“Fiorina The Smooth Operator”: The Essence Of Fiorina ’16: A Smooth Exterior With Little Beneath It
In a piece at Vox today that you should most definitely read if you are following what passes for a bipartisan debate on climate change, Dave Roberts looks closely at a four-minute segment of an interview Katie Couric did with Carly Fiorina that Republican flacks are praising as a genius tour de force (for Carly, of course, not for Katie). He goes through ten claims Fiorina–not a climate change denier but rather someone who finds infinite excuses not to do anything about it–made in the interview against Democratic climate change proposals and shows they are more than a bit factually challenged. A sample of an argument Carly advanced as a Californian:
California “destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations”
California’s climate regulations are indeed the most ambitious in the nation, and they just keep getting more ambitious. (A pair of new climate bills has cleared the Senate and is headed to the Assembly.)
If California were its own country, it would be one of the world’s top 10 in total renewable energy generation and one of the bottom two in carbon intensity. It is the top state in the nation for venture capital investments in cleantech, cleantech patents, and advanced-energy jobs. In fact, it leads the nation in virtually every cleantech category, from electric vehicles to green buildings to solar capacity to policy to investment, reliably topping the US Cleantech Leadership Index.
Meanwhile, between 1993 and 2013, thanks to energy efficiency, the average residential electricity bill in California declined, on an inflation-adjusted basis, by 4 percent, even as bills rose elsewhere in the country. Between 1990 and 2012, the state cut per-capita carbon emissions by 25 percent even as its GDP increased by 37 percent. Its total carbon emissions are declining, even as its economy continues to grow.
Oh, and California created more jobs than any other state in the nation last year, with the fifth-highest GDP growth rate. And its budget is balanced.
Looks like the state is surviving its environmental regulations so far.
After nine other, similar expositions, Roberts concludes:
However smooth Fiorina may be, in the end it’s not going to make sense to voters to acknowledge the science of climate change and then say you’re against every solution to it except handing out subsidies to the coal industry. That is some unstable derp. If I had to predict, I’d say political pressure will be such that Fiorina will either be forced back into outright denialism or she’ll have to offer something less vaporous on the policy front. She won’t be able to stay where she is.
But note that qualifier “in the end.” Untutored folk watching Fiorina may simply notice how “smooth” she is. And the fact that it’s Katie Couric interviewing her is instructive. A series of Couric inteviews took Sarah Palin down several notches in 2008 because the nationally unknown Alaska governor was anything but smooth. But that’s the essence of Fiorina ’16: a smooth exterior with little beneath it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 21, 2015
“Party Loyalty Isn’t All That Important”: How Donald Trump Exposed The Limits Of Ideology In A Most Ideological Party
Donald Trump figured something out about the Republican Party. Maybe it was a flash of insight, or maybe he stumbled into it and doesn’t even realize what he found. But here it is: Even in this most ideological of parties, ideology has its limits.
This is a party, after all, that has spent the last few years on its own miniature version of the Cultural Revolution, a tireless search for ideological heretics who can be exposed, shamed, and banished. It has made compromise into something beneath contempt, and required all who would wear the name “Republican” to demonstrate that the hatred of Barack Obama and all he touches vibrates within every cell of their beings. When the party confronts a policy development it doesn’t like, it demands not just that the idea be opposed, but that it be opposed again and again and again, no matter how fruitless the blows battered against it (the number of votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act is well past 50, all failed).
Yet the party’s effort to find a leader is now led — by a wide margin — by a man who at best is a piecemeal conservative, taking a harshly right-wing stance here and an oddly liberal one there. This seems to be a result of the fact that Trump has never thought much about policy, and doesn’t really care.
If you want to understand Trump’s appeal in the primaries — both its power and its limits — there are two articles that came out in the last few days that you should read. The first, from The Washington Post‘s David Weigel, explains how Trump’s talk about foreign countries stealing American jobs is resonating with economically troubled voters, particularly in places where manufacturing has declined. Instead of talking about job retraining or anything else realistically modest, Trump all but promises that he’ll go to China and punch the commies in the face until they give us our jobs back.
The second, from Bloomberg‘s Melinda Henneberger, describes how Republican voters, besotted with Trump’s style, barely notice that his positions on issues are a hodgepodge of conservative and liberal ideas. “After he finished talking in New Hampshire on Friday night, I asked half a dozen Republicans who said they liked him what they had heard in his long, stream-of-consciousness oration that struck them as conservative,” she writes, “and none of them could point to anything in particular.” But it didn’t matter.
The approach Republican politicians have taken toward their voters in recent years is a combination of policy and posture. The policies are a version of what they’ve always offered, just a little bit more conservative and a lot more pure. The posture is one of opposition to Barack Obama — unyielding, inflexible, even petulant or downright angry. The easiest way to assure Republican voters you’re one of them is to show them how much you hate the guy in the White House.
Which may be understandable, since the president is the axis around which elite politics revolves. When your party is out of power, you’re inevitably going to define yourself in relation to him. But then along comes Trump, who has an entirely different posture.
Though it may be odd coming from a guy who waged a campaign to prove that Obama isn’t actually an American citizen (and apparently still believes it), Trump seems to barely have time to talk about this administration, except as the most recent example of larger problems he’s promising to fix with a sweep of his hand. His message isn’t, I’ll reverse everything that happened in the Obama years, it’s, Everyone else is a bunch of losers, and I’m a winner. That applies to Democrats, Republicans, everyone. The force of his persona is such that when he displays some lack of fealty to conservative ideals — like saying that single-payer health care “works well in Canada” — ideological conservatives may be horrified, but he just rolls right past it. And that tells us that ideological purity isn’t all that important to Republican voters, at least not all of them.
If it was, Trump would be pulling 5 percent in the primary polls, not 25 percent. His flirtation with a third-party run would also be bringing him down, but it isn’t, which suggests that there are lots of Republicans for whom party loyalty isn’t all that important.
Of course, 25 percent isn’t a majority, and it’s probably necessary to demonstrate both ideological fealty and a fundamental commitment to the GOP in order to get the nomination. But Trump has shown that there are other impulses within the Republican electorate, like resentment, dissatisfaction with targets bigger than Obama, and the desire for a confident leader who will promise the moon.
Even in a party now defined by its ideological extremism, it isn’t always about ideology. Whether any of the party creatures who make up the rest of the field can capture and exploit those impulses is something we’ll have to wait and see.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 18, 2015
“G.O.P. Candidates And Obama’s Failure To Fail”: Republicans Had Nothing To Say About Any Of The Supposed Obama Disaster Areas
What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.
Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.
And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the G.O.P. — even bigger than Donald Trump.
Start with health reform. Talk to right-wingers, and they will inevitably assert that it has been a disaster. But ask exactly what form this disaster has taken, and at best you get unverified anecdotes about rate hikes and declining quality.
Meanwhile, actual numbers show that the Affordable Care Act has sharply reduced the number of uninsured Americans — especially in blue states that have been willing to expand Medicaid — while costing substantially less than expected. The newly insured are, by and large, pleased with their coverage, and the law has clearly improved access to care.
Needless to say, right-wing think tanks are still cranking out “studies” purporting to show that health reform is a failure. But it’s a losing game, and judging from last week’s debate Republican politicians know it.
But what about side effects? Obamacare was supposed to be a job-killer — in fact, when Marco Rubio was asked how he would boost the economy, pretty much all he had to suggest was repealing health and financial reforms. But in the year and a half since Obamacare went fully into effect, the U.S. economy has added an average of 237,000 private-sector jobs per month. That’s pretty good. In fact, it’s better than anything we’ve seen since the 1990s.
Which brings us to the economy.
There was remarkably little economic discussion at the debate, although Jeb Bush is still boasting about his record in Florida — that is, his experience in presiding over a gigantic housing bubble, and providentially leaving office before the bubble burst. Why didn’t the other candidates say more? Probably because at this point the Obama economy doesn’t look too bad. Put it this way: if you compare unemployment rates over the course of the Obama administration with unemployment rates under Reagan, Mr. Obama ends up looking better – unemployment was higher when he took office, and it’s now lower than it was at this point under Reagan.
O.K., there are many reasons to qualify that assessment, notably the fact that measured unemployment is low in part because of a decline in the percentage of Americans in the labor force. Still, the Obama economy has utterly failed to deliver the disasters — hyperinflation! a plunging dollar! fiscal crisis! — that just about everyone on the right predicted. And this has evidently left the Republican presidential field with nothing much to say.
One last point: traditionally, Republicans love to talk about how liberals with their environmentalism and war on coal are standing in the way of America’s energy future. But there was only a bit of that last week — perhaps because domestic oil production has soared and oil imports have plunged since Mr. Obama took office.
What’s the common theme linking all the disasters that Republicans predicted, but which failed to materialize? If I had to summarize the G.O.P.’s attitude on domestic policy, it would be that no good deed goes unpunished. Try to help the unfortunate, support the economy in hard times, or limit pollution, and you will face the wrath of the invisible hand. The only way to thrive, the right insists, is to be nice to the rich and cruel to the poor, while letting corporations do as they please.
According to this worldview, a leader like President Obama who raises taxes on the 1 percent while subsidizing health care for lower-income families, who provides stimulus in a recession, who regulates banks and expands environmental protection, will surely preside over disaster in every direction.
But he hasn’t. I’m not saying that America is in great shape, because it isn’t. Economic recovery has come too slowly, and is still incomplete; Obamacare isn’t the system anyone would have designed from scratch; and we’re nowhere close to doing enough on climate change. But we’re doing far better than any of those guys in Cleveland will ever admit.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, August 10, 2015
“Liberals And Wages”: Public Policy Can Do A Lot To Help Workers Without Bringing Down The Wrath Of The Invisible Hand
Hillary Clinton gave her first big economic speech on Monday, and progressives were by and large gratified. For Mrs. Clinton’s core message was that the federal government can and should use its influence to push for higher wages.
Conservatives, however — at least those who could stop chanting “Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!” long enough to pay attention — seemed bemused. They believe that Ronald Reagan proved that government is the problem, not the solution. So wasn’t Mrs. Clinton just reviving defunct “paleoliberalism”? And don’t we know that government intervention in markets produces terrible side effects?
No, she wasn’t, and no, we don’t. In fact, Mrs. Clinton’s speech reflected major changes, deeply grounded in evidence, in our understanding of what determines wages. And a key implication of that new understanding is that public policy can do a lot to help workers without bringing down the wrath of the invisible hand.
Many economists used to think of the labor market as being pretty much like the market for anything else, with the prices of different kinds of labor — that is, wage rates — fully determined by supply and demand. So if wages for many workers have stagnated or declined, it must be because demand for their services is falling.
In particular, the conventional wisdom attributed rising inequality to technological change, which was raising the demand for highly educated workers while devaluing blue-collar work. And there was nothing much policy could do to change the trend, other than aiding low-wage workers via subsidies like the earned-income tax credit.
You still see commentators who haven’t kept up invoking this story as if it were obviously true. But the case for “skill-biased technological change” as the main driver of wage stagnation has largely fallen apart. Most notably, high levels of education have offered no guarantee of rising incomes — for example, wages of recent college graduates, adjusted for inflation, have been flat for 15 years.
Meanwhile, our understanding of wage determination has been transformed by an intellectual revolution — that’s not too strong a word — brought on by a series of remarkable studies of what happens when governments change the minimum wage.
More than two decades ago the economists David Card and Alan Krueger realized that when an individual state raises its minimum wage rate, it in effect performs an experiment on the labor market. Better still, it’s an experiment that offers a natural control group: neighboring states that don’t raise their minimum wages. Mr. Card and Mr. Krueger applied their insight by looking at what happened to the fast-food sector — which is where the effects of the minimum wage should be most pronounced — after New Jersey hiked its minimum wage but Pennsylvania did not.
Until the Card-Krueger study, most economists, myself included, assumed that raising the minimum wage would have a clear negative effect on employment. But they found, if anything, a positive effect. Their result has since been confirmed using data from many episodes. There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.
How can this be? There are several answers, but the most important is probably that the market for labor isn’t like the market for, say, wheat, because workers are people. And because they’re people, there are important benefits, even to the employer, from paying them more: better morale, lower turnover, increased productivity. These benefits largely offset the direct effect of higher labor costs, so that raising the minimum wage needn’t cost jobs after all.
The direct takeaway from this intellectual revolution is, of course, that we should raise minimum wages. But there are broader implications, too: Once you take what we’ve learned from minimum-wage studies seriously, you realize that they’re not relevant just to the lowest-paid workers.
For employers always face a trade-off between low-wage and higher-wage strategies — between, say, the traditional Walmart model of paying as little as possible and accepting high turnover and low morale, and the Costco model of higher pay and benefits leading to a more stable work force. And there’s every reason to believe that public policy can, in a variety of ways — including making it easier for workers to organize — encourage more firms to choose the good-wage strategy.
So there was a lot more behind Hillary’s speech than I suspect most commentators realized. And for those trying to play gotcha by pointing out that some of what she said differed from ideas that prevailed when her husband was president, well, many liberals have changed their views in response to new evidence. It’s an interesting experience; conservatives should try it some time.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 17, 2015
“Bush ‘Woefully Misinformed’ On Overtime Policy”: The Economy, In Other Words, Is Not Bush’s Strong Suit
With Congress unwilling to pass meaningful economic measures, President Obama’s recently unveiled overtime policy is one of the year’s biggest stories on the domestic economy. Jeb Bush, not surprisingly, doesn’t like it, but he may not fully understand it, either.
To briefly recap, under the status quo, there’s an annual income threshold for mandatory overtime: $23,660. Those making more than that can be classified by employers as “managers” who are exempt from overtime rules. The Obama administration’s Labor Department has spent the last several months working on the new plan, which raises the threshold to $50,440 – more than double the current level.
The policy doesn’t just nibble around the edges; its scope includes roughly 5 million American workers. NBC’s Kristin Donnelly reported the administration’s move constitutes “the most ambitious intervention in the wage economy in at least a decade.”
Campaigning in Iowa this week, Jeb Bush said the policy would result in “less overtime pay” and “less wages earned.” The Guardian did some fact-checking.
Numerous economists attacked Bush’s statement, calling him woefully misinformed. And several studies on the rule contradict Bush’s assertion that the overtime rules would “lessen the number of people working”.
Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas labor economist, said: “He’s just 100% wrong,” adding that “there will be more overtime pay and more total earnings” and “there’s a huge amount of evidence employers will use more workers”.
Indeed, a Goldman Sachs study estimated that employers would hire 120,000 more workers in response to Obama’s overtime changes. And a similar study commissioned by the National Retail Federation – a fierce opponent of the proposed overtime rules – estimated that as a result of the new salary threshold, employers in the restaurant and retail industries would hire 117,500 new part-time workers.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey added that Bush “should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Noting that the Republican presidential candidate also said Obama’s policy would also prohibit many bonuses, Eisenbrey added, “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense.”
On a surface level, it’s problematic that Bush would flub the issue so poorly, but it’s even more significant in the context of related confusion about economic policy.
Remember, the Florida Republican remains deeply committed to 4% GDP growth – a target no president has reached in the post-WWII era – despite the fact that the number was basically pulled out of thin air.
Bush picked the growth goal because, as he sees it, four is a “round number.” The fact remains, however, that this is “backed by zero substantive analysis of any kind.”
The former governor still sees himself as some kind of economic expert, thanks to Florida’s growth in the 1990s, but as we’ve discussed before, whether Bush is prepared to admit it or not, Florida’s economic growth during his two terms was the result of a housing bubble. In fact, Paul Krugman accurately described it as “the mother of all housing bubbles – and when the bubble burst (luckily for Jeb! just after he left office) it promptly wiped out 900,000” of the 1.3 million jobs created when Bush was in the governor’s office.
The economy, in other words, is not Bush’s strong suit.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 17, 2015
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