Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I thought I’d take advantage of a lazy Memorial Day to re-up some of my standard complaints about the world and the quality of the information we receive. My big four ones today are:

1) The which way is up confusion; is the deficit or job-killing AI the big problem (can’t be both),

2) Big numbers without context; no one knows what spending $100 billion on food stamps means,

3) Media ownership; major news outlets were always owned by rich people, but they are becoming more right-wing,

4) Social media; the major platforms are controlled by people on the right and far-right.

The “Which Way Is Up?”  Problem

Media outlets are filled with stories about how AI is taking all the jobs. There are also plenty of stories telling us that soaring deficits and rising debt are going to bankrupt the government. These problems are 180-degree opposites, sort of like saying that someone is seriously overweight, but needs to put on a few pounds. Either can be true, but they can’t both possibly be true. There is zero recognition of this fact in elite intellectual circles.

To make the logic clearer, the AI taking all the jobs story is one of abundance. We don’t need workers anymore; AI is going to do everything for us. That means we can all sit around all day and play video games and still get the food, housing, medical care, and everything else we need. AI will do the work.

The out-of-control debt and deficit story is one of scarcity. The idea is that the government is spending beyond our means, creating demands on the economy it is unable to fulfill.

It is important to realize that the serious deficit/debt crisis story is one about the actual economy, not government finance. The government spends dollars. It also prints dollars. If it wants to spend more, it can print more dollars.

There is the complication that the Fed is the entity that most immediately decides how many dollars to print, but the Fed is part of the government. If the Fed were to decide to accommodate a large and growing deficit and debt, the only limitation on its ability to do so would be the risk of inflation.

But inflation would only result from excess spending if we’re facing supply constraints. If AI allows us to produce whatever we want with minimal human labor, then we are not facing supply constraints. That means we don’t have to worry about deficits and debt.

There are reasonable arguments on both sides of this issue. For my part, I am an AI skeptic. I believe there will be productivity gains, but nowhere near as large as the “AI will take all the jobs” crowd. I also think it is virtually certain we will see some AI disasters, as some bozos trust AI to do something important, for which it should not be trusted without oversight.

But the ultimate productivity impact is not the issue here. The point is that the productivity impact is directly connected to the deficit/debt issue. It is astounding that people who write on economic policy for outlets like the NYT or WSJ don’t seem to recognize this fact.

Everyone Knows Writing Billions or Trillions with No Context is Meaningless. Why Do They Do It?

This is my endless pet peeve, which is actually a very big issue. It is standard practice to see or hear huge budget numbers, like the $550 million annual appropriation for public broadcasting, or the $34 billion for USAID, reported with no context. Almost no one will see these amounts of money in their lifetime, so the sums strike people as enormous.

If they took 5 seconds and 8 words to tell people that the funding for public broadcasting is less than 0.008% of the budget, or the spending on foreign aid was less than 0.5%, they would immediately know that cutting or eliminating these programs would not have a big effect on the budget deficit or their taxes. But reporters choose to have deliberately uninformative budget reporting.

It is widely known that most people have no idea where their budget dollars go. This makes it easier for demagogic politicians to scream about immigrants and dark-skinned people being responsible for budget deficits and/or high taxes, even though the claims are absurd on their face to anyone remotely familiar with budget data.

Obviously, part of the confusion reflects racism. Some people want to believe that all their tax dollars go to paying for welfare for Black people, but a large share of people who are centrist or even liberal hugely overestimate the share of the budget that goes to welfare programs. This would not be the case if we had responsible budget reporting that put these numbers in context, but we don’t.

The Media, Which Was Always Owned by Rich People, Is Being Taken Over by the Far-Right

Every progressive in the country can immediately tell you how Citizens United, which gave corporations the right to throw unlimited money into campaigns, was a horrible decision. Ask them about media ownership and politics, and most will look blank-faced.

There is some magical thought process involved here that I cannot understand. People understand that money, which mostly goes to buy campaign ads, can influence elections. But somehow, they didn’t seem to think that the news or other content they see between the ads has an effect. I suppose this is the magical power of political ads theory of consciousness.

My guess is if people constantly hear Fox News-type coverage of immigration, global warming, or any other major issue, it matters much more than even a large barrage of 30-second ads telling them a candidate is bad because they support open borders or outlawing cars (both likely lies). The major media outlets were never great, the huge corporations that owned NBC, CBS, and the rest were not anxious to push a progressive agenda, but they did feel the need to have some pretense of objectivity.

This is likely not to be the case for long. CBS was recently taken over by Paramount, which is controlled by the Ellison family, huge backers of Donald Trump and the Israeli government. They have already blocked or altered major stories by their news division. As they consolidate control and get rid of serious reporters, they will come to look much more like Fox News. They also have plans to take over CNN, through a merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers, CNN’s parent company.

In addition, there is a current plan by the right-wing media group Nexstar, the largest media group in the country, to merge with TEGNA, the fourth largest, which would give them unprecedented control over the nation’s broadcast outlets. Look for still more Fox News type reporting. (The Media and Democracy Project, along with other groups, is trying to block both mergers.)

Anyhow, it is mind-boggling that people who get rightly upset about how campaign spending can tilt the outcome of elections don’t pay any attention to the influence of the media. It’s probably also worth noting that even if Citizens United were somehow reversed, it would not have much impact. Elon Musk could still spend $300 million in the next election backing his favored candidates.

The Major Social Media Platforms are Controlled by the Right and the Far-Right

Elon Musk owns Twitter (now X). Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook. Larry Elliot used his friendship with Donald Trump to seize control of TikTok from a Chinese company. Since tens of millions of people go on these sites every day and get much of their news from them, the fact that they are controlled by right-wingers like Zuckerberg, or far-right wingers like Musk and Elliot, should be troubling. These people do not hesitate to use their control to promote right-wing content and suppress material they don’t like.

It’s not clear what can be done to directly challenge the right’s control of the social media platforms. Letting them get this control in the first place was not great policy. Preventing the takeover of Instagram by Facebook might have been a good thing to do. Maybe that could conceivably be undone in a future administration with a more serious Federal Trade Commission.

Another mistake was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This provision, which was approved with bipartisan support in Congress, protects sites from being sued for defamation over material they carry. This is a contrast with print or broadcast media with are responsible for third-party content.

For example, Fox News was forced to pay $787 million to Dominion for spreading lies about the 2020 election. To win its case, Dominion did not have to show that Fox’s employees actually told lies about the election, just that it spread the lies.

Section 230 makes it impossible to have a similar suit against X or Facebook. Musk or Zuckerberg just have to say Section 230, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they spread defamatory claims.

It would be very difficult to reverse Section 230 with Republicans in control of Congress and Donald Trump in the White House, but it is worth at least getting the issue on the agenda. The original logic of the provision was that it is impossible for a social media platform to monitor the tens of millions of posts that are made daily. That may be the case, but an alternative would be to have a takedown requirement for allegedly defamatory material.

This would be similar to what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires for allegedly infringing material. The site can protect itself from legal liability by promptly removing the material, or if it determines it is not infringing, it can leave it posted and risk a lawsuit. The same standard could apply to allegedly defamatory material.

This sort of requirement would definitely raise costs, but it would make a liability structure parallel to what print and broadcast outlets already face. And if Elon Musk wanted to spread lies about his political opponents, he would potentially face large damages.

We Need to Stop the Lies!

That’s my rant for Memorial Day. In the age of Trump, we all have a very full political agenda. But it is important to ask how we ended up with a vengeful, petulant 8-year-old in the White House. There is much else that can be mentioned, but these four items are big on my agenda. Let’s hope things look better on Memorial Day next year.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.