“Can This Campaign Be Constructive?”: Republicans Should Offer Specifics Or Shut Up
What might a reasonable, constructive presidential campaign look like?
To ask the question invites immediate dissent because we probably can’t even agree across philosophical or political lines what “reasonable” and “constructive” mean.
But let’s try an experiment: Can we at least reach consensus on the sort of debate between now and November that could help us solve some of our problems? I’ll let you in on the outcome in advance: Ideology quickly gets in the way of even this modest effort.
Start out by defining goals everyone could rally around. We need to get the economy moving faster and bring unemployment down, an all-the-more-urgent imperative after last week’s disappointing jobs report. We want all Americans to share prosperity and to reverse the trend toward widening inequality. We want a sustainable budget where, in good times, revenue more or less matches expenditures. And we want an education system that prepares members of the next generation for productive and rewarding lives.
Notice a few things about this list. It does not include social issues. Many Americans on both sides of politics legitimately believe that matters such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control, contraception and religious liberty (I could mention others) are of absolutely central concern. Some of them would reject my agenda at the outset. I’d defend it by insisting that the vast majority of Americans, whatever their views on any of these vexing subjects, want to get to certain basics first. They know the social issues won’t go away.
Conservatives might rebel against the way I frame our objectives. In talking about the budget, I do not even bring up reducing taxes. That is because I think the evidence shows that if we are serious about balancing the budget, government needs more revenue. The brute facts of (1) the steady rise in the costs of health care and (2) the aging of the baby boomers mean that we can’t just hack our way to a balanced budget without eviscerating programs such as Medicare and Social Security that most Americans want.
Thus a challenge to conservatives: If cutting taxes is really more important to you than fiscal balance, why not just say so? Why pretend that balance matters when your real goal is a sharp reduction in the size of government? Alternatively, if we could agree that revenue is needed, let’s argue about the right mix between spending cuts and tax increases, and about which taxes to raise.
And can politicians and commentators stop hiding behind vague promises of “tax reform”? Offer specifics or shut up about tax reform. Let’s also agree that slashing programs for poor people — and I’m one who thinks we should spend more — won’t come anywhere close to resolving our fiscal difficulties.
Job creation is at the heart of the campaign, and it is the issue about which we will have the least clarity. To me (and, I would say, to most non-ideological economists), it is perfectly obvious that rolling back government, both here and in Europe, has been exactly the wrong thing to do in a time of high unemployment. To save words, I refer you to a pile of fact-rich Paul Krugman columns.
The unemployment numbers would be much better without the massive loss of government jobs, and private-sector job growth would, in turn, be higher as those public workers spent money. It would be helpful if conservatives who disagree would offer evidence for why they are so certain that government austerity will make things better.
I’d like to hope we’ll get somewhere on education, but as for rising inequality, many on the right don’t even think it’s a problem. So let’s debate over whether greater inequality impedes faster growth or promotes it. Again, I think the evidence shows that when inequality gets out of hand (see 1929 and now), it’s a drag on the whole economy. Forgive me for noting that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less. But let’s have it out. Arguing in a serious way about the single question of economic inequality would make all the other nonsense of the next five months endurable.
What I do know is that if we don’t use this campaign at least to define the problems we face, we will end up wasting the $2 billion or so this campaign will cost, and a lot of time.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 3, 2012
“The American Jobs Act”: The Road Not Taken By A “Do Nothing Congress”
About a year ago, the job market looked a lot like it does now — after a strong winter, the economy stumbled badly in May and job growth stalled. Once the Republicans’ debt-ceiling crisis was resolved, President Obama shifted gears, refocused his agenda, and unveiled the American Jobs Act.
It seems like ages ago, but it was just last September when the president delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, laying out a detailed plan to boost job creation. It’s easy to forget, but it was a credible, serious plan — the AJA would have prevented thousands of layoffs for teachers, cops, and firefighters; invested heavily in infrastructure; and cut taxes intended to spur hiring.
Independent analysis concluded the plan would have a significant and positive effect. From an AP report in September:
A tentative thumbs-up. That was the assessment Thursday night from economists who offered mainly positive reviews of President Barack Obama’s $450 billion plan to stimulate job creation. […]
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that the president’s plan would boost economic growth by 2 percentage points, add 2 million jobs and reduce unemployment by a full percentage point next year compared with existing law.
Macroeconomic Advisers wasn’t quite as optimistic, but its analysis projected that the White House plan “would give a significant boost to GDP and employment over the near-term.” The firm would expect to see the proposal create at least 1.3 million jobs.
Despite public clamoring for action on jobs, congressional Republicans reflexively killed the American Jobs Act, saying it was unnecessary. The House wouldn’t bring it up for a vote, and a Republican filibuster killed it in the Senate. For GOP policymakers, this was a time when Washington should stop investing in job creation and start focusing on austerity — lower the deficit, take capital out of the economy, and everything would work out fine.
As panic sets in after this morning’s brutal jobs report, take a moment to consider a hypothetical: what would the economy look like today if Congress had followed Obama’s lead, responded to public-opinion polls, and passed the American Jobs Act? In 2012, do you think the nation could use those 1.3 million jobs or not?
Are we better off now as a result of Republican obstructionism and intransigence, or would we have been better off if popular and effective job-creation measures had been approved?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 1, 2012
“The Panicky Man”: Mitt Romney’s Ridiculous Unemployment Reaction
Unemployment, which is high but generally dropping, ticked up a tenth of a percent in May to 8.2 percent. This is not good news. There were 69,000 jobs created—a big improvement over the months when the country was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs—but still not what economists had hoped for or expected.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee, called it “devastating news.”
Devastating? Seriously? It’s a disappointment, to be sure. But “devastating” is a word used to describe rubble-making crises, things like Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks. It sounds over-the-top from anyone, but in Romney’s case, the hyperbole is worse, since it just ends up underscoring Romney’s fatal flaw.
Romney’s not a passionate guy. He has a very calculating manner about him—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since it means he’s capable of making tough decisions without being overly influenced by emotion. This is a man who withdrew from the 2008 Republican presidential candidate race in February of that year, and endorsed Sen. John McCain soon afterward. This is not the behavior of a man given to delusion or hysteria. This was the behavior of a man who took an objective look at his own situation and concluded he could not win the nomination. So he wasn’t going to continue on a quixotic and ultimately losing quest.
It’s that sort of businesslike calm—or coldness, if you will—that is both Romney’s greatest asset and liability. He fails to connect with voters in large part because he appears to be driven by cold statistics instead of compassion, or indeed any emotion. But he also can use that to his advantage, casting himself as the person able to make hard decisions during tough times.
Calling a one tenth of 1 percent uptick in the unemployment rate “devastating” makes Romney look ridiculous. It makes one wonder how he’d react in a far worse crisis. But mostly, it appears phony. Romney already has trouble convincing people he has a solid core of principles, since he has changed his position on gay rights and abortion. Pretending to be Panicky Man doesn’t help.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, June 1, 2012
“Setting Up The Big Gamble”: Paul Ryan And Mitt Romney’s Long Game
The Republican campaign has been relentlessly focused on the goal of making voters hold President Obama responsible for the aftereffects of the 2008 global economic crisis. (See, for instance, these ads on “the Obama economy.”) But the party intends to use its power, should it win election, not to focus on decreasing short-term unemployment but on implementing a dramatic long-term restructuring of the scope of government. Mike Allen reports that Mitt Romney, in meetings with campaign donors, is tying himself more tightly to the Paul Ryan plan.
Pull back for a moment and consider Ryan’s role within the party, which is really pivotal. For several months, Ryan has been imploring Republicans not only to support his plan but to embrace it. Why should they do so? Because, when they win, then they will be able to implement the full thing. At a high-profile speech at the sacred locale of the Reagan library yesterday, Ryan hammered home the theme again:
I believe boldness and clarity of the kind that Ronald Reagan displayed in 1980 offer us the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition in 2012. We will not only win the next election, we have a unique opportunity to sweep and remake the political landscape. …
If we make the case effectively and win this November, then we will have the moral authority to enact the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year.
What Ryan is up to here, and what he’s been up to for more than two years, is this: He is trying to win an argument within the party that will occur after the 2012 election.
Should that happen, at least some of the more vulnerable Republicans will propose some measure of caution. They will believe the party won due to the poor state of the economy, not because of the Ryan plan (more accurately, even despite its embrace of the Ryan plan). Ryan wants to discredit that objection in advance.
The connecting thread of my last two print stories for the magazine — the first on the GOP’s almost panicked now-or-never focus on 2012, and the second on the rise of Paul Ryan — is that the Republicans, led by Ryan, have made a strategic decision that the economic crisis offers them an expiring window of opportunity to pass the agenda of their dreams. Should they win the election, it is vital that they use their majority immediately and to maximal effect. That’s why Ryan insisted on boxing the party in by getting his fellow Republicans to take dangerous votes on his budget in 2011 and again this year despite having no chance of signing into law under Obama. By making virtually all Republicans in Congress take the vote now, they will have a hard time claiming next year that voters don’t want such radical change.
I don’t think Ryan particularly cares whether Republicans actually win by running on his plan or merely can be persuaded that they have done so. He would probably be perfectly happy for Romney to win solely by focusing on the lingering effects of the economic crisis, as long as the party turns around and uses the win to pass his plan. The point is, Ryan has been setting up the big gamble for a long time — win the presidency, House, Senate trifecta in 2012 and pass his plan — and everything he’s doing is geared toward locking the rest of his party into it.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, May 24, 2012
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