Gadarene Swine
From our editorial on the debt-ceiling debate:
The compromises required by democracy often involve some brinkmanship. But many are now worried that the Tea Party has taken possession of enough Republicans to drive the whole party—and with it the country—over the brink. The Treasury Department is worried. The Fed is worried. Wall Street and even the Chamber of Commerce are worried. Brinkmanship is one thing, extortion another. It’s unlikely that most Republican politicians really believe spending cuts would help the economy more than defaulting on our debt would hurt it, but it’s beginning to look as if at least some of them wouldn’t mind seeing the economy continue to limp if it would help them win back the White House and the Senate in 2012. They’re confident voters will blame the president for whatever happens until then. The only constituency the GOP is sure it needs to help before the next election is the one that fills its campaign coffers.
I disagree with the analogy about either swine or even better one, the US experience of running buffalo over a cliff. That kind of ruin is caused by dumb fear. A more accurate analogy would be The GOP/TP de- faulting on the debt more like a suicide bomber, that is, causing damage by detonating economic ruin for the middle class. Forget ‘limp’ it would make Greece look like a pimple. A last desperate GOP chance to win 2012 with their loser candidates. Republican Majority leader Canter R-VA has bought self protection by investments in shorting US Treasuries. Maybe the GOP should put in their desperate calculations that their failure will insure Obama in 2012, insure Michelle Obama in 2016 and 2020 which leaves them nurturing a new GOP crop for 2024 [long after I'm gone TBT God]]
I would normally be frustrated by the decidedly one-sided telling of this sordid tale that omits relevant facts such as: the President’s own “plan” to let SOME of the Bush tax cuts expire on a small number of taxpayers is mathematically insufficient to fix the problem; the President’s own party failed to make any significant tax action when they controlled both houses of Congress; his bold plan of appointing yet another commission while he ignores the Simpson-Bowles recommendations that could really paint the Republicans in a corner; and that the GOP has indicated this week that both military cuts and revenue-raising are on the table. As I say, normally I would be frustrated by these omissions, but the President has been so out-maneuvered and hamfisted in his “leadership” on this issue, has ceded so much ground to the Republicans and is so weakly polling on the issue, that it hardly seems worth the trouble.
But I am humored by the unshakeable belief among progressives in the President’s ability to give (yet another) speech that will prove to be the balm that salves all our wounds. I bet they even believe him when he says dropping bombs in Libya doesn’t qualify as “hostilities.”
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Seems appropriate right now for frustrated progressives.
That is not what I understand of the negotiations. I thought they are not putting those on the table but simply wanting to go after entitlements.
That massive defense cutbacks are not on the table simply boggles the mind. In around 500 BCE Sun Tzu wrote, “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare”.
The real problem is obvious.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/gop-compromise-on-debt-cut-military-spending/2011/06/25/AGPrGBmH_story.html
But then again, it’s difficult to cut defense spending when the President is engaged in non-hostile hostilities (or is it the other way round?) in Libya and increasingly Yemen. Not to mention a half-effort at drawing down in Afghanistan.
“it’s difficult to cut defense spending when the President is engaged in non-hostile hostilities (or is it the other way round?) in Libya and increasingly Yemen.”
Every country will have its strategic interests. That does not preclude thinking about the most cost effective way to meet those objectives. And yes to reflect on whether to become entangled in internal affairs of a country because promises and commitments need to be kept. If the US has made promises and commitments to people in Afghanistan with respect to helping build a nation, it is morally obligated to keep those. That is fair. But certainly, the US needs to say that into the future the world cannot just expect the US to respond as fully as they have in the past. That is not isolationism that is reality. The UN needs to be strengthened and other countries should do their part in the global village.
I have been watching the US news and the drumbeat around not being able to afford medicare and social security into the future is so loud and I assume it must be true. Fine. I hear earnest, sincere people saying that unless this problem is addressed our children will pay for it. Fair enough.
The same is certainly true for national defense. The US simply cannot assume the role on the world stage that it has had in the past. It has to be candid about that.
Maybe legislation could be proposed and passed in an off-election year that requires that when an agreement can’t be reached by some important date (like one month before the ceiling is expected to be attained) a computer program will make a decision.
Each party would assign a numerical value to each budget and revenue item (positive or negative) and the computer will find an optimal solution, which minimizes integrated dissatisfaction. Then Congress would vote up-or-down on the computer’s solution. If the solution fails, the parties can readjust their figures of merit and try again.
I think this problem may be NP-hard, but that could be overcome by requiring the parties to put numerical values on bundled resources, e.g., on national parks in general, not on each individual park. No doubt people will protest that “nobody elected the computer,” but in principle this is not so different from keeping the Congressional Record in a database.
not so different from keeping the Congressional Record in a database.
Probably an apt analogy. In addition to proceedings on the floor, CR also has a section of “Extensions of Remarks”, AND members also frequently “revise and extend” the remarks they actually made on the floor before the debates are published in the Congressional Record. The latter used to be indistinguishable from actual proceedings, though now they are printed in a different font.
I suspect your software would be subject to similar manipulations by legislators.
President Obama has spent most of the time blaming former President Bush. In dealing with terrorists, President Obama has more or less continued Bush’s policies; military tribunals instead of civilian courts, Gitmo still open, use of drones (he actually is more aggressive with drones than Bush was), interrogations, etc. Still, the economy is down and the next election looming.
Accordingly, the hard-Left David Axelrod types will trot out class warfare and claim fat cat Republicans are “sabotaging” the economy; taking money from the peeps. As if President Obama’s efforts to establish a centrally-planned socialist economy have had no effect at all.
I say the government should borrow enough money from China to keep the government bureaucrats in bacon for three years, with no expansion of government services; just maintain the status quo for three years, and for those three years, cancel all federal taxes e.g., income and capital gains taxes.
Like the poor, we will always need to feed the public bureaucrats thatw addle up to the trough. However many people would be surprised what would happen if the average American had an extra $10,000 available to him for three years running, and what would happen if small-medium sized businesses had the extra cash a temporary federal tax moratorium would provide.
The so-called stimulus efforts by the government have produced little or nothing by way of jobs or growth. The public i.e., the private sector knows how to spend money better than the central government. And so borrow the money just to keep the government trundling along and let the people decide how to best stimulate the economy.
Oh this is a good one; right out of the Leftie playbook.
Democrats have basically been in charge since 2008 and regarding the economy, President Obama has spent most of the time blaming former President Bush. In dealing with terrorists, President Obama has more or less continued Bush’s policies; military tribunals instead of civilian courts, Gitmo still open, use of drones (he actually is more aggressive with drones than Bush was), interrogations, etc. Still, the economy is down and the next election looming.
Accordingly, the hard-Left David Axelrod types will trot out class warfare and claim fat cat Republicans are “sabotaging” the economy; taking money from the peeps. As if President Obama’s efforts to establish a centrally-planned socialist economy have had no effect at all.
I say the government should borrow enough money from China to keep the government bureaucrats in bacon for three years, with no expansion of government services; just maintain the status quo for three years, and for those three years, cancel all federal taxes e.g., income and capital gains taxes.
Like the poor, we will always need to feed the public bureaucrats thatw addle up to the trough. However many people would be surprised what would happen if the average American had an extra $10,000 available to him for three years running, and what would happen if small-medium sized businesses had the extra cash a temporary federal tax moratorium would provide.
The so-called stimulus efforts by the government have produced little or nothing by way of jobs or growth. The public i.e., the private sector knows how to spend money better than the central government. And so borrow the money just to keep the government trundling along and let the people decide how to best stimulate the economy.
Interesting; the porcine imagery you chose for this piece truly says more about you and your views than it does about conservatives.
Ken,
Here are some informal groundrules for the comboxes at dotCommonweal:
1. Try to avoid posting more than one comment at a time.
2. Try to avoid posting different drafts of the same comment.
3. Try to keep to the topic at hand. This thread, for example, is not about President Obama’s foreign policy, much less President Bush’s. I think Gitmo ought to be closed; I oppose the frequent use of drone strikes; I think the president should have secured congressional approval for our involvement in the NATO intervention in Libya. And none of this is relevant.
4. Try to avoid hurling around words like “socialist” for rhetorical effect. Otherwise people will begin to think either that you’re not to be taken seriously or that you do not know what socialism is.
“The public i.e., the private sector knows how to spend money better than the central government.”
Ken –
You mean like on derivatives and over-sized houses?
Good one Ann – Nobody is perfect of course.
:-)
Obama has just asked at the press conference for tax increases on ‘Millionaires, billionaires, corporate jet owners and hedge fund managers’. these revenue increases will go along with cuts in defense, entitlements. [Hedge fund managers pay at 15% now] Will we keep hearing the charge ,as used by Ken, ‘this is class war’.???. Being on the ‘hard left’ I ask …what’s wrong with non-violent class war? How about those who have the most to lose, ought to be those to contribute the most?. The high end upperclass do not contribute family blood in the wars anymore do they? I say if we don’t draft their children let’s draft their resouces.
Ed –
As I see it, it’s not a matter of the rich, richer, and richest having more to lose. It’s a matter of their having more to be protected by our armed forces, legal system, state dept., etc. As their wealth increases (and yours and mine too) their services from the governments (plural) increase proportionately. So they OWE more for said protection, support of research, etc., etc., etc. But the rich pay proportionately much less all the way up to the super-rich who proportionately pay an obscene amount less for the services they get.
Who does Exxon think the military is defending in the Middle East? Me? You? Well, maybe a bit if we have Exxon stock in our retirement portfolios, or maybe we bought a tiny bit. Whose interests do the courts defend? See Google, etc. Whose kids’ educations are supported by the huge gov’t grants to universities for scientific and medical research so companies like Dow and Genentech won’t have to pay for their own R&D? Why does the State Dept. have commercial attaches’ in foreign country? I could go on.
“Try to keep to the topic at hand. This thread, for example, is not about President Obama’s foreign policy, much less President Bush’s. I think Gitmo ought to be closed; I oppose the frequent use of drone strikes; I think the president should have secured congressional approval for our involvement in the NATO intervention in Libya. And none of this is relevant.”
Actually it is relevant to this topic because progressives have raised defense spending cuts as part of any deal (as it certainly should be). So we must examine our increasing military commitments in light of our fiscal issues. But it seems strange that the GOP is knocked, but we’re supposed to pass over the President’s consistent inconsistencies on cutting spending but expanding military operations.
Ann is probably onto something inasmuch as wealthy folks have more to lose if hordes of Muslim terrorists come rushing int and take over the country. However nobody honestly thinks we are facing hordes of terrorists, and we seriously need to trim our military obligations and expenditures. My gosh, just look at what Iraq and Afghanistan alone are costing us, not to mention the numerous other military bases we have in Europe and the Mediterranean.
We should close all the military bases we have in Europe e.g., Germany, France, Italy and Spain; sell or at least rent out the land. The Soviets will not be invading Poland or Germany anytime soon.
In explaining this sort of foreign policy abroad, I would put it something like. “You know folks, we have been helping out in Iraq and Afghanistan for ten long years now, and our boys have done a good job. However now that we have killed Bin Laden and seriously weakened his minions and Al Qaeda, and considering that we are frankly quite financially strapped, and that in all fairness we need to start paying what we owe to China soon, we are going home; we are done here. Good luck with all this, and if you need any financial help, do not call us; here is the phone number for President Hu Jin Tau over in Beijing.”
As for Libya and Syria and other French & British imperial leftovers, let the French and Brits do something for once; these lands and those folks were British and French subjects after all. We just need to know who is in charge there on any given day, and what the current price of oil is.
To be fair to Iraq and Afghanistan, and to help us pay what we owe China in a more timely manner, I would suspend all foreign aid for a period of ten years. This would add stability internationally in that other government would know what to expect from Uncle Sam.
The only real foreign obligations I can see are the eternal obligation we have to Japan and the support we have by treaty pledged to Taiwan and South Korea.
Otherwise I would bring the troops home, and attend our interests in this hemisphere. There is a lot we should be doing in our own neighborhood; from Canada to Patagonia, and the Caribbean. We would do better to start paying attention to, and cooperating with people who actually do not hate us.
Ross Douthat’s blog entry today “The Parties of No” seems relevant this editorial.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/the-parties-of-no/#
He could have written this sentence with the editorial in mind:
“But like a lot of laments about Republican intransigence and right-wing anti-intellectualism, his piece was written as though America’s other political party doesn’t exist.”
He notes the reactions of liberals to Obama’s Bowles-Simpson commission recommendations, and Nancy Pelosi’s histrionics in relations to Tom Coburn and Joe Lieberman’s Medicare plan they recently released.
Jeff Landry,
Thanks for the link to Ross Douthat’s blog post. I guess my reaction to the post is about the same as Douthat’s reaction to the Fareed Zakaria essay in Time. Douthat lands a few good blows, as he almost always does, but ends up suggesting a false equivalence between Republican and Democratic “anti-intellectualism.” The Republicans’ supply-side nostrums are the real thing: culpable wishful-thinking that has been falsified again and again by history. When, for example, Tim Pawlenty (by no means the least serious Republican presidential candidate) says that tax cuts have always paid for themselves, he is simply repeating something he has heard other Republican politicians say and would like to be true. But it isn’t true, as conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, among many others, has recently pointed out. When Democratic politicians say the way to reform entitlements is not to cut them or privatize them but to fund them better and use them to control overall health-care costs, their proposal may be politically unrealistic but it is not based on a fantasy.
I have a lot of respect for Tom Coburn. Few Senators in either party know as much about fiscal and monetary policy as he does. He’s honest, serious, and brave (as his recent showdown with Grover Norquist demonstrated). But Coburn has nothing interesting to say about our economy’s longterm structural problems, which are not the result of reckless spending in Washington. Middle-class wages have flatlined over the last thirty years. All the gains in GDP have gone to the top. As Robert Reich puts it:
There is no supply-side solution to this problem. Supply-side policies are one of the things that caused the problem in the first place. Like all Republican lawmakers I’ve heard, Coburn talks about the “uncertainty” that’s inhibiting business investment. This is plausible-sounding nonsense. The reason corporations aren’t investing is because there’s not sufficient demand for what they produce; too many people are unemployed, or in debt; too many of the employed have seen their wages cut. Meanwhile, federal revenue as a percentage of GDP is at an all-time low — and much lower than in any other developed country. Coburn’s right about the dysfunction and pusillanimity of our politcal system, but he’s wrong about the basic dynamics of our economy. Needless to say, the two are related. Good fiscal policy requires an awareness of what’s actually happening and what actually works. Commonsense pieties about the private corporations doing a much better job of [fill in the blank] than government bureaucrats are no longer good enough.
Matthew -
I don’t see how you can say he’s engaging in “false equivalence” when he’s pretty clear in his post (and has been for some time) about the “nostrums” of supply-sidism (is that a word?). Whatever else you might say of Douthat, he is one of the consistent critics of a supply-side nostalgia (along with Reihan Salam, Bruce Bartlett and others). So I think it somewhat unfair to conflate supply-sidism with THE conservative position on the economy’s “long term structural problems”, just as I would think it unfair to conflate THE liberal view on entitlement reform with Pelosi’s “no cuts in benefits over my dead body” stance. I think Douthat’s only point is that both sides are engaging in a rather cynical game of political chicken and we would be better served by evaluating the rhetoric of both sides in that light.
As for those “long term structural problems,” there are various and sundry causes for wage stagnation and the growing inequality and the record of supply-sidism is a mixed one (at best), but just as mixed as “stimulitis.” I mostly suscribe to Tyler Cowen’s thesis, which is not that far off from Reich, if from a more libertarian POV.
By the way, I think Douthat is spot on to show that whatever the faults on the right, liberal responses to MODERATE proposals such as Bowles-Simpson have generally been more harsh than the conservative critics to those same proposals. I don’t think it is a false equivalence to equate such denunciations with supply-side nostalgia using your “good fiscal policy” standard.
Matthew B. –
What you said at 5:11. The Reagan over-simPlified economic system that so many Republicans seem incapable of criticizing, just doesn’t work. It’s bad capitalism. Reagan was a lovable man, but a very poor economist.
I should have written that revenue as a percentage of GDP is lower than it’s been in recent history — not that it’s at an “all-time low.” It’s now lower than it’s been since 1950.
Thanks for that figure, Matthew. It’s the bottom line and most revealing of all. We have no real intention of paying our bills, will fight tooth and nail not to do so, all the while insisting on the world’s greatest medical care at least for the middle class. We’re freeloaders, that’s what we are. Face it.
Part of the problem of course is that consumer demand is slack just now. However if we all just think for a moment; why would it not be?
We are all quite “fat” in the sense that most Americans have more things and more toys nowadays than we did back in the 1950’s and 60’s. Back then, most folks were one-car families; now most folks have two or three cars. Then most households had one TV; now most have several.
Since the 1980’s most house holds went from having one TV, one or two phones, a washer-dryer set, standard kitchen appliance set, a standard-sized home, and a standard lawnmower, to having much larger homes (the McMansion syndrome) two or three TVs, cell phones for all, one or two desktop computers and maybe a laptop, movies on-line, much larger homes, a whole platoon f gas or electric powered lawn tools, and the consequent exercise machine(s) to “stay trim”, granitite countertops, new windows, extra refrigerator in the garage, hardwood flooring; basically “the works”.
Now after all that heavy spending comes the hangover. The party is over for now; time to tend our knitting for awhile. We will kick our heels up again when the time is right, but for now consumerism seems to have calmed a bit, the frenzy has quieted some. Also, now is time to pay some bills; namely to China.
Accordingly, we need to trim our expenditures and it seems that we should start with reducing our military obligations and costs. We definitely need to look at other ways to trim the federal budget (e.g. close the Federal Dept of Education and a temporary moratorium of foreign aid), but we should start with trimming military expenditures.
On the tax side, it is true that for the top earners, marginal rates are lower today that in 1950. As such, while nobody likes it, if we can keep Democrats from savaging the top earners too badly, and if Republicans have some reason to believe that Democrats do not want to move us toward a European-style socialized economy, most reasonable Republicans would agree to a modest increase in the marginal tax rates for those who earn the most.
That should help us pay our bills and move along until people feel confident enough to start another economic party.
However, it happens that just now, while no doubt Republicans can keep the left from unduly savaging top earners, Republicans also suspect Democrats, not of wanting to raise taxes just to pay the bills, but rather they suspect, with good reason it seems to me, that Democrats want to raise taxes to gain more control of the economy, to spend the money foolishly or in a corrupt manner (i.e., buying union votes ala old Juan Peron), and to shove the nation’s economy as far as they can, to the Left.
Oops – meant to say “… that [some] Democrats want to raise taxes to gain more control of the economy, to spend the money foolishly . . .”
Ken gives us the GOP/TP point for 2012 i.e.
” as wealthy folks have more to lose if hordes of Muslim terrorists come rushing in and take over the country’.. 50s fear tactic..
I say the only hordes we will see in 2012 will be all the American young and oldsters rushing to the polls to vote out the GOP/TP ‘right wing’ nay sayers out of the House and state offices. ..