Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Fantasies and Fictions at G.O.P. Debate

Paul Krugman
SEPT. 18, 2015

I’ve been going over what was said at Wednesday’s Republican debate, and I’m terrified. You should be, too. After all, given the vagaries of elections, there’s a pretty good chance that one of these people will end up in the White House.

Why is that scary? I would argue that all of the G.O.P. candidates are calling for policies that would be deeply destructive at home, abroad, or both. But even if you like the broad thrust of modern Republican policies, it should worry you that the men and woman on that stage are clearly living in a world of fantasies and fictions. And some seem willing to advance their ambitions with outright lies.

Let’s start at the shallow end, with the fantasy economics of the establishment candidates.

You’re probably tired of hearing this, but modern G.O.P. economic discourse is completely dominated by an economic doctrine — the sovereign importance of low taxes on the rich — that has failed completely and utterly in practice over the past generation.

Think about it. Bill Clinton’s tax hike was followed by a huge economic boom, the George W. Bush tax cuts by a weak recovery that ended in financial collapse. The tax increase of 2013 and the coming of Obamacare in 2014 were associated with the best job growth since the 1990s. Jerry Brown’s tax-raising, environmentally conscious California is growing fast; Sam Brownback’s tax- and spending-slashing Kansas isn’t.

Yet the hold of this failed dogma on Republican politics is stronger than ever, with no skeptics allowed. On Wednesday Jeb Bush claimed, once again, that his voodoo economics would double America’s growth rate, while Marco Rubio insisted that a tax on carbon emissions would “destroy the economy.”

The only candidate talking sense about economics was, yes, Donald Trump, who declared that “we’ve had a graduated tax system for many years, so it’s not a socialistic thing.”

If the discussion of economics was alarming, the discussion of foreign policy was practically demented. Almost all the candidates seem to believe that American military strength can shock-and-awe other countries into doing what we want without any need for negotiations, and that we shouldn’t even talk with foreign leaders we don’t like. No dinners for Xi Jinping! And, of course, no deal with Iran, because resorting to force in Iraq went so well.

Indeed, the only candidate who seemed remotely sensible on national security issues was Rand Paul, which is almost as disturbing as the spectacle of Mr. Trump being the only voice of economic reason.

The real revelation on Wednesday, however, was the way some of the candidates went beyond expounding bad analysis and peddling bad history to making outright false assertions, and probably doing so knowingly, which turns those false assertions into what are technically known as “lies.”

For example, Chris Christie asserted, as he did in the first G.O.P. debate, that he was named U.S. attorney the day before 9/11. It’s still not true: His selection for the position wasn’t even announced until December.

Mr. Christie’s mendacity pales, however, in comparison to that of Carly Fiorina, who was widely hailed as the “winner” of the debate.

Some of Mrs. Fiorina’s fibs involved repeating thoroughly debunked claims about her business record. No, she didn’t preside over huge revenue growth. She made Hewlett-Packard bigger by acquiring other companies, mainly Compaq, and that acquisition was a financial disaster. Oh, and if her life is a story of going from “secretary to C.E.O.,” mine is one of going from mailman to columnist and economist. Sorry, working menial jobs while you’re in school doesn’t make your life a Horatio Alger story.

But the truly awesome moment came when she asserted that the videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood show “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” No, they don’t. Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses.

So is Mrs. Fiorina so deep inside the bubble that she can’t tell the difference between facts and agitprop? Or is she deliberately spreading a lie? And most important, does it matter?

I began writing for The Times during the 2000 election campaign, and what I remember above all from that campaign is the way the conventions of “evenhanded” reporting allowed then-candidate George W. Bush to make clearly false assertions — about his tax cuts, about Social Security — without paying any price. As I wrote at the time, [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/01/opinion/reckonings-bait-and-switch.html ] if Mr. Bush said the earth was flat, we’d see headlines along the lines of “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.”

Now we have presidential candidates who make Mr. Bush look like Abe Lincoln. But who will tell the people?

Embedded links
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/opinion/paul-krugman-fantasies-and-fictions-at-gop-debate.html?_r=0


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Reckonings; Bait and Switch

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 1, 2000

The big lesson of this year's campaign -- a lesson that we can be sure politicians will take to heart -- is that a candidate can get away with saying things that are demonstrably untrue, as long as the untruths involve big numbers.

George W. Bush has repeatedly declared, among other things, that he intends to spend about a trillion dollars on new programs; his budget actually earmarks less than half that much. But his repetition of this claim has not led the public to question his credibility.

Mr. Bush has also promised to use a trillion dollars of Social Security money for two conflicting purposes: putting it into private accounts for young workers, while still using it to pay benefits to older workers. And his favorite argument for privatization involves similar double dipping. When he compares the rate of return people can get on their money with the implied rate of return on Social Security contributions, he seems to have misunderstood why Social Security offers lower returns: it has to set young workers' contributions aside, or it will run out of money before today's middle-aged workers have retired.

But it's not a misunderstanding. Since warnings about his accounting have come from many places, including the American Academy of Actuaries, Mr. Bush's continuing use of this comparison is not a mistake -- it's a ploy. Still, this exercise in double counting has caused remarkably few problems for a campaign that promises to bring ''honor and integrity'' back to the White House.

How has he gotten away with it? One answer is that voters can't relate to big numbers. But it's also true that the media haven't helped them make sense of these numbers.

Partly this is a matter of marketing -- insider gossip makes better TV than budget arithmetic. But there has also been a political aspect: the mainstream media are fanatically determined to seem evenhanded. One of the great jokes of American politics is the insistence by conservatives that the media have a liberal bias. The truth is that reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even the most outrageous misstatements, presumably for fear that they might be accused of partisanship. If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ''Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.'' After all, the earth isn't perfectly spherical.

What we don't know, however, is how the story ends. If Mr. Bush wins, he will have to produce an actual budget, not to mention an actual Social Security plan. At that point rhetorical flourishes won't be enough. So what would he really do?

Many analysts seem to hope -- hope! -- that Mr. Bush is actually playing bait-and-switch. That is, they hope that if he wins the election he will actually unveil a program very different from anything he has suggested in the campaign. Conservatives, in particular, not so secretly believe that the real program will involve drastic cuts in social spending to make room for reductions in income and estate taxes, and large cuts in Social Security benefits to offset the diversion of taxes into private accounts.

But the needed spending cuts would make a mockery of any claim to compassionate conservatism. And we have a pretty good idea what a realistic plan for partial Social Security privatization would look like. It would involve some combination of substantially raising the retirement age, sharply reducing cost-of-living adjustments and heavily taxing those private accounts when they are cashed in. (''It's your money'' -- but under the plan proposed by one of Mr. Bush's advisers, you get to keep only 25 percent of any gains you make.)

Would Mr. Bush dare to present such a tough-minded plan, after promising a free lunch in his campaign? Think of the reaction to the original Clinton health plan, and ask whether Mr. Bush would be prepared to face a similar firestorm.

My guess is that if elected, Mr. Bush will try to govern as he has campaigned. The accounts will simply be fudged until the financial markets, alarmed by America's rapidly deteriorating finances, deliver a message that cannot be ignored.

But maybe I've underestimated Mr. Bush's willingness to cast aside his campaign promises. Sad to say, if he wins we must indeed hope that he actually was playing bait-and-switch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/01/opinion/reckonings-bait-and-switch.html