[8/22/2011] Friday, Rachel Maddow coined a humorous term for a serious phenomenon: Republicans’ habit of passionately attacking their own ideas as soon as President Obama adopts them. She called it “The Great Flabbergasting“.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
In her usual manner, Rachel wasn’t content just to float a cute phrase out there, she assembled the research and gave these examples:
trade agreements and patent reform that is in the Republican jobs plan.
a bipartisan deficit commission
pay-as-you-go rules in Congress
cap and trade (the original bill was McCain-Liebermann)
individual mandate in health reform (Romneycare in Massachusetts)
the DREAM Act
“We should have known this was coming,” she says, before playing tape from the 2008 Republican debates where John McCain promises to vote against the immigration bill he wrote.
Thursday Jon Stewart’s show had two brilliant segments. In the first, he answers the charge that billionaire Warren Buffett is a socialist:
You really have no f**king clue what socialism is, do you? “Eh, that George Clooney, always banging different broads — what a queer.”
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In the second, he examines the strange notion that tax fairness should begin with taxing the poor.
So raising income tax on the top 2% of earners would raise $700 billion, but taking half of everything the bottom 50% have in this country would do the same. I see the problem here: We need to take all of what the bottom 50% have.
… global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.
My advice to reporters with access: The way to get Perry to answer is to attack his manhood. It’s cowardly to slander people vaguely and refuse to back up your claims.
Were black families more stable during slavery? In a word: no.
Looking at the briefs John Boehner’s lawyer filed to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, you can see why the Obama administration bailed. Here’s what you need to buy to defend DOMA: Gays haven’t faced historical discrimination, sexual orientation is a choice, gays have enough power to defend their interests through the political system, same-sex couples make bad parents, and same-sex marriage damages opposite-sex marriage
One Word Turns the Tea Party Around. Want to transform annoying Tea Party rhetoric into motivating Progressive rhetoric? It’s easy: Just replace all occurrences of government with corporations. Who knew that Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, and Ronald Reagan could make so much sense?
Building the Rioters of the Future. Pundits tried very hard to stuff the British riots into some simple box: a crime spree, a revolution, bad parenting, mass insanity. When that failed, they proclaimed the violence a great mystery. But is it really so hard to understand why people with little to lose would loot or burn?
After Wisconsin. Tuesday, Wisconsin Democrats picked up two seats in staunch Republican districts, but fell short of re-taking the state senate. So was that a win or a loss? And now we move on to Ohio.
Noah’s Dinosaurs and other short notes. Should a Bible theme park get tax breaks? Is it OK for a county board to begin its meetings by praying to Jesus? How the Republican 2012 field looks after the Ames Straw poll. Global warming in one graphic. Mitt Romney embraces corporate personhood, and the DNC strikes back. What countries are still AAA? Socialist ones, mostly.
This Week’s Challenge is only a little self-serving: Figure out how you can draw more attention to the kinds of things you like. If you’ve mostly been a passive user of social media, figure out how to Like or Link or Retweet. Or sign up at Reddit or Digg or StumbleUpon and start trying to influence the wisdom of crowds.
Sometimes they look really good doing it: fast, agile, determined. None of their teammates can catch up and turn them around.
This last year or two I’ve been feeling that way about the Tea Party — not the corporate lobbyists who run the organizations or the billionaires who fund them, but the rank-and-file types who wave signs and bring their babies to rallies. A few are the stereotypic gun-toting racists, but a lot of others are low-to-middle-class folks who have figured a few things out:
Honest, hard-working Americans are seeing their opportunities dry up.
The country is dominated by a small self-serving elite.
Our democracy is threatened.
The public is told a lot of lies.
People need to stand up and make their voices heard.
If we stand together, we’re not as helpless as we seem.
I could go on, but you get the idea. They’re on to something. The country needs people like this carrying the ball, if only they weren’t running the wrong way.
How they should turn around is pretty easy to describe. Tea Partiers think:
The threat to our way of life comes from government, and the solution is to shrink government while freeing corporations from government control.
Just flip government and corporations in that sentence:
The threat to our way of life comes from corporations, and the solution is to shrink corporations while freeing government from corporate control.
Perfect. Now you can explain things like too-big-to-fail banks gambling trillions on the unregulated credit-default-swap market, sinking the economy, and then getting the taxpayers to cover their losses.
And more: Did the USDA put salmonella in our meat? No, meat-packing corporations did. And they’ve got enough lawyer-and-lobbyist power to keep the USDA regulators at bay. Did the EPA dump raw oil into the Gulf of Mexico? No, BP did. They cut corners on safety and no regulator was in a position to stop them. Did the government kill the 29 miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine? No, Massey Energy did, and had enough clout to keep the mine going even after inspectors had found more than 500 safety violations.
On the other hand, the government/corporate flip fixes just about all the Tea Party rhetoric. For example, John Boehner was trying to pander to the Tea Party when he said:
The bigger the government the smaller the people.
But what if he had said “The bigger the corporations, the smaller the people”? That would have been really insightful, and (among other things) would have explained why the working class needs more unions, not less.
Go to one of those Tea Party web sites full of their favorite anti-government quotes. Do the flip to make them anti-corporate, and you’ve got rhetoric that’s dead-on:
When one gets in bed with corporations, one must expect the diseases they spread. — Ron Paul
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and corporations to gain ground. — Thomas Jefferson
The corporate solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. — Milton Friedman
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where a corporation is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission. — Ayn Rand
Ronald Reagan becomes the font of wisdom Tea Partiers believe he is:
In this present crisis, corporations are not the solution to our problem; corporations are the problem.
A corporation is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the corporations the more corrupt they will become.
Man is not free unless corporations are limited.
“We the people” tell the corporations what to do, they don’t tell us.
People know something has gone terribly wrong with our corporations and they have gotten so far off track.
Grover Norquist is still a radical, but now he’s attacking the right problem:
We want to reduce the size of corporations in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on corporations so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.
Here’s another rhetoric-flipping trick: Replace Washington with Wall Street. Then Rand Paul has it right:
Wall Street is horribly broken. I think we stand on a precipice. We are encountering a day of reckoning and this movement, this Tea Party movement, is a message to Wall Street that we’re unhappy and that we want things done differently.
Go Rand! Go Tea Party!
Now let’s translate the Founders:
A corporation, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. — Thomas Paine
It is error alone which needs the support of the corporate media. Truth can stand by itself. — Thomas Jefferson
If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in our corporations, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. — Samuel Adams
Like fire, the corporation is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. — George Washington
When you understand who today’s powerful elite really is, many of the Tea Party’s favorite Founder-quotes don’t need any translation:
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite. — Thomas Jefferson
All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree. — James Madison
There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. — James Madison
So true, James. Little by little we are losing our privacy, our access to information, and even our political system to the corporations.
And in spite of the economic collapse Wall Street’s machinations have brought upon us, how do we explain the market-worship we see all over the corporate media? The 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat had that one nailed:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
But that’s the real problem with the Tea Party rank-and-file: Like the guns of Singapore, they’re facing the sea when the attack comes over land. They know they’re under somebody’s thumb, but they’re confused about whose thumb it is. So when they strike back, they swing at the wrong guys.
If any Tea Partiers have read this far, I’m sure they think I’m the one who has it backwards. But I ask you, as you run free and clear towards the goal line: Whose goal line is that? Look up in the stands and see who’s cheering for you: The billionaires. The CEOs. The traders on the floor of the big exchanges. The investment bankers.
Isn’t that just a little strange? Have they all suddenly started rooting for everyday middle-class Americans?
But while it was easy to turn on your TV and see video of burning and looting, getting a half-way decent explanation of what it was all about was quite a bit harder.
Everyone agreed that the riots weren’t “political” like the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tunis or Cairo. No leaders presented lists of demands. Mobs didn’t shout slogans, political or otherwise.
Those who were taking part in the looting and fighting, or throwing fireworks at the police, were of many shades, ages and nationalities, but they all had something in common: they felt they had little to lose.
Eliminating politics and race left even less likely simple explanations: Prime Minister Cameron seemed to suggest that lots of people spontaneously turned criminal for no reason. Others blamed bad parenting, though it’s mysterious why that would suddenly become a problem last week rather than the week before. Maybe it was “mob mentality” or “mindless violence” — terms that sound more substantive than “I’ve got no clue”, but may not be. And there were the usual attempts to blame technology, which made no more sense than giving technology the credit in Cairo.
To me, the most disturbing aspects the coverage were the journalists who didn’t want an explanation. In this BBC interview, West Indian writer (and long-time Londoner) Darcus Howe tries to raise underlying issues:
What I was certain about, listening to my grandson and my son, is that something very, very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye and a careful hearing, they have been telling us — and we would not listen — about what has been happening in this country to them.
The interviewer then cuts him often, asking if he condones the violence. After a disgusted “Of course not”, Howe tries to talk about police behavior, and how often young blacks are stopped and searched for no reason. The interviewer interrupts to accuse Howe of having been a rioter himself in the past, which he indignantly denies. (“Show some respect for an old West Indian Negro,” he pleads.)
And then time is up. Riots: Are you for them or against them?
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
As in this week’s lead article, I find myself thinking that people are looking in the wrong direction. Asking why rioters take what they want, hurt people they don’t like, or burn down establishments they resent is like asking Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. (His iconic answer: “Because that’s where the money is.”)
It’s perfectly obvious why people would loot and burn. If you want to get simple, start with the question: Why don’t the rest of us riot every day?
The best answer, I think, is: Because we participate in systems that we believe work better for us and for our loved ones in the long run. We participate in the property system because we also want to own things. We participate in the money economy because we also want to have jobs and buy things. We participate in a system of mutual respect because we also want want to claim respect.
Now imagine that you own essentially nothing, have no job prospects, and are treated with disrespect on a regular basis. What’s the system to you other than a policeman who is too busy to bother with you right now?
Riots may not be organized political actions that make clear demands. But nonetheless they have political causes. If we are leaving people out, leaving them without hope and without any clear way to channel their effort into bettering their lives, then we are building the rioters of the future. When the disorder begins, they will have no reason to restrain themselves.
[8/15/2011] Democrats fell just short of taking the Wisconsin state senate in the recall elections last Tuesday, picking up two Republican seats when they needed three (and once again falling short in a cliff-hanger due to late-breaking votes from Waukesha County). The two last recall elections (both with incumbent Democrats) happen tomorrow.
Republicans tried to spin this as victory, and the national media largely went along. But the only senators eligible for recall were those elected in 2008, a Democratic year. And if Democrats gain two seats over the 2008 results (assuming they hold their two seats tomorrow), it’s hard to see that as defeat.
So what happens next? The recall of Governor Walker, who is so unpopular he did not campaign in the senate recall elections, will likely still happen when he becomes recall-eligible in January. But the next big test of the ALEC agenda is in Ohio.
Ohio’s SB 5 is the same public-union-busting effort that started the trouble in Wisconsin. Opponents collected a huge number of signatures to get an overturn-SB-5 referendum on the ballot for November. This election will draw the same avalanche of anonymous corporate cash that went into Wisconsin, but so far the polls look good.
Ark Encounter is the latest project of Answers in Genesis, the non-profit that already owns the Creation Museum 45 minutes down the road. Unlike the CM, though, Ark is a for-profit venture owned by its investors. (AiG will just manage it.) The two attractions share AiG’s young-earth Creationist view, as you can tell from the dinosaur-head sticking out of the Ark.
This is going to be a tricky separation-of-church-and-state case. On the one hand, as Daily Kos’ Kaili Joy Gray puts it:
you can’t use millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to teach people about Jesus. Pretty sure that building a creationist theme park on the taxpayer dime is actually the textbook definition of what you can’t do.
But a new Six Flags could probably wrangle some tax concessions too, so I think Ark-park opponents will need to argue that it’s getting a better-than-secular deal because state officials want to promote Christianity. As I said: tricky.
Still, try to imagine the uproar if tax breaks helped build a Mahabharata theme park intended to draw millions of Hindu tourists to Kentucky.
A North Carolina county board is going to appeal to the Supreme Court after an appellate court stopped it from opening its meetings with prayers to Jesus. The board’s vice chair says church-and-state isn’t being violated because the board’s “open door” policy would allow members of non-Christian faiths to lead prayers if they wanted.
Like my fantasy of a tax-subsidized Hindu theme park, though, it’s hard to imagine the response a meeting-opening Islamic prayer would draw.
Now the focus shifts to Rick Perry, who announced his candidacy Saturday. Perry is making a “Texas miracle” case: Under his leadership Texas is creating jobs, and the same policies could work nationally.
As Paul Krugman and an NYT panel point out, Texas’ example wouldn’t scale up even if we wanted it to: Texas has benefitted from a high oil price and from snow-birding retirees who bring in money they earned in other states. Also, Texas is winning a race-to-the-bottom with other states by offering businesses cheap labor unprotected by state government. So Texas leads not just in new jobs, but in minimum wage jobs and in the percentage of people without health insurance.
In short: Texas isn’t creating jobs, it’s taking bad jobs from other states and making them worse. That’s not a route to national prosperity.
Grist boils the evidence that global warming is man-made down to one graphic. “It’s getting hotter” isn’t the whole case for man-made global warming. How and where it’s getting hotter eliminates alternative explanations like increased solar radiation.
Just because a corporation talks green doesn’t mean it isn’t funding climate-change denial through organizations like ALEC.
Mitt Romney’s claim that “Corporations are people, my friend” may have been true legally and even in the sense he intended (that a corporate tax ultimately means some person — most likely some very rich person — has less money). But he’s given the DNC fodder for an effective ad.
Now that the United States has lost its AAA bond rating, you know who still has one? Socialist countries, mostly: Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, and a few others — all of whom have universal health care.
The discussion shows that are supposed to add to public understanding may actually reduce it, by hammering home the message that “issues” don’t matter except as items for politicians to squabble about. … The press, which in the long run cannot survive if people lose interest in politics, is acting as if its purpose was to guarantee that people are repelled by public life.
James Fallows, Breaking the News (1995)
In this week’s sift:
Voter Suppression 101. Imagine you are a politician who serves only the top 1%. What’s your plan for getting enough votes to win?
Tea By Any Other Name. After the disastrous end of the Bush administration, conservatives used their money and media power to ditch the wounded Republican label and rebrand themselves as the new (and therefore blameless) Tea Party. Now that the Tea Party’s public image is tanking, how long before they try the same trick again?
A Week of Down. Bad as it looked, the debt-ceiling deal was supposed to keep the stock market from crashing and the ratings agencies from downgrading our bonds. Funny how that worked out.
The Solar Oil Field and Other Short Notes. Oman uses solar to bring up more oil. Protesting Obama’s 50th birthday. Sponge Bob, propagandist. The E-Trade baby loses everything. Matt Damon sticks up for teachers. The EPA saves money. And a manufactured snub of Easter.
This week’s challenge. Six Republican state senators face recall elections in Wisconsin tomorrow. If three of them lose, the state Senate flips to the Democrats. This would send a powerful message to state governments around the country about union-busting and favoring corporations over people. It’s too late for your money to do much good, but they need people to make get-out-the-vote phone calls and you can do it from home.
A special note to RSS subscribers. If you read the Sift via Google Reader or some other RSS reader, you’ve probably noticed all the out-of-date posts you’re getting. Here’s what’s happening: When I moved the Sift to weeklysift.com a few weeks ago, the archived posts didn’t transfer perfectly. So I’ve been fixing them little by little. Unfortunately, those fixes have been showing up in the RSS feed as if they were “updates”. I’m not sure what to do about this other than just get the fixes done as fast as possible. Any Weekly Sift post that shows up on anything other than a Monday is the result of this glitch. My apologies.
Suppose you’re a politician who represents the interests of the rich and powerful. In any democracy, you have one basic problem: The top 1% is only 1%. How are you going to get enough votes to win?
There are a lot of tried-and-true strategies for convincing at least some of the bottom 99% to vote for you: You can divide the them along fault lines like race or religion. Single-issue groups (guns, abortion) can help you if their issues are harmless to your real constituents. You can run against some minority — gays, immigrants, unions, poor people, teachers, the unemployed — and make your opponent look like the special-interest candidate. You can smear your opponent directly so that you don’t have to say much at all — you’re “the other guy”, the one who isn’t a Marxist child-molesting terrorist.
Fortunately, you’re going to have a lot of money to help you pursue those strategies — even more now that corporations can contribute anonymously to front groups like the Chamber of Commerce or Americans for Prosperity. You’ll have the best consultants money can buy, and all the ad time you want.
Plus, you get to build on all the PR the rich do anyway: They aren’t vampires who suck the blood out of the people who make and do things, they’re “job creators“. They’re the winners who bobbed up to the top of the meritocracy on sheer talent and virtue. They work long hours (in comfortably air-conditioned offices with great views) for their millions of dollars a week. (Or, in some cases, more than $10 million a day, all year long.)
But even so, it’s a long way from 1% to 50%-plus-one. A frustratingly large percentage of the electorate wants to be represented by people who look out for their interests rather than the interests of the people who suck their blood.
What can you do?
The final piece of your puzzle is just math. Paul Weyrich nailed it back in 1979:
I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
So you don’t need a majority of the electorate at all. You just need to make sure that a lot of the people who don’t support you don’t vote.
But how?
The first thing you need to realize is: The poorer and less powerful people are, the harder it is for them to jump hurdles. Any hurdles.
Picture a single mother with a minimum-wage job. If registering means taking time off work, it’s not going to happen — she needs the hours, and minimum-wage employers don’t know the meaning of “personal time”. Going across town means taking the bus; it won’t be an extra half-hour at lunch, it’ll be all afternoon. If it means knowing exactly where to go and who to see and what form to fill out — she’s not going to look that stuff up with her home computer.
You know what really slows the poor down? They’re used to being pushed aside. If you tell college-educated professionals that they can’t vote, they’ll say: “That can’t be right.” They’ll talk to a supervisor, they’ll read the fine print, they’ll yell and start writing down names if they have to. Because deep down they believe that the system is supposed to work for them.
The poor don’t think that way — especially if they’re poor and black, or poor and disabled, or poor and non-English-speaking. They’re used to clerks who just want to get rid of them and supervisors who threaten to call the cops. It happens all the time.
New voters — the young, people who just moved to town, new citizens, folks who just got interested in politics — are the same way. Tell them they’re in the wrong office. Tell them the deadline was yesterday. Lots of them will believe you.
See where I’m going with this? Anything that makes voting harder shifts the electorate in your favor. Any confusion you can add … occasionally it will affect one of your voters, but mostly not. You win the numbers game.
Make it harder to vote. Shut down any early voting, restrict the hours on election day, and make sure the lines are long, especially in poor neighborhoods. Look at Ohio. If enough people give up and go home, you win.
Voter ID laws are a must. They don’t prevent any actual fraud, but people without drivers’ licenses — poor people, the disabled, folks in nursing homes — are exactly who you don’t want voting. The Supreme Court makes you offer them some other way to get an ID, but if you make it enough of a hassle, most of them won’t.
Hassle voters. It’s easy to come up with excuses to challenge voters at the polls. Vote caging is a good one: You send postcards to the addresses on the voting rolls, and if they come back undelivered you remove the names from the rolls or challenge them at the polls. A lot of names get removed by mistake, but that’s all to the good. (If you do it right, college students can’t vote either at home or at school. Score!)
Another great trick from Ohio: If voters show up in the wrong polling place (say because you moved the boundaries), poll workers don’t have to help them! Figuring out where to go is their problem.
Dirty tricks. The Koch brothers’ front Americans for Prosperity, just pulled such a good one in Wisconsin that Stephen Colbert covered it. They sent out an official-looking mailing about absentee ballots that gave the wrong deadline and the wrong address. Anybody who believes it won’t get their vote counted. And when caught, AFP blamed a “printing error”.
Another great trick is to spread rumors: If there’s a warrant out on you, the police will be waiting at the polls. If your home is foreclosed, you can’t vote. You can vote over the phone. The possibilities are endless.
So don’t despair. Democracy isn’t about representing the people, it’s about having more votes than the other guy. That’s not as hard as you think.
A new poll says that the Tea Party’s public image has dimmed now that the people they elected have actually been in office and done something.
This is a good time to back up, look at the big picture, and see what you can do if you have corporate money and the conservative media empire — Fox, Limbaugh, the Washington Times, et al — behind you.
At the end of the Bush administration, the Republican brand was dead, and deservedly so. Bush and a Republican Congress had implemented the full conservative agenda: tax cuts for the rich, de-regulation for corporations, and two new wars to keep the Neocons happy. It was an across-the-board disaster. The wars dragged on with no clear goal, the tax cuts never had any effect beyond making the rich richer and the deficit bigger, and a de-regulated Wall Street managed to make trillions of dollars disappear by financial sleight-of-hand.
But rebranding means never having to say you’re sorry, so instead of apologizing for the carnage, conservatives said, “We’re not those old Republicans, we’re the new Tea Party.”
Instead of that Washington-centered lobbyist-driven Republican Party, the Tea Party was a fresh and energetic movement of real downhome Americans who wanted to cut rich people’s taxes, de-regulate corporations, and keep fighting wars. (Oh, and by the way, from Day 1 they were organized the same Republican lobbyists and funded by the same Republican billionaires.)
So if the Tea Party is getting a bad image now too, why not do it again? Any day now you should expect to see a hot new Constitution Party or Freedom Party or something. It will have vast anonymous funding and Fox will anoint it the new “voice of real America”. If it gets power, what will it do? Cut rich people’s taxes, fight wars, and de-regulate corporations. But it will be “new”, and none of the old failures will stick to it.
For the most part the media has covered this constellation of issues the way they cover anything: What-happened and what-it-means-for-citizens has gotten short shrift, in favor of assessing blame (always awarding it equally to both sides) and trying to predict how this tactical skirmish will affect future elections.
But we’re talking about trillions of dollars here, so it must have some effect on real people. Let’s start there.
What got cut first. “Only” $917 billion of spending cuts have been passed so far, including only $21-25 billion in the 2012 budget. (I’m seeing different numbers in different places; not sure why.) So worries about immediate contraction in the economy (at least from this deal) are overblown. The rest of the $900 billion is cut over the next decade.
Apparently, $350 billion comes from “security” — defense, homeland security, etc — and $567 billion (although this article in The Hill claims $756 billion) from domestic discretionary spending (i.e., not entitlements like Social Security and Medicare). That’s as specific as things have gotten so far. The Hill:
The law does not itemize the cuts, instead leaving those decisions to appropriators. But the size of reductions makes it inevitable they will impact a long list of discretionary programs, including those related to environmental protection, food safety, education and infrastructure.
<sarcasm> Food safety. Just the other day I was noticing that I hadn’t gotten food poisoning lately and thought, “That’s probably something we could cut back on.” <end sarcasm> The long-term unemployed are probably going to suffer too.
The next round of cuts. Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell each get to name three people to a “Super Committee” to recommend another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by November. Their recommendations will get an up-or-down vote in both houses of Congress, with no amendments.
The problem with agreements like this is that no Congress can force a future Congress to do anything. So the agreement contains automatic cuts that will happen if the $1.5 trillion deficit reduction doesn’t pass. The automatic cuts are supposed to be ugly to both sides, so that they’ll be motivated to negotiate a deal to avoid them.
Republicans are so set against any tax increases on the wealthy that they wouldn’t agree to them even in this automatic deficit-reduction package that isn’t supposed to happen. Their motivation is supposed to come from defense spending cuts.
The painful-automatic-reduction feature of the agreement sets up another hostage crisis in November, with the idea that both sides will have hostages, so no one will get shot. Somehow I don’t find this comforting. Jonathan Chait has compared such agreements to ransoming your child from kidnappers for “$100,000 and your other child”.
The precedent we’ve set. Keep in mind that the debt ceiling has never been used this way before. Most other countries don’t even have a debt ceiling, because it’s redundant: If Congress passes a budget with a deficit, it shouldn’t have to separately authorize borrowing to cover it. (That’s like going to a restaurant with nothing but your Visa card, eating, and then debating whether you’re going to take on this additional debt by signing the receipt.)
In the past, debt-ceiling increases have been opportunities for the out-of-power party to posture about the irresponsibility of the in-power party. But never has there been a negotiation in which the president made concessions to get the ceiling raised. That’s because the debt ceiling is a doomsday device. Nobody seriously believed that the country would be better off if our government couldn’t meet its commitments. So there was nothing to negotiate about.
I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.
McConnell says this “set a template for the future. … we’ll be doing it all over.”
I keep flashing back to the novel The First Man in Rome. As the story begins, the Roman Republic has few rules but a lot of traditions. In a gradual back-and-forth escalation of advantage-seeking, Marius (the main character) and his enemies violate the traditions — sometimes with justification, sometimes not. By the end, Marius is mounting his enemies’ heads on spikes in the Forum.
So yeah, there is nothing illegal about holding the American economy hostage until you get what you want. It’s just a violation of tradition, something we’ve never done before. But if you go far enough down that road, you wind up with heads on spikes.
Here’s the thing to understand: What bothers S&P isn’t the sheer size of the federal debt. (Again, Japan is much worse fiscal shape, and they’re far from bankrupt.) It’s the dysfunctionality of our political system. If you look at the trends and do the math, our current level of taxation doesn’t cover the expenses of a world empire with an aging population and an inefficient health care system. None of that is unsolvable, but S&P says:
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.
No one has a plan to disengage our military commitments, the Republicans have drawn a line in the sand against any increase in revenues, and our society is probably not willing to let large numbers of old people die in the streets. So how does that situation resolve? Inflation? Or maybe one of the future fiscal hostage crises goes bad and we actually default.
Given what we’ve just seen, it’s hard to make the case that loaning money to the U.S. government is risk-free.
The Weekly Sift 