others feel the most appropriate measure is the MZM Money Stock:

In this view, we’re stuck in neutral because monetary conditions are actually quite tight.

I think this Greg Mankiw post against stimulus and Brad DeLong’s riposte are worth reading. Then it’s worth considering that I think writers in the Krugman/DeLong/Thoma vein are all being a bit too literal in their disagreements with the center-of-center economists of the world.

What I take Mankiw et al to be saying is that taxes are really, really, really bad. And taxes on high-income people are really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad. They think that the electorate is joined by leftwing economists in massively underestimating the scale of the badness. And they look at population aging and growing health care costs and see that it’s likely that taxes will go up in the future. And they think this is an incredibly bad outcome, with massive negative long-term consequences. Consequences that are far more dire than any transient, years-long period of unemployment. Ergo, it’s really important to do the best one can to weather the 111th Congress—the most leftwing congress in decades, and the most leftwing congress we’re likely to see in quite some time—while minimizing increases in the spending level. Really, really, really important.

I can’t prove this is wrong, and Mankiw can’t prove it’s right, but as he notes this—the level of tax-aversion and related disagreements about the key drivers of the political process—is really at the root of the disagreement.