by Jacob Davies
There’s an op-ed in the NYT today by David Stockman with what Barry Ritholz calls a “brutal critique” of recent Republican fiscal policy. Ritholz provides a convenient summary of it:
• The total US debt, including states and municipalities, will soon reach $18 trillion dollars. That is a Greece-like 120% of GDP.
• Supply Side tax cuts for the wealthy are based on “money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesiansism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.”
• Republicans abandoned the belief that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — government, trade, central banks private households and businesses.
• Once fiscal conservatism was abandoned, it led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.
• The Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement.
• Who is to blame? Milton Friedman. In 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold.
• According to Friedman, “The free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.” What actually occurred was “impossible.” Stockman calls it “Friedman’s $8 trillion error.”
• Ideological tax-cutters are what killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion.
• America’s debt explosion has resulted from the Republican Party’s embrace, three decades ago, of the insidious Supply Side doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.
• The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine.
• It was Paul Volcker who crushed inflation and enabled a solid economic rebound — not the Reagan Supply Side Tax cuts.• Republicans believed the “delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.”
• Over George W. Bush 8 years in office, non-defense appropriations gained 65%.• Fiscal year 2009 (GWB last budget): Tax-cutters reduced federal revenues to 15% of GDP — lower than they had been since the 1940s.
• The expansion of our financial sector has been vast and unproductive. Stockman blames (tho but not by name): 1) Greenspan, for flooding financial markets with freely printed money; and 2) Phil Gramm, for removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation.
• The shadow banking system grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008 (see Gramm, above).
• Trillion-dollar financial conglomerates are not free enterprises — they are wards of the state, living on virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.
• From 2002 to 2006, the top 1% of Americans received two-thirds of the gain in national income.
In light of the actual history of Republican governance, it’s hard to swallow the line that tax-and-spend Democrats are about to bankrupt the country. If you really are a fiscal conservative, you should be voting for Democrats, at the very least until the Republican party gets the message.
Sounds great, non factual and I would love to discuss the specifics when you put all of those things in the context of Democratic vs Republican Congresses over those thirty years. It is fine to say that the Republicans did this or that, but each of those things were a compromise with many Democratic Congresses. (And, as always, it starts with Reagan so no history before that matters.)
Here are the facts, the original Bush tax cuts were designed to give back a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics. The estimate was Clintons.
Supply side economics created the most stable 30 year period for the economy in our history.
Then the combined parties each took their chunk, tax cuts (both parties, different taxes) and extra spending (both parties, different spending), they both avoided fixing structural long term issues, and they both voted for the war in Iraq
Then the economy tanked, as much because of Barney Frank as Phil Gramm.
That doesn’t make all of those policies bad or wrong, it means we should do better at watching how they work going forward.
Marty,
a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics.
Deficits grew dramatically through the Reagan-Bush Sr. years. They began to decline under Clinton.
I think that for many people on the political right, fiscal conservatism is more of a tribal marker than a policy preference. I haven’t seen any evidence that there are significant numbers of voters who would use their vote to try to push for more fiscally conservative policies.
BY,
but the supply side economics drove the growth that gave the Congress the ability to create the surplus. It strikes me that we can’t talk about thirty years of supply side policy and then say “except for that time Clinton was there”.
Here are the facts, the original Bush tax cuts were designed to give back a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics. The estimate was Clintons.
Heh. Was Clinton’s 1993 tax hike part of “supply side economics”? You know the tax hike I mean: the one that Republicans called “the biggest tax increase in history”; the one they declared would “destroy the economy”; the one that not a single one of them voted for.
If the Republicans thought Clinton was just carrying on “supply side” economics, why did they do and say those things? To expose themselves to ridicule? To show what they mean by “compromise”?
Reagan doubled the national debt. So did Dubya. You can try, if you like, to argue that their deficits stimulated the economy, which is what Keynesians say government deficits do. But you cannot then praise the stimulation while denouncing the deficits.
As for blaming “Barney Frank” for the housing bubble, are YOU trying to expose yourself to ridicule?
–TP
TP,
I am a huge fan of extending the tax cuts and spending another 3 trillion dollars to stimulate the economy. I am just not a huge fan of giving all 3 trillion to the government to spend. All of those great multipliers everyone talked about in terms of the first stimulus were great, but they mostly sustained fed, state and local spending without significantly growing the private economy.
I believe in having a plan that says we are going to spend x on y that will create z and then measure it. The only policy that I saw implemented in my lifetime that came close to creating z was the supply side focus of Reagan, Bush and Clinton. Politics aside.
Democrats are busy throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Republicans are doing what the minority does, finding any lever they can to criticize the Democrats. Neither is very appealing to me.
Marty,
but the supply side economics drove the growth that gave the Congress the ability to create the surplus. It strikes me that we can’t talk about thirty years of supply side policy and then say “except for that time Clinton was there”.
So the prosperity of the Clinton years was due to Reagan? Come on. You can’t just choose lags that fit your theory.
I took the compound growth rate in GDP for the previous decade for every year from 1956 through 2001. In 1975 that number was 3.1%, which represented a drop from higher figures going back to the mid-60’s.
After that it has pretty well stayed in the 3.0-3.5% range, showing no particular increase in the mid 80’s – early 90’s, when the effect of Reagan’s tax cuts would appear.
Looking at shorter time intervals, the 83-85 period showed strong growth, since we were coming out of a recession, but the level was not sustained, as I would expect if the tax cuts were truly miraculous.
“Should Vote Democrat[ic]”
Seriously, it’s the Democratic party, and if you vote for them, you’re voting Democratic. It’s not the Democrat party, unless you’re from Fox News and are trying to create psychic distance between the Democratic party and democracy.
Marty,
What do you mean by “giving all 3 trillion to the government to spend”? How do you distinguish between “fed, state, and local spending” and the “private economy”?
The cop that’s sitting in his cruiser a few doors down from my house, waiting for speeders on Main Street, is a government employee. But he buys his coffee at the same Dunkin Donuts as I do. We call his paycheck “government spending” because it is MONEY THAT LEAVES THE GOVERNMENT. My friend the cop, as a consumer, is part of the “private economy”.
A few doors the other way, construction is wrapping up on our new police station. “Government spending” in action. Again, the money went to a private-economy architect, and a private-economy construction company, and private-economy vendors of office furniture. Government can no more “spend money” without spending it in the “private economy” than you can call it spending when you move a dollar bill from your left pocket to your right one.
I am trying to illustrate a general principle with specific examples. The general principle is that “government spending” is what government transfers from the Treasury to the “private economy”.
If you want “another 3 trillion dollars to stimulate the economy” without “giving all 3 trillion to the government to spend”, I can only infer that you’re saying this: don’t collect that entire $3T in taxes; borrow some of it instead, i.e. run a deficit. I’m fine with that, being a Keynesian and all.
But here’s the thing: it matters what government spends money on, and it matters who it collects (or does not collect) taxes from. Government could spend $3T by hiring millions of people to write essays on political economy. Or it could spend $3T by hiring a dozen people to do the same thing. The same $3T would be going into the “private economy” in either case. Never mind whether the government’s spending is “productive” in the sense of purchasing something of lasting value in either case. The same $3T would be going into the private economy. The recipients, as private-sector consumers, would “stimulate” Dunkin Donuts, or General Motors, or Microsoft, or Wal*Mart — but differently in the two cases.
Now substitute “tax cuts” for “payments to write essays on political economy”. See if you can figure out what I’m driving at.
–TP
but the supply side economics drove the growth that gave the Congress the ability to create the surplus. It strikes me that we can’t talk about thirty years of supply side policy and then say “except for that time Clinton was there”.
Im curious what you think “supply side economics” means.
As to what ‘created the surplus’, that’s pretty clear- economic growth and higher taxes. Here is a nice chart of federal revenues as a % of GDP. The surplus period is at the end of the Clinton presidency, just before this metric peaks with the Bush tax cuts.
As Bernard says, there’s not actually evidence that tax cuts stimulate the economy in some gargantuan sense that leads to huge growth. So Clinton’s raising taxes meant more money for the federal government, which meant a historic (since the Reagan years) chance to pay down our ballooning debt.
Here are the facts, the original Bush tax cuts were designed to give back a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics.
Bush did run on giving money back to the (wealthier) people rather than paying down the deficit- the absolute height of fiscal irresponsibility, since the last thing a roaring economy needs is a tax cut. If Bush really wanted a smaller government, that would’ve been the perfect time to cut some spending wo damaging the economy, but we all know that “cut taxes and spending” means “cut taxes now and cut spending later”.
But this ‘give the surplus money back’ tax cut morphed to a stimulatory tax cut policy when the economy tanked around the time he took office- it turns out that, no matter what the economic situation, the prescription was tax cuts… at the time, that seems humorous. Not so much now.
The Anti-Orwell Brigade: Seriously, it’s the Democratic party, and if you vote for them, you’re voting Democratic. It’s not the Democrat party, unless you’re from Fox News.
I generally would let this kind of intense stupidity slide, but it’s Get The Hell Out Of Dodge day at the house we just moved from and I’m tired and cranky after loading the first of what will probably be three gigantic, Okie-style truckloads of crap* without assistance, so let me just say a few things:
1. The use of the term “Democrat” to describe a generic member of the Democratic party is in no way an offensive use of the term, is frequently used by actual Democrats, and to my ear is more grammatically correct in the phrase than “vote Democratic”. The equivalent for a singular member of the Republican party is “Republican” so the choice doesn’t have to be made there. You might also consider that I made a choice between “Democrat” and “Democratic” and picked the former, in part, because I was addressing Republicans.
2. You know why Fox News calls it the “Democrat Party”? Because every time some simpleton like you gets upset about it they get to laugh and laugh. You call people names to upset them. The trick is not to get upset.
3. Rather than claiming that this is an “Orwellian” attempt to rewrite language, perhaps you should try phrasing your point of view as a polite disagreement. And
4. If you decide to hork up another hairball, I suggest it include the words “I apologize” and that you post it with a pseudonym that isn’t completely ridiculous when addressing a Democratic partisan – you might have guessed I’m a Democratic partisan, you see, from the way I was exhorting people to vote for Democrats. Any more trivialities like the previous comment will be deleted. Or worse, I might tell you what I really think.
* I (heart) the American full-size pickup truck:
Now, back to the regular scheduled “arguing about the actual subject of the post”, if you don’t mind.
Marty: “All of those great multipliers everyone talked about in terms of the first stimulus were great, but they mostly sustained fed, state and local spending without significantly growing the private economy.”
You mean the state and local spending that say, pays for schools (25%+ cuts for regular and higher ed over the last three years here in GA, thousands of teachers laid off in many different states), that was cut down by Ben Nelson and other “moderates”, who wanted to be to show off their moderate-ness by making the bill worse to by cutting an arbitrary amount from the stimulus? Seriously, if you’re going to claim something, at least look and see if it’s true, first.
Marty: “Here are the facts, the original Bush tax cuts were designed to give back a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics.” Crap and a half. The surplus was generated by the Clinton tax increases and the internet boom. And instead of doing the “fiscally conservative” thing and paying down some of the debt with the surplus, the Republicans gave it away to the people already making the most.
Matt Yglesias has been beating this drum over at his site for months now, that Republicans care a lot more about tax cuts, especially for the highest brackets, than they do about deficits. At least until a Democrat’s in office, but I bet a Democrat proposing irresponsible tax cuts for people making 5 or more times the median wage is the only thing that could get any “bipartisan” Republican votes.
Also, I should note that cutting deficits and paying off debt during good times is, literally, textbook Keynesian economics.
Yeah Jacob! A PC hair I regularly have to reread to make sure I split it correctly. Hopefully for all time the inferred insult will be forgiven as an oversight rather than intentional.
Although I promise to continue to try my best to comply.
On the subject of the original post, some of the comments from the op-ed sound very much like the Austrian Business Cycle nonsense. Especially the line about “vulgar Keynesianism”, because Keynes’ economic theories aren’t about constant deficit spending, it’s about deficit spending to make up the shortfall during recessions, then paying down the debt (by say, economic growth, or tax increases, or shrinking some programs that aren’t as necessary now) when times are good.
Plus there’s the obsession with “hard money”, backed by gold, which is exactly as arbitrary as money backed by government promises, except instead of the money supply being under the control of the Fed, it’s under the control of the balance of extraction and industrial uses for gold. If you want a real hard currency, the best place to look would be ideas from environmental economics, like basing the economy around some percentage of the total solar energy influx on the Earth. (Which makes our use of fossil fuels for analogous to running our economy out of our savings accounts). Plus all the comments about austerity, which this is exactly NOT the time for.
Also, this line? “In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970.” I checked on this inflation calculator, and $425 billion in 1970 would be $2,322 billion in 2009, so, 2.3 billion. That’s about 8 times, not 40. So his numbers are wrong, and inflated to try and sound scary. Also, in terms of GDP, from here, the US debt is around 93% of GDP including the Social Security Trust Fund, and about 60% for Publicly held debt. Also not 40 times what it was in 1970. That whole sentence is dishonest and loaded to try and sound scary.
“As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008.” This is bigger than the US debt, and maybe had more of an affect on the economy than the debt? Never know it from the article.
“It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy. ”
This line I agree with almost completely, and I would say that this is actually MORE at fault than deficits. The concentration of income and wealth distorted the economy, and pushed investment by this tiny slice of the country into things that would make “enough” profit to be worthwhile, enough defined as usually in the range of 8-10%. This is why companies kept “right-sizing” during the 90s, even when they were perfectly profitable anyway. The executives were ‘extracting value’ for the shareholders (and themselves). That’s what has hit lots of things like local papers, once they got bought out, their 2-3% profit margins weren’t good enough for the new owners, so people got laid off, news wire reports instead of reporting, and the local sections kept getting slimmed down. Oh, and they kept shrinking the comics pages, too. Same with radio and TV. And that’s what drove the whole “innovation” of CDS and all the mortgage bundling crap, there was demand for things paying 8-10% return, more demand than actual investments like that existed. That’s how Bernie Madoff kept finding suckers.
“Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.” This is total crap. The Republicans aren’t promoting Keynesianism, they’re promoting austerity, which is what this guy is promoting. Austerity and the resulting layoffs and losses won’t fix the recession, they’ll make it worse. What’s needed is aid that goes to the actual working people, not the kind that just gets siphoned onto the balance sheets of banks and the bonuses for CEOs and dividends for the stockholders, while the banks aren’t loaning and are foreclosing on houses.
I agree with your point that if somebody is serious about long-term balanced budgets, then the Republican Party is not their home. But this op-ed is full of Austrian business cycle hard money fetishism.
(Sorry for going off like that, but there’s been a number of Austrian Theory folks over at Matt Yglesias’s for months, repeating the same nonsense about “hard money” over and over for months, and ignoring any holes poked in their ideas. Also, the article dishonestly uses numbers, and pushes things that would make the recession worse.)
Marty claim: Supply side economics created the most stable 30 year period for the economy in our history.
A breathtaking claim, the mendacity of which is equaled only by an utter ignorance of the facts. I would stack up the period 1945-75 against that period any time, and you could keep the change.
Reagan cut taxes for the rich and raised them for the poor and middle class. Bush just cut taxes for the rich and some of the middle class. They both spent like drunks on a fall off the wagon drinking spree, and spent it all on the wrong stuff–defense and war, the future of this country be damned. Clinton was not much better, and was the recipient of a well timed economic boom. Now cast your eyes on the wreckage that are the direct result of these reckless policies.
It is beyond-all-sense-of reason-claims such as these that continually reinforces my contempt for what passes for so called “conservative” thought these days.
the original Bush tax cuts were designed to give back a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics.
That’s a pretty strong claim for supply side economics.
Here is what I’ve never understood about supply side theory. How does removing impediments to production spur demand?
Is the idea that there’s all this potential, latent demand out there, and all we need do is make it easier for producers to put product on the market?
I’ve been trying to get my head around that one for just about 30 years.
The expansion of our financial sector has been vast and unproductive. Stockman blames (tho but not by name): …2) Phil Gramm, for removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation.
• The shadow banking system grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008 (see Gramm, above).
is this referring to the bi-partisan bill Clinton signed, and was endorsed by much of Obama’s current econ team at the time?
The upper 5% carry more political weight than the other 95% of the populace.
The upper 5% do not need a fully functioning US; they barely need a US that functions at all. They can have, and do have, access to their own education system (private), their own healthcare (concierge and/or international), their own security services (private), and their own consumer goods providers (catalog, international, and upscale US purveyors).
They don’t need Medicare, or Social Security; and so don’t particularly care if those programs live or die. They don’t need abortion to be legal in this country, since they can go to any country where abortion is legal. They don’t need same sex marriage to be legal in this country, since they have the financial and legal resources to protect their same-sex spouses (cf Mary Cheney). They most assuredly don’t need healthcare reform.
They do not mix with the other 95%, nor permit their children to do so. That way, neither they nor their children need ever know or care about what happens to the other 95%.
About all they do “need” from the rest of the country is a military capable of protecting their territorial security – and, surprise, the military budget is sacrosanct.
The upper 5% control the debate by virtue of owning the parent companies of most of our news media outlets, and by being the primary contributors to political campaigns – esp. now that Citizens United has removed the limits on corporate contributions to politicians.
To make matters more… interesting, they have no particularly deep emotional attachment to the idea of America. The US was founded entirely on ideas: ideas about self-government, public good, common welfare, and other collectivist nonsense. The great irony is that the US – being based on an idea, and being populated almost entirely by immigrants – does not have, inherently, any tribal, ethnographic, or ancient historical identity to propagate a feeling of “nationhood.”
The people currently in charge of the US economy do not, therefore, have any vested interest in seeing the nation as a whole be prosperous. They can do just fine in a banana republic.
I don’t see any reason for that to change. In fact – as environmental change and peak oil and whatnot make maintaining our current standard of living damn near impossible – they will very likely be even more protective of the privileges they want to continue enjoying, and care even less about the rest of us.
Nothing is going to change until the plutocracy’s controlling interest in politicians ends. And that’s simply not going to happen – particularly when 30% of the electorate, for reasons which escape me, continue to support policies which do them no good at all; who are concentrated in areas where they comprise an actual majority of voters, and therefore continue to elect politicians who appeal to their tribal instincts while selling them down the river to the upper 5%.
Why the thirty percenters support hte five percenters: it’s the peasant mentality. They think if they kiss up to the power structure, some crumbs will fall their way. Also by identifying upwards they get the ego gratification of feeling superior to other people.
Competition at the bottom of a heirarchy can get pretty damn hot. No one wants to be at the absolute bottom. One way to keep from feeling like an absolute loser is to identify up and define others as losers.
The oligarchs understand this. Remember the dead peasant tax?
the original Bush tax cuts were designed to give back a projected 4 trillion dollar plus surplus, generated by supply side economics.
And the reason not to use that projected surplus to first pay off the existing (enormous) government debt was what exactly?
If the government had zero debt, then it would make sense to cut taxes; or at least have a discussion of the merits of cutting taxes vs. doing stuff that the government hadn’t done before. But since the government was seriously in debt, what possible reason was there not to pay it off?
If I went out, every time I got a raise, and cut my working hours (i.e. reduced my income, like a tax cut does) or spent it, without first paying off my debts, I’d be an idiot. How do you see the government as different in that regard, Marty?
Here is what I’ve never understood about supply side theory. How does removing impediments to production spur demand?
russell, meet Say’s Law, which Keynes restated as “supply creates its own demand”.
And the reason not to use that projected surplus to first pay off the existing (enormous) government debt was what exactly?
Hilariously, the concern was that we were going to pay down the deficit too quickly. What were we going to do with all that extra money? Fortunately, Bush II delivered us from that fiscal nightmare.
This is nothing new. You might recall that David Stockman called BS early in Reagan’s first term. It accomplished nothing then and will no doubt do the same now.
russell, meet Say’s Law, which Keynes restated as “supply creates its own demand”.
Thanks Carleton.
I had run across Say’s Law before, but I have to confess I don’t understand it. Time to put the thinking cap on.
” I would stack up the period 1945-75 against that period any time, and you could keep the change.”
And all we need to do to replicate that period is to somehow destroy the industrial base of the rest of the world, while leaving our’s intact. Regrettably, given the widespread existence of nuclear weapons, I don’t see how that can be accomplished… It’s certainly not proof of the validity of any particular approach to economics, though.
I will gladly agree that the last 30 years is not a ringing endorsement of the notion that Republican officeholders are a lot more fiscally conservative than Democratic officeholders. Indeed, the main lesson of ’94 was that, if you gave the GOP a chance to actually deliver on it’s conservative promises, it would take a dive every time.
That’s why the tea party movement is so down on Republican incumbents, and why the GOP is so desperate to co-opt it. They’re trying to change the GOP, replace people who only talk the talk with people who will walk it, too. And the Republican establishment is desperate to prevent that from happening, while wanting to somehow harness the movement’s energy anyway.
Carleton, I remember that argument for the tax cuts. But my curiosity was how Marty rationalizes them. Since he’s presenting a theoretical justification, it seems like he should have something.
Perhaps that a tax cut would increase tax revenues — except that the deficit increased afterwards. Or perhaps that lack of a tax cut would allow the government to spend more — except having one doesn’t seem to have headed of Medicare D. I honestly am curious about his reasoning. Not to mention that, if he happens to be one of those who believe that tax cuts will actually increase tax revenues, why would he want one when the “problem” is a surplus? Inquiring minds want to know.
the supply side economics drove the growth
Really, Marty? After all this, you really believe all of that?
They’re trying to change the GOP,
No, really, they aren’t. They are the GOP. Simply the GOP that’s pissed off that the GOP lost.
The upper 5% do not need a fully functioning US
This is so true. You just have to look at other, dysfunctional countries. Ones where there’s an elite 5% surrounded by deprivation and mass inequality are the ones that stay. The rest are the ones trying to emigrate. Why? Because for the top 5%, the system works. We Americans are the descendants of those who said, “screw this messed up system in our home countries where the deck is stacked against us. I’m leaving for better opportunities.” You’d think that we, as a country, would be interested in not duplicating the social problems of the countries our ancestors left.
And all we need to do to replicate that period is to somehow destroy the industrial base of the rest of the world, while leaving our’s intact.
There’s a fallacy here that I see repeated often, the idea that we grew from 1945 not primarily because we had pumped an enormous amount of stimulus to get the economy going, but primarily because the rest of the world “was in ruins” and so we could just have the run of the place.
The fallacy involves ignoring the fact that, in what was already a global economy at that point, while the rest of the world were our competitors, they were also our customers.
Their lack of money to buy whatever we were selling was as much a potential hindrance on our growth as a stimulus to it.
Sure, we could sell things to ourselves inside our borders, but that’s both directly affected by our having pumped all that money into our economy through the war effort and entirely independent of what shape other economies were in.
Besides, the “we won because they were in ruins” claim relies entirely on the idea that it was already a global economy, but it misses the fact that competition globally is impossible if no one else had any money to buy your products.
On balance I’d say the effect is a wash, which leaves the enormous stimulus we had pumped into our economy as the reason for the growth from 1945 forward.
Strange argument, though that doesn’t seem to diminish how often I see it used.
One caveat: if this argument were limiting itself to saying “We did better than some European countries in that period because our country and its factories weren’t literally smoking ruins and theirs were” that of course would be true.
However the argument that I’m rejecting is always put forth as a way of refuting that the stimulus of WWII war effort had anything to do with the growth, and claims that we had unusual growth simply due to the fact that we didn’t have competitors, like the argument I’m responding to here: “All we have to do to repeat that growth is destroy the industrial base of the rest of the world” and we’ll magically have that sort of growth.
Nope. It’s not the reason we had it then, and it wouldn’t create it now, if we didn’t have enough stimulus. All of which we’re seeing played out right in front of us, right now.
JD, check out the deficit growth from ’07 to the present and see who controlled both houses and, of course, the White House after ’08. During the Reagan and Bush Sr. years, the Dems had at least one one house the entire time.
Fairness holds that both parties accept their share of responsibility.
It was the Dems who put SS tax income into the general fund with the fiction of IOU’s to fake a asset. Fiscal responsibility was a Republican characteristic. That changed with GWB. Along with a lot of other things that drove me and many other generic conservatives out of the party.
There seems to be a move back in some quarters toward fiscal sanity. It’s a nonstarter though, because the Repubs do not have a viable candidate who lacks the baggage to credibly bring the party back. Plus, the base has lost its mind, if it ever had one.
But, as for trusting the Dems with the keys to vault. No thanks. I choose option C–None of the Above.
“supply creates its own demand”.
This is a lot like the idea that invention is the mother of necessity (see Guns, Germs, and Steel).
And what do you think the advertising industry is for? We certainly don’t “need” all this stuff.
JD, check out the deficit growth from ’07 to the present and see who controlled both houses and, of course, the White House after ’08.
You don’t think the massive economic crisis that began in ’07 might have had something to do with that as well?
It was the Dems who put SS tax income into the general fund with the fiction of IOU’s to fake a asset.
Oh, God, this one just won’t die, will it. An IOU from the US government is a T-bill. IT IS THE SINGLE SAFEST, MOST SOLID, MOST RELIABLE FINANCIAL ASSET IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
Fiscal responsibility was a Republican characteristic. That changed with GWB.
Oh, God, this one apparently won’t die either. What happened to the deficit under Reagan, McK? Do you know? Now tell the class what happened to it under Clinton.
“And all we need to do to replicate that period is to somehow destroy the industrial base of the rest of the world, while leaving our’s intact..”
Balderdash. What UVP said above. The rest of the industrial world being in ruins did nothing to “spur” US post-war economic growth. If anything, such a situation would hinder growth (no efficiencies from comparative advantage, for example). Similarly, most everybody pretty much agrees a “beggar thy neighbor” trade policy, if adopted by all, would be an economic disaster (1930’s, which see). Yet that is exactly what you are asserting…that if our economy was isolated, growth would be enhanced.
How utterly strange.
The upper 5% do not need a fully functioning US
Yep. See Krugman’s column today.
Not to mention, one of our biggest investments when the rest of the world’s industrial sectors were in ruin?
Rebuilding the industry in those countries. The Marshall Plan for Europe, and we did broadly similar stuff in Japan, too.
There are (typically RW) people that consider rebuilding Europe and Japan the greatest error of all time (apart from not giving the Nazis their weapons back to jointly march on Moscow). How could you help your competitors instead of crushing them an making them totally dependent on you?
I should have added a caveat to this noting that I don’t believe any of the hard-money stuff myself, although I don’t believe in accelerating expansion of the deficit either. But I’m a Keynesian myself. However, if you are a traditional fiscal conservative his points are damning.
I do agree with him that the tax cuts were “vulgar Keynesianism” – that is, their stimulative effect on the economy, such as it was, came entirely from their effect on aggregate demand and not at all on their effect on producers. In the case of GWB, they were combined with ultra-low interest rates to pump what little economic expansion there was.
McKT, sadly, there is no option C, and that’s the point: you have to vote for whichever of A or B is most likely to move things in the direction you prefer. Or abstain and let other people decide.
Marty, as others have noted, the Reagan boom was caused by the killing of inflation, a massive drop in interest rates, and a large bump in government spending. In other words, it was basically a Keynesian exercise too.
What happened to the deficit under Reagan, McK? Do you know? Now tell the class what happened to it under Clinton.
Under Reagan, with a Democratic house, the deficit went up. I have to work today and lack the research skills to do this in a timely manner, but it is my distinct recollection that every year during the Reagan administration, the White House would propose one budget, a relatively lower one, and the Dems would propose a much higher budget. The compromise still produced a deficit.
What happened under Clinton? Several things: defense spending dropped significantly, we had the dot-com boom, the cost of borrowing dropped consistently (fueling the economy with cheap[er] money), the accounting scandals (Enron was one of many) pumped up balance sheets and, after ’94, you had gridlock which produced budget compromises that held down spending more or less.
An IOU from the US government is a T-bill. IT IS THE SINGLE SAFEST, MOST SOLID, MOST RELIABLE FINANCIAL ASSET IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
It won’t die because it’s alive (IT’S ALIVE!!!). Every dollar “borrowed” from SS is a debt obligation. The offsetting asset, i.e. the IOU, is funny money. I can’t create an asset by lending money to myself and the gov’t can’t either.
There are (typically RW) people that consider rebuilding Europe and Japan the greatest error of all time (apart from not giving the Nazis their weapons back to jointly march on Moscow).
It’s a vanishingly small number and the left/right dichotomy doesn’t work here. It’s the nut fringe, if it exists at all. Hartmut, this is a big reach.
McKT, sadly, there is no option C, and that’s the point: you have to vote for whichever of A or B is most likely to move things in the direction you prefer. Or abstain and let other people decide.
Marty, as others have noted, the Reagan boom was caused by the killing of inflation, a massive drop in interest rates, and a large bump in government spending. In other words, it was basically a Keynesian exercise too.
Yes, I know, I have to vote. But if the choice for fixing the problem is A or B, then it’s not a choice, or at least not much of one.
As for Reagan increasing gov’t spending, the largest spending increases were in defense. Defense spending probably did stimulate the economy to a degree. More importantly, IMHO, he outspent the Sovs and materially aided the end of the Cold War (I know this will produce a lot of fan mail).
I will gladly agree that the last 30 years is not a ringing endorsement of the notion that Republican officeholders are a lot more fiscally conservative than Democratic officeholders.
The reason for this is that, right about 30 years ago, Republicans hit upon the idea that deficits caused by tax cuts could be ignored.
Because taxes, especially business taxes, capital gains taxes, and income taxes on high earners, along with regulation, were impediments to production.
And if you removed impediments to production, then increased production would automatically cause the economy to grow (see the discussion on “Say’s Law” above), and the growing economy would increase revenues more than enough to make up for what was lost through lowering taxes.
That’s what’s behind Cheney’s “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”, and it’s what’s behind Kyl’s statement that we can ignore deficits caused by lowering taxes.
Ever since “supply side” economics came into fashion, I’ve been trying to understand WTF it’s all about, by which I mean, how it’s supposed to work.
Because to me it’s fairly unintuitive.
What Say’s Law actually appears to be saying, as best as I can make out, is that when someone produces something, they do so in order to use the income from it’s sale to purchase other stuff that they, in turn, want.
So, “production creates demand”.
But Say doesn’t address what happens if nobody buys the first guy’s widgets in the first place, other than to observe that the first guy will quickly be forced out of the widget business, and the means of production dedicated to his shop will find another, hopefully more renumerative, home.
Say also doesn’t really account for the role of money and/or the supply of money in the overall picture. In what is commonly known as a “simplifying assumption”, he ignores it.
And so, even though there is no place in Say’s model for large scale, structural unemployment, or for surplus production or capacity, nonetheless those things exist.
I have no problem with the idea that sometimes, in particular, concrete circumstances, that impediments to production might be what is holding back economic growth. In those cases, we should ease or remove those impediments.
But the “supply side” gospel, that in all places and at all times the solution is to cut taxes, ease regulation, and ignore the resulting debt load when national revenue drops, is to my eye f***ing insane.
Or, rather, it’s not insane, it’s just self-serving cant, in the interest of people who earn high incomes and/or derive their income from investments.
The Republicans of the last 30 years *have not* failed to live according to their principles. They have changed their principles, from those of fiscal responsibility to those of extracting wealth from the economy and putting it in their pockets.
So, yeah, it ain’t your grand-dad’s Republican party anymore, but that’s by intent, not by a failure to live up to their own creed.
Their creed has changed.
Say also doesn’t really account for the role of money and/or the supply of money in the overall picture. In what is commonly known as a “simplifying assumption”, he ignores it.
And so, even though there is no place in Say’s model for large scale, structural unemployment, or for surplus production or capacity, nonetheless those things exist.
I didn’t feel like creating a link, so go here, if you like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_Second_Best
This theory is quite clarifying for a great many economic conundrums, or, pehaps, the conundrum that is economics, itself.
That Theory of Second Best sounds like a description of local maxima, where there’s several stable states, and getting from one local optimum to another will entail going down first, before rising back above the old maximum.
A walk down memory lane, the 1956 Republican Party National Platform.
I have no desire to return to the America of 1956. It wasn’t a particularly good place for women, gay people, or racial, ethnic, or religious minorities. It was a time of profound political and social paranoia.
But it was a place where “conservative” included the idea that the federal government should extend itself for the benefit of working people, and for the broad public good.
Show me a Republican platform like that one, and maybe we can talk about “fiscal responsibility” and “conservative values”.
I think of more as an explanation for the failure of ideal models as stand-ins for real-world phenomena. If you have some number of assumptions, as soon as one of them isn’t met, any number of the others may become invalid in terms of getting as close to optimal as is possible given the unmet one (if that’s at all clear to anyone but me).
In other words, you can’t say “Well, we’ve met 9 out of 10 of our assumptions, so the model will be 90% right, which is still better than anything else.” Most likely, it will be worse than 90% right, and there will be other scenarios, deviating even further from the model’s assumptions, that will work out better.
This appears to be a wide-spread problem in the field of economics from what I’ve read over the years, before even being aware of the Theory of the Second Best, which gave me that “so I’m not crazy?” feeling when I came upon it.
More importantly, IMHO, he outspent the Sovs and materially aided the end of the Cold War (I know this will produce a lot of fan mail).
McK, Im pretty sure the USSR was in its death spiral by the mid-80s- it may have wrecked itself trying to keep up while using a bad economic model, but I don’t see how Reagan could’ve caused this without a time machine.
One thing has always mystified me about Communism- it’s a pretty bad system. And even in the 80s most people knew this.
But the ones who were the most frightened of the Communists’ economic might, the “Team B” folks who were exaggerating the threat beyond even the overestimates of the CIA, were the ones preaching that Communism was an incredibly inefficient and clumsy way to run an economy.
I could never square that circle. At least, rationally.
Say also doesn’t really account for the role of money and/or the supply of money in the overall picture
Krugman gives a great example of baby-sitting coop in a recession that I think is useful for illustrating the principle.
hsh: Ah, that makes a bit more sense, I was misinterpreting the wikipedia article. Yeah, with any model of reality, if your assumptions are wrong, then the answers you get are going to be wrong.
But it was a place where “conservative” included the idea that the federal government should extend itself for the benefit of working people, and for the broad public good.
I think there is some of that. Or, rather, I think the biggest problem is that Republicans have learned that “cutting taxes” just about always polls well, regardless of whether it’s appropriate fiscally.
But I also see another root to the problem, going back to the Reagan era: the GOP is half-heartedly devoted to the idea of shrinking the government- rolling back Social Security, medicare/medicaid, etc. I say half-heartedly because they know that these programs are incredibly popular & it would wreck the party to dismantle them, but ideologically they cannot abandon the principles that lead to this opposition.
So they never reconcile their fiscal position (ie lower taxes and lower spending) with the reality that they have no intent to dismantle the social safety net. Reagan cut taxes, and *wanted* in his heart of hearts to dismantle those programs, but I suspect that he (and his descendants today) know that they will do no such thing. Yet they cannot bring themselves to abandon the other (and much more popular) half of their old principle, lower taxes. Bush II cut taxes and *added* to the social safety net, when dismantling social security turned out to be the third rail it had always been described as.
So we end up with the GOP advocating an impossible policy- low taxes and big safety net. What we need is a conservative party more like that in the UK, where it comes to terms with the existing social spending.
Or, once and for all, cut it and let the public decide if they’d rather have low taxes and weak social services, or higher taxes and strong social services.
“I can’t create an asset by lending money to myself and the gov’t can’t either.”
Under our current fiat money system, issuing debt (Treasuries) is simply a way to satisfy the public’s liquidity preferences and control interest rates. It is also a public subsidy to the bond market (Wall Street).
The federal government is financially unconstrained. Only the government can create net financial assets (but we’ve had this discussion before).
Really? I’m guessing the US Department of Defense was just about eight years behind that news, then.
But if you look at the acquisitions strategy of the US military, they were taking Soviet forces seriously long after the collaps of the USSR. Or pretending to.
Missile defense was just starting its upswing in 1985. Somebody was taking the Soviet Union seriously. Its ICBM force was, as far as we knew, relatively intact.
If you look back and the Cold War, the US defense establishment had a tendency to systematically overestimate the Soviet military and especially economic power. The non-existent “missile gap” that contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance. How much of this is due to incompetence, or trying to justify their jobs, or the general difficulty, given the Soviet Union’s reasons to misrepresent things I leave up to the readers to decide.
But the ones who were the most frightened of the Communists’ economic might
What follows is entirely off topic:
I don’t remember anyone worrying about Soviet economic might. Military might, yes. Economic, not so much, or even at all.
As for the death spiral, that’s a look back in the rear view mirror. In the 80’s it was all doom and gloom, nuclear winter, nuclear freeze, get the Pershings out of Europe, blah, blah, blah, from the left, none of it rationally related to the balance of Warsaw Pact/NATO forces. Everyone else favored the Reagan build up.
What Reagan’s build up did was convince a clique within the politburo that the soviet economy couldn’t keep up with the west on military spending. Glasnost, Gorbachev etc. all flowed from that. Again, IMHO, with which many here will likely disagree, should this off-topic topic take on any life.
The non-existent “missile gap” that contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance.
Yes, that 1959-60 debating point remained a mainstay throughout the Cold War. Uh, not really. No one miscounted Soviet tanks or standing divisions. They were a fact. A big ass fact. The fear among US thinkers was that NATO’s inability to withstand a conventional attack would so lower the tactical nuke threshold that a general exchange would then become likely.
Eh? I don’t know what one of those could possibly have to do with the other. The issue in Cuba was missiles nearby, not that they had more missiles than we did.
Every dollar “borrowed” from SS is a debt obligation. The offsetting asset, i.e. the IOU, is funny money. I can’t create an asset by lending money to myself and the gov’t can’t either.
OK, it’s funny money. So when Social Security starts selling off its holdings of T-bills to pay for the boomers’ retirements, no one’s going to buy them? If the Social Security fund had been invested in, say, gold, that’s what it would do with the gold. Same if it had been invested in anything else. Why wouldn’t that apply to T-bills?
“What Reagan’s build up did was convince a clique within the politburo that the soviet economy couldn’t keep up with the west on military spending.”
Not even close. The Soviet economy was crumbling and not competitive. Even the die-hards on the Politburo knew this. The question was reform.
The world wide fall in oil prices ended Soviet export capability, and pretty much finished the job. The USSR’s nuclear deterrent capability was not diminished by US arms spending or “star wars” hallucinations.
Really? I’m guessing the US Department of Defense was just about eight years behind that news, then.
and
As for the death spiral, that’s a look back in the rear view mirror.
I didn’t say it was known in the West, or even by many in the USSR. Just that I think the USSR was already prepared to come apart by the mid-80s, so it’s hard for me to see how Reagan’s budget-busting military spending could’ve been causative.
But if you look at the acquisitions strategy of the US military, they were taking Soviet forces seriously long after the collaps of the USSR. Or pretending to.
Well, yeah. I expect the people who make their living on defense spending to find ways to justify it. China was being groomed as the reason for spending, before 9/11 provided a set of ready-made villians. I don’t think that this necessarily tracks with an objective assessment of threat level.
What Reagan’s build up did was convince a clique within the politburo that the soviet economy couldn’t keep up with the west on military spending. Glasnost, Gorbachev etc. all flowed from that.
With Mutual Assured Destruction, I don’t see how this would follow. “We cannot build as many redundant missles as the Americans- ergo, we must abandon our economic system, our control of the states on our border, and change our political system to accomadate dissent.” Certainly eg the North Koreans haven’t abandoned totalitarianism or embraced democracy because they cannot keep up with the US militarily.
No, what happened in the USSR was almost entirely internal, based on the political and economic tensions within the Soviet Empire. Maybe Reagan sped it up a few years. Maybe he slowed it down a few years by giving the hardliners an enemy to oppose. But I find the idea that Reagan caused this t be entirely implausible- tacked on to history to justify the budget-busting of the 80s to defend us against an enemy who was on the verge of collapse.
“So when Social Security starts selling off its holdings of T-bills to pay for the boomers’ retirements, no one’s going to buy them? If the Social Security fund had been invested in, say, gold, that’s what it would do with the gold. Same if it had been invested in anything else. Why wouldn’t that apply to T-bills?”
No the problem is that when you sell them off and people redeem them you have to raise taxes to pay for them.
But anyway, fiscal conservatives should vote for people who actually care about the deficit, and the right times and methods of controlling it. By my rough estimation that would include very close to zero national level Republicans and a handful of national level Democrats. There are also an additional handful of national level Democrats who sometimes have non-awful instincts on the budget. So if you are lucky enough to have a district or state option to vote for one of those Democrats, you should do so.
The above state of affairs has nothing to do with going off the gold standard, and ideas that the gold standard provided more economic stability are rubbish. We might note that the Great Depression happened under the gold standard…
I don’t want to wade to deep into the whole Soviet army thing, since a) I haven’t done a terribly deep examination of it, b) my point was more directed at the economic side of things, where the entire US official apparatus kept predicting the Soviets were stronger than they were, c) pointing out that the CIA/NSA/DOD can be wrong or lie for their own benefit shouldn’t be controversial at all, and d) I freely admit I could be wrong on some of the specifics.
And it’s on economics I want to focus, because Reagan’s military buildup, if it did anything, was just a final push that accelerated things. Reagan and Bush I’s willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev, and try and make the transition something other than a crash was probably more notable. The real thing that defeated the Soviets in the Cold War? I would take David Brin’s stance, that the Marshall Plan did it. By rebuilding Western Europe, and the comparisons between Western Europe’s successful, well-off, and freer Social Democracies as opposed to the Soviet Union’s failures in Eastern Europe, that kept Soviet-style communism from spreading, and prevented the same kinds of events that led to the rise of the Nazis, when we tried to punish the losers after WWI.
No one miscounted Soviet tanks or standing divisions. They were a fact. A big ass fact. The fear among US thinkers was that NATO’s inability to withstand a conventional attack would so lower the tactical nuke threshold that a general exchange would then become likely.
First, meet Team B. Overestimating Soviet strength was a hobby of the CIA, but the Team B folks did it professionally, putting the CIA to shame. (And weirdly, didnt lose a shred of credibility- exaggeration of enemy resources in the defense of the defense industry is no vice).
(Also, btw- Fareed Zakaria notes, however, that the specific conclusions of the report “were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber ‘probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984.’ In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.” So yes, some people were overestimating Soviet economic might. And yes, they were the same people who ought to have believed that Communism was terribly inefficient).
And the ‘missle gap’- if your belief were correct, then the ‘missle gap’ would’ve been used to justify additional conventional forces. But it was, in fact, primarily used to justify additional *missles*. Really, Im not even sure your position makes sense- you are saying that the ‘missle gap’ was in fact a conventional forces gap?
fiscal conservatives should vote for people who actually care about the deficit, and the right times and methods of controlling it. By my rough estimation that would include very close to zero national level Republicans and a handful of national level Democrats. There are also an additional handful of national level Democrats who sometimes have non-awful instincts on the budget. So if you are lucky enough to have a district or state option to vote for one of those Democrats, you should do so.
I was about to ask if, history of the Cold War aside, any conservatives here wanted to take issue with the basic idea that the D’s are, at this point in time, a better bet for fiscal soundness than the R’s.
And Sebastian beat me to it.
Thanks for a candid reply Seb.
Boy, there are times when this zombie Saint Ronnie Bankrupted the Soviets story comes back to life that I just want to pull Mikhail Gorbachev out from behind a pillar, Annie Hall style, to disabuse some people of some notions. You know, amazing as it is to think about, the USSR was actually a country with all kinds of internal concerns that were entirely unmotivated by anything to do with the US or Ronald Reagan.
Ah. Thanks for clarifying, Carleton.
There was never any such thing. But I don’t think you can blame it on Team B.
That aside, various points, to the effect that intelligence on the USSR military capabilities were variously wrong and/or deliberately misleading, are well taken.
McKinneyinTexas,
Wasn’t it Reagan (with an assist from Greenspan) who began the whole masking the deficit by creating the Social Security Trust Fund and accounting for it’s surplus as part of the overall budget?
Why, as you criticize democrats on social security and deficits, have you ignored this tricky little deficit-hiding, accounting-fiction from ’83?
Maybe b/c it was a Reagan/Greenspan creation?
I guess I’m saying I had always (since my early college days) believed the below accurately described Reagan’s involvement with Social Security:
” You already “fixed” Social Security, in 1983. In that fix, Ronald Reagan and the Greenspan Commission (yep, Alan Greenspan) recommended increasing Social Security taxes on the middle class, but not on the Big Boys, the wealthy. The declared goal was to put tons of cash into the Social Security Trust Fund — create a huge rainy day stash — for when Boomers started retiring. (If you click the Trust Fund link, watch what happens to the last column, the total amount, starting in 1984.)
Why is it important to understand this?
Everyone making less than $100k per year has been paying for that fix — every working day since 1983. They robbed you once, so they wouldn’t have to do it twice. Want them to do it twice?
3. Reagan used that earlier “fix” to hide much of his massive deficit, to make it look smaller. That was the real goal (or if you’re feeling kind, the other real goal) of beefing up the Trust Fund.
But do you think either of them cared two twits about fixing the future, a future in which they themselves would be dead? The facts show just the opposite. What they really cared about was destroying the future — “starving the beast” in politer terms — while making it look like the beast was partially fed. They were also seriously into looting. Good little Randians are.
So it worked like this: The Reagan tax cuts steadily lowered the rate on the top dollars earned (keep that “top dollar” point in mind; mere mortals never saw those rates) from 70% to 50%, then to 28%. Those tax cuts, plus his massive spending, made the deficit rocket skyward. Mission accomplished; beast starving.
But how to make that deficit look smaller to the easily fooled? Simple. Grab a huge pile of cash from the middle class, invest that cash in Treasuries, and declare those Treasuries off-budget. Voilà — beast looks partially fed. Since the Trust Fund keeps growing (the 2008 number is $2.4 trillion), both the debt and the deficit have looked smaller ever since.”
How to kill social security: Be ignorant about it
The Reagan tax cuts steadily lowered the rate on the top dollars earned (keep that “top dollar” point in mind; mere mortals never saw those rates) from 70% to 50%, then to 28%.
Even this doesn’t really tell the whole story.
It wasn’t just a matter of lowering the marginal rate on the top dollar. It was a matter of just getting rid of the top rates.
So, if you made a lot of money, your top marginal rates went way down.
If you were lower class to middle class, your rates hardly changed at all.
It wasn’t an across-the-board lowering of rates, it was a dramatic shift in the distribution of the rates regime to a much, much less progressive one.
Even more so when the cap on SS withholding is considered.
It was a gift to the wealthy.
McKT, the view that to rebuild Europe and Japan was an error had quite some followers at different times. For Europe it grew from general opposition to the Marshall plan. Can’t say when it became a fringe position. For the idea that rearming the nazis would have been right, the top popularity was still in the 40ies, I’d say. For Japan I would put the main popularity at the time when Japanese electronics really began to make a dent and later with the cars (then it had turned more into ‘let’s have a trade war now’). I doubt that it was ever seriously considered by economists but it served well for demagoguery. And as for fringe, the GOP is currently overrun by nuts that work on a comeback of the John Birch Society (and try to revive the fluoridation scare). Fringe with megaphones is difficult to ignore.
I found this a pretty convincing analysis of the relationship of Reagan to the fall of the SU:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html
It is not that the current crop of republicans is more reckless than their predecessors…it’s that they wear their class based agenda so openly.
It is a class war, and the GOP knows which side it is on. Democrats who buy in to the “we can’t afford it” meme are simply surrendering without a fight or actually share the GOP’s class bias as having some kind of social validity.
Thus, I would argue, their alleged fiscal “superiority” is not really all that superior. In this respect I differ from Jacob’s otherwise insightful post.
That Wesley Clark piece was excellent, Lewis Carroll. Thanks.
“I have to work today and lack the research skills to do this in a timely manner, but it is my distinct recollection that every year during the Reagan administration, the White House would propose one budget, a relatively lower one, and the Dems would propose a much higher budget. The compromise still produced a deficit.”
I fear your ideology is affecting your memory. The spending levels in the budgets passed by Congress were lower than in Reagan’s budget proposals.
“It was Paul Volcker who crushed inflation and enabled a solid economic rebound.”
About 10 years ago I read a study which concluded that stock markets around the world performed significantly better during periods of low inflation (or deflation) than during periods of high inflation (or deflation). So there is good reason to believe that the economic boom was caused by Paul Volcker crushing inflation. I haven’t seen comparable evidence to suggest that supply side economics, however defined, deserves the credit.
I fear your ideology is affecting your memory. The spending levels in the budgets passed by Congress were lower than in Reagan’s budget proposals.
Kenneth, do you have links? I don’t remember one way or the other- wasn’t in a position to, really.
It is not that the current crop of republicans is more reckless than their predecessors…it’s that they wear their class based agenda so openly.
If you mean economic class, I’m not sure that “openly” is quite right.
Krugman once observed that Reagan did not deny that he was cutting taxes on the rich. He was more or less up front about it; it was the whole point of “supply side” economics.
Dubya, said Krugman, pretended that his tax cuts were NOT for the rich. The Rovian talking point was “$1100 tax relief for the average family”. Krugman’s response was the line about Bill Gates walking into a bar.
Dubya’s acolytes then, who are still his acolytes now, were not what I would call “open” about their class allegiance. They were, and remain, explicit about their goal to un-tax everything except wages, but they are determined to pretend that they’re doing it for the benefit of the wage-earning class.
–TP
The spending levels in the budgets passed by Congress were lower than in Reagan’s budget proposals.
It’s not ideology, it’s memory. Defective perhaps, but that is my memory. I quickly googled two articles. They go both ways. What would decide the issue would be a table, if it exists, showing congressionally proposed and administration proposed domestic spending, and then the actual numbers passed, and the same for defense spending for all of the Reagan/Bush I years.
If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it forthwith.
DeLong says, of the original Stockman article:
Since I don’t subscribe to the underlying ideology, it doesn’t much bother me that the Republican critics of Republican policy often turn out to be massive hypocrites who were guilty of exactly the things they’re accusing others of. And whatever Stockman’s own role, if you subscribe to the brand of hard-money fiscal conservatism he’s talking about, I think his points have some weight.
I don’t subscribe to it, but I try to understand those who do buy it and figure out what to say to them, since it’s such a popular viewpoint (and since they infuriatingly seem to have infested the Democratic party as well).
Some of the better Republicans are good enough to apologize for their previous role, at least. I think Bruce Bartlett is one of those.
Under Reagan, with a Democratic house, the deficit went up.
Of course in those days, before their current incarnation as intolerantly doctrinaire hard-left Islamophile elitists, the House Democrats still contained a good number of post-Dixiecrat boll weevils (including Phil Gramm, who was the House co-sponsor of Reagan’s first budget), who consistently voted with Reagan on fiscal and defense issues. The Dems were nominally a majority, but the balance of power was held by the boll weevils and Republicans.
For all his posturing, I don’t remember Reagan ever proposing a balanced budget.
What would decide the issue would be a table, if it exists, showing congressionally proposed and administration proposed domestic spending …
I find such a table on page 96 of Al Franken’s book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: a fair and balanced look at the right”. Before you gag, Franken reproduces the table directly from Sean Hannity’s book “Let Freedom Ring”; Hannity sources it to http://reagan.webteamone.com/reaganbudgets.html which you’re welcome to look at if it’s still up.
The bottom line is that in Reagan’s 8 fiscal years, the Gipper proposed $7.357 trillion and Congress approved $7.554 trillion of spending. Congress overspent Reagan by 2.8%, if you believe Hannity’s source — a fellow named Tom Kottle who (in 2003, anyway) was running “The Ronald Reagan Homepage”.
If you believe Franken’s source, Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution, you go by the table on page 100 of Franken’s book. The bottom line on that one: Reagan proposed $7.314 trillion, Congress actually SPENT $7.361 trillion, or 0.6% more.
The slight differences in the numbers are not the main difference in the two tables. The main difference is that Hannity’s (meaning Kottle’s) table had a column labelled “Cumulative % Difference”, which compounded the year-by-year percentage differences and came out to a bottom line that Congress “cumulatively” approved 24.5% more than Reagan proposed. Mann’s table replaces those entries in the table with “This is a totally bogus, piece of shit column”.
Hard-core Republicans don’t waste their time trying to deceive Democrats. It’s rank-and-file Republicans they keep trying to fool with bogus, piece-of-shit “statistics”.
–TP
The main difference is that Hannity’s (meaning Kottle’s) table had a column labelled “Cumulative % Difference”, which compounded the year-by-year percentage differences and came out to a bottom line that Congress “cumulatively” approved 24.5% more than Reagan proposed.
Wow. The sheer chutzpah is almost admirable.
TonyP — That page is down, but it can be found at the Internet Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040604135946/www.presidentreagan.info/reagan_budgets.cfm
Hopefully that works.
Innumeracy? Dishonesty? Really, I don’t care which. Anyone who does something of this nature should be exposed & subsequently ignored until they’ve repented and, well, educated themselves up to the high school graduate level.
Otherwise: as if I needed another reason not to listen to Sean Hannity.
The main difference is that Hannity’s (meaning Kottle’s) table had a column labelled “Cumulative % Difference”, which compounded the year-by-year percentage differences and came out to a bottom line that Congress “cumulatively” approved 24.5% more than Reagan proposed.
This reminds me of an argument that I had with a friend at lunch once. He mixed together some 1% and 2% milk from the cafeteria, and claimed that he had created 3% milk. I tried to explain that he had actually created 1.5% milk, but everyone else at the table sided with my friend, partly because it was “his milk” and partly because they didn’t understand division. This was in the third grade.
‘I was about to ask if, history of the Cold War aside, any conservatives here wanted to take issue with the basic idea that the D’s are, at this point in time, a better bet for fiscal soundness than the R’s.
And Sebastian beat me to it.
Thanks for a candid reply Seb.’
I won’t take issue with it but I’m not going to jump to affirm it either. I think most of the foregoing discussion about free spending and lack of concern for rising deficits applies equally well to a majority of both parties, albeit, perhaps, for different public reasons. I must conclude that the privately held reasons behind this behavior by the pols is to sustain their incumbency. So, like McKT, I don’t like the choices, and I don’t like them almost equally, but for a single aspect. That is the democrats are led by individuals who will create new major federal programs and powers with which I strongly disagree. That is why I cannot vote for a democratic candidate even when their positions on fiscal matters might be better than most republicans.
Someone upthread mentioned some odd behavior of typical republicans regarding safety net social programs like SS and Medicare. Here’s my view. I don’t favor these types of programs to be funded and administered at the federal level. Most of my objection can be explained by my aversion to size (anyone recall too big to fail?) and the concept of one solution fits all (anyone ever think flexibility in solving a problem can be helpful?). Big organizations running big programs are typically wasteful and unresponsive to their customers. If I had been of age when Social Security was created as a federal program, I think I would not have supported it, and in the sixties I did not support the creation of Medicare.
None of this means that I think government should not be involved in these kinds of programs. I’m a supporter of federalism and I believe these kinds of programs should have been left to states. Almost every week I can find some congressperson or senator introducing legislation on a matter that simply blows my mind as to how it was judged to be a federal government issue.
To sum up, how would anyone ever expect any federally elected official to control spending if we behave as if there is no conceivable limit on their legislative powers.
T.P.–thanks for that. As you say, regardless of the numbers, neither variation seems significant. I stand corrected.
Big organizations running big programs are typically wasteful and unresponsive to their customers.
Not necessarily disagreeing with this in general, but *in the specific case of SS*, this is not really so.
That is why I cannot vote for a democratic candidate even when their positions on fiscal matters might be better than most republicans.
That’s your call, and it’s a reasonable position given the preferences you’re starting from.
Just for curiosity, GOB: how do you think 50 separate Social Security plans would deal with the pesky American habit of moving from one state to another? I mean, I know they could handle it; the only question is whether they would need EVEN MORE THAN 50 TIMES the bureaucrats that SS employs. Same question applies to Medicare, of course.
Also just for curiosity: why do you think efficiency-seeking private enterprises (e.g. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, etc.) don’t seem interested in a “federalist” business model for themselves?
–TP
‘Just for curiosity, GOB: how do you think 50 separate Social Security plans would deal with the pesky American habit of moving from one state to another? I mean, I know they could handle it; the only question is whether they would need EVEN MORE THAN 50 TIMES the bureaucrats that SS employs. Same question applies to Medicare, of course.
Also just for curiosity: why do you think efficiency-seeking private enterprises (e.g. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, etc.) don’t seem interested in a “federalist” business model for themselves?’
That’s a complex hypothetical. If this had been left to the states, a number of varied approaches would likely have developed and under very different time frames. Two components, retirement and welfare, that exist in the current program would likely have had a number of variations as well. The retirement component might have been portable and the welfare component not.
How is this done in the European Union? Since those member states existed and had comparable social safety net programs at the state level prior to union. How are they handling this in the Union going forward?
On the business question, I know nothing about how Wal-Mart operates, but it is my understanding that McDonald’s sells franchises which means there should be some sort of distributed decision-making scheme that would promote efficiency by recognizing different circumstances in different franchise locations.
I appreciate your questions, but too much speculation required to picture how the government programs might have evolved.
Dear GOB,
You are applying a cookie cutter yardstick (one size fits all, eh?)in a flailing attempt to fit your predispositions (I hate big stuff), but we all do that 🙂
If “big” was a concern, I’d expect to see something about big trans-national corporations that are essentially becoming governments unto themselves. Somehow you just must have overlooked that in your haste to condemn the federal government. After all the social and economic outrage that is MacDonalds is nothing compared to a 75 year old wildly successful program like Social Security.
And I take it you favor reckless spending on totally wasteful stuff by those who proclaim to the heavens their stout hearted opposition to big government over those who try to adopt sensible legislation with a modicum of central control and oversight that simply offends your sense of “how things ‘should’ be done”?
You will excuse me if I cannot bring myself to share that viewpoint.
“If you mean economic class, I’m not sure that “openly” is quite right.”
hmmm…possibly. But the appeal is a bit more over the top than the post war GOP struggling to get back from the political wilderness of the Depression years. It reminds me more of the appeals made by Mark Hanna’s GOP:
Freedome
We are a rich country full of rugged individualists
Freedom
You, too, could become rich
Freedom
Leave the rich alone, and they will leave you alone….
…did I mention the appeal to freedom?
I see this as a pretty naked appeal to let the rich have their way. There is no disguise here…perhaps the term misdirection is more appropriate.
Hairshirt,
You’re welcome.
I remember that that level of thinking was why I was a big Clarkie during the ’04 primaries.
Goodoleboy wrote,
“None of this means that I think government should not be involved in these kinds of programs. I’m a supporter of federalism and I believe these kinds of programs should have been left to states.”
I’m not certain I believe that politicians in state government are any wiser or responsible than those in federal government. Maybe because I’ve read so many stories like this one, Pension woes and state government largesse.
GOB: “That is the democrats are led by individuals who will create new major federal programs and powers with which I strongly disagree.”
I suppose that’s fair enough, if you don’t consider military invasions, the TSA, and the kinds of federal level social restrictions the Republicans push to be “major federal programs.”
Also, there is one very big reason that SS and Medicare are administered by the federal government, and not the states. If it had been left up to the states, old people in large portions of the South, like Mississippi, would probably have no kind of social safety net now. Also, during the 60s, those same states would certainly have denied any kind of social safety net spending to black people.
It’s not about efficiency (though Social Security is one of THE most efficient programs around, 50 state versions would be less so), it’s about the fact that we decided, as a nation, that old people deserve some freaking dignity, to not have to work until they die, and not live on cat food. Not just some old people, everybody across the country. Yes, Social Security started out smaller than it is today, and left out many occupations (partially to get support from racist Dixiecrats, which is why jobs like farm workers, that were disproportionately jobs occupied by black people were excluded), and wasn’t perfect. But it’s a damn sight better than what came before it. And what’s come after it, given the performance of all the vaunted individual retirement stock funds, and corporations doing their best to divest their pensions.
Also, contrary to most claims, I suspect that state and local politicians are often less accountable to voters than federal ones. Especially with the deaths of local news sources, people are more likely less informed about their state government than the federal government. Look at how few can name their congresscritter. Now look at how even fewer can name their state reps. Local doesn’t mean more accountability.
And if you want to argue about it on an economic basis, we can talk about the benefits from having old people live with their kids or not, and the benefits of retired workers still having some money coming in, and the efficiency and function of a low-grade social safety net.
But that’s all a sideshow. The real point is the moral one, that everyone should be able to have some stability when they retire, and doing it state by state would leave a great many citizens of this country without one.
None of this means that I think government should not be involved in these kinds of programs. I’m a supporter of federalism and I believe these kinds of programs should have been left to states.
Ive always found that an odd ideological point; I can see a practical argument for doing certain activities at the appropriate level: plan your interstate highways at the federal level, set your bus schedules at the city/county level. Immigration and customs, federal. etc.
But I’ve never understood attaching a strong ideological preference to this sort of thing. That is, I don’t understand how someone could be totally opposed- in principle- to a federal retirement program but seemingly ok with a state-run one.
‘If “big” was a concern, I’d expect to see something about big trans-national corporations that are essentially becoming governments unto themselves’
Premise here is incorrect. IMHO ‘big’ anything organizationally becomes problematic. This includes government, businesses, unions, non-profits, you name it. Examples here after government could include GM, AIG, GE, UAW, NEA, AARP. If anyone feels left out, please say so.
I’m not interested or trying to impose my preferences on others. Our federal government got to have the responsibilities assigned to it in a very specific way. Most of those that are clearly legitimate have been mismanaged as noted by some earlier in this thread. International conflict and immigration, for example. If our federal legislators could see their way to restrain themselves from acting as if everything is somehow their responsibility, then maybe they would become a little more adept at dealing with matters that ARE clearly their responsibility.
Nothing I said suggests that state politicians have talents, ethics, or perceptive skills exceeding those at the federal level, just that the people who are affected will be better able to exert influence.
I’m really interested if someone will comment on my questions on the European Union.
Sorry that my points are drifting off topic. I tried to give some explanation to my response to Jacob’s staightforward suggestion that fiscal conservatives should vote democrat.
The reason why not is that: A vote for a specific democrat (like Matheson in Utah, or Webb or Warner in Virginia) who claim to be fiscal watchdogs, is not just a vote for that person, but a vote for the legislation that will be presented by their leadership in Congress.
Legislation that will be enacted as a result (given that leadership is in control and has enough votes in the Senate) will not serve the preferences of the constituents who voted them in, in the above examples.
GOB, I salute you. You’re right: party affiliation matters. I have been saying that (from the other side of the fence, of course) for decades. You can’t vote for “the person” without voting for the party the person belongs to.
You can, for your own good reasons, vote for the party of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Pat Robertson. I can’t. I just plain can not. If Solon himself were running on the GOP ticket, and running against a Democrat who was an obvious idiot or a convicted felon, the best I could manage would be to stay home. Very partisan of me, I know.
I feel a bit less embarassed to be so partisan when honest partisans on the other side (meaning you, not lying scum like Sean Hannity) frankly acknowledge their partisanship. So, thank you.
–TP
P.S.: You might imagine I’m being sarcastic. Trust me: just this once, at least, I swear I’m not.
You can, [GOB] for your own good reasons, vote for the party of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Pat Robertson. I can’t. I just plain can not.
Because I know you’re a straight shooter, Tony P., I can tell you aren’t being sarcastic here. But you are trying to make a sort of sotto voce argument (‘party of Sarah Palin…etc’). And I think it’s mostly hopeless (sorry Hilzoy).
Denial is boring. It’s not amenable to argument. The closest you get to a counter argument is ‘well, that’s contrary to my ideology’ – which is, of course, no argument at all; it’s a means to forestall argument.
I’m glad Jacob made an entire post out of the point you raised the other day, and I admire the fortitude you guys have in trying to be convincing, but it’s never going to work with some people (e.g. Marty, GOB). Denial not only isn’t amenable to argument, it denies it.
‘Partisanship’ is also not really an argument, except perhaps in the opposite way to which GOB means it. The GOP used to be relatively diverse (i.e. ideologically less coherent). It isn’t diverse now – it’s practically a parliamentary party. A vote for any Republican really is a vote for Rush L., Sarah Palin, GW Bush and the rest. The dems, on the other hand, are much more diverse, ideologically. Does it make sense for fiscally conservative Republicans to vote for a Democratic party which is actually more fiscally conservative than the GOP of yore? Patently, yes. Most won’t. ‘Sense’ has nothing to do with it.
Soldier on. Maybe it will help. But Denial gets stronger, not weaker, the more (rationally) obvious what’s being denied is.
But I’ve never understood attaching a strong ideological preference to this sort of thing. That is, I don’t understand how someone could be totally opposed- in principle- to a federal retirement program but seemingly ok with a state-run one.
Me, too, CW. It seems to me to be a matter of practicality – simply what works best, but some people look on it in what appears to be a matter of something much like morality, or as though there’s some natural law being violated. It’s seems weird to me for people to have such strong preferences about things as dry as whether some governmental efforts should be handled at the federal or state level when those preferences are held for reasons other than specific functional ones (that is, you can’t simply say that you think states are just better at stuff without discussing the specifics at hand).
Regarding the EU question, the EU is not a nation, even if it has some aspects of one. The members are sovereign and mostly pre-existed the EU.
Ideologies function like fundamentalist religion: gives the believer an excuse never to think again because they already are convinced that they have all the answers.
Objective reality has no impact.
Ideologies function like fundamentalist religion
They function *like* that, but it’s misplaced.
I personally don’t think that our constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion should render articles of religious faith sacrosanct from rational debate (the fact that it seems to is a big problem, IMO), but the fact remains that such articles are relatively difficult to prove or disprove. OTOH, articles of *political* faith are much easier to debate rationally – are, in fact, made for rational debate, since there’s evidence, etc. For this reason, I call a refusal to debate them ‘denial’ rather than ‘faith’.
Nothing I said suggests that state politicians have talents, ethics, or perceptive skills exceeding those at the federal level, just that the people who are affected will be better able to exert influence.
Well, that cuts both ways: lobbyists for national and supranational interests have a much easier time suborning state legislators than congresspersons; the prices are lower. And it’s not even like state government is more transparent; it certainly isn’t in my state, where they stopped printing the record of legislative debates and votes years ago, and still put none of that online. The number of people who can name their state representative is even smaller than the pathetically small number of people who can name their federal representative.
Yeah, it makes a lot more sense to privatize parts of SS than it does to let 50 states bear the administrative burden, particularly given the mobility of the US population. But even discussing the merits of devolving SS to the states is pretty esoteric, given that the chances of that ever being even remotely on the radar screen are probably less than zero.
Privatizing even a part of Social Security is just as bad an idea now as when George W. Bush pushed for it. Not only because then it would stop being a guaranteed benefit program, which would undo the moral reasons I mentioned above, but for practical purposes too.
First, then Social Security would cease to be a guaranteed benefit program, which would leave the retirements of seniors up to the whims of the market a lot more. Second, it would be less efficient because it would raise administrative costs by a lot, and Social Security’s administrative costs are extremely low right now. Third, it would pump even more money into our already out-sized financial sector. Given the genius of the financial sector we’ve seen on display, do we really want to put more money in for brokers to skim a few percent off, and traders to “innovate” new investments they can profit off of, and put everybody’s retirement programs under the control of a casino that’s out to enrich itself? Do we want to enlarge the size of the financial sector even more, and further distort our economy? I say no.
If we put it in “safe” investments, like market index stocks, or Treasuries, or something like that, which is basically linked to the performance of the entire economy, how is that fundamentally different than what we have now, where Social Security is paid out of the larger economy anyway?
Seriously, what’s the point of “privatizing” Social Security, other than Government Bad feelings or ideology, or the desire to get the Social Security money into the Stock Market so Wall Street can profit off it?
Privatizing even a part of Social Security is just as bad an idea now as when George W. Bush pushed for it.
I was comparing the notion of privatizing some of SS with the notion of devolving it to the 50 states. I wasn’t advocating privatization, simply comparing two ideas and saying one makes more sense than the other.
Nate: If we put it in “safe” investments, like market index stocks, or Treasuries, or something like that, which is basically linked to the performance of the entire economy, how is that fundamentally different than what we have now, where Social Security is paid out of the larger economy anyway?
Amen, brother. I have made this point myself many times. Social Security is as diversified as a mutual fund can get. It can neither “over-perform” NOR “under-perform” The Economy, because it’s backed by the government’s power to tax the entire economy.
Back when Dubya was making his big push to privatize SS, then-Senator Rick Santorum appeared on Face the Nation one fine Sunday. He was asked how the federal government could finance the transition costs, if part of FICA were diverted to “private accounts”. His answer — I kid you not — was that many people would invest their private accounts in … wait for it … United States Treasury bonds!
McKinney: I wasn’t advocating privatization, simply comparing two ideas and saying one makes more sense than the other.
Speaking of comparing ideas: proposals to privatize Social Security are EXACTLY AS sensible (or foolish) as my oft-repeated proposal to “privatize the national debt”. Anybody who touts the former while poo-pooing the latter must believe that ledgers have only one side.
–TP
“I was comparing the notion of privatizing some of SS with the notion of devolving it to the 50 states. I wasn’t advocating privatization, simply comparing two ideas and saying one makes more sense than the other.”
And if that idea that makes more sense is a bad idea, then the other idea is even worse, so why did you say you would have supported doing Social Security by the states?
And what is a “partial” privatization of Social Security supposed to mean? All of my critiques apply to doing it to the whole program, or part of the program (except, perhaps, the one about how it wouldn’t be guaranteed, if you leave some guaranteed benefit).
What do you actually think about Social Security, and why? Is it just a reflexive distrust of the Federal Government, or do you think it would be better done some other way, and why? The Republicans want to get rid of Social Security, and have since it was made, because it’s “socialism”. Which didn’t stop them from whipping people up to “keep big government out of my Medicare/Social Security” at various times. The Democrats want to keep it the way it is. Which policy outcome do you prefer?
why did you say you would have supported doing Social Security by the states?
I think you’re confusing McKinneyTexas with GoodOleBoy here.
Hogan: Quite right. McKinney, GoodOleBoy, my apologies on confusing your arguments.
I don’t think it materially affects the rest of my comment, most of which I leave open to both of them,.
T.P.–I missed your proposals for privatizing debt. Perhaps it’s OT, but I’d like to hear them.
‘ I’m a supporter of federalism and I believe these kinds of programs should have been left to states. ‘
‘why did you say you would have supported doing Social Security by the states?’
The question and my earlier statement don’t really connect.
What do you actually think about Social Security, and why?
I think the money taken in over the last 4 decades under FICA should have been set aside and invested conservatively–Gore’s lock box comes to mind. That is water under the bridge. Going forward, I don’t have an informed opinion–you would have heard it by now if I did. I know it can’t be dismantled. I don’t know how it can be fixed fairly.
Is it just a reflexive distrust of the Federal Government, or do you think it would be better done some other way, and why?
It depends on what you mean by distrust. I don’t think gov’t is inherently dishonest or corrupt. I think it is inefficient, inflexible, administratively top-heavy and, at the lower levels particularly, unresponsive. My libertarian leanings favor people saving or not as they see fit and living with the consequences. My practical sense tells me too many people won’t act prudently, so some minimal, gov’t mandated savings program is the only other solution.
Given my preferences, FICA would be matched in private investments by the employer, but that has its own set of administrative and other issues.
The Republicans want to get rid of Social Security, and have since it was made, because it’s “socialism”.
This is a bit broad. I think many conservatives wish SS wasn’t needed because they don’t think it’s the proper role of gov’t. It’s wishful thinking, nothing more.
Which didn’t stop them from whipping people up to “keep big government out of my Medicare/Social Security” at various times.
Hypocrisy is the bipartisan Vaseline of political intercourse.
The Democrats want to keep it the way it is. Which policy outcome do you prefer?
Actually, the Dems don’t want or intend to keep Medicare the way it is–they want to cut physician reimbursement rates significantly. They will find that this won’t work. Doctors cannot make ends meet today on Medicare reimbursement rates. Cutting them will just put doctors out of business.
Further, I don’t see it as an either/or situation, i.e. either do away with Medicare or leave it as is. More importantly, I don’t have a sufficient understanding of the details to express an informed opinion, other than the reimbursement rate issue and that only because one of my best bud’s an orthopedic surgeon. He and his hospital are not taking any new Medicare patients. They can’t break even, much less earn any money.
Here is something that seems to get overlooked in some of these questions regarding whether Social Security, for example, should have been a federal program or left to individual states. A debate on administrative efficiency and/or effectiveness is not enough.
Anyone here knows what a political hot potato Social Security is. Any politician holding or seeking federal office, including the POTUS, must be very careful when touching this subject. When I make a comment or suggestion regarding my preference that matters like Social Security be handled by states, the issue is not confined to the program administration. I actually dream of an environment where those making decisions about national defense, national security, immigration, domestic and international commerce, and other subjects the proper purview of the federal government could do that more limited job with a better chance to get it right. Would some of these responsibilities be executed more effectively if many of the domestic programs run out of Washington were at state levels instead? Consider the reduction in the number of issues that candidates for federal offices would need to address.
In national elections today, Florida is considered by some to be THE key to the election, representing ten per cent of the needed electoral votes, and not recently having been one of those states any candidate can consider in their pocket. Would Florida have this same position if Social Security were not a federal program? What if, OTOH immigration were handled very effectively by the feds? Would this make a difference in Florida, Arizona, or Texas?
I do have one more point for the administrative side of the issue. Social Security benefits are the same regardless of where one lives. The feds could change and make adjustments for geographical cost of living differences, but these would probably be built in if the states were doing it. This would be for the welfare component, not the retirement component.
McTx: The last time I explained my modest proposal was in the “Career Opportunities” thread.
–TP
Hypocrisy is the bipartisan Vaseline of political intercourse.
Just wanted to say, that is a great line.
LOL
TP, I like the idea. It won’t ever happen, but I the concept is intriguing. If I understand it, it is not too dissimilar between (A) capping spending at current levels and (B) raising taxes on the over 250K crowd (e.g me) but use that money only for deficit reduction and also any surplus revenues only for deficit reduction. When I say cap spending at current levels, I mean cap aggregate spending–congress would be free to allocate more money on SS or whatever, and less on defense or crop subsidies or whatever, so long as next year’s budget equals last year’s budget.
Russell, if I ever start my own blog, that will be the title: Political Intercourse. I even registered the domain name. I couldn’t believe that someone hadn’t already taken it.
GOB, The feds could change and make adjustments for geographical cost of living differences, but these would probably be built in if the states were doing it.
The states can’t do SS. People are too mobile, the administrative costs would increase dramatically. It’s a nonstarter.
Further, adjusting benefits geographically would be even worse for a variety of reasons. Older people can and do move to communities where the cost of living is reduced. That’s how they stretch their retirement savings and SS. Adjusting, i.e. reducing benefits on people who relocate to live better, doesn’t seem like a good idea at all.
Further still, how do you estimate cost of living in NYC vs. upstate NY. Isn’t one more expensive than the other? Shouldn’t we do it by city? Or neighborhood?
Conservatives should do what they can to make the system viable, hopefully with minimal additional taxes, and let individuals decide how to manage their retirement.
My libertarian leanings favor people saving or not as they see fit and living with the consequences. My practical sense tells me too many people won’t act prudently, so some minimal, gov’t mandated savings program is the only other solution.
Oh, brother.
You know, there are actually people in this country who, quite literally, after meeting their monthly required expenses — housing, food, electricity, gas, transportation — don’t have anything to save. Many of them don’t have enough to completely meet those each month.
They aren’t irresponsible. The money just doesn’t exist. Particularly since real wage growth has been stagnant for three decades.
It’s nice to blame it on imprudence — doing so certainly allows one to feel superior!! — but let’s try to live in the real world when we have these discussions, shall we?
Some people can’t save for retirement, because the money just ain’t there. Some people are never going to get to retire anyway, because due to their life histories, their household obligations, becoming caretakers for their elderly parents, etc., they just can’t afford it.
My mother will be 62 this winter. She works a 40 hour week, every week. She gets no sick time and one week’s vacation each year. If she misses even one hour for a doctor’s appointment — one frigging hour — she loses a $100 “bonus” that her employer gives for perfect 40-hour attendance. (He’s one of those oh-so-noble Small Businessmen whose praises McKinneyTexas can’t sing frequently enough around here.)
Mom has a bad knee. She’s had to see an orthopedist several times this year. Since she gets no sick time, she either has to burn a vacation day to go to the doctor, or get docked the time she’s at the doctor’s and lose the “bonus” hundred bucks.
In addition, her mother — my grandmother — has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s bad, and getting worse. Mom used to just stop at Grandma’s before work every morning and after work every night. Now she’s taken to sleeping over 3-4 nights a week. So she pays for a mortgage and utilities at a house she’s barely at. (Well, half of it. She lives with her boyfriend, who pays the other half.)
And, of course, my grandmother has a lot of doctor’s appointments. A LOT. She just spent 4 days in the hospital with a terrible case of shingles. She has ongoing coronary problems — I think she’s had three stents inserted in the last ten years. Mom and her three siblings try to split up taking her as much as possible, but every time my mother takes her to an appointment, she has to burn a vacation day, or get docked.
Mom will almost certainly never, ever get to retire. Ever. She can start collecting SS at age whatever, but it will of course be decreased because she’ll still be working. She has to.
When my parents were married, she didn’t have to work. Amazingly, throughout the 60s and 70s, an Army NCO could support a family of four on his wages alone. (Thanks, in part, to the socialized medicine that exists in the Army, but let’s not get into that right now.) So she didn’t have the opportunity to sock away a nest egg for herself.
Once they divorced, and she did work to support herself, my sister and me, she saved where she could. That savings ebbed and flowed, grew and shrank over the years for various reasons, but Mom has always been a responsible spender, and good household budgeter/manager. She’s the one who handles Grandma’s bills now, since she’s the best at it among her siblings.
I won’t say her situation is typical . . . but it’s not atypical, either. I can’t find the statistic right now, but a surprisingly large percentage of women over 40 work full-time, take care of a minor child (or children), and also take care of an elderly parent (or parents). They work for small employers like my mother does, who do things like denying them sick time. For any number of reasons, they don’t have big retirement savings.
You can call my mom a lot of things, pal, but “imprudent” better never be among them. Not if you know what’s good for you.
Next, I’ll get into the story of my mother-in-law, who spent more than fifteen years doing backbreaking work at another Saintly Small Business, a bookbinding factory. She never made more than $12 per hour.
When, after all those years of service, she really couldn’t stand up for 8+ hour days anymore, and her arthritis began to get unbearable, she asked them for one of two things: A change of jobs to one where she could sit down all day instead of standing, or a 25-cents-per-hour raise. They said “no” to both.
You can call my mom a lot of things, pal, but “imprudent” better never be among them. Not if you know what’s good for you.
No one is calling your mother anything other than someone who’s been dealt a very tough hand. And, it’s a fair point that many who might save, can’t. My point was more directed at those who could save, but don’t. I could have been clearer.
So, to rephrase more clearly, because many people won’t or can’t put back enough for retirement, it makes sense to have a minimal, gov’t mandated program.
Final note: I don’t care much at all for any business that treats its employees in the manner your mother and mother-in-law are being treated. In your mother-in-law’s case, I’d suggest consulting an ADA-qualified attorney. She’s legally entitled to a reasonable accommodation.
McKinney,
ADA was only passed in 1990 and doesn’t apply to companies of less than 15 people. So if this was more than 20ish years ago AND/OR the company has less than 15 employees it doesn’t matter.
And considering the amount of screaming I go to read about ADA breaking small businesses when I googled “ADA+Small Business+Apply” I’d guess folks aren’t thrilled with it.
And getting a lawyer means having time, money, and energy.
DFS, after re-reading about Phil’s mother-in-law, it looks like she may have left her employment some time back. I can’t tell when, if she did. You’re correct, there is a size threshold as to which companies are subject to the ADA. So, that is an assumption too. ADA lawyers typically work on contingency. Also, if her arthritis was caused or aggravated by her work conditions, there is also the avenue of a worker’s compensation claim. Again, she’d have to consult an attorney who specializes in that area of the law. Typically, comp lawyers work on a contingency (although not so in Texas anymore, and it’s hurt injured workers).
The Working Poor, by David Shipler.
And, it’s a fair point that many who might save, can’t. My point was more directed at those who could save, but don’t. I could have been clearer.
I appreciate that. You know us liberals, always striving for fairness — it’s easy to overlook that life is a lot more complicated than any of our ideologies sometimes allow for.
As for mom-in-law, well, faced with a losing hand, she simply folded, and quit, some time ago. She couldn’t start collecting SS at the time, so she and her husband lived solely on his income for several years. (He was working as a project manager at an architectural firm at the time.) Unfortunately, after a series of layoffs, several years taking care of his now-deceased mother, and other bad situations, they’ve burned through all their savings, he’s unemployed, her SS can’t support them both and they’re about to lose their house.
Yeah, but Phil, to conservatives people earning below a certain level are simply not really seen – much as some men don’t see women who aren’t sexually attractive to them, so some well-off people don’t see people who are too poor to matter. McKinney isn’t calling your mom “imprudent”. He isn’t able to think of your mom, or anyone else at her income level, as really existing at all.
To a certain extent to be a conservative, you must be either rich and sociopathic, or poor and stupid. That there are numerically more poor conservatives than rich ones – at least, I never met a conservative yet who wasn’t poor in their own estimation – only goes to show that most people are of below-average intelligence…
Unfortunately, after a series of layoffs, several years taking care of his now-deceased mother, and other bad situations, they’ve burned through all their savings, he’s unemployed, her SS can’t support them both and they’re about to lose their house.
Jesus.
He isn’t able to think of your mom, or anyone else at her income level, as really existing at all.
This may be a bit strong, Jes. My problem was lack of clarity, not lack of awareness. What I do find astonishing is an employer who would treat his/her employees in that manner. I see a lot of workplaces, few as bad as what Phil describes. I don’t doubt Phil at all, rather I am struck by the employer’s cruelty and indifference.
My problem was lack of clarity, not lack of awareness.
“My libertarian leanings favor people saving or not as they see fit and living with the consequences. My practical sense tells me too many people won’t act prudently, so some minimal, gov’t mandated savings program is the only other solution.”
I think that makes your comment even creepier, if you were perfectly aware that you were dismissing so many people below the poverty line to utter invisibility, rather than just being blithely, aristocratically ignorant that so many of them exist.
Jes, your comment of 08:12pm was over the line. You’re capable of effective snark without going ad hom; don’t be lazy.
The conversation has moved on, but I can’t resist:
Give me a 4-letter Anglo-Saxon word that ends in “k” and means “intercourse”.
I apologize in advance if this question comes too close to violating the posting rules. I acknowledge that some people are more sensitive than I am about mildly offensive talk.
–TP
I see a lot of workplaces, few as bad as what Phil describes. I don’t doubt Phil at all, rather I am struck by the employer’s cruelty and indifference.
In my experience, more small employers are like my mom’s than not. Just sayin’.
And not to tweak unnecessarily, since you’re trying to be a good guy about this, but you have threatened to fire your entire staff if your personal marginal income tax rate should happen to return to what it was 10 years ago.
“Overestimating Soviet strength was a hobby of the CIA, but the Team B folks did it professionally, putting the CIA to shame. (And weirdly, didnt lose a shred of credibility- exaggeration of enemy resources in the defense of the defense industry is no vice).”
Well, yeah; It’s a question of which sort of error you want to make. Overestimating your opponent’s strength leads to you winning at a higher than necessary cost. Underestimating your opponent’s strength leads to you losing, and nobody gives a damn that you brought the defeat in under budget. So military planners have a built in incentive to over-estimate the foe’s capabilities, and quite properly so. Because the costs of underestimating them are so much higher.
“But I’ve never understood attaching a strong ideological preference to this sort of thing. That is, I don’t understand how someone could be totally opposed- in principle- to a federal retirement program but seemingly ok with a state-run one.”
It’s a rule of law thing: The federal government lacks constitutional authority to do that sort of thing, the states have it. Therefore the federal government is violating the Constitution in doing it, where the states wouldn’t be.
This isn’t going to matter much to people who don’t value having a constitution, or having government by people who don’t violate their oaths to uphold it. Personally, I think having government bound to the rule of law, and run by people whose first act isn’t to forswear themselves, would be a good idea. We ought to try it some time.
Since returning the federal government to the role the Constitution actually delegates it is a non-starter, maybe we ought to just amend the Constitution to actually give the federal government most of the power it’s currently exercising. Then we could have government run by honest people, because you wouldn’t have to agree to a lie to hold high office. We could have an honest judiciary, because being willing to perpetuate a lie wouldn’t be a job requirement.
I personally think that the Constitution is pretty nifty as written, but what’s the point of a nifty constitution that’s being ignored? A substantially worse constitution that’s actually enforced would be better.
you have threatened to fire your entire staff if your personal marginal income tax rate should happen to return to what it was 10 years ago.
I am pretty sure you have this wrong. What I have consistently said is that if the tax rates begin to approach 50% (not 39.6%, which I would go along with if the delta between 36% and 39.6% was used for deficit reduction), then I would have to look at lay offs to make it worthwhile to stay in business. It is a fact that I can make well more than I need to live on with virtually no employees. The point is that higher taxes on small operations increase the cost of doing business and produce layoffs.
Another point worth making: no one, including me, is obliged to employ someone else. Or, having extended employment, to keep it in force into perpetuity. My obligations to my employees stem from the fact of employment, i.e. having entered into the contract, I have obligations to my employees, as they have to me. Some (many, all?) Progressives would levy punitive taxes on “the rich” as a matter of ideological imperative, i.e. as a redistributive measure. In at least part of the Progressive world, employers are simply supposed to nod in acquiescence and go on with their lives, grateful I suppose that the People have left the employer something.
Vilifying employers, businesses, etc. is a subset of Progressive thinking. It is counterproductive, to say the least.
Bad use of italics. sorry.
“Another point worth making: no one, including me, is obliged to employ someone else.”
Similarly, no business is owed any particular profit margin, or indeed any profit at all. But the fastest route to protecting the margin you want is to cut costs, obviously, and the fastest way to do that is to fire people. Which is a fact of business, and one that sucks, since the person being fired is rarely in any way directly responsible for the failure to meet desired profits.
“Vilifying employers, businesses, etc. is a subset of Progressive thinking. It is counterproductive, to say the least.”
Neither should they be immune from vilification when they do, well, nasty things. You often seem reluctant to criticize employers and businesses for anything at all short of actually getting caught murdering someone. People’s thresholds for “nasty things” obviously varies. I think my mother’s employer should, obvs, be beaten with a sack of doorknobs just for being a jerk.
Employers and entrepreneurs are not some sainted, superior class of people worthy of our worship. They’re just people. We’re all just people.
“What I have consistently said is that if the tax rates begin to approach 50% (not 39.6%, which I would go along with if the delta between 36% and 39.6% was used for deficit reduction”
I the interest of pedantry, returning from 36% to 39.6% is an approach towards 50%.
‘It’s a rule of law thing: The federal government lacks constitutional authority to do that sort of thing, the states have it. Therefore the federal government is violating the Constitution in doing it, where the states wouldn’t be.’
It’s gratifying to have at least one here recognize the underlying principle guiding my thought process. Amending our Constitution probably would not occur to most of our elected officials since they consider it not relevant or appear not too even know it exist.
‘Since returning the federal government to the role the Constitution actually delegates it is a non-starter, maybe we ought to just amend the Constitution to actually give the federal government most of the power it’s currently exercising.’
This I also agree with, so anyone concluding that I think Social Security should be changed from a federal program to a state program can stop.
McK, I think it was the prior comment that had an open tag. I’m not sure I can fix it.
But as to this: Vilifying employers, businesses, etc. is a subset of Progressive thinking. It is counterproductive, to say the least.
No more counterproductive than the equally overgeneralizing unquestioning worship of small business on the other side.
As Phil points out (and as the book I referenced, “The Working Poor,” makes amply clear from the stories of the people the author followed for several years), many many small businesses, never mind big businesses, do not in fact treat employees well.
You say you do, and there are others who do. But if employers refuse to “redistribute” to the tune of a living wage, then sooner or later people are going to get sick of it and try to change the situation, whether via unions, the community in the form of the government, armed revolution, or whatever.
“Mine” is not a concept cast in stone tablets by an impartial deity.
Heh. Italics fixed. That never worked for me before.
“Similarly, no business is owed any particular profit margin, or indeed any profit at all. But the fastest route to protecting the margin you want is to cut costs”
True, no business is owed a profit. You either earn one or you don’t. Your second sentence is accurate, but only up to a point. You staff per the needs of the operation. If business falls off, you have to cut costs. It’s arithmetic. But what we are talking about is adding to the cost of business by imposing additional taxes. If enough people vote for that, then it’s the law and everyone has to go along. But, in voting for higher taxes, people need to do so with eyes wide open: there will be layoffs. There will be cutbacks in discretionary purchases, reducing demand for some products and ancillary services.
You are correct that employers are not saints nor are they or should they be a protected class. But, they do provide the jobs and you can only spend a dollar once. You can spend it on taxes or on payroll or on expansion. The latter two are better, in the aggregate, for everyone.
Amending our Constitution probably would not occur to most of our elected officials since they consider it not relevant or appear not too even know it exist.
Meanwhile, at stately Wayne Manor . . .
But what we are talking about is adding to the cost of business by imposing additional taxes.
Changes in the top marginal personal income tax rate are irrelevant to “the cost of doing business” except to the extent that the business owner takes the firm’s profits as salary.
. . . you can only spend a dollar once. You can spend it on taxes or on payroll or on expansion. The latter two are better, in the aggregate, for everyone.
Well, now, that depends on what the additional tax revenue is being spent on, doesn’t it?
‘Meanwhile, at stately Wayne Manor . . .’
Is there a point here related to my comment?
In the same vein: I am approaching 100 years of age. It’s not a close approach as yet, but with every passing year I come closer…
Jes, your comment of 08:12pm was over the line. You’re capable of effective snark without going ad hom; don’t be lazy.
Fair enough. The whole thing was meant to be effective snark, not ad hom: I thought the line about “most people are of below-average intelligence” would cue that in. I apologize to anyone who felt ad-hommed, including McKinney*. *sighs, goes back to the School of Thullen Humor to take fresh lessons*
*Said apology of course does not change the fact that McKinney will be second against the wall when the revolution comes. (First against the wall, as any fule kno, are the entire Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.)
Just to follow up on JanieM’s post, I’d like to add comment on redistribution.
As McK mentions, Phil’s mother and mother-in-law are getting a crap deal from their employer. They are paid poorly and work under crap conditions.
A simple solution for this is *to pay them better and provide them with better working conditions*.
This is not a question of redistribution, it is a question of distribution.
It’s a question of more of the value that people’s labor create coming to them in the form of wages and other workplace benefits.
It is, in fact, a point of great contention in this country whether employers should feel any obligation to pay their people well, or provide them with a safe or comfortable work environment.
For reference, see Wal-Mart.
Many of the issues of redistribution — the need for and extent of a social safety net — go away or are significantly mitigated if people are paid well in the first place.
*golfclap*
Is there a point here related to my comment?
Only if you can explain to me why the Republican Party has spent so much time and effort attempting to amend a document that, according to you, they don’t even know exists.
“It’s arithmetic. But what we are talking about is adding to the cost of business by imposing additional taxes.”
Raising the marginal tax rate on the highest income groups doesn’t change “the cost of doing business”.
“It’s a rule of law thing: The federal government lacks constitutional authority to do that sort of thing, the states have it. Therefore the federal government is violating the Constitution in doing it, where the states wouldn’t be.”
Oh, what a load of crap. The goals of the Constitution are clearly laid out in the Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (ref)
Social Security is a matter of “establish[ing] Justice”, insur[ing] domestic Tranquility”, promot[ing] the general Welfare”, and “secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It would not work as a state program, for reasons I mentioned above, both ethical and practical. Pretending to stick to the letter of the Constitution when it suits you, while ignoring the explicitly states reasons for having the Constitution is pretty weak tea. It handily lets you paint your political opponents as liars, hypocrites, corrupt, not caring about the Rule of Law, or whatever crap you want to add, but it is a complete lie. It’s very bad faith arguing.
Also, Article 1, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; …” There’s that general Welfare line again.
Also, Brett, GOB, how often have you guys been in opposition to say, cruel and unusual punishment? Or Habeas Corpus? How about the “limited time” of copyright? Have you guys ever pushed for the Post Office to be privatized, even though it’s directly enumerated in Section 8? What do you guys think about standing armies, since Congress is only supposed to be able to appropriate money for an army for 2 years? The way it’s done now pretty much contradicts that.
I know there’s plenty of lawyers here, who are trained to argue the letter of the law, but when you are arguing that the letter of the law directly contradicts the expressed spirit of the law, then there is either a problem with the law, or with your argument. You would probably say there’s a problem with the law, I think the problem has more to do with your arguments, and your attempts to read the Constitution to make your opponents look as bad as possible and to support the policies you prefer. This is called “interpretation”, and it’s something that happens with any written document.
“Also, Brett, GOB, how often have you guys been in opposition to say, cruel and unusual punishment?”
I’m on record favoring the re-legalization of drugs, opposition to felony inflation, and complaining about the lack of jury trials when they pull that “We promise not to sentence you to more than 364 days on each charge.” trick the Supreme court authorized in defiance of with the 6th amendment actually guarantees.
“Or Habeas Corpus?”
I’ve said that the point of this was to allow the Congress to deal with situations where the courts are shut down by a war on our own territory, and that this obviously does not apply to the people we’re holding at Gitmo, who are entitled to a trial. Too bad your guy Obama doesn’t agree…
“How about the “limited time” of copyright?”
I don’t recall commenting on this, but, yeah, I think it was a constitutional violation to extend copyrights beyond their original terms at the time they were granted.
“Have you guys ever pushed for the Post Office to be privatized, even though it’s directly enumerated in Section 8?”
Just because the Constitution says the federal government CAN do something, doesn’t mean it has to do it, if it’s bad policy. Congress has the authority to create a post office, (But not a postal monopoly.) not a mandate to do so.
“What do you guys think about standing armies, since Congress is only supposed to be able to appropriate money for an army for 2 years?”
I think it’s a bad idea, though reauthorizing it every two years does nominally comply with that clause. I’d rather we much downsized the Army, and restored a militia system. I’ve also said that the appropriate response to the militia movement would have been to appoint their officers, as the Constitution clearly permits…
I think you’ve got me confused with Sean Hanity…
I’ve also said that the appropriate response to the militia movement would have been to appoint their officers
I’ve got nothing in particular to object to in your comment here, but I’m curious about why we need a militia movement when there is already a national guard.
Do militia guys consider the guard to be something other than what the Constitution means when they say “militia”?
The National Guard is what replaced the militia. It is not the institution the founders were referring to in the Second Amendment (and in Article I, Section 8). We kind of let that one lapse without updating our paperwork.
If we go to a true militia (whatever that is) as some believe the Founders conceived, would they have to get in shape, or would it be a bunch of overweight, nearsighted guys hiding in duck blinds, garbed in acres of camouflage like a bunch of right-wing Divines, fiddling with two-way radios and having a little sotto-voiced vote to decide the secret password?
Tough Guy #1: How about “potato” as the password.
Tough Guy #2 (fairly barking this out): We’re not having a tuber as the password. Come up with something a little more martial.
Tough Guy #3: Shhh! Geez, keep it down! They’ll hear you! (Pauses, then whispers). Speaking of tubers, Harry, did you get the potato salad out of the car? I’m famished.
Harry (codename: Tough Guy #1): Damn, I forgot that. It wasn’t on the official checklist. I brought the alatle, the Swiss army barcalounger, and the whistle, for what that’s worth.
Tough Guy #2: Did you bring the alatle AND the arrows? And, by the way, who is going to hear us?
Harry: Wait a second, I thought the alatle was the arrow. Are you telling me the alatle is the bow? Hey, how about “alatle” as the password?
Tough Guy #3 (handing out Moe-slaps to the assembled tough guys, one of whom named his eldest daughter “Malisha”, for obvious reasons) They can’t hear us. THEY, and we know who THEY are, are in town plotting against us at the local Starbucks, and undergoing core-strength Pilates training for when THEY are going to make their final unconstitutional move and confiscate our precious bodily fluids.
Another tough guy, I can’t remember which one: Shouldn’t we move this here bivouac into town and confront the enemy directly, before they corrupt our essential lattes?
Tough Guy #2: I heard a noise. What was that?
Tough Guy #7 (sheepishly): Sorry, I farted.
Scene ends: Big wide guys heading in all directions into the shrubbery, tucking and rolling, some just rolling and cursing.
The National Guard is what replaced the militia.
Not according to the US Code, it’s not:
Sure, neither the states nor the Federal government have ever actually had to muster the unorganized militia, nor is it likely they ever will unless we’re actually invaded by a large army, but it does exist.
US National Debt in 1980: ~$1 trillion (33% of GDP)
US National Debt in 1992: $4 trillion (64% of GDP)
US National Debt in 2000: $5.6 trillion (58% of GDP)
US National Debt in 2008: ~$10 trillion (69% of GDP)
That’s enough of a reason. The “Democrats are fiscally irresponsible” meme seems to either be deeply outdated, or have come out of thin air.
Sure, neither the states nor the Federal government have ever actually had to muster the unorganized militia, nor is it likely they ever will unless we’re actually invaded by a large army, but it does exist.
On paper, yes. But it’s not a functioning institution; there is no leadership structure, no training, no one even keeping a membership list. No one mustered me in when I turned 17, or mustered me out when I turned 45. It’s like being a registered voter in a country that never has elections.
@Thullen: Apparently in the 1820s and 1830s it was a lot like that, only with more corn liquor.
Sorry, I forgot this:
Tough Guy #4: Permission requested to water the tree of liberty, sir.
Tough Guy Numero Uno: O.K. But do it far enough from us so we don’t step in it like last time. Someone cover him.
Copied from the “Vote Republican” thread, by “popular” “demand”:
Jonathan Schwartz summed it up nicely:
Almost all political conflict, especially in the US, boils down to a fight between the Sane Billionaires and the Insane Billionaires. It generally follows this template:
INSANE BILLIONAIRES: Let’s kill everyone and take their money!
SANE BILLIONAIRES: I like the way you think. I really do. But if we keep everyone alive, and working for us, we’ll make even more money, in the long term.
INSANE BILLIONAIRES: You communist!!!
So from a progressive perspective, you always have to hope the Sane Billionaires win. Still, there’s generally a huge chasm between what the Sane Billionaires want and what progressives want.
” No one mustered me in when I turned 17, or mustered me out when I turned 45.”
I always wondered why you still had to register for the draft 30+ years since we had one, now I know.
Damn, I was in the militia for 28 years and never knew it.
Casey L, I’ve quoted you on my Facebook, and my friend wants to pass it on. Since I’m kind of a newbie here, is there a blog or some way you’d like to be credited?
Thanks,
scyllacat
…as seen on fine social-networking sites everywhere
Brett: No, I was asking seriously, because those are some of the many things that most of the Republicans who claim to fetishize the Constitution have no problem supporting. You seem to be more consistent than most.
But. If you are arguing that the Constitution doesn’t permit something, in opposition to years of settled jurisprudence, legislation, and custom, then the onus is on you to prove that your interpretation of the Constitution is correct, and that what you’re saying is unConstitutional actually is. Which you haven’t done. And given the numerous references to “the general Welfare” in the Constitution, as I cited, it helps if your interpretation jibes with the stated purpose of the Constitution, as well.