Paul Ryan’s Norquistian-Churchillian Foreign Policy
Last night, Paul Ryan took the highly suggestive step of delivering a foreign policy address and leaking it to the magazine that’s been crusading for him to run for president. There is, however, one ideological snag.
Ryan’s budget is a Grover Norquist fantasy that would so starve the government of revenue that the only way to avoid deep defense cuts would be for the entire non-defense, non-entitlement portion of government to disappear entirely:
Perhaps the single most stunning piece of information that the CBO report reveals is that Ryan’s plan “specifies a path for all other spending” (other than spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest payments) to drop “from 12 percent [of GDP] in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 and 3½ percent by 2050.” These figures are extraordinary. As CBO notes, “spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of GDP in every year since World War II.”
Defense spending has equaled or exceeded 3 percent of GDP every year since 1940, and the Ryan budget does not envision defense cuts in real terms (although defense could decline a bit as a share of GDP). Assuming defense spending remained level in real terms, most of the rest of the federal government outside of health care, Social Security, and defense would cease to exist.
In reality, Ryan’s budget is unworkable and something would have to give. Many Republicans, and especially the neoconservatives forming the draft-Ryan committee, loath the idea of pressuring the defense budget. Ryan’s forceful endorsement of neoconservative principles, along with his continued opposition to defense spending cuts, reassures his base. In the neoconservative world, mighty declarations of willpower always trump puny arithmetic.
The political angle of Ryan’s foreign policy speech is to pick up the attack line that President Obama denies American exceptionalism. Here’s Ryan:
There are very good people who are uncomfortable with the idea that America is an “exceptional” nation…
Today, some in this country relish the idea of America’s retreat from our role in the world. They say that it’s about time for other nations to take over; that we should turn inward; that we should reduce ourselves to membership on a long list of mediocre has-beens.
This view applies moral relativism on a global scale. Western civilization and its founding moral principles might be good for the West, but who are we to suggest that other systems are any worse? – or so the thinking goes.
Instead of heeding these calls to surrender, we must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen.
Ryan is referring to, without explicitly saying so, a widespread conservative claim. In April 2009, a reporter asked Obama if he believed in American exceptionalism. Obama began by citing objections to the concept before endorsing it:
I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.
And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.
An endless parade of conservatives have truncated the quote, ending it after the first sentence, to make it sound like a disavowal of American exceptionalism. In other words, it’s utterly false, and therefore a fitting theme for Ryan’s foreign policy message.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, June 3, 2011
Loose Lips: Romney Miscasts Economy In GOP Debut
In rhetorical excesses marking his entry in the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney said the economy worsened under President Barack Obama, when it actually improved, and criticized the president for issuing apologies to the world that were never made.
A look at some of the statements by Romney on Thursday in announcing his bid for the Republican nomination and how they compare with the facts:
ROMNEY: “When he took office, the economy was in recession. He made it worse. And he made it last longer.”
THE FACTS: The gross domestic product, the prime measure of economic strength, shrank by a severe 6.8 percent annual rate before Obama became president. The declines eased after he took office and economic growth, however modest, resumed. The recession officially ended six months into his presidency. Unemployment, however, has worsened under Obama, going from 7.8 percent in January 2009 to 9.1 percent last month. It hit 10.1 percent in October 2009.
A case can be made for and against the idea that Obama’s policies made the economy worse than it needed to be and that the recession lasted longer than it might have under another president. Such arguments are at the core of political debate. But Obama did not, as Romney alleged, make the economy worse than it was when he took office.
ROMNEY: “A few months into office, he traveled around the globe to apologize for America.”
THE FACTS: Obama has not apologized for America. What he has done, in travels early in his presidency and since, is to make clear his belief that the U.S. is not beyond reproach. He has told foreigners that the U.S. at times acted “contrary to our traditions and ideals” in its treatment of terrorist suspects, that “America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy,” that the U.S. “certainly shares blame” for international economic turmoil and has sometimes shown arrogance toward allies. Obama, whose criticisms of America’s past were typically balanced by praise, was in most cases taking issue with policies or the record of the previous administration, not an unusual approach for a new president — or a presidential candidate. Romney’s actual point seems to be that Obama has been too critical of his country.
But there has been no formal — or informal — apology. No saying “sorry” on behalf of America.
ROMNEY: “Three years later, foreclosures are still at record levels. Three years later the prices of homes continue to fall.”
THE FACTS: Although foreclosures remain high, the number of U.S. homes that were repossessed by lenders fell in April, compared with March and a year ago, according to the foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. Romney’s claim about home prices, though, is supported by the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city monthly index. It found home prices in big metro areas have sunk to their lowest since 2002. Since the bubble burst in 2006, prices have fallen more than they did during the Great Depression.
ROMNEY: “Instead of encouraging entrepreneurs and employers, he raises their taxes, piles on record-breaking mounds of regulation and bureaucracy and gives more power to union bosses.”
THE FACTS: Romney ignores ambitious tax-cutting pushed by Obama. The stimulus plan early in his presidency cut taxes broadly for the middle class and business. He more recently won a one-year tax cut for 2011 that reduced most workers’ Social Security payroll taxes by nearly a third. He also campaigned in support of extending the Bush-era tax cuts for all except the wealthy, whose taxes he wanted to raise. In office, he accepted a deal from Republicans extending the tax cuts for all. As for tax increases, Obama won congressional approval to raise them on tobacco and tanning salons. The penalty for those who don’t buy health insurance, once coverage is mandatory, is a form of taxation. Several large tax increases in the health care law have not yet taken effect.
ROMNEY: “The expectation was that we’d have to raise taxes but I refused. I ordered a review of all state spending, made tough choices and balanced the budget without raising taxes.”
THE FACTS: Romney largely held the line on tax increases when he was Massachusetts governor but that’s only part of the revenue story. The state raised business taxes by $140 million in one year with measures branded “loophole closings,” the vast majority recommended by Romney. Moreover, the Republican governor and Democratic lawmakers raised hundreds of millions of dollars from higher fees and fines, taxation by another name. Romney himself proposed creating 33 new fees and increasing 57 others — enough to raise $59 million. Anti-tax groups were split on his performance. The Club for Growth called the fee increases and business taxes troubling. Citizens for Limited Taxation praised him for being steadfast in supporting an income tax rollback.
By: Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press, Yahoo News, June 3, 2011
Gov. Rick Scott May Personally Benefit From New Law That Hands Medicaid Program Over To Private Companies
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed “a landmark Medicaid overhaul” yesterday that will put “hundreds of thousands of low-income and elderly Floridians into managed-care plans.” The proposal “gives managed care companies more control over the program that’s paid for with federal and state money,” a shift the state GOP claims will “hold down spiraling costs in the $20 billion program.” However, as TP Health editor Igor Volsky pointed out, a five-county pilot program in Florida already revealed that such a plan produces “widespread complaints and little evidence of savings.” Under managed care, states “have to ensure that private payers aren’t looking out for short term profits by denying treatments or reducing reimbursement rates” and — given what occurred during the pilot program — the results “are already less than promising.”
But Scott may have another reason to push a dubious bill into law. As Mother Jones reported, one of the private managed-care companies that stand to gain from the new law is Solantic, “a chain of urgent-care clinics aimed at providing emergency services to walk-in customers. Solantic was founded in 2001 — by none other than Rick Scott:
The Florida governor founded Solantic in 2001, only a few years after he resigned as the CEO of hospital giant Columbia/HCA amid a massive Medicare fraud scandal. In January, according to the Palm Beach Post, he transferred his $62 million stake in Solantic to his wife, Ann Scott, a homemaker involved in various charitable organizations.[…]
“This is a conflict of interest that raises a serious ethical issue,” says Marc Rodwin, a medical ethics professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. “The public should be thinking and worrying about this.”
Scott’s office dismissed the conflict of interest concern as “incorrect and baseless.” However, Scott’s history of fraud with entitlement programs (in that case Medicare) should certainly raise a red flag here. And it is not as if Scott is completely clean when it comes to the mix between professional office and personal interest.
Incidentally, Scott also just signed a bill that will require anyone applying for welfare benefits to pay for a drug test to qualify for benefits. They will only recoup that fee if they pass. One company that provides such drug tests? Solantic.
By: Tanya Somander, Think Progress, June 3, 2011
GOP Has 2012 Trouble: Attacking Medicare And Social Security Could Be Death Of Republicans’ 2012 Hopes
Recent weeks have finally defined the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The field has finally achieved a greater level of clarity as many candidates have opted out, running the absurd-to-formidable gamut from Donald Trump to Mitch Daniels. A smaller number have opted in, running the has-been to may-never-be gamut from Newt Gingrich to Tim Pawlenty, not to mention former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who officially entered the race yesterday.
A former Minnesota governor, Pawlenty officially joined the wannabe ranks last week with a speech aimed at defining himself as a fearless teller of hard truths (previously he had perhaps best been known for lacking any definition at all). This is smart on several levels. He quickly moved to fill the void left by Daniels, the governor of Indiana, whom many in the party had yearned for as a tough-minded fiscal hawk. And in part it is a strong bid for the mantel of not-Romney, the alternative to the former Massachusetts governor and current GOP front-runner. Romney is a laughably transparent flip-flopper, so Pawlenty’s new truth-teller frame could make him an ideal foil.
Politicians love to position themselves as tellers of hard truths, brave enough to boldly level with the voters. And the current tempestuous political climate, with its roiling discontent with politics as usual, especially lends itself to such a pose. Pawlenty is merely the latest candidate to seize this meme.
But his candidacy runs squarely afoul of Robert’s 13th rule of politics: People like the idea of hard truths and hard-truth tellers much more than they like the reality of them. You can ask straight shooters like Walter Mondale (“Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”), Paul “I’m not Santa Claus” Tsongas, and John “Straight Talk” McCain. Winning the presidency requires an aspirational element at odds with the doom-and-gloom that comes with those self-consciously trying to speak hard truths.
So kudos to Pawlenty for standing up to big ethanol in little Iowa. But while some may take off their hats to him for traveling to Florida in order to call for overhauls (read: cuts) of Social Security and Medicare, it might be merely to scratch one’s head. As Hot Air blogger Allahpundit quipped after Pawlenty’s Florida performance, “Alternate headline: ‘Pawlenty now unelectable in not one but two early primary states.’ ”
Maybe this is actually deep strategy. Many conservatives and Tea Partyers in particular seem intent these days on—as Ronald Reagan used to complain of some of his more gung-ho supporters—going “off the cliff with all flags flying.” Perhaps this is a clever way for Pawlenty to appeal to that “I’d rather lose being right” instinct.
An additional problem for would-be hard-truth tellers is that in the telling, these so-called truths often become vehicles for an even harder ideology. The attempt to conflate serious problems with ideologically inflexible and partisan solutions can create political tensions and open deadly political rifts. See the political abyss House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has marched his colleagues into over his plan to repeal and replace Medicare.
With the future insolubility of Medicare as a starting point, Ryan and the GOP have embarked on an emphatically ideological course. They hailed themselves as seriously facing a tough issue, and they spin the plan as an attempt to save the program, but all it would save would be the name “Medicare.” A guarantee of healthcare would be replaced with a voucher of diminishing value. If it fails to cover seniors’ costs . . . tough luck. The view was perhaps best summed up by Georgia GOP Rep. Rob Woodall, who chastised a constituent at a town hall meeting last month when she asked how, after Ryan’s reforms eliminated the guarantee of Medicare, she could expect to get medical coverage since she worked for a company that doesn’t offer it in their retirement package. “Hear yourself, ma’am,” he said. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’ ”
Woodall, like many conservatives, fails to grasp why programs like Medicare were created. They were a response to a market failure—specifically an inability of senior citizens to get or pay for healthcare. But in Woodall’s world there are apparently no market failures; if seniors can’t get healthcare it’s because they simply won’t take responsibility for themselves. Of course in 1964, 44 percent of senior citizens had no health coverage, and the cost of medical bills had driven more than one third of them below the poverty line. If only they had had the moral fiber to take care of themselves!
Safe in a heavily conservative district, Woodall can spout such nonsense. But roughly 60 House Republicans represent districts Barack Obama won in 2008 and virtually all voted for the Ryancare overhaul. In this case, the gap between hard truths and hard ideology may be big enough to swallow a House majority.
Just ask the pollsters employed by the House GOP, who warned that the bill was a ticking time bomb, Politico reported last week. Or ask Jane Corwin, that bomb’s first casualty. She is the Republican who lost May’s special election in a GOP-leaning New York district in which the Ryan plan was the defining issue. Or ask Sens. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Scott Brown, four of the five Senate Republicans who fled the plan last week (the fifth, Rand Paul, opposed it as not being conservative enough).
Or ask Gingrich, the former House speaker who drew party-wide opprobrium when he dismissed the Ryan plan as being so much “right-wing social engineering.” Pity poor Newt: He was just trying to tell a hard truth.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 3, 2011
The Limits Of Free-Market Capitalism
Until a few years ago, my spiritual devotions were limited to the free market and the music of Patsy Cline. I’m sorry to say it’s just me and Patsy now.
Karl Marx may have been wrong where it really mattered—communism, to paraphrase Churchill, is government “of the duds, by the duds, and for the duds”—but he was spot on about the pitfalls of capitalism, particularly when it came to the entrenchment of social classes, the fetish of consumption, the frequency of recession, and the concentration of industry. Yet, like trained seals, we continue to leap through the flaming rings of a system that is contemptuous of the public good while rewarding those who feed off “free” markets and the politicians who rig them. Nearly three years after the global economy almost collapsed under the weight of a corrupt and inbred financial order, Washington is still mired between the false choice of the state or private enterprise as the proper steward of the general welfare.
It should be clear to anyone who has lost a cell phone signal in our nation’s capital or been denied health coverage because of a pre-existing ailment that capitalism’s endgame is not freedom of choice and efficiency, but oligarchy. Many of America’s top industries—agriculture, airlines, media, medical care, banking, defense, auto production, telecommunications—are controlled by a handful of corporations who fix prices like cartels. As Marx predicted, the natural inclination of players in a market-driven economy is not to compete but to collude.
Reporting in Asia and the Middle East for many years, I prayed to the same kitchen gods of untrammeled commerce that now bewitch the Republican Party faithful and the neoliberals who inhabit the Obama White House. In Asia more than a decade ago, I covered the liquidation of state assets as prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, perhaps the largest-ever transfer of wealth from public to private hands, as if it were a new religion that would transform economies from the Korean peninsula to the Indian subcontinent. Laissez-faireism, I wrote, would liberate consumers and domesticate once overweening state-owned enterprises.
In fact, privatization merely shifted economic control from corrupt apparatchiks to their allies in business, a transaction lubricated with kick-backs and sweetheart deals. That’s what happened in the Middle East, and it became the spore that engendered the Arab uprising.
The corruption of capitalism in America is all the more appalling for its legality. With the economy still struggling to recover from a housing crisis fomented largely by Wall Street’s craving for mortgage-backed securities, prosecution of those responsible has been confined to a single lawsuit filed by the Securities Exchange Commission against a lone financier. The system is still lousy with loopholes, and the Republican Party, which demographically as well as ideologically is becoming a gated community for white, southern males, is calling for more deregulation, not less.
Which brings us to the central failure of American capitalism: the excoriation of the state.
So deep is the mythology of the free market that we ignore the consequences of starving our schools, libraries, public media, and roads and railways. We expect our teachers to assume the burdens of parenthood and then blame them for failing education. We lament our dependence on foreign oil and the aviation cartels, but we refuse to underwrite a passenger-rail equivalent of the interstate highway system. We disparage the coarse reductionism of corporate-owned news outlets while neglecting public broadcasting, an isolated archipelago of smart, responsible journalism.
Our hostility to the public sector—fountainhead of the Hoover Dam, Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Los Angeles Coliseum, our national parks, and countless other public utilities and services in addition to the federal highway system—is inversely proportional to our reverence for private consumption. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his 1958 book The Affluent Society, “Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses are praiseworthy and essential in our standard of living. Street cleaners to ensure clean streets are an unfortunate expense. Partly as a result, our houses are generally clean and our streets are generally filthy.” Galbraith also noted the uniquely American conceit of sanctioning debt when households and private investors hold it but condemning it when governments do.
Should the feds nationalize banks and appropriate soy fields? Certainly not. At its essence, there is probably no more efficient way of establishing the price of a particular good or service than market economics. Not all transactions are so simple, however, and there are some services—healthcare, for example, or transportation—that often fare better more as public goods than as private commodities. In order to save American capitalism, we must appreciate its limits even as we struggle to harness its power.
By: Stephen Glain, U. S. News and World Report, June 2, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 