“Fiscal Fever Breaks”: 2013 Was The Year Journalists And The Public Finally Grew Weary Of The Boys Who Cried Wolf
In 2012 President Obama, ever hopeful that reason would prevail, predicted that his re-election would finally break the G.O.P.’s “fever.” It didn’t.
But the intransigence of the right wasn’t the only disease troubling America’s body politic in 2012. We were also suffering from fiscal fever: the insistence by virtually the entire political and media establishment that budget deficits were our most important and urgent economic problem, even though the federal government could borrow at incredibly low interest rates. Instead of talking about mass unemployment and soaring inequality, Washington was almost exclusively focused on the alleged need to slash spending (which would worsen the jobs crisis) and hack away at the social safety net (which would worsen inequality).
So the good news is that this fever, unlike the fever of the Tea Party, has finally broken.
True, the fiscal scolds are still out there, and still getting worshipful treatment from some news organizations. As the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, many reporters retain the habit of “treating deficit-cutting as a non-ideological objective while portraying other points of view as partisan or political.” But the scolds are no longer able to define the bounds of respectable opinion. For example, when the usual suspects recently piled on Senator Elizabeth Warren over her call for an expansion of Social Security, they clearly ended up enhancing her stature.
What changed? I’d suggest that at least four things happened to discredit deficit-cutting ideology.
First, the political premise behind “centrism” — that moderate Republicans would be willing to meet Democrats halfway in a Grand Bargain combining tax hikes and spending cuts — became untenable. There are no moderate Republicans. To the extent that there are debates between the Tea Party and non-Tea Party wings of the G.O.P., they’re about political strategy, not policy substance.
Second, a combination of rising tax receipts and falling spending has caused federal borrowing to plunge. This is actually a bad thing, because premature deficit-cutting damages our still-weak economy — in fact, we’d probably be close to full employment now but for the unprecedented fiscal austerity of the past three years. But a falling deficit has undermined the scare tactics so central to the “centrist” cause. Even longer-term projections of federal debt no longer look at all alarming.
Speaking of scare tactics, 2013 was the year journalists and the public finally grew weary of the boys who cried wolf. There was a time when audiences listened raptly to forecasts of fiscal doom — for example, when Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairmen of Mr. Obama’s debt commission, warned that a severe fiscal crisis was likely within two years. But that was almost three years ago.
Finally, over the course of 2013 the intellectual case for debt panic collapsed. Normally, technical debates among economists have relatively little impact on the political world, because politicians can almost always find experts — or, in many cases, “experts” — to tell them what they want to hear. But what happened in the year behind us may have been an exception.
For those who missed it or have forgotten, for several years fiscal scolds in both Europe and the United States leaned heavily on a paper by two highly-respected economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, suggesting that government debt has severe negative effects on growth when it exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. From the beginning, many economists expressed skepticism about this claim. In particular, it seemed immediately obvious that slow growth often causes high debt, not the other way around — as has surely been the case, for example, in both Japan and Italy. But in political circles the 90 percent claim nonetheless became gospel.
Then Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reworked the data, and found that the apparent cliff at 90 percent disappeared once you corrected a minor error and added a few more data points.
Now, it’s not as if fiscal scolds really arrived at their position based on statistical evidence. As the old saying goes, they used Reinhart-Rogoff the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination. Still, they suddenly lost that support, and with it the ability to pretend that economic necessity justified their ideological agenda.
Still, does any of this matter? You could argue that it doesn’t — that fiscal scolds may have lost control of the conversation, but that we’re still doing terrible things like cutting off benefits to the long-term unemployed. But while policy remains terrible, we’re finally starting to talk about real issues like inequality, not a fake fiscal crisis. And that has to be a move in the right direction.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 29, 2013
“Meet Our Modern-Day Scrooges, Proud As Can Be”: Where’s “The Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come” When You Really Need Him?
The holiday season is that time of year when the news pages take on a softer edge, as editors, photographers, and reporters strive to convey the spirit of fellowship and concern for the less fortunate embodied by the Salvation Army bell-ringers and the end of year charity appeals that fill out mailboxes and in-boxes. The Washington Post ran a short article on a homeless 11-year-old girl named Christmas Diamond (yes, really) who, facing a year without presents, was still thinking dreamily of a paint set she got two years ago; a few days later, the paper ran a heartwarming follow-up on the dozens of gifts that readers had dropped off at her shelter. Many papers ran articles on the plight of the 1.3 million long-term unemployed who lost their extended federal benefits over this past weekend. The New York Times annually outdoes everyone with its “neediest cases” stories, written explicitly as inducements for readers to give to its charitable fund.
It’s enough to make one think we’re turning into a nation of sentimental Tiny Tims. Luckily, we still have the letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, whose readers are strikingly eager to give expression to their inner Scrooge even at the peak of yuletide. Consider this remarkable sampling from just the past few days (emphasis added):
…Even if Congress passed a law that decreed all incomes must be equal, the inequality the president laments would continue as individuals spend their equal incomes unequally. Individual choice is fundamental to American freedom and liberty, yet it leads to inequality of outcome. Should the government therefore fix inequality by dictating every choice an individual makes?
The logical terminus of such egalitarianism is totalitarianism.
Patrick Hall
Chattanooga, Tenn.
What’s wrong with income inequality? In a society where its most productive members are incentivized to produce as much as they can, the economy grows. The people who benefit the most from economic growth aren’t the high-income producers; it is the poor who benefit most. The difference between being unemployed and dependent versus employed and self-sustaining has enormous impact on one’s life. If you want to improve someone’s life, raising the other guy’s taxes or health-care insurance premiums isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is to create jobs.
The doctrine President Obama self-righteously pushes is to strive for income equality. However, morality is a doctrine under which people experience the consequences of their behavior. Disincentivizing wealth creation, which is what President Obama seeks, is immoral and imposes misery on the underclass. That is what we should be discussing.
Michael O’Guin
McKinney, Texas
Barton Swaim (“‘Giving Back’ to Our Sanctimonious Selves,” op-ed, Dec. 20) misses the central insult of the words “giving back.” While giving generously to the needy and to the talented is a long American tradition, the term “giving back” suggests a prior “taking away,” i.e., theft. That single adverb “back” embodies the core conceit of the modern progressive liberal: that wealth is theft, requiring atonement; that unequal wealth—the fruit of a successful meritocracy—is criminal; that “society” is the only rightful owner of all that any individual can build and earn.
Give back our language!
Phil Harvey
Hampton Falls, N.H.
Mr. Swaim is so focused on questioning the sincerity of our small acts of giving that result from political and corporate marketing during the holidays that he fails to see the detriment that the constant pounding of phrases like “giving back” and “social responsibility” have on a free society.
Since one cannot “give back” what one has not previously received, this phrase implies that society has bestowed wealth on an individual instead of him having created or acquired it from his work and merit. “Giving back” is the twin brother of “you didn’t build that.” Likewise, one cannot be deemed “responsible” for someone to whom one has no obligation. “Social responsibility” implies that an individual has an obligation toward society, which he must fulfill. That is the cornerstone of socialism.
Mr. Swaim believes that the problem with the “giving back” phenomenon is that nothing is required from the individual but “minor, outwardly visible gestures.” On the contrary, let’s hope that it stays that way: that nothing is required from the individual and that “giving” always remains a voluntary gesture.
Fiamma Truuvert
London
…The economic reality is that the poorest Americans, with government subsidies and benefits, have better lifestyles today than did the poor at any other time in American history or anywhere else in the world. There is deprivation and pain, but life generally is better. In addition, there still is a remarkable amount of economic mobility in America despite pitiful public schools in most cities and severe cultural disadvantages (e.g., out-of-wedlock births, and low marriage rates) in poor minority communities.
Finally, no matter what we do collectively, we will never eradicate poverty unless Jesus mis-spoke two millennia ago. We can improve safety nets and try to reform public education, but there will always be a bottom 20%….
Jim Fitzpatrick
Hampton, Va.
The cover of the Journal on December 26, the day the first of these letters ran, featured a large photo of altar boys in violet robes standing among the 70,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Square to hear Pope Francis deliver the traditional Christmas Day message. Francis’s message included this line: “Looking at the Child in the manger, Child of peace, our thoughts turn to those children who are the most vulnerable victims of wars, but we think too of the elderly, to battered women, to the sick…”
In other words, to all those people “experiencing the consequences of their behavior.”
Where’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come when you really need him?
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, December 30, 2013
“Time To Get A Life”: Republicans React To Benghazi News
The article The Times published on Benghazi this weekend infuriated many Republicans, who ran screaming to television studios.
Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has made a special crusade out of the attack on the American diplomatic and intelligence compound in Benghazi, was asked on “Meet the Press” to justify Republican claims that Al Qaeda agents planned and executed the operation. (The article found no evidence that Al Qaeda was involved.)
Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC put her finger on the political question when she asked Mr. Issa why Republicans “use the term Al Qaeda.” After all, she said, “you and other members of Congress are sophisticated in this and know that when you say Al Qaeda, people think central Al Qaeda. They don’t think militias that may be inspired by Bin Laden and his other followers.”
“There is a group there involved that is linked to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Issa said. “What we never said — and I didn’t have the security to look behind the door, that’s for other members of Congress — of what the intelligence were on the exact correspondence with Al Qaeda, that sort of information — those sorts of methods I’ve never claimed.”
I’m still trying to parse that sentence.
On Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan insisted the story was wrong in finding that “Al Qaeda was not involved in this.”
“There was some level of pre-planning; we know that,” he said. “There was aspiration to conduct an attack by Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Libya; we know that. The individuals on the ground talked about a planned tactical movement on the compound — this is the compound before they went to the annex.”
For anyone wondering why it’s so important to Republicans that Al Qaeda orchestrated the attack — or how the Obama administration described the attack in its immediate aftermath — the answer is simple. The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. They also want to throw mud at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who they fear will run for president in 2016.
Which brings us to one particularly hilarious theme in the response to the Times investigation. According to Mr. Rogers, the article was intended to “clear the deck” for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said today that The Times was “already laying the groundwork” for a Clinton campaign. Other Republicans referred to Mrs. Clinton as our “candidate of choice.”
Since I will have more to say about which candidate we will endorse in 2016 than any other editor at the Times, let me be clear: We have not chosen Mrs. Clinton. We have not chosen anyone. I can also state definitively that there was no editorial/newsroom conspiracy of any kind, because I knew nothing about the Benghazi article until I read it in the paper on Sunday.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Editorial Page Editor, The New York Times, December 30, 2013
“Please Proceed, Republicans”: With No Regard For Facts, Do They Have The Capacity For Shame?
Well, lookee here:
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
Let’s go back to that infamous appearance that Susan Rice made on Meet the Press the Sunday following the Benghazi attacks:
DAVID GREGORY: The images as you well know are jarring to Americans watching all of this play out this week, and we’ll share the map of all of this turmoil with our viewers to show the scale of it across not just the Arab world, but the entire Islamic world and flashpoints as well. In Egypt, of course, the protests outside the U.S. embassy there that Egyptian officials were slow to put down. This weekend in Pakistan, protests as well there. More anti-American rage. Also protests against the drone strikes. In Yemen, you also had arrests and some deaths outside of our U.S. embassy there. How much longer can Americans expect to see these troubling images and these protests go forward?
MS. RICE: Well, David, we can’t predict with any certainty. But let’s remember what has transpired over the last several days. This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Obviously, our view is that there is absolutely no excuse for violence and that– what has happened is condemnable, but this is a– a spontaneous reaction to a video, and it’s not dissimilar but, perhaps, on a slightly larger scale than what we have seen in the past with The Satanic Verses with the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Now, the United States has made very clear and the president has been very plain that our top priority is the protection of American personnel in our facilities and bringing to justice those who…
GREGORY: All right.
MS. RICE: …attacked our facility in Benghazi.
I seem to recall that Ms. Rice received some criticism for those remarks. Yet, the New York Times reports:
Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…
…There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.
So, to recap, the attacks in Benghazi were not carried out by al-Qaeda, were not meticulously planned, and the motivation to participate in them was largely “a spontaneous reaction to a video.”
It appears that Ms. Rice’s comments weren’t all that far off the mark.
The lack of an al-Qaeda role is particularly damaging to the Republicans because their main conspiracy theory all along has been that the administration blamed the whole thing on the Innocence of Muslims movie to deflect from the fact that they had not eradicated the terrorist organization by eliminating their leader, Usama bin-Laden. Supposedly, the real problem in Benghazi wasn’t insufficient security but the actual identity of the attackers.
But it wasn’t the administration that politicized the tragedy. It was Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, behind in the polls and smelling blood, that tried everything they could think of to gain an advantage.
I wonder if they have the capacity for shame.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 28, 2013
“Personal Relationships’ Can Only Go So Far”: No Modern Precedent For Partisan Polarization As Intense As Today’s GOP Status Quo
It’s a fact of contemporary domestic politics that many in Washington resist, but there’s a limit to the power of presidential schmoozing.
The President’s failure to build friendships with lawmakers has damaged his chances of finding bipartisan support for legislation, a senator from his own party said Sunday. “It’s just hard to say no to a friend,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“When you build that relationship and that friendship, you’re looking for ways to try to work things out and find a compromise and, you know, that friendship means an awful lot. When you don’t build those personal relationships, it’s pretty easy for a person to say, well, let me talk about it, you know, and not really make, you know, that extra effort.”
I wish this were true, because it would suggest the underlying problem would be fairly easy to solve. If Manchin were right, and President Obama’s “personal relationships” with lawmakers could lead to more responsible governing, a concerted effort could be made to turn the White House into The Friendliest Place on Earth.
Regrettably, though, Manchin’s remedy is deeply flawed.
Let’s put aside, at least for now, the fact that Obama has gone further than any modern president in bringing members of the opposing party into his cabinet and incorporating ideas from the opposing party’s agenda into his own policy plans – only to find that Republicans oppose the very ideas they used to support once they learn the president agrees with them.
Let’s instead focus on this notion of “building personal relationships.” I’m reminded of an anecdote from a year ago, when Obama invited several GOP lawmakers to the White House for a private screening with the stars of the movie “Lincoln.” The president extended the invitation in secret, so congressional Republicans wouldn’t face any lobbying to turn Obama down.
How many of the invited Republicans accepted the invitation? None.
The Beltway seems to accept as fact the notion that an aloof president has made no effort to cultivate friendships with members of Congress, but reality points in a very different direction. It’s not just movie nights, either – Obama has hosted casual “get-to-know-you” gatherings; he’s taken Republicans out to dinner on his dime; he’s taken House Speaker Boehner out golfing; and he’s held Super Bowl and March Madness parties at the White House for lawmakers.
When it comes to “building personal relationships,” we’ve seen the effort. It just doesn’t seem to have paid any dividends.
And why not? Because the importance of presidential schmoozing has been wildly exaggerated, based on an antiquated, romanticized vision. As we’ve discussed before, there have been times at which lawmakers were on the fence before a big vote, and a president could gently apply pressure with a White House dinner invitation and an after-meal chat on the Truman balcony. For those who believe these traditional norms still apply, there’s an assumption that Obama can get his way with Congress if only he engaged more.
But in 2013, those norms have been thrown out the window.
If lack of schmoozing isn’t the problem, what is? As we’ve discussed many times, traditional governing dynamics are largely impossible given that the Republican Party has reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It’s a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one.
The result is a situation in which GOP lawmakers refuse to compromise or accept concessions, partly due to partisan rigidity, partly out of fear of a primary challenge, and most of the time, both.
Indeed, the parties sharply disagree with one another – there is no modern precedent for partisan polarization as intense as today’s status quo – and presidential outreach won’t change that. Congressional Republicans tend to fundamentally reject just about everything the White House wants, believes, and perceives as true. Presidential friendships change nothing.
Let’s return to the thesis presented last year by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein: “[W]e have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
The notion that schmoozing will lead to progress rests upon the assumption that congressional Republicans are responsible officials, willing to negotiate and work in good faith, and prepared to find common ground with Obama. All they need is some face-time and presidential hand-holding. Once they can get along on a personal level, a constructive process will follow.
It’s a pleasant enough fantasy, and I wish it were true, but everything we’ve seen over the last four years points in the opposite direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 23, 2013
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