Again, back to me. I’ve been writing about what’s missing in coverage of unemployment, what’s smart about stimulus stories, and what’s confusing when it comes to tax cuts. And I’m critiquing press coverage of the big structural issues in which my funder is working hard to reshape the playing field, and, at a minimum, thinks he’s having some success.
My wise editor wondered if this feels like that scene in Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich goes to a restaurant; all the customers and waiters are John Malkovich, the menu is full of Malcovich salad, fried Malcovich, etc. It’s not quite that enveloping. I’ve had no contact with the Peterson gang. I didn’t even get invited to the fancy Fiscal Times launch party (though I heard the desserts were very good).
But this isn’t something that can be handled with a neat disclosures saying that someone mentioned in a post is also CJR funder. This is about big-picture changes in the national conversation.
That’s what I’ve been wrestling with in my CJR writing—how to reckon with the Peterson role in it all, even if I can’t draw a straight line from the Peterson checkbook to those changes in the conversation.
I’ve complained before about the press’s bad habit of equating what politicians say is their growing concern over the deficit with broad public worry about the issue. Should I have pointed out in that post that the same Peterson Foundation that funds my CJR position has given money to groups that hope to boost public concern about the issue? Maybe.
What makes my challenge especially nettlesome, I think, is that so much of the deficit conversation just wouldn’t be happening without the Peterson infusion.
The Fiscal Times tries to flood the zone with its coverage, but I haven’t seen much evidence that the site has become a big player in our crowded media world. But despite their early misstep, The Fiscal Times and The Washington Post still have an association. Back in June, the Post ran a story from TFT about the improbable team of Andy Stern, the former labor leader, and David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International. Both sit on the president’s deficit commission and, if the panel is to reach the bipartisan consensus it needs to have any impact, it may well come down to their budding relationship.
The Post cleaned up its disclosure act, and I didn’t have any major complaints about the story. Yeah, it had a bit of a warm-and-fuzzy feeling, with passages like this:
Both men wore blue, pin-striped suits and bantered about their common experience running big organizations. Stern, with his coifed white hair and his pink silk tie, could have passed for a business mogul and often sounded like one as he talked of the need for “targets” and “reaching the numbers.” Cote was if anything the more rumpled of the two and spoke in plain terms about the sheer magnitude of a trillion-dollar deficit.
But, despite that, more coverage of the commission and its important work is a good thing. If these two change something from improbable to possible, it’s got to be smart to write about them.
And yet, it’s still problematic. The story got a lot of space in the Sunday paper, and, plain and simple, it wouldn’t have been there if The Fiscal Times hadn’t provided it.
Which gets to the next question in this muddle. Just how easy is it to shape public debate in a serious policy area like this?
There’s been a lot written lately about this (Try here, and here, and here.). But the short answer: Maybe not as easy as the Peterson gang thinks.
The latest evidence comes from what was billed as “the largest ever national discussion on the country’s fiscal future,” drawing 3,500 people in nineteen cities. The meetings were organized by AmericaSpeaks, a nonpartisan group that, you guessed it, gets money from the Peterson Foundation. AmericaSpeaks specializes in helping ordinary folk engage in decision-making on important, and complicated, policy topics and, based on what I saw at a 2002 weekend meeting in New York about plans for redeveloping the World Trade Center, they know what they’re doing.
the unfortunate thing to remember about these Peterson funded fiscal debates is when they take place. We talk about deficits when the democrats are in power and the left is expecting a return for their support.
When the Republicans are in charge, all is quiet on the deficit front while the right get their returns.
Now this is all fine and good, having one group throw a party and making the other group clean it up, except for a couple of problems:
a) As critics from both liberal
http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2010/07/25/the-political-genius-of-supply-side-economics/
and conservatives have mentioned recently
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html
when one party becomes completely unhinged from fiscal responsibility, the other party begins to question "where's the practical benefit in being the sole fiscally responsible ones? We're the guys who have to clean up all the time and make ourselves unpopular doing so. What's the point in being clean if the yahoos are just going to trash the place again?"
And they have a point.
b) Clean up costs money. If you are going to push fiscal responsibility, do it in a responsible way. You don't do it in the middle of a crashing, weakened economy, you do it when the economy is healthy like when George Bush had a surplus and didn't need to cause a long term fiscal hole (tax cuts) to solve a short term fiscal problem (2001 stock bubble pop). When Peterson pushes for cut backs in the middle of a Great Recession, it looks less like he's trying to help the country get its finances together and more like he's pushing Shock Treatment disaster capitalism. It's not like Peterson's unique in in being generous to the ideas he wants pushed. Right wing deficit hawks have been pushing and funding think tanks and conservative enterprises since the old days of the Powell Memorandum. Normally it would be fine to push austerity, so long as it was consistent focusing on both revenue and expenditures, both entitlement and military waste, both increased personal tax (such as FICA under Reagan) and corporate / capital gains tax. But these are not normal times and I don't sense a balanced discussion (one side is completely unhinged, remember). Austerity works when an economy is growing and showing a reasonable rate of inflation. The contractive pressure from austerity can be absorbed in this environment.
The whole global economy is slowing down right now. Austerity in this environment accelerates already existing contraction. Fiscal responsibility doesn't work when the economy is posed for deflation. Many good economists and market analysts know this. These were also the people who knew about the asset bubble in 2004-2005. Try listening to them. The democrats haven't finished cleaning up the mess from the previous party. Do you want them to leave that big deflationary hole in the floor?
c) A deflationary economy wasn't the only mess. America has environmental messes, energy messes, geo-political messes that all need cleaning up. The environmental mess is potentially an existential challenge. If we underfund that because we've allowed ourselves to get convinced that we need to cut back more than we need to save ourselves, then we will fail the challenge. Pete Peterson has a billion dollars to influence a debate... you'd think he'd have a few million for solar factories like in Spain or wind farms or energy research or ANYTHING WORTH WHILE.
You'd think a man who was concerned about the deficit would have spent his billion influencing the health debate so that the BIGGEST future cost driver would be controlled and people would be enrolled in an efficient health care system like what exists every in the developed worl
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 03:37 PM
The old Galbraith takedown is beautiful reading.
http://economy.nationaljournal.com/2008/10/is-there-room-for-fiscal-stimu.php#1152033
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/james-galbraith-lets-loose/
"We don’t have an entitlement crisis — we have a health care crisis, one of whose manifestations is high projected costs for Medicare and Medicaid. And the way Walker tried to hijack the financial crisis on behalf of a benefit-cutting agenda deserves every bit of withering scorn you can muster."
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 03:51 PM
Relax,
This same argument must have crossed anyone working on a R. Hurst paper, or anyone connected to Mr. M. or Ted Turner or whoever owns this and that and has a lot of money, true?
But, you have the freedom to do as you will, you illustrate that here. I think what concerns you might be any undue influence funding, support may have, thats a valid point.
Myself, I don't have to worry about that, my suggestion is not too. I was dying to hear about the debate and exchange, I hope you cover that, versus wondering how your Fellowship sponsor may feel.
Best Wishes, and good luck, keep it going.
charleymiller2010
#3 Posted by Charley Miller, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 05:23 PM
Paid, professional journalism is doomed to die so long as its practitioners spend so much time and psychic energy on hand-wringing. Relax. Nobody expects you be objective. Just fair, insightful, entertaining at times and, above all, succint.
#4 Posted by Tom Abate, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 05:52 PM
The one thing you don't mention you bribe taki9ng hack is that Peterson and his scum want to unilaterally decide that the US BONDS that back the social security debt and have been bought and paid for are suddenly worthless because the debt is to POOR PEOPLE...I notice he doesn't suggest defaulting on our debt to china and that you neglect to mention that fact as well.
Bought and paid for whore that you are!
#5 Posted by matt, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 11:17 AM
Also nice that you neglect to mention...the FINANCIAL TIMES is a Peterson Propaganda rag, not a real magazine...oops guess that slipped by your peterson paid research...hack!
#6 Posted by Matt, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 11:20 AM
My bad you do mention it, then cheerlead just the same....way to earn those crumbs from the massas table.
#7 Posted by matt, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 11:23 AM
Little on the heavy side Matt. Holly hasn't shown signs of being compromised and people have been watching. The financial times has very questionable funding but it also has good staff and so they haven't done the direct advocacy that David Walker does, or at least they do it very subtly because I haven't seen it.
At any rate, whore is a tad strong.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 12:11 PM
Here's a question for you Holly.
"The story that impressed me was about a meeting of President Obama’s fiscal commission, and what I liked was the way it captured, in lively, back-and-forth detail, the tension between two big D.C. figures - Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman of the panel, and Grover Norquist, who leads Americans for Tax Reform."
Why, in the name of yahweh, was Grover, the friendly republican monster, Norquist invited to a supposedly serious panel on entitlement and tax reform.
Especially when the meetings locations are being kept secret from serious guys like Dean Baker,
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/19/social_security_under_attack_cuts_proposed
never mind representatives of the public and the unapproved press.
I mean you'd think that in a commission where they hadn't already made up their minds what to do and they were seeking serious input to shape their decisions, they would seek a variety of serious input and not know nothings on the subject like Grover Norquist.
Never mind the grim reapers at the Heritage Foundation.
I mean what did Grover have to offer?
"Norquist called for spending cuts to stimulate economic growth, offered procedural proposals such as requiring that all legislation be online for five days before a vote, and said Congress should spend more time out of session, asserting that through history, when members go home, the stock market goes up."
Spending cuts stimulate growth? In what universe? Congress should spend even more time out of session, because that grows the economy?
These people should be talking to economists and professionals, not professional hacks. Hearing that Alan Simpson didn't argue that Grover's growth strategies weren't delusional, but that they wouldn't produce the growth required to solve the long term fiscal problem gives one no comfort. From what's being reported, this committee is farcical.
"Commission members drifted in and out and no more than six of the 18 were ever present, although 75 witnesses spoke during the seven-hour affair. Commission chairman Erskine Bowles left before the 8 p.m. final gavel to make a flight out of town. His co-chairman, Alan Simpson, got a cushion for his chair two hours into the hearing, the better to bear the burden."
Is this serious?
"Several witnesses echoed the need for different approaches to shorter-term and long-term situations. That prompted Bowles to say: "Where I'm having difficulty is trying to figure out the when and what triggers the deficit reduction." He asked what to use as a sign that the threshold had been crossed from need for growth to need for reductions."
There are people who study this stuff, like Richard Koo, Delong, Krugman, experts-real ones, not ones who hand out"Obama Tax Hike Exemption" cards with instructions to present "it to retailers, asking for a discount and, if challenged, asking: "Are you calling President Obama a liar?"
I don't know, but it seems to me this is the same sort of group that Max Baccus disastrously lead on Senate Healthcare, which had meetings, heard people out, but let a Wellpoint lobbyist write the language of decisions which had been made long before, by people like Kent Conrad.
Just be careful Holly that your growing accustomization to the Washington environment doesn't make you blind to the insanity of it all. There are good people who know about things like economics, fiscal policy, and entitlements. Journalists need to step outside the bubble and talk to these people so that when they go back in, they can hear the insanity.
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 03:34 PM
Good question, Thimbles.
Norquist was appearing at a rare public hearing of the commission.
His group made a big deal of pointing out that Simpson had issued Norquist a special invitation to attend, and Norquist jumped at the chance.
http://www.atr.org/norquist-accepts-obama-fiscal-commission-chair-a5069#
But you and I could have appeared as witnesses, too.
#10 Posted by Holly Yeager, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 04:34 PM