“The Timidity Trap”: The Best Lack All Conviction, While The Worst Are Full Of Passionate Intensity
There don’t seem to be any major economic crises underway right this moment, and policy makers in many places are patting themselves on the back. In Europe, for example, they’re crowing about Spain’s recovery: the country seems set to grow at least twice as fast this year as previously forecast.
Unfortunately, that means growth of 1 percent, versus 0.5 percent, in a deeply depressed economy with 55 percent youth unemployment. The fact that this can be considered good news just goes to show how accustomed we’ve grown to terrible economic conditions. We’re doing worse than anyone could have imagined a few years ago, yet people seem increasingly to be accepting this miserable situation as the new normal.
How did this happen? There were multiple reasons, of course. But I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, in part because I’ve been asked to discuss a new assessment of Japan’s efforts to break out of its deflation trap. And I’d argue that an important source of failure was what I’ve taken to calling the timidity trap — the consistent tendency of policy makers who have the right ideas in principle to go for half-measures in practice, and the way this timidity ends up backfiring, politically and even economically.
In other words, Yeats had it right: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
About the worst: If you’ve been following economic debates these past few years, you know that both America and Europe have powerful pain caucuses — influential groups fiercely opposed to any policy that might put the unemployed back to work. There are some important differences between the U.S. and European pain caucuses, but both now have truly impressive track records of being always wrong, never in doubt.
Thus, in America, we have a faction both on Wall Street and in Congress that has spent five years and more issuing lurid warnings about runaway inflation and soaring interest rates. You might think that the failure of any of these dire predictions to come true would inspire some second thoughts, but, after all these years, the same people are still being invited to testify, and are still saying the same things.
Meanwhile, in Europe, four years have passed since the Continent turned to harsh austerity programs. The architects of these programs told us not to worry about adverse impacts on jobs and growth — the economic effects would be positive, because austerity would inspire confidence. Needless to say, the confidence fairy never appeared, and the economic and social price has been immense. But no matter: all the serious people say that the beatings must continue until morale improves.
So what has been the response of the good guys?
For there are good guys out there, people who haven’t bought into the notion that nothing can or should be done about mass unemployment. The Obama administration’s heart — or, at any rate, its economic model — is in the right place. The Federal Reserve has pushed back against the springtime-for-Weimar, inflation-is-coming crowd. The International Monetary Fund has put out research debunking claims that austerity is painless. But these good guys never seem willing to go all-in on their beliefs.
The classic example is the Obama stimulus, which was obviously underpowered given the economy’s dire straits. That’s not 20/20 hindsight. Some of us warned right from the beginning that the plan would be inadequate — and that because it was being oversold, the persistence of high unemployment would end up discrediting the whole idea of stimulus in the public mind. And so it proved.
What’s not as well known is that the Fed has, in its own way, done the same thing. From the start, monetary officials ruled out the kinds of monetary policies most likely to work — in particular, anything that might signal a willingness to tolerate somewhat higher inflation, at least temporarily. As a result, the policies they have followed have fallen short of hopes, and ended up leaving the impression that nothing much can be done.
And the same may be true even in Japan — the case that motivated this article. Japan has made a radical break with past policies, finally adopting the kind of aggressive monetary stimulus Western economists have been urging for 15 years and more. Yet there’s still a diffidence about the whole business, a tendency to set things like inflation targets lower than the situation really demands. And this increases the risk that Japan will fail to achieve “liftoff” — that the boost it gets from the new policies won’t be enough to really break free from deflation.
You might ask why the good guys have been so timid, the bad guys so self-confident. I suspect that the answer has a lot to do with class interests. But that will have to be a subject for another column.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 20, 2014
“Ted Cruz’s Exploitative New Sham”: What “Drafting” Him To Run For President Really Means
“It is time to Draft Ted Cruz for president,” says RedState diarist “razshafer,” and to that end, Raz has established RunTedRun.com, and an affiliated Draft Ted Cruz for President PAC. Raz is, Dave Weigel explains, Ted Cruz’s (now former) regional director Raz Shafer, and not just some person using Cruz’s name to convince conservatives to send along their lucrative email addresses.
Here is part of Shafer’s pitch:
I know there are other candidates who may run as conservatives, but I believe Ted Cruz has demonstrated that he’s the only consistent conservative who will do what it takes to roll back Barack Obama’s agenda. He’s the only one who has the passion, principles, and courage needed to deliver real results for Americans.
I’ve never spoken to Ted about him running for president and I honestly don’t know if he will do it, but I do know he won’t succeed unless freedom-loving Americans like you and me begin organizing this effort now.
Ted Cruz is the people’s candidate and we need to be the ones driving the effort to elect him.
So if you’re ready to be proud of your vote again and you agree that Ted Cruz should run for president, please do three things:
Go to RunTedRun.com and sign the official Draft Ted Cruz for President petition.
Urge your friends and family to join you.
Donate whatever you can to help us spread the word and build support.
My advice, even if you do support Ted Cruz and think he should run for president, is don’t do any of this. It is a waste of your time and you will be exploited. Your name and contact information will be sold. You will have no effect whatsoever on Cruz’s decision to run for president or not. Your monetary donation will have no effect whatsoever on Ted Cruz’s potential 2016 electoral chances.
Unless you have a lot of money, and giving that money to politicians is how you gain access to those politicians in order to convince them to advance your agenda, most of the time you shouldn’t give money to politicians. Especially credible presidential candidates and sitting members of Congress. Mainly because most presidential candidates and sitting members of Congress are awful, but also because generally they already have a lot of money, have access to more money, and don’t need yours. (Again, this all assumes you’re not very rich. The very rich waste plenty of money on losers and dumb causes, but they can afford it. Plus, many of their political investments show some pretty impressive returns.)
You really shouldn’t donate money — or give away your contact information — to shady (or even reputable!) organizations devoted to “drafting” someone or other to run for president. Especially if the person they are drafting is probably already going to run and doesn’t need some sort of pseudo-grass-roots demonstration of mass appeal and fundraising ability. Ted Cruz knows he is popular and can raise money and he probably will at least pretend to run for president, unless he decides it would be more lucrative to just be a right-wing media star, in which case you have still wasted your money.
This isn’t just about Ted Cruz! Hillary Clinton is almost definitely running for president too, and she really doesn’t need your support. She has a vast fundraising network and national campaign experience; you don’t need to sign a petition (or, god forbid, write a check) to nudge her toward deciding to run again. She has already done extensive polling on the subject of whether Americans are “ready for Hillary,” and (I can’t stress this enough) she has very rich friends who will write her much bigger checks than you will.
Sometimes, these PACs or other groups dedicated to drafting someone to run for office are truly aimed at convincing reluctant candidates that they have enough already existing support to make a presidential campaign feasible. In that case, your name and donation could make a real difference! And then you end up with Wesley Clark 2004. But for the most part, national politicians don’t need or deserve your money, and people running officially unaffiliated outside groups shouldn’t be gifted your valuable data. Don’t draft anyone.
By: Alex Parene, Salon, March 20, 2014
“Why The GOP Won’t Change”: A Year After Their “Autopsy”, The Recommendations Haven’t Been And Won’t Be Followed
Exactly one year ago, a committee of Republican party bigwigs issued the report of its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” better known as the “autopsy.” The idea was to figure out what the party was doing wrong, and how on earth Barack Obama had managed to get re-elected when everybody knows what a big jerk he is. There were some recommendations on things like improving the party’s use of technology and its fundraising, but the headline-grabbing message was that the party had to shed its image as a bunch of grumpy old white guys and become more welcoming to young people and racial minorities.
It was always going to be a tricky thing to accomplish, both because the GOP is, in fact, made up in large part of grumpy old white guys, and because “outreach” can only go so far if you aren’t willing to change the things you stand for. Mike Huckabee, that clever fellow, used to say, “I’m a conservative, but I’m not angry about it.” Which is all well and good, but if, for instance, you say to young people that you don’t think their gay friends ought to be allowed to get married, saying it with a smile doesn’t really help.
And a year later, it’s not just that the Republican party hasn’t changed, it’s that they don’t have much reason to change. The coming election may or may not be the GOP “tsunami” that Reince Priebus predicts, but they’re certainly going to pick up seats, just because of which seats are up in the Senate, the standard pattern of the president’s party losing seats in the 6th year of his presidency, and the fact that that president isn’t particularly popular right now. So why would a member of Congress—especially one from a conservative district or state—feel any need to undergo some kind of wholesale reinvention? Particularly when the people who put him where he is, and the people who are going to keep him where he is, aren’t the kind of people he’s being asked to “reach out” to. If your job is to get re-elected this fall, everything’s looking just fine.
And even in the upcoming presidential election, the non-old-white-guy-outreach may not look all that important. As Jamelle Bouie notes, things like the economy and President Obama’s popularity at the end of his term are going to matter much, much more than whatever outreach has been accomplished. What that means is that at the moment, no one whose name is or will be on a ballot in the near future has any particular interest in rethinking the party’s identity. The members of Congress are thinking about their next election. Those running for president in 2016 will be thinking about 2016. It’s fine for some party strategist to look 20 years down the road at the country’s inevitable demographic changes and predict doom about the party’s future. But the people who will actually implement the changes they suggest (or not) have no interest in looking that far ahead. And so they aren’t going to change.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 18, 2014
“When The Dog Catches The Car”: Why Taking Over The Senate May Not Do Republicans Much Good
There’s an old story about a freshman member of the House who is getting shown around by a senior member on his first day, and the freshman asks about the other party. “I want to meet the enemy,” he says. “No, son,” says the old bull, “they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.” I thought about that today as the prospect of a Republican takeover of the Senate becomes more of a possibility. If the GOP controlled both houses, would Republicans be able to present a united front against President Obama, one that might actually accomplish any practical goals? There are some clues in the maneuvering that’s going on right now over health care as Republicans look forward to this fall’s elections.
To begin with, we should acknowledge that a Republican takeover of the upper house is anything but a sure thing. The midterms are still seven and a half months away, and a lot could happen between now and then. There could be an economic crisis, or months of solid job growth, or an alien invasion, or who knows what. But barring anything dramatic, we know it is going to be very, very close. The map is just horrible for Democrats — not only are they defending 21 seats while Republicans are defending only 15, many of those Democratic seats are in conservative states such as Alaska, Arkansas and South Dakota, where any Democrat is going to be at a disadvantage. Combine that with the fact that the president’s party almost always loses seats in the sixth year of his presidency and with Obama’s relatively low approval ratings (43.3 percent in the latest Huffington Post/Pollster average), and it’s going to be a nail-biter. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball predicts the Senate on Election Day as 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans and three toss-ups.
If the Republicans do take the Senate, they won’t have a lot of time to savor the victory, because two years later they’re going to be the ones defending more seats (see Sean Trende’s analysis for more details). That makes it entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Republicans will have control of both houses for only two years, and after 2016 we’ll go back to the way things are now. So can they legislate during that time?
To a certain degree, the question is moot as long as Obama is president. Anything big and consequential on the Republican agenda would get vetoed. But you can accomplish a lot by thinking relatively small. The question is whether Republicans — or to be more specific, House Republicans — are capable of doing that.
I’ll point you to two articles written in the last couple of days. The first, by Dylan Scott in Talking Points Memo, discusses some of the ways Senate Republicans and the insurance industry are thinking about the possibility of a GOP Senate takeover. There’s a lot of discussion about some of the features of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that might be trimmed back. Could you cut or eliminate a tax on insurance policies? What about restoring cuts to Medicare Advantage? Might you introduce a lower-level “copper” plan to be sold on the exchanges, which would be less comprehensive than the gold, silver and bronze plans?
Now let’s turn to the House. Last night, The Post’s Robert Costa reported that House Republican leaders are coalescing around an alternative to the ACA that would do some of the things Republicans have been advocating for years: repeal the ACA, institute medical malpractice reform, let people buy insurance across state lines and a few other things.
See the difference? The senators accept that the ACA is law and are thinking about how they’d like to change it. The House members are coming up with another way to make a futile, symbolic shaking of their fists in the general direction of the White House. And this may offer a clue to how legislating would proceed in a Republican Congress. The House, still dominated by extremely conservative Republicans for whom any hint of compromise is considered the highest treason, could continue to pass one doomed bill after another, while the Senate tries to write bills that have at least some chance of ever becoming law.
And that would be just fine with Barack Obama. If he’s faced with both houses controlled by the opposition, there’s nothing he’d rather see than them fighting with each other and passing only unrealistic bills that he can veto without worrying about any backlash from the public.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Published at The Plum Line, The Washington Post, March 17, 2014
“Keep Calm And Carry On”: Jolly’s Win Does Not Presage Republican Wave
David Jolly won an upset victory over Democrat Alex Sink in Tuesday’s special election in Florida’s 13th congressional district, sending another Republican to the House of Representatives, and unleashing a torrent of breathless predictions that Democrats are doomed in 2014.
A National Journal article by Josh Kraushaar, titled “Why a Republican Wave in 2014 is Looking More Likely Now,” and Joe Scarborough’s declaration that “we may have something historic here happening, where you have one act [Obamacare] actually causing grave damage to a political party two midterms in a row” typify this brand of speculative political analysis.
That makes for an easy narrative, but it’s grounded in very few facts. It’s entirely possible — or even probable — that Republicans make major gains in the 2014 midterms. They may even win a Senate majority. But if they do, it will have nothing to do with what happened in Pinellas County on Tuesday night.
For starters, as political scientist Alan Abramowitz pointed out after a 2011 special election in New York — in which Republican Bob Turner upset Democrat David Weprin, prompting excited (and false) reports of an impending Republican wave in 2012 — the results of special elections do not accurately predict the results of subsequent general elections.
“An analysis of the results of all special House elections since World War II shows that while there is a weak relationship between the net party swing in special elections and the net party swing in the subsequent general election (the correlation is .32), special election results have no impact once you control for other factors such as the party of the president in midterm elections, seats held by the parties going into the election and the incumbent president’s approval rating,” Abramowitz wrote.
A quick look at the specifics of Florida’s special election makes it clear that this contest is no exception.
First, turnout was very low. Just 183,634 voters cast ballots in the election, down from 329,347 in the 2012 general election, and 266,934 in the 2010 midterm. To be clear, Republicans — who have a narrow registration advantage in the district — did a much better job getting their voters out to the polls than Democrats did. But Florida Democrats’ failure to convince voters to turn out for Alex Sink in March tells us exceedingly little about, say, Alaska Democrats’ ability to get out the vote for Mark Begich in November.
Second, there’s no evidence that Obamacare — which has been widely labeled as the hinge on which the election swung — actually served as a decisive factor in the election. There is no exit polling available for the race, but polls leading up to election day suggested that voters had other priorities; a Februrary Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll, for example, found that while 39 percent said the Affordable Care Act was “very important” to their voting preference, 33 percent said it was just “somewhat important,” and 26 percent said it is “not at all important” (in fairness, that poll also said that Sink would win).
And while the Affordable Care Act featured prominently in the barrage of television ads that saturated the airwaves throughout the campaign, it was hardly the sole focus of the race. In fact, Jolly didn’t even mention the law in his victory speech, choosing instead to focus on his commitment to local issues.
But even if it turns out that Obamacare did seal the victory for Jolly, there’s no reason to assume that the issue will spark a Republican wave. As Abramowitz reminds us, the way that 180,000 Floridians feel about the law in March tells us very little about how some two million voters in North Carolina or Georgia will feel about it eight months from now. And national polls suggest that the law is not set up to be a clear electoral winner for either party.
Finally, in Florida’s election, one must consider Libertartian candidate Lucas Overby, who won about 5 percent of the vote. As Nick Gillespie points out in Reason, Overby’s platform makes it very plausible that he pulled more votes away from Sink than he did from Jolly (in the same manner that Libertarian Robert Sarvis pulled more votes from Democrat Terry McAuliffe than he did from Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial election). Again, with no exit polls, it’s impossible to know for sure. But there’s a chance that were Overby not in the race, Sink would have won. If that were the case, would the media be running with overheated reports that Democrats will be in the catbird seat come November?
There’s no question that Sink’s loss should be a major disappointment for Democrats, who squandered a real shot at winning a seat that Republicans have held for decades. And there’s also no question that Democrats, saddled by an unfriendly electoral map and an unpopular president, are in danger of suffering big losses in the midterms. But there is simply no reason to believe that last night’s result provides a roadmap for future elections across the nation. If Republicans do make big gains in November, it will have nothing to do with David Jolly or Alex Sink.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 12, 2014
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