“Conservatives Have No Idea What To Do About Recessions”: Republicans Have Not The Wrong Answer, But No Answer
For the last five years, liberals have promoted three main economic policies to shorten or ameliorate the Great Recession and speed the recovery from it.
- Deficit-financed spending to compensate for demand gaps in the private sector.
- Easy monetary policy to raise inflation and support demand.
- Mortgage modifications to reduce foreclosures and support consumption.
Most conservatives hate this agenda. As Mike Konczal notes, they bizarrely portray these policies as “corporatist” efforts to enrich the rich. But what’s really weird is conservatives have no alternative to this agenda they loathe.
To be clear, conservatives absolutely do have an economic policy agenda. They favor lower taxes, less regulation, government spending cuts, more domestic energy production, school choice, free trade, and low inflation. They often cite these policies as ones that might alleviate recession and speed recovery. They favor these policies now, they favored them in 2008, and they favored them in 2004.
That is, conservatives favor the same set of economic policies when the economy is weak and when it is strong; when unemployment is high and when it is low; when few homeowners are facing foreclosure and when many are. The implication is that conservatives believe there is nothing in particular the government should do about economic cycles.
This is a big problem. Recessions are terrible. They create enormous misery by throwing people out of work and out of their homes. How can a political ideology have nothing to say about how to address recessions?
Perhaps conservatives believe that conservative economic policies will prevent recessions, making it unnecessary to have policies aimed at addressing them. That view would involve a distinctly unconservative degree of hubris.
Perhaps conservatives concede that recessions are terrible and sometimes inevitable, but genuinely believe that nothing productive can be done to address them. If that is so, how can they favor reductions in the social safety net? The argument for cutting welfare programs is that able-bodied people should work and will do so if denied the opportunity to receive benefits without working. But the defining characteristic of an economic down-cycle is that some people who would like to work cannot find work.
As with many economic issues, there is a gap between conservative wonks and conservative policymakers. Many conservative economic policy wonks break with the Republican party by favoring one or more recession-specific economic policies. Economists Luigi Zingales and Glenn Hubbard have called for aggressive programs to modify mortgages. Scott Sumner, David Beckworth, Josh Hendrickson and others have promoted monetary intervention to combat recessions. Michael Strain has promoted a suite of reforms, mostly aimed at the labor market, that would aim to cut unemployment in recessions.
But acceptance of these policies among actual Republican policymakers is near zero. The standard Republican answer for what to do about a bad economy is the same as their answer about what to do about a good economy. As with health care and bank regulation, economic recessions are a policy question to which conservatives have not the wrong answer, but no answer.
By: Josh Barro, Business Insider, December 16, 2013
“A Bleeding-Heart Liberal”: Why Conservatives Should Hate Santa Claus
The war over the War on Christmas has flared up again. Slate’s Aisha Harris fired the latest salvo with her piece last week, “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore,” prompting a famously confused response from Fox News host Megyn Kelly that “Santa Claus just is white” and “Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure, I mean, that’s verifiable fact—as is Santa.” Every single living being on the Internet weighed in. Kelly later defended herself in the usual manner of someone who regrets having said something: “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.”
She was not joking, of course. To conservatives—of which she is one—the War on Christmas is a very real and serious thing, and the holiday’s two most revered figures, Jesus and Santa, must be defended at all costs from liberals who would dare make the holiday more inclusive. What’s even weirder than the insistence that Santa is white, though, is that conservatives dare to defend him in the first place. He’s a conservative’s worst nightmare, actually.
Consider the lyrics to “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”:
He’s making a list / Checking it twice / Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice / Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you’re sleeping / He knows when you’re awake / He knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake
That he’s “making a list” sounds more than vaguely McCarthyistic, I’ll admit, but this is 2013, not 1954. You know who makes lists these days? The National Security Agency—for the express purpose of finding out who has been, or may one day be, naughty. By monitoring your emails and cell phone metadata, the NSA also has a pretty good idea of when you’re sleeping or awake. (Another agency that likes lists: the Internal Revenue Service.)
Santa invades our privacy in more literal ways, too. He breaks into everyone’s homes in the middle of the night—a crime that no one of any political persuasion, except perhaps anarchists, should endorse—and once inside, what does he do? He leaves presents totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars under your tree. You know who else gives Americans free stuff simply for being alive, rather than making recipients work for it? The bloated federal government and its social safety net. Every day, millions of Americans open unearned gifts in the form of Medicaid, unemployment insurance, TANF, and food stamps.
Santa’s home address further complicates matters. Eventually the North Pole will become the equivalent of a Caribbean beach, converting Santa into the world’s most famous and influential climate-change activist—at which point the only coal being mined in America will end up in presents beneath conservatives’ Christmas trees.
And as longtime Santa actor Jonathan Meath points out, “Santa is really the only cultural icon we have who’s male, doesn’t carry a gun, and is all about peace, joy, giving, and caring for other people.” Sure sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal to me.
Note: Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this website, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.
By: Ryan Kearney, The New Republic, December 16, 2013
“Hell Bent On Another Crisis”: Will Congress Ever Grasp That The Debt Crisis Is Fake?
As the American people tried to celebrate last year’s holiday season while mourning the loss of 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, Congress and the White House were duking it out over the “fiscal cliff.”
Our leaders reached a temporary solution on New Year’s Day that averted some of the self-imposed toxic mix of mandated tax increases and discretionary spending cuts that threatened to trigger a new recession. In the end, they couldn’t agree on a comprehensive deal, so the sequester went into effect two months later with relatively little fanfare.
We’re still living with those $80 billion across-the-board cuts, which slashed research spending, kicked nearly 60,000 kids out of Head Start and forced Meals on Wheels to provide less help for the elderly and others in need.
Now they’re at it again. After October’s government shutdown, a new congressional committee got a Friday, December 13 deadline to reach an agreement on a budget for the 2014 fiscal year — which began more than two months ago. Come January 15, federal spending authority will run out again and we could begin 2014 with another shutdown.
On the surface, the conflict between President Barack Obama and the Republican Party is over how to cut yearly federal deficits, which pile up over time and increase the national debt. Republicans cite a “debt crisis” and construct economic doomsday scenarios to justify their insistence that Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security should be cut.
Obama says no — we need more revenue, and it needs to come from the very wealthy and corporations who don’t pay their fair share in taxes. Besides, the deficit is already much smaller – thanks to the ongoing sequester and two provisions in that New Year’s fiscal deal: a payroll tax cut for all workers and the end of the Bush-era tax cuts for the very richest Americans.
There are a couple of things wrong with this picture. To begin with, while the government is indeed operating at a deficit (albeit a much lower one) and as a consequence piling up debt, there is no debt “crisis.”
According to leading economists like Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, deficit spending can improve ailing economies, and we should actually have more of it until ours fully recovers from the deepest crisis we’ve seen since the Great Depression.
Secondly, Republicans don’t really care about deficits and debt. After all, they created both — largely through tax cuts for the wealthy and unpaid-for wars during the George W. Bush administration. Their whole argument is a smokescreen for their core agenda — massive wealth transfers from the poor and what’s left of the middle class to the rich — through regressive tax policies and dismantling the safety net.
This isn’t new. It’s been the Republican agenda for at least 30 years.
In 2011, Republicans brought the country to the brink of default for the first time in history by insisting that a raise in the debt ceiling (historically bipartisan and routine) be offset by program cuts. This year, they shut down the government because they didn’t get their way.
Obama has said that strategy won’t work again, and the current need to once again raise the amount the government can borrow is non-negotiable. And he has upped the ante with a new demand that any future cuts be offset by tax increases on the wealthiest and corporations.
We don’t yet know if the latest standoff will trigger a new round of cuts to programs low-income Americans depend on most. Right now the House is asking for a $40 billion cut in food stamps over the next decade, and Medicare and Social Security are always on their hit list.
What we do know is that Republicans seem bent on causing one “crisis” after another, and the country loses in the bargain.
By: Martha Burk, Director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations; Published in The Bill Moyers Blog, December 4, 2013
“Casting Aside The Weak And Fragile”: Cuts To Food Stamp Program Reveal Congressional Hypocrisy
For decades, I’ve proudly asserted that “nobody starves to death in America.” The comment has been addressed to acerbic critics of the American government, often foreign visitors, who insist that the United States is a mean-spirited place that casts aside its weak and fragile citizens.
I still contend that nobody starves to death here, but I’ve had to modify my claims about the country’s social safety net. Even if no one dies for lack of basic nutrition, plenty of people go to bed hungry every night. And if Congress’ harsh Republican caucus has its way, some may starve.
That’s because the band of ultraconservatives who control the House are bent on deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps. They passed a farm bill laden with welfare for farmers, but they left out one of its biggest traditional components: food stamps. It was the first time since 1973 that the nutrition program had been left out of the farm bill.
Now, negotiations have started between the Senate and the House to try to reconcile the upper chamber’s more charitable version with the one the lower chamber put together. It will be a tough slog since the two bills are billions of dollars apart. The Senate wants to cut $4 billion from SNAP over 10 years, while the House wants to cut nearly $40 billion.
Perhaps the most appalling thing about the farm bill presented by the ultraconservatives in the House is that it makes little pretense of cutting spending by ferreting out wastefulness or fraud, no feint at an all-out assault on the deficit. Instead, this is just a base and ugly assault on the working poor.
Oh, conservatives claimed that their cuts to food stamps were in response to fraud, as their claque filled the airwaves with the same example of a carefree California surfer enjoying his “wonderful” life on food stamps. They neglected to point to government data which show that SNAP is among the most efficient of government programs, with fraudulent spending restricted to about 2 percent of its budget.
Meanwhile, the same conservatives have said nothing — nothing — about the millions of dollars in fraud related to farm subsidies. A June audit by the Government Accountability Office found that millions of dollars in subsidies have been sent to farmers who’ve been dead for at least a year. That’s just the illegal stuff.
That doesn’t touch the entirely legal fraud: The entire network of agricultural subsidies is a massive boondoggle, welfare to people who hardly need it. While conservatives hector the working poor about their alleged laziness, some agricultural programs pay farmers not to plant. Why don’t Fox News and Rush Limbaugh ever talk about that?
Farmers hardly need the money. (Forget about the struggling family farmer of lore. He has largely disappeared.) Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department projected that farm income in 2013 would be $128.2 billion, the highest since 1973.
One of the more egregious examples of the sheer hypocrisy surrounding the debate over the farm bill was revealed by The New York Times, which wrote about U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN). He voted for the bill that eviscerates SNAP, but he received nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government between 1999 and 2012, according to the Times.
“We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” he said, apparently without irony.
Conservatives claim to be alarmed by the dramatic increase in food stamp outlays, up 77 percent since 2007 to a record high of $78.5 billion in fiscal year 2012. (The SNAP program is already scheduled for a 5 percent cut as a provision related to the 2009 stimulus bill lapses.) But that’s because so many more people are struggling to make ends meet.
The Great Recession accelerated a trend that has hollowed out the middle class, leaving many Americans without college degrees in a downward spiral. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that nearly 49 million Americans are “food insecure” — bureaucratese that means they don’t have enough to eat.
If we aren’t willing to see to it that they have basic nutrition, I’ll have to reconsider what I believe about my country.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, November 2, 2013
“Deep Seated Racial Antagonism”: Tea Partiers React With Fury To A World They Can’t Control
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many pundits and political observers were eager to expunge the nation’s brutal and long-running history of stark racial oppression. They spoke of a “post-racial” society freed from the divisions of tribe, healed of the deep wounds that ached and bled along the color line for centuries.
Even those who were less sanguine about the disappearance of racism — myself included — believed that the election of the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of greater racial harmony and understanding. Surely, a nation ready to be led by a black man was ready to let go many of its oldest and ugliest prejudices.
But that was a very naive notion. It turns out that Obama’s election has, instead, provoked a new civil war, a last battle cry of secession by a group of voters who want no part of a country led by a black man, no place in a world they don’t rule, no home in a society where they are simply one more minority group. Call those folks “Tea Partiers.”
The ultraconservatives who have taken over the Republican Party are motivated by many things — antipathy toward the federal government, conservative religious beliefs and a traditional Republican suspicion of taxes, among them. But the most powerful force animating their fight is a deep-seated racial antagonism.
Don’t take my word for it. Democracy Corps, a political research and polling group headed by Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, has published a report from a series of focus groups conducted with segments of the Republican Party — moderates, evangelicals and Tea Partiers.
The report confirms that Republicans, especially the Tea Partiers, “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority. The race issue is very much alive.” It also notes that “Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters.”
Tea Partiers believe that the Democratic Party is intent on expanding the social safety net in order, basically, to buy votes. They see “Obamacare” as a sop to that alleged 47 percent of lazy Americans who don’t want to work, don’t pay any taxes and live off government handouts. And, of course, those lazy Americans are, in their view, voters of color.
One focus group participant actually described the mythical America he pined for this way:
“Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. … Very homogeneous.”
Democracy Corps isn’t the only research group that has ferreted out the racial antagonism at the heart of Tea Partiers’ radicalism. Writing in The New York Times, journalist Thomas Edsall shared portions of an email exchange with political scientist Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. Parker said that “reactionary conservatives” believe “social change is subversive to the America with which they’ve become familiar, i.e., white, mainly male, Protestant, native born, straight. ‘Real Americans,’ in other words.”
None of this should come as any great surprise. In 2010, a New York Times poll of Tea Partiers found that more than half said the policies of the Obama administration favor the poor, and 25 percent thought that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public. Their racial paranoia has long been clear.
If anything has been surprising, it’s been the potency of their hatred, the irrationality of their tactics, the venom in their backlash. But, as they see it, they are fighting for their way of life — their control, their power.
This is an existential battle, and they’re willing to burn down the country to save it from people of color. That’s why they’re willing to risk defaulting on the nation’s debt for the first time in history.
The only whiff of good news is that Tea Party supporters tend to be older than average. Their cohort is diminishing and will be replaced by a younger voting bloc whose members don’t hew to their antediluvian views.
But the Tea Partiers are going to be with us for a while, and it’s going to be a wild ride.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 12, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 