Meanwhile, Paul Krugman at the Times rather sensibly declares, “The Obama budget isn’t going to happen, so in a sense it’s irrelevant.” Then, exploring the rhetorical implications of this budget, Krugman says Obama “has effectively given up on the idea that the government can do anything to create jobs in a depressed economy. In effect, although without saying so explicitly, the Obama administration has accepted the Republican claim that stimulus failed, and should never be tried again.” Of course, if you’ve been reading Krugman on the stimulus, you might expect what follows:
What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending.
Krugman provides a chart to demonstrate his point: a line showing “Government Current Expenditures” dips deeply in the 2008-2009 recession period. He concludes that while the non-starter budget seems an admission that the stimulus didn’t work, in actual fact, “Fiscal policy didn’t fail; it wasn’t tried.”
Washington Post wunderkind blogger Ezra Klein also steps back from the details of the twenty-pound budget to look at it as a political tool or statement in a roundup of wonk reactions published painfully early this morning. The budget is a potential first chess move in doing unpopular entitlement reform, argues Klein, without necessarily getting the unwanted credit. Perhaps he’s onto something. Discussing the budget’s missing entitlement reforms in a presser today, Obama said the recommendations of his deficit commission had not been shelved, but “still provides a framework for a conversation”—a conversation of which the budget is a part, but not the conclusion. And Jacob Lew, the president’s budget director, has said that addressing mandatory programs would best be handled in closed-door discussions.
Klein writes:
…it’s worth remembering that this is the White House’s opening bid in a negotiation that’s just getting started. They have made a decision—perhaps savvy, perhaps not—to leave it to the Republicans to take the first step on entitlements and tax reform. The Republicans, due to their criticism of this budget, now have to offer something more far-reaching in their proposal. If they come up with a plan people like and some votes for it, the White House can join with them in negotiations and eventually sign onto a grand compromise. This budget will be largely forgotten. If they come up with a plan people hate that clearly can’t get the votes, the White House can attempt a replay of the mid-1990s and hammer them with it.
This budget doesn’t lead on long-term deficit reduction. But that’s not necessarily because the White House is uninterested in that discussion. Note the section laying out the White House’s interest and position on Social Security reform. Rather, they’re keeping their options open until Congress makes the first move.
At The New Republic, Jonathan Chait sees the budget in political terms as well. For Chait, the budget is a demonstration that the White House is trying to change the idea, seemingly lodged deep in the American mind, that government is riddled with waste and bureaucracy. Chait says it’s meant to be a conversation-changer. He writes:
The message, sometimes made explicit, is that the budget actually does not contain a lot of waste. It’s filled with programs that have survived many previous rounds of belt-tightening for a reason. If you want to cut the budget, you have to cut useful and necessary things…. He’s explaining to the public that the free-ride view of budget cutting —we can cut our way out of the deficit by eliminating waste and spending that only benefits foreigners—is wrong.
CJR, you're doing a fine job of keeping the debate within the preferred bounds of beltway elite.
Left/Right/Center covers only half of the effectual debate. What about None of the Above?
Historically, the political left/right/center groupings are quite useful to politicians, for getting votes and crushing their preferred corporate interests' competitors: hence the "politicking." In root-level reality, the spectrum has interventionists/statists/authoritarians/centralizers ("big govt") on one extreme and non-interventionists/individualists/libertarians/decentralizers ("limited govt") on the other. Every pundit and outlet you linked to resides on the interventionist side of the philosophical fulcrum. (Is NRO supposed to pass as limited-govt? Oh dear.)
All this talk about whether to cut "defense" or whether to cut "entitlements" amounts to "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," and an effective way to keep readers "dumbed down."
We've heard from the interventionists; now, let's hear from the growing opposition.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 04:29 PM
I just heard within the past hour that his budget inlcudes job creation when a reporter asked him where the jobs are in this budget.
Here's where they are: 8,000 jobs added to Homeland Security.
Oh, goodie gumdrops! More people to control us because of all the terrorist attacks that have been nipped in the bud in this country#&%$! More fear-mongering with cancer scans and enhanced body groping with dirty rubber gloves. And if, for example, you ask the TSA agent to put on a clean pair of gloves, will you be detained and fined? From what I've read, people who dare open their mouths get the royal treatment. Does Homeland Security reimburse for the airline ticket?
More surveillance with Napolitano's public service announcements in the new partnership with Walmart advising cutomers to report any suspicious activity to the manager. Hey, there's a woman in the sock department deciding what she wants to buy! This public service announcement will be at the check out counters. They'll probably also wind up in many other places other than Walmart.
Next in the budget re jobs: 6,000 added to the Dept. of Treasury. For what and for who? People in Flint, Michigan? Laid-off factory workers in another state or two or three?
And didn't he say not long ago that he was laying off federal employees? Or was that just their pensions or, maybe, health care benefits?
Also heard the usual mantra: We all have to sacrifice. We all have to cut back.
Well, cuts in this budget and anywhere else such as state budgets, for example, don't affect any of the politicians (except when they are seeking reelection) so we all won't have to sacrifice. The sacrificial lambs are we the people who will have to give up what hasn't already been lost such as a home, health insurance, etc.
We all have to cut back? Not a single, solitary one of them will be forced to cut back nor will they. John Kerry's gonna not buy another yacht that he tries not pay taxes on? The "we" who they expect to cut back, haven't got anything to cut back to. What?
Wanna make cuts? Get the troops home now and stop spending billions on faux wars that maim and kill our young men and women not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent people in other countries - needless aggression that creates millions of refugees and destroys their land. How can it be that the superpower of the world is threatend by countries that have no miltary capability other than a bunch of guerillas?
Yet this nation doesn't have a dime to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes and can't afford healthcare for every American from womb to tomb. And now it has to cut heat for its seniors and poor, and grants for kids to be educated, and ad nauseum.
I really can't stand it anymore. I support none of them - not red, blue or inbetween. America is on the fast Road to the Bottom.
#2 Posted by dianne, CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 07:10 PM
Okay, first off this article is pundit heavy, expert light, and the few experts that are presented are given equal weight on these economic issues to Andrew Sullivan. That's weak.
Second, if we're going to use pejoratives turned labels such as "the professional left" to a body of criticism, I have no problem with that. The teabaggers, the neo-fascists at the national review, and members of the kochtopus might.
Third Andrew Sullivan is not a member of the "professional left". He's fits less the too neatly. 'Not at all' is a better characterization. He's a gay-rights libertarian who threw himself behind Bush, before he got too disgusted with the keystone cops police state they were running, and threw himself behind Obama for a time after. He's always been to the right of progressives and, aside from his anti-torture material, he's more often read and cited by Libertarians. He's not a leftist, he's a blob.
Fourth, Krugman, the one person who's won a nobel prize talking about economics here, is discussing something serious here which one could go into further detail on, the Anti-stimulus:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061803289.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/10/welcome_to_the_anti-stimulus.html
This was something Krugman alluded to in his fifty hoovers piece back in 2008 - the stimulus propped up the economy, it did not fix the economy because the states are fiscally damaged - revenues are depressed, state services are in high demand, and states are both unable to raise taxes and borrow. They have no options but cutting to the bone unless the Fed assists them.
Does this budget have state assistance in it? If not, 2012 will have some real problems.
More in a second
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 07:42 PM
Which goes to the major problem, number five, with this article. Because we surveyed pundits instead of experts and got the voice of an expert or two more out of luck than of desire, we do not know what this budget means for the economy. And this is important because conventional wisdom has no idea that we are in a strange economy, one that doesn't play by the normal rules.
America just had a historic real estate bubble, inflated by fraud and unprosecuted crime, which lead to a historic collapse. For the individual, this means they have a liability incurred in 2004 for an asset worth a third of that in 2011 (plus exploding interest rates and other fun things). Home owners have a balance sheet problem.
Now one way to have solved that problem would have been to pass cram down legislation in order to reduce the principle, but the banks own congress so what homeowners got was HAMP.
So homeowners are damaged fiscally and are paying debts any way they can. They are not making purchases. Demand is suppressed. Stock is unsold. People are fired. When everyone experiences demand suppression because of asset collapse and job insecurity, you get a deflationary spiral.. a whirlpool of suffering.
That is the balance sheet recession. Talk to Richard Koo. Talk to Brad Delong. Talk to Bruce Bartlett. What is the effect of a slashed government budget on the balance sheet recession economy? It happened in Japan. Ask.
They will tell you increased deficits. Deficits will increase whether you cut (because of the depressed tax revenues of a spiraling economy) or whether you borrow and spend, but the difference is that one is leading the country out of the spiral and the other is letting it sink, one is keeping people working until debts are paid and the other is watching glibly as millions of lives are blighted.
But not the top percentiles. No no, they got tax cuts. A budget that slashes from the already depressed poor to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy belongs to a society which has broken its trust. The consequence of a budget like this, and rhetoric that uses phrases like "shared sacrifice", so soon after the tax cuts were extended, is broken faith in government and a perception that society is geared to the needs of the few at the cost of the many.
Pundits won't tell you this story because its rooted in math and data as well as fundamental morals.
Right now, we have a strange economy because the markets were gamed and the majority of people lost. When the perception takes hold that we have a unjust society, other strange conditions manifest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXfEv-xEWtE
People will not participate in an unfair society. They will punish it.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 07:47 PM
WHAT DIANNE SAID!
#5 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 07:54 PM
Thimbles,
At best, Andrew Sullivan is to libertarianism as Paul Krugman is to free-market capitalism.
Justin Raimondo (actual libertarian) demonstrates why Sullivan is more like a state-worshiper:
'When Bush and the neocons were in the White House, Sullivan took up the role as the administration’s aggressive and even vehement defender, the Boadicea of the War Party whose jeremiads against the “fifth column” on both coasts first put him in the blogospheric spotlight. As the chief intellectual enforcer of the neocons’ domestic “war on terrorism,” he excoriated poets (like this obscure guy) and intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, who questioned the war hysteria that followed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – the “fifth column,” in his words.
'As Bush and his policies became more unpopular, Sullivan began to turn on his former heroes, and his anguished confession of guilt and complicity came at about the time when the American public had quite clearly had enough of the neocons and their wars. It was such a smoothly executed turnabout, of such professional quality, that it was nearly seamless in its credibility. The torture issue, says Sullivan, was the turning point for him, and if one forgets his earlier call for the nuking of Iraq – on the grounds that Saddam was responsible for the anthrax attacks – this narrative might almost pass muster. Yet what is the torture of a few Guantanamo detainees against the incineration of millions of Iraqis, openly advocated by Sullivan?
'Today, Sullivan has swung completely around in the other partisan direction, and spends his blogging hours doggedly defending every move and mishap of the current administration. Every blip on his radar screen, every twist and turn in the Washington Game is evidence of the Dear Leader’s superior wisdom, every presidential burp is a the Breath of Heaven, and the Republicans and “Christianists” are the new “fifth column” undermining the moral and social fabric of the United States of Obama. No one deserves the “honor” of being awarded the Andrew Sullivan Prize for Obsequious Blogging more than Sullivan himself, and so he gets it for the second year in a row.
'Sullivan really has pioneered a whole new literary genre, the specialty sub-genre of court-blogging. The court blogger, like the court historian and the court jester, is the servant of the king, and his job is to glorify the ruler as the jester’s is to provoke royal laughter. Court-blogging is a thriving business, as the success of the Talking Points Memo site, dailykos.com, and Media Matters attests: but none of these command Sullivan’s audience or his talent as an apologist and attorney for Power. Indeed, perhaps court-blogging will lead to a new government position, the latest addition to the burgeoning federal bureaucracy: the Office of Court Blogger, headed up by the Blogger to the Royal Court.'
[Original article w/links here: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/28/2010-the-best-and-the-worst/]
#6 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 08:39 PM
Yes, people will not participate in an unfair society. But until people start thinking for themselves instead of listening to Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly and Hannity and politicians on their soapboxes (just for starters), and until they are curious enough to look at the laws and regulations that are coming at them left and right, they will not really know how to punish this unfair society in a meaningful way.
One form of meaningful punishment would be non participation in these gov't scams. If people don't participate, then the scams won't work. It's called: Don't back down.
What took place in Egypt required hundreds of thousands, and we have yet to see if that will work in favor of the people or if they will find themselves under another repressive ruler. One must keep in mind that America dictates to other countries and even puts in some of the rulers that it knows will serve the interests of the military industrial complex and corporations (maybe using those two is redundant).
I think that the ruling class knew that the financial system was going to collapse and let it get just to the point where they could "jump in and save the day" which they knew would give them "credibility" or an "excuse" to bring us to where we are now - we all have to sacrifice. I believe this is about control of the population, and, is, indeed, very sad and disturbing.
Neither Democrats or Republicans are going to come to the rescue of this sinking ship because theirs is but a political game tainted by endless sums of money and favors. They are broken humans who don't care.
If all people can do is complain or make silly comments on blogs and Twitter, then there is no hope. If all they can do is focus on the wedge issues that don't really have a direct effect on their lives, then there is no hope. The wedge issues are what politicians love to use as distractions because they know a divided house cannot stand. That is why they continue to cause division while they say we must come together. People tend to believe and repeat what they hear. It is a form of subliminal messaging that trains people to think what gov't wants them to think. Mainstream media is the delivery boy.
I find that journalists like Joel Meares and Trudy Lieberman as well as others on this site do their best to inform the public instead of spouting off the blue or red spinmeisters' talking points which is what MSM does as the third branch of gov't. To criticize each and every word or sentence Joel and the others write is not productive. People will learn more at this site along with very few other sites than they will from MSM newspapers and TV.
#7 Posted by dianne, CJR on Tue 15 Feb 2011 at 08:55 PM
"At best, Andrew Sullivan is to libertarianism as Paul Krugman is to free-market capitalism."
Paul is a free market capitalist, just not for all markets. :)
But I get your point. Sullivan isn't really libertarian or progressive, he's a blob of beliefs - but I don't want him on my team. You take him.
"I find that journalists like Joel Meares and Trudy Lieberman as well as others on this site do their best to inform the public instead of spouting off the blue or red spinmeisters' talking points which is what MSM does as the third branch of gov't. To criticize each and every word or sentence Joel and the others write is not productive. "
But this is the thing, Dianne - there is a big difference between what Joel did and what Trudy does. Joel answered the question "What are people saying?"
If that was his job, then he did good work. He went to "professional left"ish sources, he went to the "Wingnutia Central" national review, he read a lot of what people had to say.
Trudy answers the question "What does ..... mean?" Then she goes to experts, she goes to town meetings, she digs into the policy, she highlights the most significant parts, and she points out who is to gain and who is to lose while showing how.
If Trudy was doing this piece, she would be highlighting, in bright yellow marker, Jacob Lew's comment " addressing mandatory programs would best be handled in closed-door discussions."
Because what that means is that the push Obama aborted before the State of the Union to cut Social Security is likely still on. This should prompt a reporter to make some calls and confirm or deny what's on the table. Erza Klein's speculation should not be the lead here.
In this economy, where significant percentages of the nearing retirement population has become unemployable years before the government programs kick in, to suggest raising retirement ages and cutting benefits so soon after renewing upper percentile tax cuts is sadistic.
These are people who already lost wealth in their houses and in their private pensions + 401K's. It's sadist to play with their lifeline government program, the one they paid into that built up a 2 trillion dollar surplus based on a tax that was capped for the rich.
These people paid into and deserve their social security. The same cannot be said for the extended Bush tax cuts.
I don't want to hear a smorgasbord of pundit opinion on the budget. I want a credible analysis of what this budget means and what the budget should contain. Based on this article and its links, do I know what I'm supposed to talk to my congressman about? If not, then the piece should be reconsidered.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 12:39 AM
Will no one save some foul-mouthed lefty bloggers mention the right's fiscal hypocrisy? Apparently not.
#9 Posted by Southern Beale, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 11:23 AM
@ Southern Beale: Indeed
#10 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 11:36 AM
Even if I belonged to a "team," it wouldn't include state-coddling pundits and court historians. Such folks are better suited for groups willing to use the monopolized violence of govt to "cure" every perceived ill.
#11 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 03:54 PM
@MikeH Deja vous?
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 05:36 PM
The Repu blicans are phonies. The Demorats are phonies. We can rely only on the President and he turns out to be a phony too. I voted for Obama and sent him two checks. I am beginning to believe that the Tea Party wingnuts might be on he right path. If we continue to spend trillions more than we earn, the compounding interest alone will destroy our nation.
#13 Posted by Mike Robbins, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 10:38 PM
"Oh when? When Obama? When are we gonna get entitlement reform?"
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/02/if-not-now-when.html
Not my left, no sir.
#14 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 17 Feb 2011 at 04:44 AM
Thimbles, touche, but I am still waiting for Ridley Scotts updated deficit commercial.
#15 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 17 Feb 2011 at 09:53 AM