“The Land Of The Not-Free”: Meet Mitt Romney, The Real European
An odd thing happened during Mitt Romney’s victory-lap speech after Tuesday’s Republican primaries: He didn’t once mention the word “Europe.”
The absence was jarring, because Romney’s claim that President Obama is dragging the United States toward a loathsome European-style “social welfare” future has been a staple of the former Massachusetts governor’s shtick ever since he started campaigning in earnest.
It’s always been an easy line for him: Europe, Romney’s audience understands, is the land of the not-free. The continent gave birth to Karl Marx, for crying out loud! Every now and then, socialist political parties actually take power!
But there is a big problem with Romney’s formulation. For the last year or two, Europe has been implementing, in real time, exactly the policies that Romney and congressional Republicans fervently believe are the best strategy for boosting economic growth. It’s called “austerity,” and it means cutting deficits, slashing spending, and chipping away at all those goodies the social welfare state provides.
And guess what? It’s not working. Compared with the United States, Europe is in shambles. Unemployment is rising across the continent. Just this week, the United Kingdom, which has pursued an austerity regime so severe that it makes House Republicans drool with lust, slipped back into recession. In France, the socialist candidate for president (and likely winner), François Hollande, has been campaigning against austerity. Italy’s prime minister, Mario Monti, is expressing qualms. The latest news out of Brussels, according to the Daily Telegraph, suggests “a major shift in economic strategy” as fears spread “that excessive fiscal tightening will inflict unnecessary damage on a string of eurozone countries.”
The evidence keeps amassing. Maybe, just maybe, John Maynard Keynes was right: Cutting government spending in the face of a weak economy is a recipe for further decline. In a startling turnabout, political leaders all over Europe are questioning the merits of austerity and calling for more stimulative policies.
You can see the problem Romney faces, and why he might suddenly be reluctant to utter the word “Europe.” The facts are uncomfortable: Under Obama, the United States has recovered more quickly from the Great Recession than has Europe. Economic growth is steadier, and unemployment is falling faster. But if Romney wins the White House, bringing along with him Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House, he will have the power to do exactly what he says he wants to do: slash government spending and cut the deficit.
It’s a plan that runs the very real risk of sabotaging the economic recovery. It’s a plan, in other words, that would make the U.S. just like Europe.
Romney’s efforts to tar Obama as a fifth columnist for French-accented Really Big Government have been unrelenting. In December, he told voters in Iowa that Obama’s polices “were making us like Europe,” and “I don’t want Europe here.” In January, after winning the New Hampshire primary, he lambasted Obama for wanting “to turn America into a European-style entitlement society.” Just a few days ago, he explained to Fox News that the conservative base would rally behind his candidacy, because “President Obama has taken America in such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before. We are becoming far more like a European social-welfare state, and people don’t want to see that.”
Never mind that by historical standards Obama’s efforts to strengthen the American safety net do not come close to the transformational efforts of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, making Romney’s assertion that Obama is taking America on “such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before” transparently ridiculous. If anyone running for president this year in the United States is a pioneer in European-style liberalism, it’s got to be Romney, the first governor to preside over the creation of a statewide universal healthcare plan. (And for a guy who seems to despise Europe so much, Romney sure seems to enjoy vacationing in France.)
But whatever. Romney’s Europe-bashing rhetoric serves multiple purposes. It labels Obama as something different, a “foreigner,” un-American. It also directly appeals to conservative concerns that the social welfare state is unaffordable. In this vein, unless governments everywhere tighten their belts, balance their budgets and get their ships in order, we’re all headed down the hopeless path of Greece, doomed to bankruptcy and social chaos.
Most importantly, Romney’s opposition to European-style Big Government stakes an implicit position on the great economic debate of our time: How best to spur economic growth?
The stances of the two main camps have been clear for years and endlessly debated by economists and pundits. The pro-stimulus, Keynesian argument holds that the problem afflicting stagnant economies all over the world is a lack of demand. When everyone is worried about their economic future, everyone simultaneously tightens their belt, and the capitalist machine stops in its tracks. Since no one is willing to buy anything, companies can’t sell their goods and services and respond by laying off their employees, and that further exacerbates the overall problem. Under such constraints, only the government has the power to step in and stimulate demand. Once the economy is growing strongly and consistently, only then do you look for ways to balance the budget — a task that becomes much easier when tax revenues are booming again.
The opposing camp, now commonly referred to as “Austerians,” believes the problem isn’t a lack of demand, but a lack of confidence. People are afraid to invest and buy and take risks because they’re worried that high deficits inevitably lead to high taxes, or high interest rates, or general fiscal chaos (or all of the above). And they’re going to hunker down until they’re sure that governments intend to act responsibly, and live within their means.
The Austerian camp’s stance translated into one of the most delightfully mindbendingly oxymoronic proposals to enter the economic policy parlance in years: “expansionary fiscal contraction.” Cutting government spending will boost confidence, which will lead to growth! To get big, one must first get small.
It was all the rage two years ago. Today, not so much. The problem with expansionary fiscal contraction is that when you try it at a time when the economy is stagnant or recessionary, you run a real risk of exacerbating the problem you are trying to cure. Slashing government spending subtracts demand from the economy. Growth slows, tax revenues fall, and suddenly the government has even less to spend, which subtracts even more demand from the economy.
And that’s exactly what appears to be happening in Europe — in countries such as Greece, Italy, Spain and France, and perhaps most intriguingly, in the United Kingdom, where David Cameron’s new conservative government pursued austerity with a vengeance. From the outset, a clamor of voices warned that the risks were huge, and so far, their worries have been validated. On Monday, the U.K. registered its second quarter of economic contraction, the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.
It’s very rare that one gets a real-time demonstration of how two different economic policies compare, but the numbers are hard to argue with: In the “euro area,” where austerity has reigned, GDP growth has declined for each of the last four quarters. In the U.S. it has risen. In the euro area, unemployment has been rising for a year. In the U.S. , it’s been falling. As Felix Salmon observes, when one compares the United States, the U.K and the euro area, “the tougher and more credible the austerity, the worse the GDP performance.”
The trend lines are far too obvious to ignore, and they have sparked a political counter-reaction that appears to have reached critical mass this week. In Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands, austerity is suddenly out of favor.
Meanwhile, the United States, despite the best efforts of Republicans, never pursued austerity as devoutly as Europe. Which is not to say the U.S. hasn’t tightened its belt at all. Perhaps the most stunning counter-argument to Romney’s accusation that Obama is pushing for a government-centered European-style government can be seen in the decline in the size of the public sector under Obama: During his presidency, employment in the public sector — local, state and federal government — has fallen by almost 600,000 jobs. In comparison, Bill Clinton added over 600,000 and George Bush added 800,000. As Paul Krugman points out, if Obama’s administration had added public sector jobs at the same rate as George Bush, unemployment would currently stand around 7 percent.
But even with those headwinds blowing against it, the U.S. has done surprisingly well. The first guess at GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012, due out Friday morning, is likely to peg growth at around 3 percent. Meanwhile, the most recently available statistics for the euro area show it contracting.
Which leads us back to the all-important question: What happens if Romney wins the election? The chances are good that if he is victorious, he will bring in Republican control of Congress along with him. Anything budget-related can be passed using the congressional technique known as “reconciliation,” which means Senate Democrats won’t be able to filibuster. He’ll be able to do what he wants.
Once upon a time, Mitt Romney supported stimulus spending to boost the economy. But now he sings a different tune. He has endorsed Paul Ryan’s budget, — “It’s an excellent piece of work, and very much needed” — which would combine huge cuts to social welfare programs with dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy — an austerity program directly targeted at the poor. Romney’s speeches are generally devoid of specific policy proposals, but he’s fond of encapsulating his overall economic strategy with the three Tea Party-friendly words “cut,” “cap” and “balance” — the simplest definition of austerity one could ask for. And as he said in Philadelphia on April 12, “The economy is struggling because government is too big, and we have to bring it down to size.”
All together, everything points to a plan for turbo-boosted austerity. That’s exactly the model that Europe has tried and is now finding wanting. And it’s exactly the wrong medicine for a country in which economic growth is still very vulnerable and unemployment is still high.
Wanna be like Europe? Elect Romney.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, April 27, 2012
“Omission Accomplished: GOP Fantasy World Foreign Policy
Perusing the text of Marco Rubio’s foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution, I notice a word that doesn’t appear: Iraq. It’s so hard to believe that I’ve read the speech twice and executed a word search three times. Did he think no one would notice? The Senator from Florida has given a lengthy address about the wisdom of American intervention without so much as acknowledging the most consequential foreign intervention that we’ve undertaken in decades.
This is the same Marco Rubio who says George W. Bush, whose presidency was defined by Iraq, did a fantastic job. As recently as last fall he was fearful that the United States was leaving the Iraq too quickly. Back in 2010 he avowed that the Iraq War made America safer and better off.
But Iraq has now disappeared from his analysis of American foreign policy. He manages to avoid talking about Iraq even as he frets that Iran is attempting to rule over the rest of the Middle East. Does Rubio ever ponder what recent military campaign effectively increased their influence in the region?
Says Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Rubio’s speech is a remarkable political document. It shows that some Senators have learned nothing from the past decade.” He’s mostly right, but there is one important caveat. The interventionists have apparently learned to stop acknowledging the Iraq War, for their vague generalities about America’s role in the world cannot survive a confrontation with a decade of costly, catastrophic intervention. Better to pretend the debacle never happened, even while ratcheting up the rhetoric about Syria and Iran.
It’s a perfect distillation of how ideological and divorced from empiricism the neoconservative project has become. A subject is raised at length — but the most relevant real world example isn’t. Rubio making foreign policy for a fantasy world, and we’d all be better off if someone bought him a Risk board so that he could work out his delusions of strategic acumen with fewer consequences.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 25, 2012
“Compro-What?”: The Republican Definition Of “Compromise”
What is compromise? Getting more of what you want, according to House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia.
Appearing this morning at a policy briefing hosted by National Journal and United Technologies, Price was asked by National Journal’s John Aloysius Farrell (a former U.S. News contributing editor) whether a term in office would make the Tea Party freshmen more likely to compromise.
His response was classic: “Compromising is one thing as long as you’re compromising and moving in the direction of your principles. If you’re compromising and moving away from the direction of your principles, I’m not sure it’s a compromise.”
Of course by definition, compromising means, um, compromising your principles. Here in fact is the dictionary definition of the word: “an adjustment of opposing principles … by modifying some aspects of each.”
One of the enduring themes from the Obama-Tea Party years here in Washington has been on compromise—whether and when it’s a good thing and how one defines it. Polls have consistently shown that liberals and independents want compromise, but conservatives prefer their leaders to stick to their guns. Democrats have exploited this public opinion gap by portraying Republicans, accurately in my view, as being a party of hardliners unwilling to make the kind of compromises necessary to solve the nation’s problems, especially in a time of divided government. See, for example, their unwillingness to seriously consider the revenue side of the deficit problem.
But since “compromise” is a concept popular with swing voters, they feel the need to radically redefine it in a way they can embrace. (It’s kind of like their Medicare plans.)
California Rep. Xavier Becerra, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus was interviewed at the event after Price and was asked what a bipartisan solution to the deficit problem would look like. Here’s his answer: “Bipartisan means that at the end, everyone will hate it, and people will all complain that it hit them to some degree. No one should be left out, as I said, all hands on deck.”
Kudos to Becerra for supplying a reality-based answer and apparently understanding the oldspeak definition of “compromise.”
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 26. 2012
“Behind The Eight Ball”: John Boehner Flat Out Lies On Student Loans
Setting the groundwork for the GOP congressional capitulation to President Obama’s insistence that interest rates not be raised on college loans, Speaker John Boehner announced today that the House will vote to keep the rates at the current level and will pay for it from a ‘slush fund’ in the Affordable Care Act.
In making his announcement, Boehner claimed there was never any intent on the GOP’s part to raise the rates on student loans and that President Obama had simply manufactured this disagreement to score political points with young voters and their families.
I wonder, then, how the Speaker would explains the provision in the Ryan Budget—passed last month by all the Republicans in the House but ten—that doubles the student loan rate to 6.8 percent on July 1, 2012?
And that Obamacare ‘slush fund’ the Speaker intends to raid to pay for holding the line on the student loans?
It turns out, the fund in jeopardy was created in the Affordable Care Act to screen women for breast and cervical cancer in addition to providing funds for the treatment of children with birth defects.
This, apparently, is Speaker Boehner’s idea of a slush fund.
While it was clear from the start that Congressional Republicans had handed the president a political gold mine by opposing the freeze on student loan interest rates, it is not only Speaker Boehner’s troops that find themselves behind the political eight ball. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, after managing to work out that supporting the hike was a serious political loser, came out in support of the President’s position earlier this week. By doing so, Romney has now put himself in opposition with the Ryan budget for which he has previously offered up his strong and complete support.
BY: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, April 25, 2012
“The End of Newt”: The People Have Spoken, Decisively, All 10 Of Them
Well, the results of the latest wave of primaries are in. The people have spoken, decisively. All 10 of them.
I am exaggerating. In Rhode Island, well over 3 percent of the eligible voters flocked to the polls on Tuesday, as the overwhelming majority declared their enthusiasm for Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee. We are totally talking mandate.
And I cannot tell you how much excitement there was in New York. Six percent turnout! In my neighborhood, the atmosphere was electric. Voters had not been so politically exercised since that year we had a primary pitting a recently deceased congressman and a member of a cultlike group led by a Marxist psychotherapist.
And, wow, no more Newt Gingrich.
Newt is reportedly planning to drop out of the presidential race on Tuesday. The crushing blow was the Delaware primary, where the Gingrich campaign had hoped to win a dramatic come-from-behind victory under the theory that only a couple of Republicans would actually vote and that they would be the same people who once nominated Christine O’Donnell for the Senate.
Unfortunately, a whopping 16 percent of the eligible electorate showed up, way too big a crowd for the fragile Gingrich candidacy to withstand. This has been a terrible month for Newt. His campaign is millions in debt. His pet billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, seems to have deserted him. He was bitten by a penguin at the St. Louis Zoo. And now this.
Did you ever notice how many of the Republican candidates seemed to have animal issues? Rick Perry shot that coyote, and Jon Huntsman got bitten by a goat — really, that was the high point of the Huntsman campaign. Also, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, the veep front-runner, recently imitated a chicken on television. You will be hearing more about this incident because I think I speak for the entire national media when I say that we are planning to discuss possible Republican vice presidential candidates nonstop through the spring and summer.
And the winner is the guy who drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car!
“My guess is you’ll see a dramatic difference in the youth vote this time — part of it is you have a younger, more dynamic Republican candidate,” said a Romney surrogate, former Senator Hank Brown.
Take that, young Americans. You can’t find jobs because the baby boomers are never going to retire. The Republicans in Congress want to raise the price of student loans. And, in politics, 65-year-olds get to be the youth candidate.
We are now in for six months of Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, and with the polls showing the race to be very close, you could argue that it is going to be really exciting. Except for the fact that it’s Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama.
Ignore the polls, I beg you. It will just make you nervous and crazy for no good reason. When it comes to their political preferences, the American people are like a bunch of middle school students picking their best friend on Facebook. Do you know who one of the most popular political figures in the United States is right now? Hillary Clinton! Nearly two-thirds of Americans are crazy about Hillary Clinton, and only 27 percent view her unfavorably. Do you remember when she was the most polarizing name in politics? Do you remember when she lost to Barack Obama and we all said it was like the cool popular guy versus the hard-working student council treasurer? Barack Obama would kill for Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings now.
Romney is now busy with a passel of closed-door fund-raisers in states like New Jersey and New York, which he will never, ever, visit for any other reason than closed-door fund-raisers. Newt’s future plans are unknown. Perhaps he will go back to that great job he had before, getting $300,000 fees for his advice as a historian to corporations with big financial interests pending in Congress. And what about Rick Santorum? You can’t spend the rest of your life not endorsing Mitt Romney. The only guy who seems to have his future plotted out is Ron Paul, who is apparently planning to continue running for president while we all ignore him.
So many surprises to look forward to. What humanizing interchange will Mitt have with the public next? Will it be as good as the last one, when he insulted the cookies at a Pittsburgh community center? Will he win over the loser Republicans’ billionaires? Their celebrity supporters? Rich guys are one thing, but Gary Busey will take some wooing.
Will he ever release all his tax returns? Will he keep the Kid Rock theme song for his campaign? Have we ever had a presidential nominee who walks on stage to a song that seems to suggest he is “wild, like an untamed stallion?” When we did, would you have imagined it would be Mitt Romney?
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 25, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 