Artificially Equalizing Unequal Views on Inequality

The mainstream political press has a horrible tendency to rely on false equivalencies and to conclude, far too simplistically and without nuance or detail, that 'both sides are equally to blame.' It would take much more effort, and seem like taking sides, to call things accurately to the best of their ability, or discuss policy positions in terms of facts and likely outcomes, or contextualize negotiations and other matters for their audience. Even important issues can wind up being poorly covered. Some conclusions, no matter how well supported, are deemed unacceptable; others are essentially predetermined, regardless of the pesky facts. A Washington Post piece from July provides a good example.

The Article

"A think tank wanted to study inequality. It couldn’t get conservatives on board" by Jim Tankersley covers an interesting tidbit. (Its subtitle, "If most of the research on a big economic question comes from one political point of view, can Americans trust it?" seems like an awfully loaded and misleading question, however. To be fair, editors often choose the headlines, not the authors – but Tankersley is listed as the editor for this and other "Storyline" pieces.)

The setup—a new Beltway think tank (Washington Center for Equitable Growth) wants to study an important issue:

What she wanted, [Heather] Boushey said, was to fund an intellectually honest investigation of arguably the hottest issue in American economics right now: the widening gap between the richest Americans and everyone else. She wanted to learn more how and why that gap might hurt the nation’s overall economic performance.

The think tank has some members with a liberal background, but apparently it aims to be inclusive and is officially "non-partisan." Accordingly, it extends a wide invitation:

Boushey was hoping to sign up an ideologically diverse cross-section of thinkers to her effort. . . .

The grant recipients, she explained, would examine questions of inequality and growth from every possible angle, liberal and conservative. They’d report what was true and what wasn’t. Her think tank would live with the findings, whatever they might be.

The think tank's trying to be inclusive and strives to be empirical and data-driven. Sounds good so far. Next, proposals are submitted and grants are given:

There are no identifiably conservative economists among the grantees, however.

Uh-oh! That doesn't sound inclusive! What gives?

No conservative economists applied for grants, among the 70 submissions the center received, Boushey said.

...Oh. Well, it's rather hard to offer a grant to someone who can't even be bothered to apply. Not even one of the 70 applicants was a conservative? That seems remarkable. Why was this? Tankersley theorizes:

Perhaps that’s because the center has, in its early months of existence, engaged in some high-profile blog-and-social-media fights with conservatives over questions of data and policy when it comes to inequality.

Alas, no links are provided for this. This sounds a bit whiny, that the new think tank was mean, so conservatives didn't want to play. The think tank's twitter feed seems fairly anodyne and not combative. Back in May, Boushey did appear on PBS' NewsHour to debate Kevin Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) about Thomas Piketty’s recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, but it's a pretty polite exchange of disagreements. The most charitable possibility (for conservatives) would be that they judged that their contributions would be unwelcome. (It's a paid gig, though. And wouldn't getting paid to skewer a liberal position be tempting?) But Tankersley's speculating anyway, so let's move on. He floats another idea:

Perhaps it’s because it’s relatively rare in Washington for liberal and conservative thinkers to team up to pursue big questions – especially ones that, depending on the answer, could shake party platforms or basic ideological beliefs.

This is a much more convincing hypothesis, especially if one's familiar with the usual conservative stances on inequality. Tankersley continues:

It’s also true, in this case, that a lot of conservative economists have already decided that inequality – as opposed to mobility or the even broader “economic opportunity” – isn’t a problem.

Aha! Yes, this is much stronger, more accurate stuff – conservatives have often stated that inequality is overstated, or that it isn't a problem, or that efforts to ameliorate it cause more harm than good, or all of the above. Tankersley's link is to conservative AEI and its latest 117-page collection of essays, which argue all of these positions. This is good context for the reader.

This is the real challenge posed faced by Boushey, and her center, and the work that will now begin thanks to their grants: If most of the research into an economic issue is being conducted from one side of a political debate, consumers of that research could – and should – look skeptically on its conclusions, until persuaded otherwise. The burden is on the researchers, on their data and the stories they tell from it.

It’s a heavy burden. It would help to have a more diverse group of thinkers shouldering it.

Umm… what? Where did this come from? How does this follow? And a "diverse group" needs to include people who explicitly don't want to study the issue? I suppose "until persuaded otherwise" and the mention of "data" soften this a bit, but this is quite the sharp turn. It also ignores that there's a great deal of solid research on inequality already. For example, Thomas Piketty's aforementioned book, Capital in the 21st Century, is a new, major work in the field, and it's earned praise for its extensive research and synthesis of previous studies. (It's also received plenty of attacks from conservative outlets.) This think tank story, and discussions about inequality in general, do not take place in a vacuum. Let's recap Tankersley's account and conclusion:

1. A think tank wants to study inequality. It invites conservatives to participate.

2. Conservatives completely decline to participate (zero of seventy applicants).

3. It's mentioned but isn't emphasized in the piece that the think tank is sponsoring data-driven work. (A chart of the grantees and their paper topics is included. The findings of previous major studies on inequality are not mentioned.)

4. The conservative position is that inequality doesn't matter. (It's not really explored that justifications for this tend to be ideological versus data-driven. More on this in a bit.)

5. Conservatives have their own think tanks upholding their position.

6. Somehow… the new think tank's conclusions will be suspect and the burden is on its members, despite conservatives rejecting their invitation and rejecting their entire endeavor (not to mention rejecting the findings of previous studies).

Tankersley sure seems to arguing that if conservatives don’t agree with something, it can't be valid (or at the very least, that it must be viewed with great suspicion). There are several glaring problems here.

It's completely reasonable and fair to let different political factions have their say. It's utterly ridiculous, however, to automatically judge that their positions are equally valid and sound – especially when the facts say otherwise. Serious policy discussions require some level of qualitative analysis and judgment. Tankersley offers a variation on the usual predetermined "both sides are equally to blame" conclusion – in this case, he essentially lets conservatives veto the propositions that inequality matters and that it should be studied. He doesn’t provide much context for the reader, but essentially, he's falsely equating an empirical approach (and extensive data from it) by one "side" in a debate with a conservative ideological position against it. (For instance, conservatives will indeed argue that efforts to lessen inequality are ineffective or counterproductive, but their central, much more common argument is that such efforts are morally wrong.)

But Tankersley's conclusion doesn't even follow his own account. He links AEI's collection of papers arguing that inequality doesn't matter (and is overstated, etcetera). How is this point of view not represented, then? Why does the Washington Center for Equitable Growth specifically need to represent it, too? (Especially when they tried to, and offered an invitation that was rejected?) How the hell is this their fault?

Put another way, Tankersley's stated concern is about "research into an economic issue . . . being conducted from one side of a political debate." Based on his own account, either the other side has refused to engage in research, or the other side is already engaged. Yet somehow, the conservatives are still blameless and the fault lies with the more liberal – in this case, the intentionally centrist – faction.

Realistically, the news business is based on sales, ads, and page hits – content is churned out, and some of its quality will suffer. A short, quickly written piece won't give a full account of an issue. However, it should give a roughly accurate account of an issue and some basic context, and Tankersley's piece is striking for its abrupt and ill-fitting conclusion. It reads as if he was writing up an interesting tidbit, then realized he had to end by blaming "both sides," so he took a sharp swerve. He could have tried a familiar Beltway gambit – holding this incident up as an example of political intransigence and then bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship in Washington – and he kind of does this briefly (the less context on the issue one provides, the easier it is to pull off this move). But that route is slightly problematic here, because one "side" is investigating the issue and the other is refusing to do so – so fault must be invented in the name of "balance." Basically, the piece offers a socially driven conclusion versus an empirical or logical one.

The Bigger Picture

Tankersley's piece exemplifies some persistent problems in coverage of policy and political disputes. Let's return to that loaded and misleading subtitle: "If most of the research on a big economic question comes from one political point of view, can Americans trust it?"

This asks for a simple "yes" or "no" in a polarizing fashion, not for deeper reflection. (As Neil Postman put it, poor questions "insinuate that a position must be taken; they do not ask that thought be given.") Why does any political point of view automatically possess virtue, insight and accuracy? The stated attitude is also a major problem in "debates" about climate change and evolution, among other things. What if one "side" rejects empiricism and facts? What if one side consistently lies? What if one side had obvious reasons for arguing in bad faith? In the context of the paucity of conservatives in academia, PZ Myers has tackled this issue (emphasis mine):

Of course if [Jonathan Haidt] believes there’s no real difference between left and right, it’s a problem that the right is poorly represented in academia.

But what if there is a real difference, a difference of substance, in how left and right approach the evidence and how they respect the methods of science? I think the field of social psychology is suffering because they haven’t hired enough serial killers for their tenure line positions. They’d certainly do a good job of making psychologists question their assumptions about the importance of health, happiness, and security in human welfare, and also, someone would be around who could finally intimidate those prissy-pants on the Human Subjects Review Board. Should we complain about the deficiency, or should we recognize that some behaviors are antithetical to the cooperative and responsible pursuit of knowledge?

The problem isn’t that academia excludes conservatives. It’s that it is a rare conservative who doesn’t prioritize the moral foundations (to use Haidt’s own terms) of respect for authority and loyalty to the ingroup above breaking through conventions and assumptions to test the truth. Also, it’s the rare conservative who will accept a job with high admission requirements that also pays a pittance.

(As commenters in a Lawyers, Guns & Money thread on Tankersley's piece point out, conservative think tanks likewise probably pay much better than the new think tank's grants.)

Returning to the subject of inequality, it's not a secret that conservatives generally defend it and oppose efforts to lessen it; this is a core ideological principle. As conservative David Frum explained to Bill Moyers in 2009:

The Republicans are not the party of equality. They're the party of liberty and they're the party of efficiency. . . .

Liberty leads to inequality just as attempts to reduce equality lead to adoption of liberty.

The data don't always cooperate with the conservative position, however. Paul Krugman's written a great deal about inequality over the years, and a recent op-ed, "Inequality Is a Drag," summarizes some recent research:

It’s true that market economies need a certain amount of inequality to function. But American inequality has become so extreme that it’s inflicting a lot of economic damage. And this, in turn, implies that redistribution — that is, taxing the rich and helping the poor — may well raise, not lower, the economy’s growth rate.

You might be tempted to dismiss this notion as wishful thinking, a sort of liberal equivalent of the right-wing fantasy that cutting taxes on the rich actually increases revenue. In fact, however, there is solid evidence, coming from places like the International Monetary Fund, that high inequality is a drag on growth, and that redistribution can be good for the economy.

Earlier this week, the new view about inequality and growth got a boost from Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, which put out a report supporting the view that high inequality is a drag on growth. The agency was summarizing other people’s work, not doing research of its own, and you don’t need to take its judgment as gospel (remember its ludicrous downgrade of United States debt). What S.& P.’s imprimatur shows, however, is just how mainstream the new view of inequality has become. There is, at this point, no reason to believe that comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted is good for growth, and good reason to believe the opposite.

Specifically, if you look systematically at the international evidence on inequality, redistribution, and growth — which is what researchers at the I.M.F. did — you find that lower levels of inequality are associated with faster, not slower, growth. Furthermore, income redistribution at the levels typical of advanced countries (with the United States doing much less than average) is “robustly associated with higher and more durable growth.” That is, there’s no evidence that making the rich richer enriches the nation as a whole, but there’s strong evidence of benefits from making the poor less poor.

(Hullabaloo has covered inequality quite a bit. My most extensive post on the subject is this 2010 one.)

The conservative American Enterprise Institute's aforementioned work on the subject is a collection of essays entitled, Opportunity for All: How to Think about Inequality. I'm not going to go through all 117 pages in detail (you can read it for yourself), but I did want to note a few key arguments. In AEI President Arthur C. Brooks' introduction, he states:

The conventional wisdom on inequality is built on three assumptions: (1) Income inequality is inherently unjust; (2) it is bad for the economy; and (3) government redistribution is the best way to remedy it. According to this narrative, narrowing the gap between what wealthy and working-class Americans earn should be our top political priority, and policies such as raising taxes or increasing the minimum wage are the answer.

It's not encouraging when the opener offers such a huge straw man argument (and tinier ones). "Income inequality is inherently unjust"? As Krugman and others have noted, some inequality is necessary and useful, but beyond a certain amount it is indeed "bad for the economy." Direct government intervention can work, as can indirect intervention, and whether it's the "best" option or not, sometimes it's the only real option (see the New Deal). That's the practical argument. The moral counterargument to Brooks is that, if the political will existed, it would be relatively easy to have a system that still featured inequality but also much more "equality of opportunity" and a higher standard of living for everybody. Compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. does relatively little social spending. Income and wealth inequality have increased over the past few decades, and the rich are being taxed at low levels by historical standards; U.S. taxes could become far more progressive and the richest 1% would still be left immensely privileged, if merely filthy rich versus obscenely wealthy.

In the same vein as Brooks, AEI author Aparna Mathur writes:

Like most Americans, I believe in equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome, which is clearly neither desirable nor attainable.

This is both a false dichotomy and a straw man. (Throw in appeal to the majority, too. What efficiency!) Of course, liberals (and the think tank centrists from earlier) don't seek "equality of outcome"; this is a wearily common conservative straw man tactic, essentially attacking communism and pretending that it's what liberals or European social democrats (or centrists) want. The goals are to reduce inequalities of both opportunities and outcomes, not to eliminate them altogether. In liberalism, governing is a balancing act, and theory and practice inform each other. Outcomes aren't the only concern, but they can't be ignored, either. The entire point of empiricism is to collect good data, which, among other things, entails – duh – looking at outcomes, measuring them and trying to determine causes with greater acuity. If the data show great inequality of opportunity, and also show great inequality of outcome – and the perennially preferred conservative policies to address the former have been shown to be insufficient or simply ineffective – perhaps something else is needed, hmm? If the data show that greater government spending does help, but conservatives oppose that, shouldn't they have to give a good reason and not just their position? If slightly higher taxes on the rich would help fund that spending, why not do it? (And do we really have to pretend that conservative arguments against even slight increases in taxes are always in good faith and with sound reason versus self-interest? Some conservatives are at least forthright about it.) It makes sense that most national political coverage avoids discussion of motives and bad faith, but it's not as if it sticks to the data instead – on inequality, climate change and many other subjects, it's been proven acceptable (for conservatives, at least) to simply say the data don't matter. Only rhetoric (which it would be rude to fact-check) can be allowed to prevail.

"Debates" about inequality do not take place in a vacuum – a long history and context exists. As Krugman observed in a July op-ed, "On Inequality Denial":

Not only do the usual suspects continue to deny the obvious, but they keep rolling out the same discredited arguments: Inequality isn’t really rising; O.K., it’s rising, but it doesn’t matter because we have so much social mobility; anyway, it’s a good thing, and anyone who suggests that it’s a problem is a Marxist.

What may surprise you is the year in which I published that article: 1992.

(Krugman's far from the only one writing about this stuff, but he's awfully good at it.)

That's a fine summing up of the arguments from AEI and other conservative outlets. In the same piece, Krugman also covers criticisms of Piketty's work:

At the risk of giving too much information, here’s the issue. We have two sources of evidence on both income and wealth: surveys, in which people are asked about their finances, and tax data. Survey data, while useful for tracking the poor and the middle class, notoriously understate top incomes and wealth — loosely speaking, because it’s hard to interview enough billionaires. So studies of the 1 percent, the 0.1 percent, and so on rely mainly on tax data. The Financial Times critique, however, compared older estimates of wealth concentration based on tax data with more recent estimates based on surveys; this produced an automatic bias against finding an upward trend.

In short, this latest attempt to debunk the notion that we’ve become a vastly more unequal society has itself been debunked. And you should have expected that. There are so many independent indicators pointing to sharply rising inequality, from the soaring prices of high-end real estate to the booming markets for luxury goods, that any claim that inequality isn’t rising almost has to be based on faulty data analysis.

Yet inequality denial persists, for pretty much the same reasons that climate change denial persists: there are powerful groups with a strong interest in rejecting the facts, or at least creating a fog of doubt. Indeed, you can be sure that the claim “The Piketty numbers are all wrong” will be endlessly repeated even though that claim quickly collapsed under scrutiny. . . .

This picture makes some people uncomfortable, because it plays into populist demands for higher taxes on the rich. But good ideas don’t need to be sold on false pretenses. If the argument against populism rests on bogus claims about inequality, you should consider the possibility that the populists are right.

Exactly. But then both sides aren't equally to blame, and there's no good reason to oppose policies helpful for the middle class (and poor) that powerful groups do in fact oppose. That's awkward for media outlets that traditionally toe the establishment line.

Moral arguments have their place (and can have great value), but the honest use of data is extremely helpful for cutting through biases and grounding those arguments. 'My ideology states that I don't need to care' is a position, not a true argument, and shouldn't cut it in serious discussions. Validating it amounts to empowering the fanatic's veto – it isn't even-handed; it's irresponsible. Having an open mind entails giving someone a fair hearing, not ignoring all evidence, judging all opinions equally sound or turning off one's bullshit detector. False equivalencies do not serve the audience (but unintentionally or not, they do serve other parties).

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

The Republican Candidates' Tax Proposals

The American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches has a neat graphic of the Republican presidential candidates' tax proposals. Three want to impose a flat tax, that would of course massively benefit the rich. In a similar vein, six would seek not just to lower the estate tax, but eliminate it altogether (alas, a standard position in their party). Because the estate tax already has a very large exemption built in (currently, it's 5 million for an individual), it only affects the most wealthy individuals, and even they can still pass on a tremendous amount of wealth. So, most of the Republican field favors measures that would simultaneously massively benefit the most rich and make the deficit they claim to care about so intensely... much worse. (Note that this chart still counts Michele Bachmann, who only recently dropped out, but not Herman Cain, who also proposed a flat tax, lowering the corporate tax rate, and eliminating the estate tax.)

Most likely, none of this is news to any regular readers, but head over to check out the whole graphic. (Hat tip to Blue Gal, who's running MBR this week.)

Estate taxes are a very old concept, arguably the most progressive part of our tax system, and one of the few remaining bulwarks against complete plutocracy in America. There are many reasons to oppose the Republican Party as it currently stands, but the almost uniform commitment of its leaders to immoral and irresponsible policies in the taxation/fiscal/economic realm, and their decades-long bad faith on such issues, is certainly way up there.

Update 1/5/12: Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice has more on Romney's tax proposals. In a huge shock, Romney, the richest of all the candidates by a long shot, proposes giving himself another huge tax break (and raising taxes slightly on the poor).

As a few people have noted, they're really all cartoon villains at heart, aren't they?

Labor Day 2011

Since it's Labor Day, it's a good time to revisit some labor history, both from the last century (the Great Depression and the New Deal) and more recent times (the battle in Wisconsin and other states, and the lackluster discussion of jobs in Washington). Here's a roundup of sorts.

A new book is out on labor icon Joe Hill. New evidence strongly suggests that he was innocent of the murder charges brought against him and was unjustly executed.

PBS' American Experience has a series of episodes on the 1930s, including an excellent one on The Civilian Conservation Corps you can watch online. I wish the New Deal was better remembered, understood, and emulated.

Mike Lux, who occasionally blogs at Crooks and Liars these days, wrote a book published in 2009 titled The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.

Over at Hullabaloo, Dennis Hartley has put together a list of the Top Ten Labor Films. It's a good list, with further discussion in the comments. I'm particularly fond of John Sayles' Matewan, and Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning docs, Harlan County U.S.A. and American Dream. (There are a few mentioned in the list and in comments I still need to see.)

Jill has posted labor songs at Brilliant at Breakfast, and links a list of Ten things you can thank labor unions for:

1. The creation of the middle class in America

2. Employer sponsored health insurance

3. Your pension

4. Forty hour work weeks

5. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA)

6. Paid sick leave

7. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

8. Workers’ Compensation

9. Vacation leave

10. Child labor laws

At Balloon Juice, DougJ has set up a Labor Day Music Thread. Also at BJ, Anne Laurie quotes Harold Meyerson's " The fallacy of post-industrial prosperity," E.J. Dionne's "The Last Labor Day?" and an old line attributed to robber baron Jay Gould: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

Kevin Drum offers "My Jobs Plan: A Trillion Dollars For Infrastructure" (H/T Ursus.)

To the Point's show today was "Labor Day, Unemployment and Obama's Jobs Plan."

It bears taking a closer look at the New Deal and similar policies, and their misguided or disingenuous critics. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933, and his policies proved far more effective at combating the Great Depression than those of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. FDR's New Deal was extremely successful at reducing unemployment, most notably by creating infrastructure projects, which in turn stimulated economic growth. FDR wasn't perfect, and his biggest mistake economically was probably bowing to pressure about deficits and cutting back on the New Deal in 1937. There are quite a few articles about this, but David Woolner's piece "The history lesson Obama has ignored" is a good summary. (Salon covers labor and economic issues pretty well.) Roughly speaking, the New Deal was extremely helpful but insufficient (FDR resisted going further); full recovery wasn't achieved until higher WWII spending kicked in. Paul Krugman has explained these dynamics countless times, and that non-military spending can accomplish the same thing. Christina Romer and Krugman recently explained this once again.

Despite – and because – of the success of these policies, there are people who oppose them, for ideological and/or political reasons. Gene Lyons explained the Republican Party's political angle well in his June piece, "How to sabotage a recovery":

Balance the budget during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression? Should Obama repeat Franklin D. Roosevelt's bad mistake of 1937, when "budget hawks" prevailed, very nearly stifling the New Deal?

That's certainly what the GOP wants. Whether leading Republicans actually believe that returning to the economic practices of the 1920s would be good for the nation is hard to say. Some may be pretending.

The House's freshman contingent appears sincerely misguided. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asks sarcastically if what Tea Partyers want is a low-tax, limited government haven of conservative religious values like ... Pakistan.

Not really. What most have in mind is something more like the Deep South of the 1950s -- an imagined paradise with comfortable "aristocrats," a timid middle class, and beaten-down peasants at each other's throats.

Pretty much, although this ideal isn't always conscious, and certainly isn't sold honestly to the American people as a whole - it's just understood by conservatives as "the way things should be."

Conservative think tanks have long attacked the New Deal and similar programs, and hackery on the subject can pay well. Historian Eric Rauschway, who's written quite a bit on the Great Depression and the New Deal, has often debunked the false claims of New Deal foes, particularly Amity Shlaes. Basically, Shlaes and other conservatives pretend that government jobs don't count as jobs, which would come as a shock to the many families and communities who have prospered because of them. In this 2007 piece, Rauschway critiques Shlaes and Grover Norquist. He followed this up in 2008 with a series of posts, "(Very) short reading list: unemployment in the 1930s," "Stop lying about Roosevelt’s record," and "When is it lying?" (Megan McArdle shows up in this series, and you'll be shocked to learn she attacked the New Deal and was wrong yet again.) Brad Delong and Rauschway have also fact-checked Lee Ohanian, who bizarrely claims that "Herbert Hoover's pro-labor stance helped cause the Great Depression."

Returning to the present day, Steve Benen recently wrote a good series of posts political opposition to successful economic policies. "'Republicans are Listening'? To Whom?" points out that Republicans are trying to slash regulations yet again, even though business owners are not seeking this and some welcome new regulations. In "A recipe for failure," Benen examines our screwed-up political landscape, and how Republican obstructionism (or sabotage) helps them:

Arguably one of the most dramatic Democratic dilemmas of 2011 and 2012 is overcoming the realization that Republicans are getting their way on economic policy and then denying any responsibility for the results. Indeed, it’s a rather extraordinary con: GOP officials see much of their agenda implemented, then see it fail, and then blame Obama when their policies don’t work.

Under ideal circumstances, the president would come up with an economic plan and execute it. If the agenda succeeded, he’d get the credit. If it faltered, Republicans would call him on it. Voters could evaluate the results and decide whether to keep the president around or go back to GOP economic policies.

Yeah, a functioning republic would be nice, huh? Benen looks at some Jared Bernstein charts in "What works?":

Put away the spin, the polls, the talking points, and the ideological axes to grind, and we’re left with a pretty simple truth: things were getting worse, then the stimulus started, then they got better. This isn’t even controversial; it’s as plain as day.

Bernstein added, “I know — this ain’t about the evidence. But I will never accept that condition and neither should anyone else. That’s the way societies decline and I’d kind of like to avoid that.”

Agreed. If, as [David] Leonhardt put it, the only meaningful question is, “What works?” then the answer matters for those who care about the consequences — and everyone should care about the consequences.

Now, under the Republican worldview, the results highlighted in Bernstein’s charts should be impossible. Democrats spent a lot of money, imposed their preferred regulations, prevented public-sector layoffs at the state and local level, and added a lot of money to the federal budget deficit.

And yet, almost immediately, the economy grew and the job market got significantly better.

I imagine some conservatives will look at this and say, “Well, yeah, but it didn’t last and now we’re slipping backwards.” That’s true, but it only reinforces the left’s argument — the stimulus made things better, but as the funding faded, so too did the economy. Common sense, again, should tell us do more of what worked, and in this case, fairly aggressive public investments expanded the economy and created jobs.

Ergo, if we now want to expand the economy and create jobs, we know what to do because we already know what works.

It’s not theoretical or some abstract idea — we know what we tried and saw what made a difference. Likewise, here we are in 2011 trying conservative austerity ideas, and we see that they’re not working.

So here’s a radical idea: why not go with the most effective policies again?

Alas, basic competence and practicality are viewed as radical by conservatives. It's not that the New Deal or the more modest 2009 stimulus didn't or don't work; it's just that conservatives don't support them, for ideological and political reasons. Sadly, the Republican Party as a whole has no interest in responsible governance, and this has been the case for some time now. Some conservatives actively seek to destroy a functioning government, through starve-the-beast and other measures. It's important to remember that for conservatives, the evidence often just doesn't matter, and the "epistemic closure" and the right-wing echo chamber of falsehoods are features, not bugs. Conservatives didn't read Amity Shlaes' work and become convinced she was right – and then somehow surprisingly miss all the fact-checking that debunked her false claims about the New Deal and the efficacy of jobs programs. Shlaes simply told conservatives what they wanted to hear, and what some of them actually believe (perhaps winning some converts along the way). She didn't offer them greater knowledge or understanding of the New Deal; she offered them lies as ammunition for their preferred policies.

Overwhelmingly, movement conservatives just don't care about the people Lance Mannion described in his 2009 piece, "The Invisibles":

I'm getting used to the fact that in the minds of Republicans, working people whose paychecks come from the local, state, or federal government don't exist. Their jobs don't count as jobs and the money they earn and spend on food, clothing, rent or a mortgage, and to pay taxes doesn't work its way into the economy as a whole but vanishes into the ether, its existence proved only by red ink in the budgets and higher taxes Republicans have to pay.

This is how Right Wing agitprop minister and pseudo-historian Amity Shlaes is able to argue that the New Deal didn't reduced unemployment. She counts government workers as unemployed---until 1942; government workers who wear uniforms and carry rifles belong to a special category of government workers who somehow don't count as government workers.

This is how the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is able to claim that the government never created a job, despite the paychecks he has collected from government and despite the fact his job is to help lots of Republicans get government jobs.

This is how Senator John Ensign can blithely suggest that his home state of Nevada can cut services without the workers who provide those services losing their jobs. Those workers don't exist to him as people. They're just bloat.

And it's not only people whose checks are signed by a government employee who are invisible. People whose companies depend on the contracts they have with the government, people who build and repair roads and schools and dams and canals and levees and ports, people who sell things for money from cashed government paychecks, and fix roofs and serve meals and wash cars and deliver flowers and pick up trash for money from cashed government paychecks---they're all invisible too.

Exactly, and it's crucial that everybody doesn't play along and buy into this irresponsible and cruel mindset. NPR is running a story called "Bumps on the Road Back to Work" today. It's part of an ongoing series on unemployment, and does a good job of showing the lives of some of those "invisibles." To combat all the bad economic policies, plutocracy and callousness out there, it's important to remind people of history, to point out the facts on effective policies, and to direct attention to the very, real present-day struggles of many Americans. Things don't have to be this way. (Plus, don't forget the arts.)

Thou Shalt Not Question Supply-Side Jesus

Over at Hullabaloo, David Atkins (thereisnospoon) has an excellent short post:

Has anyone in the media considered asking the Republican presidential hopefuls a few simple questions:

• In real dollar terms, how much more money do the rich need before they can create jobs?

• What would happen to the economy if we returned to Clinton era tax rates on the rich?

• Do you know what the marginal tax rates were under Eisenhower? Under Nixon? Why do you think the American economy was booming under those tax rates?

• What did an average college education cost at a public university in the 1960s? Why do we force our kids into a lifetime of student loan debt today?

• If the entire economy is hurting and everyone needs to tighten their belts in shared sacrifice, why are corporations showing record profits?

• Do tax cuts increase or decrease revenue? What tax rate percentage would change that equation?

Any one of these questions would throw the entire conservative messaging agenda on its ear. They're really simple questions, and they're pretty much the core questions that need answering.

And yet no one in the media is asking these questions. Which tells you everything you need to know.

I would love to see this actually happen. By all means, political figures should be able to make whatever claims they want, but it's unconscionable that even when they make outrageously false statements, they've rarely fact-checked or challenged. Conservatives have been making ridiculousy false claims about economics and taxes for decades now, yet they're rarely contested.

It's also crucial to recognize how much of conservative economic dogma is spouted in bad faith. Here's a Jonathan Chait piece from October 2010 I've featured before:

In 1993, conservatives unanimously predicted that Bill Clinton's tax increase on incomes over $200,000 would slow growth, reduce tax revenues, and likely cause a recession. Instead, of course, the economy boomed and revenue skyrocketed. Then George W. Bush cut upper-bracket tax rates, and conservatives predicted that this would cause the economy to grow even faster. Instead, the economy experienced the first business cycle where income was lower at the peak of the business cycle than it had been at the peak of the previous business cycle. It is rare that events so utterly repudiate an economic theory.

None of this evidence has penetrated the conservative mind to the slightest degree. Reading the right-wing press, it is exactly as true today as it was 18 years ago that reducing Clinton-era upper-bracket tax rates holds the key to economic growth. (The latest Weekly Standard editorial: The best place to combine fiscal rectitude and pro-growth economics is the tax code. "After repealing Obama-care, the second agenda item for the new GOP Congress is extending current tax rates.")

Paul Krugman, Digby and others have made this same basic point as well. Stop to really consider what it is, because it can't be overemphasized. Let's be charitable, and posit that the conservatives of just a decade or two ago truly, sincerely believed that Reaganomics, supply-side economics and big tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans really would help the economy and that raising taxes even extremely slightly on the rich would hurt it. Okay. But they were given proof positive that they were completely, utterly wrong on both counts.

Despite this – despite this being basic, public knowledge – despite it being the job of politicos to follow politics and study at least some rudimentary policy and recent history – despite the health of the economy being a central concern of every politician – we hear conservatives spouting the same falsehoods today.

Hmm. How could this be?

In stupid-evil-crazy terms, some may be genuinely dumb. Some others may be such zealots they have no interest in objective reality. Still others, a larger group, are bullshitters, in the sense that they simply don't care whether what they're saying is true or not; shilling for the rich pays well. And some know damn well what they're pitching is completely false.

Regardless, they should know better, and most do. I get very tired of people insisting that obvious scoundrels are arguing in good faith. If Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Mitt Romney and the rest really cared about stimulating the economy rather than funneling even more money to the plutocrats, they wouldn't completely ignore recent history. If they were honorable people and sincerely wrong, when reality showed that they were wrong, they would have changed their approach.

This is, once again, why "common ground" is so elusive. Virtually no Republicans care about responsible governance, and for decades now (starting with Reagan) they have abandoned fiscal responsibility. They serve only 25% of the populace at best, and truly only serve the richest 2%. The Republican approach, a reckless, mean and plutocratic one, interferes with a healthy economy, a functioning government and a functioning democracy.

There's much more on all this in "Attack of the Plutocrats," "Tax Cuts to the Rich Don't Raise Revenues," "The Persistence of Ideology," and most recently, "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice." (I'm overdue on a few follow-up posts.)

The People's Budget

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has produced The People's Budget, a genuinely smart and responsible way to address fiscal and economic issues in America. It's refreshing to read after all the lavish Beltway praise heaped on Republican Paul Ryan's fraudulent, cruel budget built of supply-side fairy dust... not to mention thirty-some years of conservative fiscal irresponsibility and recklessness as official Republican policy.

Follow the link, and you can read a budget overview and a technical analysis.

The CPC proposal:

• Eliminates the deficits and creates a surplus by 2021
• Puts America back to work with a “Make it in America” jobs program
• Protects the social safety net
• Ends the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Is FAIR (Fixing America’s Inequality Responsibly)

What the proposal accomplishes:

• Primary budget balance by 2014.
• Budget surplus by 2021.
• Reduces public debt as a share of GDP to 64.1% by 2021, down 16.5 percentage points from a baseline fully adjusted for both the doc fix and the AMT patch.
• Reduces deficits by $5.6 trillion over 2012-21, relative to this adjusted baseline.
• Outlays equal to 22.2% of GDP and revenue equal 22.3% of GDP by 2021.

Paul Krugman writes:

I’ve been remiss in not calling attention to the budget proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It’s not going to happen — but then neither is the Ryan plan. And unlike the Ryan plan, it actually makes sense.

The CPC plan essentially balances the budget through higher taxes and defense cuts, plus some tougher bargaining by Medicare (and a public option to reduce the costs of the Affordable Care Act). The proposed tax hikes would fall mainly on higher incomes, although not just on the top 2%: super-brackets for very high incomes, elimination of deductions, taxation of capital income as ordinary income, and — the part that would be most controversial — raising the cap on payroll taxes.

None of this is economically outlandish. Marginal tax rates on high incomes would rise substantially — enough to make even liberal economists slightly uncomfortable — but the historical evidence suggests that the incentive effects wouldn’t be too severe. Overall taxes as a share of GDP aren’t given, but they would clearly remain well below European levels.

It’s worth pointing out that if you want to balance the budget in 10 years, you pretty much must do it largely by cutting defense and raising taxes; you can’t make huge cuts in the rest of the budget without inflicting extreme pain on millions of Americans. So the CPC plan is actually much more of a real response to the deficit worriers than all the nonsense we’re hearing from the right. What it doesn’t do is address the long-run health cost issue, which is essential looking beyond the next decade. But as a medium-term proposal, it’s quite sensible.

My guess, in fact, is that in the end we’ll do something along these lines, although probably with more of the tax burden falling on the middle class.

So why does this plan get no attention, while the cruel fantasies of the right get headlines? I’ll leave that as a question for readers.

I linked some earlier liberal proposals in a December post that centered on a cool (if limited) interactive feature from New York Times that allowed readers to balance the budget. The main obstacle to fiscal sanity is political will. The Republicans are entirely plutocratic and corrupt, and the Democrats are partially so. It's crazy that the Ryan budget can be treated as "serious," and I wish liberal plans were given much more attention – because they work and typically benefit everybody, not just the rich and powerful. Responsible governance – what a radical concept!

Update: Blogger was down for a while, and this post was taken off-line, which also erased the comments on the post.

Stliglitz on the Richest 1%

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has a great article in Vanity Fair titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%":

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow...

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead...

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

Do read the rest. Stiglitz was on Democracy Now on 4/7/11 to discuss the article. A later story in the same show covered the Republican push to "privatize Medicare and gut Medicaid," and of course the two stories are related.

Meanwhile, To the Point did a good show today on Income Inequality and Social Justice in America." Guests included NYT columnist Mark Bittman, speaking on his recent fasting for the poor; Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, speaking briefly about his study on wealth inequity (Americans are largely unaware of how bad it is, but even most of the wealthy would prefer less inequity); and Eric Schoenberg of Responsible Wealth, a group of rich folks who want to taxes on the wealthy to increase. A glibertarian and a free marketeer also spoke.

I keep on linking two posts from last year, "Attack of the Plutocrats" and "The Social Contract," because these issues seem central to almost every domestic political battle.

The Wrong Cure

Here's a good video from the British group False Economy on proposed economic "solutions":

Why cuts are the wrong cure from False Economy on Vimeo.

(Via Cookie Jill at skippy's place.)

Aristocrats and Peasants

Digby's been writing a great deal of good stuff on plutocracy and the insular Villager mindset recently. Her post "Yearning to be Subjects" touches on the Estate Tax, and quotes from an intriguing essay by Phil Agre:

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats.

More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy.

In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

Insightful stuff. I've touched on some similar themes before ("Attack of the Plutocrats," "The Social Contract," "The Five Circles of Conservative Hell," "We Cheat the Other Guy and Pass the Savings to You") and will likely explore them further. Reasonable, self-described conservatives who believe in the social contract and competent governance do exist, but they sure as hell aren't running the Republican Party (nor the Democratic Blue Dog Caucus). Aristocrats and authoritarian conservatives have never been fans of the whole "democracy" thing. They're wielding a great deal of power right now, and they're doing so recklessly, even nihilistically.

As Bill Moyers has said, "plutocracy and democracy don't mix." I'm increasingly coming to think that plutocracy - or plutonomy - is the biggest issue of our time in America, affecting almost everything else: taxes, health care, the social safety net, infrastructure spending, education, climate change, scientific research, the arts and humanities, the surveillence state, indefinite detention, and endless wars. It greatly affects our news coverage as well, which makes Blue Gal's big cause, media reform, awfully important.

Also - isn't it striking that many of the people currently hollering about the Constitution the loudest are so hostile to the Enlightenment values at its core?

On a lighter note, I also can't help but think of some classic cinema:


"Who's that then?"
"I dunno, must be a king."
"Why?"
"He hasn't got shit all over him."

 

The Rich and Wealthy (Now in Video!)

Here are three rather different approaches to explaining how the game just ain't the same for the rich and wealthy. First up, some animation (from October 2004) by Lee Arnold explaining "The Bush Tax Cuts." (Via Linda Beale of ataxingmatter and Angry Bear.)



Next up, via David Dayen, here's Al Franken's floor speech from last week on tax cuts, unemployment and wealth:



Finally, Chris Rock explains the difference between being "rich" and having "wealth" (NSFW):

Give the Millionaires More Money or the Country Gets It

This post title pretty much sums up the Republican approach to economic and fiscal matters for the past ten to thirty years. However, the latest shameful but unsurprising development came with a Republican letter last Wednesday, 12/1/10:

ALL 42 SENATE REPUBLICANS ANNOUNCE HOSTAGE PLAN.... The AP had an item late last night, noting that Senate Republicans were circulating a letter, "quietly collecting signatures" on a plan to "block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending."

This morning, the Senate GOP leadership unveiled their letter -- signed by literally all 42 members of the Republican caucus -- declaring their intention to hold the chamber hostage until the tax policy debate is resolved.

"[W]e write to inform you that we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers. With little time left in this Congressional session, legislative scheduling should be focused on these critical priorities. While there are other items that might ultimately be worthy of the Senate's attention, we cannot agree to prioritize any matters above the critical issues of funding the government and preventing a job-killing tax hike."

In practical terms, this means that the Senate Republican caucus will join arms and kill literally every piece of legislation in the lame-duck session -- New START, funding U.S. troops, the DREAM Act, etc. -- until the government is fully funded and they're satisfied with the outcome of the debate on tax policy...

* Postscript: Also note the unstated truth behind the threat -- Republicans will block literally everything until they're satisfied, at which point, they'll try to block literally everything anyway.

This is the hill the Republicans have chosen to die on. This. Despite the economic hardship many Americans are facing, despite the holiday season, these fuckers will insist that unemployment benefits have to be paid for, that hungry kids shouldn't get meals, but funneling more money to the rich requires no justification whatsoever. It's unconscionable. Even Scrooge didn't actively campaign to close the workhouses.

Yet as despicable as this is, this simply makes explicit a long-existing Republican agenda and strategy. They've been flogging the same plutocratic positions for months now. According to the CBPP, a truly staggering "two-thirds of the nation's total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households." Continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans is bad policy, and despite conservative claims about a "mandate" to push their plutocratic agenda, the American people strongly support letting taxes rise again on the rich. Let's also keep in mind that Bush and the Republicans designed the tax cuts to expire to avoid normal budgeting rules because they were so fiscally irresponsible, that only the rich's top marginal rate would rise and they'll benefit from the other tax cuts, and the increase in that marginal rate is pretty miniscule. The tax cuts to those richest 2% are estimated to cost 700 billion over the next decade alone, or 830 billion if one counts interest payments. I agree with Paul Krugman and others that the tax cut money would be better spent on jobs programs (including infrastructure spending) instead. However, at least tax cuts to the middle class and poor have some stimulative effect.

Many commenters have described this as a "hostage" situation. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) was on NPR last Wednesday, and Robert Siegel asked him about the letter. You can read the transcript and listen to the audio here. For me, this was the key exchange:

SIEGEL: Senator Gregg, I just want to ask you about the letter that you and all the Republicans in the Senate signed today, the letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid, saying: We write to inform you that we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers.

In effect, you're saying, nothing happens until you extend the Bush tax cuts. Something sounds - it sounds more like a we're putting a gun to your head, rather than we're here to cooperate together in the lame-duck session.

Sen. GREGG: That would be an NPR take on something like that. But as a very practical matter, it's just the opposite. Simple fact is that the Democratic leader continues to bring forward miscellaneous legislation in a lame-duck, which is an inappropriate way to bring it forward, and then fill the tree so the minority has no right to amend. That's wrong.

Was Siegel rude? Did he deserve that response? Did Gregg really answer the question? I'd say no for all three. Siegel has often asked members of Congress how they'll balance the budget given their proposed tax cuts. His question was on point, especially given that this was a drastic if not unprecedented action from the GOP. Gregg's attack on NPR sounded pretty thuggish to me, an aggressive way to dodge the question that played on recent Republican threats to defund NPR. Consider, too, that Gregg was courted for a position in the Obama White House, and a couple of years ago was viewed by some folks as one of those "reasonable," practical conservatives interested in bipartisan efforts to solve real problems. Bad though he is, he's less extreme than some others in his party.

Since that appearance, the House passed a bill to extend the middle class tax cuts only, but the Senate Republicans and some conservative Democrats have blocked that measure despite being the minority (the vote was 53-36 – thank you, filibuster). We'll see what happens next, but the current plan appears to be lousy but not completely disastrous, in fine congressional tradition. (It's horrible in some respects.)

Conservatives were angered by Steve Benen's thought experiment that the Republican Party was deliberately sabotaging the economy for political gain, but at this point, the best defense is that conservatives are merely stupid or crazy and not completely evil. John Boehner's position on the tax cuts is indefensible if one believes that political leaders should be rational and responsible – or thay they should, at the very least, serve their own constituents. Besides, it's not as if conservatives have never heard of the data that skewers their dogma.

As usual, the framework for discussion/debate is horribly skewed, and the Overton window badly needs to shift. The debate in Congress should be how much should we raise taxes on the rich, not whether it should be done at all. As Economist Mom points out, the Bush tax cuts never should have been passed at all – yet now, a policy of fiscal irresponsibility is seen inside the Beltway as the norm.

As I've written before, the Republican Party is nihilistic, obstructionist and completely plutocratic. The Democratic Party is partially plutocratic and corrupt. To riff a bit on an earlier post, when it comes to policy this generally plays out as follows:

The liberals push to invest in the middle class (and poor), and to take on the rich and powerful. (There's a certain style of "social contract" conservative that supports this too, if more timidly.) The liberal position is largely marginalized in Congress and in the corporate media, if it's heard at all.

The Democratic Party will give some things to the middle class and poor, while generally avoiding taking on the rich and powerful. This means some things get better, while some things get worse due to negligence, timidity and watered-down measures (for instance, weak financial reform that won't prevent more skullduggery).

Conservatives in the Democratic and Republican Parties will give some things to the middle class and poor, but hold these measures hostage to even bigger giveaways to the rich and powerful. This shifts the power balance even more for the plutocrats, if a piece at a time. (The deal currently shaping up seems to be in this vein.)

Far right conservatives give very little, if anything at all, to the middle class and poor. In fact, they actively work to screw over their own constituents by destroying the social safety net and other programs. They also actively work to give more money and power to those who are already rich and powerful. Whether unwittingly or eagerly (the ol' Stupid-Evil-Crazy question), they are making America into more of a plutocracy.

Meanwhile, the meta-game played by conservatives all the time is You're not supposed to win, and You're not supposed to fight back. It's why they're such bullies in power and such whiners out of it, and completely inconsistent with every principle save their insistence on getting their way on their pique du jour.

Mistermix at Balloon Juice has a similar take:

As Tim F. posted earlier, Ezra Klein thinks that Obama’s a bad poker player. He may be right, but the analogy isn’t helpful. Poker is a win/lose game. Negotiation is a win/win game, because both parties get something when a deal is struck. Republicans aren’t playing poker or negotiating. They are playing another game, call it “You Must Lose”. They’re happy with win/lose, if they win, but they’ll tolerate lose/lose as long as Obama loses.

The only analogy that springs to mind when I look at the Republicans’ recent behavior is a bad divorce. Think of a situation where Lisa and Bob are getting a divorce, and Bob is so hell-bent on hurting Lisa that he doesn’t care about their kids or their bank account. Bob will deploy a hundred variations on the same tactic: put the Lisa in a bind where she has to choose between damaging the children and losing money. Lisa will lose money almost every time in order to save the children.

In this situation, capitulation is inevitable, the only question is what form it will take.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has another apt analogy that several liberal bloggers have used:

I've said this over and over again on the blog, but I'll say it again: the analogy that seems apt to me is spousal abuse.

Abusers, like Republicans, work to assert absolute control, and severely punish violations of an often changeable set of rules. They try to avoid harm to themselves, and often succeed for years in avoiding negative consequences, usually by persuading those who might hold them accountable that they're fine, upstanding citizens -- but when they're pushed to the limits of their anger, they're likely to throw self-preservation to the winds and do anything to reestablish their dominance. It's no surprise when an abusive relationship ends in murder-suicide.

At this point I'm not sure whether Republicans even give a thought to what kind of country they'll inherit when (inevitably) they seize control of the entire federal government in 2012. And I'm not sure they care anymore. I'm not sure they care all that much anymore about privatizing Social Security or eviscerating the progressive income tax or nuking Iran. They just want to destroy the Democratic Party and (as they see it) murder liberalism. I'm not sure they care anymore what happens after that.

This situation is atrocious, and the GOP's behavior is unconscionable. America really needs its two major political parties to both be responsible. Instead, as Bill Maher's put it, we have a "center-right party, and a crazy party." The GOP continues to become more and more nihilistic, and they show no signs of stopping. Whether it's fighting to the death to funnel more money to the richest Americans, denying global warming, or refusing to ratify an essential treaty solely out of spite, there are simply no responsible adults running the Republican Party.

 

The Federal Budget Puzzle

The New York Times has a cool interactive feature where you can balance the federal budget, addressing both the medium term deficit of 2015 and the more long-term deficit of 2030. It gives a set of options, most of them based on actual proposals that have been made. It will also show you the percentage of your savings that come from tax increases versus spending cuts. David Leonhardt has written an article about the feature, and also more about the NYT's deficit project and its methodology. Meanwhile, their Room for Debate blog has asked 16 people to weigh in on deficit solutions.

I've played with the feature a few times, normally winding up with around 32% in spending cuts and 68% in new taxes. I've seen several other results on the web, including Simon Johnson's (he has a 50-50 split.). It's actually quite easy to balance the budget if you simply cut military spending (ending wars helps) and crack down on the plutocrats. I left the middle class and poor mostly alone, and didn't touch federal employment much, because it's normally cost-effective or economically stimulative (as with federal aid to states). The feature has its limitations, and won't let you, for example, restore taxes on the rich and wealthy to pre-Reagan rates or add more than one slightly steeper marginal tax bracket at the top. The health care reform options are extremely limited, and some of the other "solutions" offered aren't the best. Still, this project is a fantastic idea and the feature is well-designed. It's educational and a great way to start conversations. Among other things, looking over the proposals and the estimated savings show how just slightly higher taxes on the rich, with a few higher marginal brackets, would solve a great deal. (You know, the same people who've made out like bandits over the past ten-thirty years, and the chief beneficiaries of that roughly five trillion the Bush administration added to the national debt.) The feature also reveals how inadequate or ludicrous some of the current fashionable proposals are. For example, cutting foreign aid (a favorite target of John McCain and other conservatives) barely makes a dent. And as was often pointed out during the health care "debate," the GOP's plan for medical malpractice reform amounted to little more than buzz words, wholly inadequate for fixing America's health care problems. Similarly, the conservative mantras about curbing government "spending" tend to be simplistic at best, dishonest at worst (Fiorina's performance on this front remains one of the funniest). However, it's one thing to hear those things or read them, and another thing to see them in this feature, especially if you're the visually-oriented type.

Leonhardt writes, "Arguably, economic growth is the most important yardstick for any plan." As Digby has pointed out, the Democrats should have been arguing that "jobs = deficit reduction" from the get-go. (The Republicans should have been doing so, too, but they don't like to admit it.) When Obama was elected, plenty of liberals called for a New New Deal, but the Obama administration and congressional Democrats largely ignored that argument. The stimulus bill did some good, but it was too small.

I do think (with the Stupid-Evil-Crazy Vortex in mind), some of the opposition to New Deal solutions like jobs programs is purely ideological or irrational, and not truly evil – although there's plenty of evil there, too. (Really every conservative think tank is dedicated to spreading paired lies – that the middle-class-focused New Deal was a failure and that plutocratic Reaganomics have been a great success.) The dogmatic objections have never made much sense to me. The pragmatic argument is, if it works, why not do it? The moral argument is, how is giving someone a job – that actually does some useful work, by the way – possibly a bad thing? I'd refer anti-government absolutists yet again to my Godzilla model of power and politics. If private industry wants to create jobs, great, but they're not doing it, and instead non-financial companies alone are sitting on 1.8 trillion in reserves. (This is, by the way, further repudiation of supply-side economics and further argument for traditional demand-based economic models. Remember when "conservatives" respected that tradition?)

One of the problems with the New York Times feature (good though it is), and all of this deficit chatter, is that it distracts from the much more important issues of job creation and how to stimulate the economy. (Media Matters and some others have made the same point. Media Matters also points out that the NYT badly misuses the term "moderate" regarding the estate tax.) It'd be neat to have another interactive feature that addressed that. Even if it might be more speculative in some respects, there is data about which government measures give the most economic bang for the buck, and which ones cost more money than they bring in. I'd love the option to create jobs programs and invest in education, research, the arts, and infrastructure. It'd be great to reform the tax system - income, capital gains, "robin hood" tax on bank transactions, the estate tax, closing loopholes for billionaire hedge fund managers, adding several marginal brackets at the top, and so on. (I'd love too see a good interactive feature for that, too.) America could really kick ass. Up until the Reagan years, you could find some Eisenhower Republicans who weren't far from where Bernie Sanders is now on economic/fiscal matters.

On the spending side, further reforming health care would be the single biggest cost saver. America stacks up horribly compared to other countries in that regard. To lessen doctor complaints, we could certainly have a more expensive model with higher compensation than other countries, yet still adapt their systems to make things cheaper and more efficient for essential care in the U.S. (Some doctors would gladly trade less pay for the considerable drop in paperwork, billing and other hassles, but still.) Kevin Drum has an eye-popping chart on medical spending, related to the Bowles-Simpson "Catfood Commission" on the deficit. (More here - one and two.) Ezra Klein looks at an older budget calculator that renders this situation starkly.

There's plenty more out there on these issues. Center for Economic and Policy Research and Center for a Responsible Federal Budget also have budget calculators, which have their pluses and minuses. The always good Center for Budget and Policy Priorities gives a detailed look at the Bowles-Simpson plan and the competing, mostly better Rivlin-Domenici plan. Jonathan Chait says no deal on Bowles-Simpson, because it would funnel even more money to the rich. That's both depressing and predictable.

The most interesting – and progressive – plan I've seen so far comes out of the project Our Fiscal Security. A PDF of the report can be downloaded here. It focuses much more on job creation and other economic growth measures. Brad DeLong, Steve Benen, Digby and Matt Yglesias have posted on it, as has Paul Krugman, who writes:

A coalition of progressive think tanks has released a plan for dealing with the deficit. It’s at least as responsible as any of the other plans being advanced, with a very different emphasis: more reliance on revenue, no attack on Social Security. Some of the revenue comes from indirect taxes — green taxes and fuel taxes — but the rest comes from measures that would raise taxes mainly on upper-income Americans.

I’ll need to work through the proposal, but one thing it clearly does is to explode the myth that there is no alternative to the Bowles-Simpson-type regressive proposal. A lot of inside-the-Beltway types have been trying to sell the notion that a severely weakened social safety net is the only possibility; it isn’t.

And it’s definitely worth noting that even with the revenue measures in the progressive plan, the US would have lower overall taxation than almost any other advanced country.

The progressive Citizens' Commission also has a report out, and a panel of progressive groups met today to discuss "prosperity, not austerity." I imagine some videos will be posted later, and there will be much more to come. However, in the meantime, the Strengthen Social Secuity site (via Digby) provides good information on that issue, and calling your congresscritters to tell them to say no to cutting Social Security wouldn't be a bad idea, either.