One of the worrisome results of the 2010 mid-term elections is the increasingly radical fringe that is now installed in the House (and in state houses and in some Senate seats). Witness the possible head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Shimkus of Illinois (Republican), who has asserted that it's a waste of time and effort to worry about global warming, because he happens to believe that God has promised not to flood Earth and so it just won't happen. See Stromberg, In the GOP's House, God Won't Allow Global Warming?, Washington Post, PostPartisan (Nov. 12 2010). (This is like the wishful thinking that the biggest oil spill in history hasn't really done any harm to the oceans--ignoring, of course, our inability to measure the impact in most cases, our ignorance of the long-term effect of the dispersant chemicals used, and our willful blindness to existing problems on beachers, in marshes and in the warmer waters near the mainland.) Instead, Shimkus and his ilk will likely try to use the House's investigative powers to put a stop to sound regulatory advances at the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments.
Meanwhile, the irreality train of Sarah Palin's influence on right-wing politics rolls on forward, with her infomercial running on "The Learning Channel" (a clear misnomer in this case, unless learning how insipid Palin and her family can be counts as "learning") as a backdrop for her continued influence in the 2011-12 Congress and the 2012 presidential election. This is a person who takes pride in meaningless homilies, quit the only challenging job she has ever held when it either got too stressful (various ethics challenges) or not remunerative enough (various fashion challenges), has a hit-or-miss education that she hasn't bothered to improve with self-educational efforts (like reading 2-3 of our major national papers or reading various nonfictions works, etc.), and is content using the "sling dirt whether true or not, support it with lots of corporate money, and hope some of it sticks" techniques developed in the Reagan campaign and perfected by Bush's "turd blossom" karl Rove. Americans will continue to hear that "real Americans" care about the things Palin cares about and that the cures for what ails us are more of the same policies that made us sick in the first place, stated as simplistic slogans that evoke dreams of personal liberty and frontier rigor, and nightmares of government corruption and Pentagon $7000 toilets. As a fellow blogger Maxine Udall has noted:
Whether we like it or not, our technical solutions are competing in a morality play scripted by interest groups and mama grizzlies who in 25 words or less conflate small government and something they imagine to be "free markets" with individual liberty, a key justice principle. Most sound techocratic solutions are difficult to convey, must less motivate, in 25 words or less (and the motivation is often moral as well as technical: more for most, more for less, prices as reliable signals of marginal social cost, reducing unemployment, increasing inflation to discourage saving and stimulate spending ... you get the idea). But the larger problem, I think, is that allegedly "amoral" economists view the moral sequelae of sound economic policy, such as banksters' gains (at taxpayer expense), as "side issues" that are irrelevant to restoring the economy, while some of "we the people" view it as one of the most important issues. We end up with....the Tea Party (or, at least, with a large portion of the population who are extremely resentful and angry at being unemployed and underwater while the economy romps upward at least for those whom we bailed out). Technocratic Solutions and Moral Dilemmas (the preceding, by the way, is just a very small excerpt of an interesting piece on the problem with what I have called "mathaholic" economics and the failures of the Chicago School's approach to setting policy based on a theory so infused with unrealistic assumptions that the policy prescriptions amount to suggesting that Alice drink a counter-potion to undo her shrinking in size and fall through the rabbit hole).
And then there are the right-wingers arguing for a full austerity budget in the US, which supports, primarily, the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits while letting military costs continue to rise unabated and for reducing corporate taxes so that Big Business (read--U.S. multinationals) can "compete" more successfully globally without the "burden" of US taxes. See my earlier post on the Peterson-Pew "deficit crisis" mentality and the Bowles-Simpson commission. And then look at Robert Samuelson, How to Avoid Japan's Economic Mistakes, Washington Post (Nov. 15, 2010). Samuelson asserts that the time for stimulus is long past and the only thing to do is to get the private sector going. He claims to base this urgent assertion on Japan's experience, when it continued to borrow to fund public spending, but overall growth has been anemic. He asserts Japan's problem is two fold: 1) a "dual economy" where robust exports had to make up for anemic domestic consumption, an economic model which folded with the yen's appreciation in the 1980s and 2) an aging, declining population with low wages and insecure jobs.
His prescription of course, is the same old right-wing prescription--less regulation, more support for big business to remove "uncertainties" (which has become a euphemism for lowering taxes/helping US MNEs to "compete").
So Japan's economy is trapped: A high yen penalizes exports; low births and sclerotic firms hurt domestic growth. The lesson for us is that massive budget deficits and cheap credit are at best necessary stopgaps. They're narcotics whose effects soon fade. They can't correct underlying economic deficiencies. It's time to move on from the debate over "stimulus."
Economic success ultimately depends on private firms. The American economy is more resilient and flexible than Japan's. But that's a low standard. Neither the White House nor Congress seems to understand that growing regulatory burdens and policy uncertainties undermine business confidence and the willingness to expand. Unless that changes, our mediocre recovery may mimic Japan's.
Samuelson conveniently skips over three important things--two a big difference between the US and Japan, and the other a similarity. First, Japan had a historically high savings rate and, though that has gone down with Japan's economic decline, it meant that Japan didn't have the kind of domestic spending pattern that could sustain a low-export economy for any length of time. So making interest rates low didn't help, and government spending couldn't be sufficient to overcome. Second, the US has already embarked on various "quantitative easing" solutions that should have a positive impact--the loosening of the money supply will provide more money floating through the economy, allowing private and public job creation to take place more easily.
Third, both countries share the stagnation of middle class wages--and what is worse in the US is that we have at the same time huge increases in inequalities as the "investor/manager class" continues to reap all the rewards of the economic system and be favored by the tax system so that it reaps most of the subsidies provided that way as well (the huge part of the benefit of the extra large housing mortgage interest deduction is enjoyed by the wealthiest Americans, who itemize and who have sufficiently large and numerous homes to easily use the full deductible interest limitation of $1.1 million combined acquisition and home equity loans; the benefit for various manager-level retirement plans is enjoyed primarily by the rich; etc.). Until that problem is resolved, it will be unlikely that the US will recover the kind of broad-based growth that provides a sustainable economic environment and quality of life for all.
The reason all of this is worrisome, of course, is that the two-party system (with the avid assistance of the Tea Partiers) is heading towards unanimity on the biggest problem facing us at this time, and their answer is the wrong one, one that fails to understand the long-term damage to the economy of rampant increases in inequality along with stagnation or worse for the middle class.
The problem is the corporatist agenda--"Big Business" using its money and power to write the laws to suit it, and the owners and managers of Big Business using their money and power to ensure that all of the rewards of the economic process go to the top, while programs intended to buffer the ill winds that blow for the middle class and low income Americans are decimated. (An agenda made all the more easy because of the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court's recent decisions, including Citizens United.) Money has become the be all and end all of politics, and Big Businesses--especially the big financial institutions-- generally have the money to buy the politicians and the laws that they like. Courts and legislatures favor business over individuals.
Obama is not apart from this--he has never been a real progressive, and his policies are in the same tepid, center-right position that Clinton occupied or even slightly to the right. As a commenter on a Washington Post article on Palin's TV infomercial noted,
[Obama largely] insists on continuing Bush's policies, or insufficiently curbing them. It is policies that serve the rich that are destroying us; these are policies that are traditionally identified with the Republicans, but in recent decades, the Democrats have learned to bow and scrape for big money from the lobbyists and either party is as abjectly servile to the wealthy as the other.
*****
[T]hose managing [Palin] as a media creation are using her to push the perceived center further to the right than it already is, which will allow real candidates for the Republican nomination to recycle the radical orthodoxies of the far right and still seem "moderate." Candidates for the Democratic nomination will be required to similarly hew further right, so as not to seem like the "socialists" or "communists" they have already been labeled by the rightwing lunatic fringe.
Palin makes big bucks and doesn't have to actually learn or do anything, while becoming the philosophical lodestar for the right, and our entire political system is transformed into a battle not between left and right but between right and extreme right. Robert 1014
There is no reason to expect that tax cuts for the wealthiest 20% of the country will do anything to support job creation for the rest of us or to help stem the tide of the recession. But the GOP will push for tax cuts for their primary constituents no matter what the cost. There is no reason to think that changing our tax system to assist US multinationals in grabbing a larger market share in Asia or Africa in the name of "competitiveness" will do anything to help ordinary Americans in the middle class here at home. But both parties will continue the disastrous mix of tax cuts for corporations and policies that pull back on anti-trust and make unionization more difficult in the name of helping companies compete. Obama and the mostly spineless Dems who don't ever stand up for their purported policy positions--whether in contesting the appointment to the Supreme Court of radical rightwingers like Alito and Roberts or in battling with the GOP for a public option in health care reform or in fighting to preserve a highly progressive income and estate tax--will likely just roll over and play dead while the wingnuts on the right move our country more and more into the radical right of the Bircher Society, Clausen, and Milt Friedman's radical "free market" agenda that socializes losses and privatizes gains.
Recent Comments