Right now it seems our only hope to prevent Obama's give aways on cuts and social security and medicare is the resistance of the teabaggers to anything Obama wants to do.
Hmmm. The truth is that House Republicans don’t actually go far enough. They should follow the logic of their more visionary members with steps like these:
BONUSES FOR BILLIONAIRES Republicans won’t extend unemployment benefits, even in the worst downturn in 70 years [ http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1920285_1920320_1920250,00.html ], because that makes people lazy about finding jobs. They’re right: We should be creating incentives for Americans to rise up the food chain by sending hefty checks to every new billionaire. This could be paid for with a tax surcharge on regular working folks. It’s the least we can do.
Likewise, the government should take sterner measures against the persistent jobless. Don’t just let their unemployment benefits expire. Take their homes!
Oh, never mind! Silly me! The banks are already doing that.
LET JOBS TRICKLE DOWN Leftist pundits say that House Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. That’s unfair! Granted, the Republican-sponsored Cut, Cap and Balance Act would eliminate 700,000 jobs in just its first year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3537 ], but those analysts are no doubt liberals. America’s richest 400 people own more wealth [ http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/ ] than the bottom 150 million Americans, and the affluent would feel renewed confidence if the Republican plan passed. We’d see a hiring bonanza. Each of those wealthy people might hire an extra pool attendant. That’s 400 jobs right there!
Cut, Cap and Balance would go even further than the Ryan budget plan in starving the beast of government. Sure, that’ll mean cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs, but so what? Who needs food safety? How do we know we really need air traffic control unless we try a day without it?
ROOT OUT SOCIALISM Republicans have been working to end Medicare as we know it but need to examine other reckless entitlements, such as our socialized education system, in which public schools fritter resources on classes like economics and foreign languages. As a former Texas governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, is said to have declared when she opposed the teaching of foreign languages: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”
For that matter, who needs socialized police and fire services? We could slash job-crushing taxes at the local level and simply let the free market take over:
“9-1-1, may I help you?” “Yes, help! My house is burning down!” “Very good, sir. I can offer you one fire engine for $5,995, or two for just $10,000.” “Help! My family’s inside. Send three fire engines! Just hurry!” “Yes, sir. Let me just run your credit card first. And if you require the fire trucks immediately, there’s a 50 percent ‘rush’ surcharge.”
CHILL OUT ABOUT THE DEBT CEILING House Republicans like Michele Bachmann are right: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, some solution will turn up. As Representative Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia, observes [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/us/politics/13repubs.html ]: “In the end, the sun is going to come up tomorrow.”
We got through the Great Depression, didn’t we? It looked pretty hopeless in 1929, but in just a dozen years World War II bailed us out with an economic stimulus. Something like that’ll come along for us, too. Ya gotta have faith.
CONSIDER ASSET SALES While Democrats are harrumphing about “default,” Republicans have sagely noted that there are alternatives in front of our noses. For example, why raise taxes on hard-pressed managers of hedge funds when the government can sell assets?
Fort Knox alone has 4,600 tons of gold, which I figure is worth around $235 billion. That’s enough to pay our military budget for four months! And selling Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon would buy us time as well.
RENT OUT CONGRESS If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we could also auction members of Congress for day jobs: Are you a financier who wants someone to flip burgers (steaks?) at your child’s birthday party? Why, here’s Eric Cantor! Many members of Congress already work on behalf of tycoons, and this way the revenue would flow to the Treasury.
Finally, if we risk default, let’s rent out the Capitol for weddings to raise money for the public good. Wouldn’t it be nice to see something positive emerge from the House?
These are interesting times — and I mean that in the worst way. Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets.
We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse.
In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.
Let’s talk for a moment about why our economies are (still) so depressed.
The great housing bubble of the last decade, which was both an American and a European phenomenon, was accompanied by a huge rise in household debt. When the bubble burst, home construction plunged, and so did consumer spending as debt-burdened families cut back.
Everything might still have been O.K. if other major economic players had stepped up their spending, filling the gap left by the housing plunge and the consumer pullback. But nobody did. In particular, cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of weak consumer demand.
Nor did governments do much to help. Some governments — those of weaker nations in Europe, and state and local governments here — were actually forced to slash spending in the face of falling revenues. And the modest efforts of stronger governments — including, yes, the Obama stimulus plan — were, at best, barely enough to offset this forced austerity.
So we have depressed economies. What are policy makers proposing to do about it? Less than nothing.
The disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only 7 percent named the deficit. Nor is it a response to market pressure. Interest rates on U.S. debt remain near historic lows.
Yet the conversations in Washington and Brussels are all about spending cuts (and maybe tax increases, I mean revisions). That’s obviously true about the various proposals being floated to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis here. But it’s equally true in Europe.
On Thursday, the “heads of state or government of the euro area and the E.U. institutions” — that mouthful tells you, all by itself, how messy European governance has become — issued their big statement. It wasn’t reassuring.
For one thing, it’s hard to believe that the Rube Goldberg financial engineering the statement proposes can really resolve the Greek crisis, let alone the wider European crisis.
But, even if it does, then what? The statement calls for sharp deficit reductions “in all countries except those under a programme” to take place “by 2013 at the latest.” Since those countries “under a programme” are being forced into drastic fiscal austerity, this amounts to a plan to have all of Europe slash spending at the same time. And there is nothing in the European data suggesting that the private sector will be ready to take up the slack in less than two years.
For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great. But, if the negotiations succeed, we will be set to replay the great mistake of 1937: the premature turn to fiscal contraction that derailed economic recovery and ensured that the Depression would last until World War II finally provided the boost the economy needed.
Did I mention that the European Central Bank — although not, thankfully, the Federal Reserve — seems determined to make things even worse by raising interest rates?
There’s an old quotation, attributed to various people, that always comes to mind when I look at public policy: “You do not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” Now that lack of wisdom is on full display, as policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic bungle the response to economic trauma, ignoring all the lessons of history. And the Lesser Depression goes on.
Truth is elusive. But it's a good thing we have math.
Our friends at Business Insider know this, and put those two principles to work today in this excellent and highly informative little slideshow [ http://www.businessinsider.com/who-owns-us-debt-2011-7 ], made even more timely by the ongoing talks in Washington, D.C. aimed at staving off a U.S. debt default.
Here's the big idea:
Many people — politicians and pundits alike — prattle on that China and, to a lesser extent Japan, own most of America's $14.3 trillion in government debt.
But there's one little problem with that conventional wisdom: it's just not true. While the Chinese, Japanese and plenty of other foreigners own substantial amounts, it's really Americans who hold most of America's debt.
Here's a quick and fascinating breakdown by total amount held and percentage of total U.S. debt, according to Business Insider:
Matt Dorfman, photograph by Jamie Rose for The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI Published: July 30, 2011
WHAT does the face of antitax absolutism look like?
It has a tentative beard, more shadow than shag, like an awkward weigh station on the road from callow to professorial. It wears blunt glasses over narrowed eyes that glint mischievously, and its mouth is rarely still, because there’s no end to the jeremiads pouring forth: about the peril of Obama, the profligacy of Democrats and the paramount importance of opposing all tax increases, even ones that close the loopiest of loopholes.
It belongs to Grover Norquist [ http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/n/grover_g_norquist/index.html ], and if you hadn’t seen it before, you probably spotted it last week, as he pinged from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, reveling in the solidarity Republicans had shown against any new revenue. The country was lurching toward a possible default, but Norquist was riding high. In between television appointments on Thursday, he met me for breakfast near Times Square.
As he walked in and sat down he was sermonizing. As he got up and left an hour later he was still going strong. He seems to live his whole life in midsentence and takes few detectable breaths, his zeal boundless and his catechism changeless: Washington is an indiscriminate glutton, and extra taxes are like excess calories, sure to bloat the Beast.
When he ordered only an egg white omelet with spinach, I had to wonder: preferred meal or deliberate metaphor?
It’s the group Norquist runs, Americans for Tax Reform, that has been pressing politicians for decades to sign a pledge [ http://www.atr.org/taxpayer-protection-pledge ] not to vote for any net tax increase under any circumstances. All but 6 of the 240 Republicans in the House, along with two Democrats, have done so.
Republicans differ on whether that reflects the sway of Norquist, who often vilifies pledge resisters during their primary campaigns, or is simply the temper of these Tea Partying times. Which came first: the Norquist or the egg?
Either way, he has emerged as the most visible mouthpiece and muse of the lower-taxes, less-government troops that have played a major role in the debt crisis. And he provides a handy window into them.
His assessment of Obama was succinct: “The president of the United States is a left-wing ideologue.”
His analysis of the Democratic Party’s values and tactics was unambiguous — and uncomplicated by the deficits racked up under Obama’s predecessor.
“Their game plan has always been spend, spend, spend, then come and ask Republicans to be responsible and raise taxes,” he said.
“Democrats are like a teenage boy on a prom date,” he added, proceeding to act out multiple parts in an imagined conversation, which is one of his favorite things to do. “They keep asking. Maybe she’ll say yes. ‘No! No! No!’ But they have to keep asking. It’s part of their DNA — teenage boys and Democrats.”
Norquist has metaphor mania. The one he hatched to argue that tax increases — as opposed to spending cuts — are a clumsy way to manage budgetary woes yanked the conversation into a hypothetical operating room.
“I’m a surgeon,” he posited. “I’m never going to have a baseball bat in my list of tools, because I don’t think a baseball bat is very useful in taking out a kidney. ‘Oh, it worked for one patient!’ No! I’m not going to use a baseball bat to take out a kidney. It leaves too much blood on the floor.”
In short, tax increases are inelegant instruments, and you can’t let Derek Jeter perform organ excavation. Whether or not it’s covered under Obamacare.
Norquist equated keeping a lid on taxes with separating church and state, casting both as unshakable positions. The Founding Fathers, he added, had no problem with absolutes.
“The Constitution has a list of things that the government’s not allowed to do ever, ever, ever. The government’s not allowed to tell you what church to go to. Ever. Period. It’s just not. So you say, ‘What if God comes down and tells everyone He’s an Episcopalian? Can we do it then?’ No! Not then. Even then we cannot do it. Got it? It’s not allowed. We can’t steal your guns. ‘Well, what if I want to? What if a bad person has a gun?’ No. Uh-uh. No.” His omelet was virtually untouched.
What Democrats want, he said, is “to turn us into Europe, the European welfare state, somewhere between France and Greece. Which is an improvement. When I was in college, the guys I debated wanted to turn us into something between Sweden and East Germany. The left has receded in its demands. Most people on college campuses don’t speak as admiringly as the kids I went to college used to about the Khmer Rouge.”
That college was the same bastion of supposed elitism that gave the president his law degree: Harvard. In the decades after Norquist, now 54, graduated, he became an immensely well-connected player in the conservative establishment, a compatriot of the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff [ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/politics/23norquist.html ], and a magnet for corporate support. Businesses like their loopholes.
But they don’t like default, and there was chatter in Washington last week about whether Norquist had done their bidding too well. Were the Boehner-resistant House conservatives Norquist acolytes run amok? Was he having a Dr. Frankenstein moment?
And is his tax-slashing fervor entirely genuine, or is it ramped up, a theatrical means to get attention? That question dogs him as well. He has framed many of the newspaper and magazine articles about him, and displays them in the A.T.R.’s Washington headquarters.
But vanity is too commonplace inside the Beltway to be troubling. What’s alarming about Norquist and the pledge mentality, which has spread to other causes and other points of the political spectrum, is their promotion of the idea that political rigidity is to be prized above all else. That purity is king. Such a theology precludes nimbleness and compromise, which are not only the hallmarks of maturity but also the essence of sane government.
When making the rounds on Capitol Hill last week, I dropped in on Representative Kevin Yoder, a Republican freshman from Kansas. He considers himself a fiscal conservative, but voted in favor of the Boehner bill. And he never did sign Norquist’s pledge.
His reason was as modestly stated as it was unimpeachable. “My responsibility lies to my constituents,” not to Norquist, he said, adding: “I can’t foresee every scenario.” No one can. That’s why it’s best not to paint yourself into a corner, and to leave room even for an Episcopal conversion.
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