“We have five percent of the world’s population; we have 25 percent of the world’s known prison population. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.”
- Jim Webb, whose criminal justice reform bill is winning support…
I’ve always said that if the Democrats were messing up, I’d call them on it as quickly as I do Republicans. So now I’m doing it.
My issue with the GOP on the current economic crisis is that they don’t get it: only a little over a week ago, John Boehner (the highest-ranking Republican in the House) was mistaking macroeconomics with microeconomics: “Americans want government to practice the same financial restraint they have been forced to exercise,” he said. “It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it.”
Which, of course, is the finest example ever of how government does NOT get it. Our macroeconomic problem is not one of shortages — you’ve lost your job or have limited funds so you have to tighten your belt –, but rather one of insufficient demand. Everybody who knows anything about economics knows this, except apparently Rep. Boehner.
But let’s not forget another guy who misses the point entirely: Treasury Secretary Geithner, so I guess by extension President Obama.
Apparently we’re about to announce the details of the plan designed to get banks out from under the famous “toxic assets” that they’re currently holding. Three things, apparently, are involved:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad we’re doing something. But this totally misses the point: these “assets” stink, and need to be written down to market somehow. This plan will not encourage that.
Think about it: the federal government floats 85% of the money to buy them, then the Treasury puts up roughly 80% of the remaining 15%. So the “buyer” ultimately has about 3% skin in the game. With everything to gain (if it turns out that they’re better assets than advertised) and next-to-nothing to lose, there is a strong incentive to overpay. Heads I win, tails you (the taxpayer) lose. So ultimately the “market” for these assets is still artificially inflated…and we accomplish nothing.
Is there no one, anywhere in government, that understands macroeconomics?
I want you all to know: on the day that the Democrats make as little sense as Republicans do, I’ll hold their feet to the fire. But this one just sent me for a loop:
On the Republicans’ website, they ask Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri to address the GOP’s issue with current healthcare proposals. Rep. Blunt proceeds to tear apart some of the foundational principles of the Republican platform in resisting the new proposals. Ouch.
A little background: Republican resistance to universal healthcare has always centered on the notion that the free market can do it all much better. This, of course, is spectacularly off-base (not only could we refer to the World Health Organization’s rankings, but also to the fact that polls show that even Medicare recipients are vastly happier with their healthcare than those in private systems.) But no matter — that is for another day. For today, suffice it to say that the refrain has always been: “Competition produces better results, and since government-sponsored healthcare is not competitive, it will produce lesser results.” I don’t agree, but you know what? Fine.
The current proposal has a little twist that has conservative panties all in a wad: Democrats are now pushing to allow private citizens to buy into a government-sponsored healthcare plan similar to the one lawmakers enjoy.
This should be fine with the GOP, of course. After all, the government is terrible at healthcare, so such a system will just get its head handed to it by superior private plans. Right?
Apparently, not so much. The problem now, says Rep. Blunt (and remember: this isn’t just one nutball opinion — this is published on the GOP’s website for all to enjoy), is that the plan would “begin forcing free-market plans to compete with government-run programs,” and he says that his party is concerned that if government is permitted to compete, “it will eventually push out private healthcare plans.”
So…ummm… which is it? Is government good at healthcare, or lousy at it?
I’m confused. But not as confused as conservatives are.
President Obama intends to raise the taxes of a millionaire by 3%. Ouch, this “socialism” is a killer!
Has anyone else had their hyprocrisy detectors ringing at the highest possible volume in the past few weeks, as we’ve watched conservatives express their outrage over the economy? It’s sort of like having Heidi Fleiss accuse you of having loose morals.
“Big government blah blah blah taxes blah…”, they intone, as though their policies had actually worked. Limited government oversight is what caused this mess, more than anything else. So save your breath, Ms. Fleiss. I’m not listening.
CNBC has been the chief moralist, and John Stewart just blew them up the other day. Like I said in the title: it’s only funny because it’s true.
When I was a kid, a lot of the smart guys were Republicans. Richard Nixon, for all of his faults, turned down admissions to both Harvard and Yale to stay near his California home, then graduated third in his class at Duke Law School. His Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was a Harvard PhD. and a former professor at that school. Gerald Ford graduated in economics from Michigan, and then finished in the top 25% of his class at Yale Law. Ronald Reagan was no academic, but was a great communicator who surrounded himself with brilliance: He re-appointed Princeton/Harvard economist Paul Volcker as his Fed chairman (Volcker, it should be noted, is the current chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board), and his Secretary of State, George Schultz, was a professor of economics at MIT and the University of Chicago prior to entering politics.
In short: these guys were not afraid of a few eggheads.
Politics is, after all, largely a series of thought experiments: what will happen here if I do this there? Economics, in particular, is not an exercise in political brinksmanship or in party lines. It is the most scientific of the social sciences, involving difficult math and comprehensive thought.
So, what gives with Republicans? I was talking at church a few weeks ago with a very conservative friend (and a very smart one) who bemoans the loss of pure smarts as a valued commodity in his party, and I do, too.
I don’t want to overstate it — Condi Rice, for example, is as smart as they come –, but what to make of all of this?
The agenda now being pushed boils down to essentially this: that there is a strain of person out there, the intellectual elite, who look down their noses at regular folks. They can be found in the following places: universities, most media, Massachusetts, New York and California, and in big cities generally, especially on the coasts. Be very careful of these people (They’re smart! Like the devil!); if you don’t watch yourselves you could be roped into giving up your liberties and freedoms. Remember: they don’t want you to have liberty or freedom! (Somehow, apparently, Keynesian economics and rolling back tax cuts that never went to you in the first place represent an attack on your freedoms.)
Don’t be seduced, you’re told by Limbaugh and Beck, by people with degrees from prestigious institutions (and these words are spat out like a bug that got in your teeth on a motorcycle ride). They don’t have your common sense. Things are black, or they are white, and these people lose track of that.
And oh, that common sense argument plays, over and over. Something about college, apparently, flushes out whatever it is that teaches us to get out of the rain. Seeing gray simply means that you’re not seeing at all.
Wait: is this truth, or could this simply be a couple of guys with lots of street smarts and a huge audience but next-to-no education (I personally know almost no adults with less education than these two) expressing their biases and their long-held personal fears, grinding their axes against people who lorded over them when they were younger? Hmm…
It all sort of reminds me of summers I spent working on farms outside of my hometown of Moscow, Idaho. There were hired hands who worked year-round, and then there were a few summer hires like me. A lot of the time, I would take a little ribbing: “Hey, college boy,” the regular hands would say, “C’mon over here. We got something here we need to think about. We need somebody who can think, and I hear that’s you.” Being the college boy bought me disdain, not respect.
Here, on the other hand, is my own thinking:
Government is complicated, and nuanced. Education helps you deal with that. Given a choice of two people with similar views, I will take the smarter and/or more educated one, every time. To be intellectual is uniformly positive; this cannot in my mind be construed as a negative thing, and Republicans should return to their roots, which embraced intellectuals.
If government involved fixing pipes, I would embrace the “intellectual elite” who went to plumbing school. I’d elect plumbers all day long. (And believe me, I celebrate plumbers and other guys who do things well that I cannot, anyway.) Government, it turns out, is law and economics and — well, college-type stuff. The more you know about those things, the better.
My advice to Democrats is to keep nominating and electing smart people. My advice to Republicans is to stop taking economic advice from guys who know less about economics than I do, and get back to electing brilliance. Mitt Romney, anyone?
I don’t get it. I have a graduate degree in business. I taught logic at a major university. I’ve been in business, including three stints as CEO, for twenty-plus years. And I don’t get it.
Conservatives are now blaming Barack Obama for the state of the economy. A conservative Facebook friend recently excoriated Obama as “the most fiscally irresponsible President ever,” and suggested that his policies were sinking the stock markets.
He can be forgiven. He’s young, and more than a little gullible. But such nonsense is being repeated by Lou Dobbs, Rick Santelli, and the ever-incendiary Jim Cramer, each of whom should know better.
Believe me, I can have a short memory. But not that short.
Let’s just get this straight: the notion that Barack Obama is somehow responsible for the collapse of Wall Street is beyond absurd. If you suggest it to me, I will immediately commence thinking that your parents dropped you on your head when you were young, and you have emerged as a high-functioning idiot.
Every major policy that produced this problem had its genesis on George Bush’s watch. The housing bubble inflated and burst in the Bush years, as did the financial bubble. That the stock market crash is a Bush problem is not speculation, and it is not subjective. The collapse of AIG and other large US financial institutions commenced on September 16, 2008. (And in case you want to suggest the fiction that all of this was in anticipation of Obama’s impending coronation, note that McCain was in the lead at that time.) ”Black Week” began on October 6th, 2008.
Please don’t suggest, either, that Obama’s policies are the driving force behind additional losses (as though a McCain White House would have pulled us out of this dive by now). The main message of this crash as it begun was that huge segments of the stock market (particularly the housing and financial sectors, but others as well) were built on a thin tissue of lies and accounting irregularities. The market has been correcting for those errors, and no one has been (or would have been) in a position to arrest a perfectly predictable correction slide. Only when the markets reflect the real values of the companies that make them will this slide slow to a halt.
But here’s what bugs me most of all: I’m hearing nothing — and I do mean, nothing — from detractors in terms of a better idea. It’s not coincidental that these same naysayers are precisely the people who led us into this mess in the first place, whistling happily while Wall Street leveraged its way into oblivion.
Anyone who knows me knows my feelings about detractors without an alternative. It’s easy. It’s the cheap way out. It’s cynical. And cynicism is just the tails side of the gullibility coin: I’m gullible if I think that every word out of Barack Obama’s mouth is a golden nugget, but I’m cynical (equally bad) if I think that he cannot be right. And I’m right back to gullible if I think that any policy, anywhere, would have turned this around within 60 days (heck, within 365 days) of the Oath of Office being taken.
