GOP Jobs Plan: Old Ideas, Fancy New Clip Art
Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around
400. Large-print books, you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday and cranked up the font to 24 points and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.
Which is odd, because there’s nothing in this plan that hasn’t been in a thousand other plans. When I asked David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist on labor markets, to take a look at the substance, he pronounced it a classic case of “what Larry Summers would call ‘now-more-than-everisms.”
“Here’s how it works,” Autor wrote in an e-mail. “1. You have a set of policies that you favor at all times and under all circumstances, e.g., cut taxes, remove regulations, drill-baby-drill, etc. 2. You see a problem that needs fixing (e.g., the economy stinks). 3. You say, ‘We need to enact my favored policies now more than ever.’ I believe that every item in the GOP list that you sent derives from this three-step procedure.
“That’s not to say that there are no reasonable ideas on this list. But there is certainly no original thinking here directed at addressing the employment problem. Or, to put it differently, is there any set of economic circumstances under which the GOP would not actually want to enact every item on this agenda? If the answer is no, then this is clearly now-more-than-everism.”
If you read Autor’s answer and then guessed at what’s included in the plan, you’d probably get it about right. The GOP wants a separate congressional vote on every significant regulation. It wants to cut taxes for corporations and small businesses led by individuals. It wants a tax break on profit that corporations earn overseas. It wants to pass pending trade agreements, increase domestic production of oil and enact spending cuts. The only two proposals you couldn’t have guessed sight unseen are patent reform and visas for the highly skilled.
But even if you think every item on that agenda is a grand idea, this isn’t exactly fast-acting medicine. “At best, an agenda like this is meant to improve long-term growth by a couple of tenths of a percentage point,” says Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “It takes a really long time to move the dial. It’s not a response to a cyclical downturn.”
That’s okay, because the document doesn’t believe in cyclical downturns. It only believes in deviations from the Republican agenda. The first page sets out the GOP’s narrative of the unemployment crisis. See if you recognize what’s missing here: “For the past four years, Democrats in Washington have enacted policies that undermine these basic concepts which have historically placed America at the forefront of the global marketplace. As a result, most Americans know someone who has recently lost a job, and small businesses and entrepreneurs lack the confidence needed to invest in our economy. Not since the Great Depression has our nation’s unemployment rate been this high this long.”
Four years ago, of course, George W. Bush was president. And he was, as you might remember, a Republican, not a Democrat. As for Wall Street, well, Wall Street who?
But it’s not just that you could read this jobs plan without knowing the financial crisis ever happened. You could read it without knowing the past decade ever happened. As Mishel says, “If lower taxes and less regulation was such good policy, then George W. Bush’s economy would have been a lot better. But under Bush, Republicans cut taxes on business and on investors and high-income people, and they didn’t add many regulations, and that business cycle was the first one in the postwar period where the income for a typical working-class family was lower at the end than at the beginning.”
That, however, is the agenda the House GOP thinks we need. And now more than
ever.
By: Ezra Klein, Columnist, The Washington Post, May 26, 2011
“Stalwart” Ronald Reagan: Why Raising The Debt Ceiling Is Necessary
Let’s get real. What person in their right mind would really want the United States to default? Of course, nobody, yet over the years many members of Congress have voted against raising the debt ceiling.
Barack Obama did it and now rejects his own action. It is always a symbolic gesture that both Democrats and Republicans use, and use irresponsibly.
Yet now we seem to have the Tea Party, and a larger group of Republicans, clamoring for some kind of show down at the OK Corral. Not a symbolic gesture to some but a real threat. Not smart.
For those who like to cite Ronald Reagan in his 100th year as a stalwart, antidebt, no-tax-hike, no nonsense conservative, they have the wrong guy. Aside from his major tax increases as governor of California and as president here is a little history on the debt ceiling.
In a letter to then-Majority Leader Howard Baker on November 16, 1983, President Reagan asked “for your help and support, and that of your colleagues, in the passage of an increase in the limit on the public debt.”
Reagan went on:
…the United states could be forced to default on its obligations for the first time in its history.
This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequence of a default–or even the serious prospect of default–by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate….The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.
The point is that Republicans should shelve using the debt ceiling vote as a means of negotiation. This is not a negotiable item. Should they take this right up until the 11th hour and refuse to fund the government, not only will Reagan’s admonitions come true but the Republicans will seal their fate as an irresponsible, minority party–a pariah for years to come.
Bad policy, bad politics.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, May 19, 2011
Newt Gingrich And “The Food Stamp President”
Newt Gingrich doubled down on his clever new slur against President Obama as “the food stamp president.” He tried the line in a Friday speech to the Georgia Republican convention, and he used it again on “Meet the Press Sunday.” It’s a short hop from Gingrich’s slur to Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “strapping young bucks” buying “T-bone steaks” with food stamps. Blaming our first black president for the sharp rise in food-stamp reliance (which resulted from the economic crash that happened on the watch of our most recent white president) is just the latest version of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Obama’s social policy amounts to “reparations” for black people.
But when host David Gregory suggested the term had racial overtones, Gingrich replied “That’s bizarre,” and added, “I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist.” That’s not quite as extreme or silly as Donald Trump declaring “I am the least racist person there is,” but it’s up there. He also told Georgia Republicans Friday that 2012 will be the most momentous election “since 1860,” which happens to be the year we elected the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln president, and he suggested the U.S. bring back a “voting standard” that requires voters to prove they know American history — which sounds a lot like the “poll tests” outlawed by the Voting Rights Act.
Just last week Gingrich said Obama “knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit,” which just happens to be home to many black people. And last year Gingrich accused Obama of “Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior” that made him “outside our comprehension” as Americans, spreading Dinesh D’Souza’s idiocy that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from the Kenyan father he never knew. “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich told the National Review Online last year.
All this from the guy who’s supposed to be the “smart” candidate for the GOP nomination?
Republicans have done well with their quest to stigmatize social welfare programs as handouts to the undeserving, and to pretend that most of the undeserving are black people. But it may not be working as well today. Paul Ryan’s class-war budget is going down in flames, largely because seniors are up in arms over Ryan’s attacks on Medicare. Ryan and his GOP allies tried to be clever, making sure his plans to phase out Medicare wouldn’t apply to today’s seniors, who happen to be disproportionately white and disproportionately Republican. But seniors are seeing through the ruse, telling Ryan and the GOP that they want to protect Medicare for their children, too. Even Gingrich is now backing away from the Ryan budget, telling Gregory it’s too “radical” and “too big a jump.” A jump off a political cliff for Republicans, that is.
Let’s hope Gingrich’s attacks on our “food stamp president” backfire, too. I learned about the ex-GOP speaker’s latest use of the term from the group Catholic Democrats, which Tweeted Sunday morning that the twice-divorced Catholic convert ought to have a look at Catholic social teaching if he’s going to call himself a Catholic. The American bishops have lately been trying to remind Americans (and themselves, perhaps) that Catholic social teaching is about more than abortion. The church has long been a force on behalf of the poor and powerless, going back to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor) at the height of the Gilded Age in 1891, which put the church on the side of labor organizing, through Pope Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate” (Charity in Truth) of 2009, which restated the church’s commitment to support for workers and the poor worldwide, in the wake of the greed-driven financial crisis of 2008.
House Speaker John Boehner got a taste of the rising Catholic concern for social justice when 83 Catholic scholars wrote to Boehner protesting his attacks on programs for the poor, after Boehner was chosen as Catholic University’s commencement speaker. They didn’t call on the university to cancel Boehner’s address, unlike Catholic conservatives who protested Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 2009). They wrote:
Your voting record is at variance from one of the church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policymakers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.
The scholars also noted that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called Boehner-promoted Ryan budget as “anti-life” for its cuts to programs for pregnant women and children. Boehner’s commencement address went on Saturday with a quiet protest from students who wore green placards reading “Where’s the compassion, Speaker Boehner?” over their graduation gowns. Of course the Catholic Boehner didn’t address the controversy; instead he shed tears remembering how his high school football coach called him the morning he became speaker to tell him “you can do it,” which he considered an answer to his prayers.
Boehner may have been crying about what his support of the Ryan budget is doing to House GOP re-election chances. Gingrich could find that his racially coded attacks on Obama backfire as well. Both the poverty rate and the unemployment rate for white Americans have doubled since the start of this recession. Maybe Republican policies will succeed in uniting Americans across racial lines for a change, as more people see them as favoring one minority — the super-rich — over the rest of us.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 15, 2011
John Boehner’s Unreality Check On The Deficit
The news out of House Speaker John Boehner’s speech to the New York Economic Club was his demand for “cuts of trillions, not just billions” before the debt ceiling can be raised. Not just broad deficit-reduction targets, the Ohio Republican insisted, but “actual cuts and program reforms.”
That’s alarming enough. It is all but impossible to get this done in the available time. It certainly can’t be accomplished on Boehner’s unbending, no-new-taxes terms. And if the speaker truly believes that it would be “more irresponsible” to raise the debt ceiling without instituting deficit-reduction measures than not to raise it at all, we’re in a heap of trouble.
Even more alarming, because it has consequences beyond the debt-ceiling debate, is the incoherent, impervious-to-facts economic philosophy undergirding Boehner’s remarks.
Reporters naturally tend to ignore this boilerplate. Journalistically, that makes sense. Boehner’s economic comments were nothing particularly new. Indeed, they reflect what has become the mainstream thinking of the Republican Party. But that’s exactly the point. We become so inured to hearing this thinking that we neglect to point out how wrong it is.
My argument with Boehner is not that he believes in a more limited role for government than I do, not that he is more skeptical of government intervention and regulation, and not that he is more worried about the economically stifling implications of tax increases. Those are legitimate ideological differences. American politics is better off for them.
I’m talking about statements that are simply false.
“The recent stimulus spending binge hurt our economy and hampered private-sector job creation in America.”
Reasonable economists can disagree about the effectiveness of the stimulus spending and whether it was worth the drag of the additional debt, but no reasonable economist argues that it hurt the economy in the short term.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the stimulus added, on average, about one percentage point annually to economic growth and reduced the unemployment rate by half a point between 2009 and 2011. And that’s the low-end estimate. The high-end numbers show the stimulus spending adding more than 2 percentage points annually to economic growth and cutting the unemployment rate by more than 1 percentage point.
The CBO is not alone. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimated in a July 2010 paper that without the stimulus spending, the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points higher.
“The massive borrowing and spending by the Treasury Department crowded out private investment by American businesses of all sizes.”
Crowding out occurs when government spending drives up interest rates and makes borrowing unattractive to the private sector. As economist Joseph Minarik of the Committee for Economic Development explains, “When interest rates are on the floor, you can’t say federal government borrowing is crowding out business investment.” The lackluster investment climate reflects low consumer demand and underutilized capacity. You can’t be crowded out of a room you’re not trying to enter.
“The truth is we will never balance the budget and rid our children of debt unless we cut spending and have real economic growth. And we will never have real economic growth if we raise taxes on those in America who create jobs.”
Never? Under President Clinton, taxes were raised, primarily on the wealthy. During the eight years of his administration, the economy grew by an average of close to 4 percent.
“I ran for Congress in 1990, the year our nation’s leaders struck a so-called bargain that raised taxes as part of a bipartisan plan to balance the budget. The result of that so-called bargain was the recession of the early 1990s. It wasn’t until the economy picked back up toward the end of that decade that we achieved a balanced budget.”
Boehner blames the budget deal for tanking the economy, but the recession actually started in July 1990, two months before the agreement was reached. And that revived economy? It came despite the supposed dead weight of the Clinton tax increase.
“A tax hike would wreak havoc not only on our economy’s ability to create private-sector jobs, but also on our ability to tackle the national debt.”
During the early 1980s, taxes were cut and public debt ballooned, from 26 percent of GDP in 1980 to 40 percent by 1986. In 1993, taxes were increased (and spending cut); debt as a share of the economy fell, from 49 percent to 33 percent. In 2001 and 2003, taxes were cut. By the time President Obama took office, debt had climbed to 40 percent of GDP.
Listening to Boehner, I began to think the country suffers from two deficits: the gap between spending and revenue, and the one between reality and ideology. The first cannot be solved unless we find some way of at least narrowing the second.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 10, 2011
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