You may not remember the last time that I quoted Amity Shlaes. It was an indirect quote by way of Rich Karlgaard, who is so stupid, that he should be getting a personal aide to cut his meat, where Karlgaard implied that the reason for the 1937 recession was that “the investor class” were somehow sick and tired of FDR’s “soak the rich policies”, when even the most solidly Chicago School economist could tell you that it was caused by a reduction in federal spending to balance the budget.

Well, Amity Shlaes is at it again, suggesting that potential shortfall in Social Security in 30+ years should be kept at a level of bare survival for 1935, the date of establishment of the program.

As an FYI, 45 million Americans did not have indoor plumbing in 1930, and you had similar numbers in terms of electricity. This was out of a total population of 123 million, giving about 37% of the population without these amenities.

So, why do I wish that I were a right wing moron? Because Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, and with those connections, she makes more in 90 days than I do in a year.

The right wing intellectual infrastructure is an artifact of subsidies for bad ideas and opaque thought processes, which since people like the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife are aggressively buying^*, leads to more bad ideas and opaque thought processes through the invisible hand of the market place.

^*I believe that over the past 30 years, these folks have spent over two billion dollars, that’s $2,000,000,000.00, or about $800 for every man, woman, and child in the US, for think tanks and related activities. When you add in Olin, Bradley, DeVos (Amway), and the rest of these folks who never worked a day in their lives for their money, you are probably well over $3 billion….A quick Google shows spending of just the major organizations from 1990-2000 to be $1B.