[Lee Ohanian's] argument, and that of stimulus opponents generally, thus boils down to this striking contention: As the government spends borrowed funds, consumers will start to realize that the resulting debt spells higher taxes in the future, which will lead them to curtail their current spending. Those cuts will offset increased government spending, leaving no net stimulus.
Although there may be people who would actually spend less now to hedge against uncertain future tax bills, it’s unlikely that you know any of them. As behavioral economists have been saying for decades, that’s just not the way most people act. Hardly any consumers even know how big the national debt is, much less how it will affect future taxes.
This is all true, but it’s worth noting that the conclusion doesn’t follow even if we stick to strong rational expectations. As Brad DeLong says “Increased nominal government spending financed by future taxes is crowded out by a reduction in nominal private consumption spending if and ony if what the government spends money on is a perfect substitute for what private consumers spend money on.” And of course that’s not true.
Unlike the case with some of his colleagues, you can’t chalk Senator Joe Lieberman’s apparent opposition to universal health care up to political cowardice. Connecticut is a solidly Democratic state at this point, and it’s pretty clear that the main political threat Lieberman faces is from his left. Nevertheless, he’s a man with the courage of his convictions and his convictions just don’t seem to be especially progressive:
LIEBERMAN: Morally, everyone of us would like to cover every American with health insurance but that’s where you spend most of the trillion dollars plus, or a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost. And I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy is out of recession. There’s no reason we have to do it all now.
Since Lieberman is a United States Senator with vast power over the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans it might have been nice for him to familiarize himself to some extent with the legislation he’s talking about. The bills I’ve seen all phase-in in the future precisely in order to meet the goals of deficit neutrality without involving a mid-recession tax increase. Meanwhile, it seems extremely likely that the economy has already returned to growth. But evidently Lieberman’s been too busy talking to TV bookers to learn about the pending legislation.
Earlier this month, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) came under fire for telling Iowans that they were right to “fear” that the federal government would “pull the plug on grandma”:
“In the House bill, there is counseling for end of life,” Grassley said. “You have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life, you should have done that 20 years before. Should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.“
Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Grassley struggled to explain why he made that statement. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, Grassley stumbled over his words and even blamed President Obama for his word choice. He said that even though he knew the House bill “doesn’t intend to” kill senior citizens, he felt that he had a responsibility to nevertheless play to those fears:
GRASSLEY: I said that because — two reasons. Number one, I was responding to a question at my town meetings. I let my constituents set the agenda. A person that asked me that question was reading from language that they got off of the Internet. It scared my constituents. And the specific language I used was language that the president had used at Portsmouth, and I thought that it was — if he used the language , then if I responded exactly the same way, that I had an opposite concern about not using end-of-life counseling for saving money, then I was answering — [...]
You would get into the issue of saving money, and put these three things together and you are scaring a lot of people when I know the Pelosi bill doesn’t intend to do that, but that’s where it leads people to.
When host Bob Schieffer asked whether the House legislation “would pull the plug on grandma,” Grassley stated, “It won’t do that,” but said that the right-wing fearmongering on the issue was still justified. “It just scares the devil out of people,” he added. “So that ought to be dropped.” Watch it:
Obama did use the phrase “pull the plug on grandma.” But he used it as an example of the lies his opponents were pushing around to scare the American public. Despite Grassley’s claim, he did not respond in “exactly the same way.” Obama said the right-wing myth was completely baseless; Grassley said that it was definitely something to be feared.
The Post isn’t really interested in asking people who might offer an objective opinion. The first answer they print is from Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute. Hmm. I wonder if they’ll take the opportunity to diss the bill and environmentalists. Last year, Green gave a speech in which he asserted such standard right-wing denier falsehoods as:
We’re back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978….
No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly.
[AEI seems to have removed the speech from their website (excerpts here) -- apparently they think people believe they are a center-right organization and don't know they spout far right-wing nonsense when they think they won't be caught.]
The second answer the Post prints is from a member of Congress — the only member actually featured in the print edition of the paper. One guess which member they chose. Yes, it was the uber-denier Senator James Inhofe (R-OIL). Seriously what exactly is the Washington Post thinking? Inhofe has spouted more disinformation on global warming than perhaps any other politician in the entire world. Does the Post really need to give him a platform to rail against the bill?
On October 9, 1964 Lyndon Johnson spoke at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans and tried to explain to his fellow southerners why it was that he was pushing such a strikingly liberal agenda; an agenda that in many ways was at odds with his record:
When Mr. Rayburn came up as a young boy of the House, he went over to see the old Senator, the leader, one evening, who had come from this Southern State, and he was talking about economic problems. He was talking about how we had been at the mercy of certain economic interests, and how they had exploited us. They had worked our women for 5 cents an hour, they had worked our men for a dollar a day, they had exploited our soil, they had let our resources go to waste, they had taken everything out of the ground they could, and they had shipped it to other sections.
He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in the South, if we could just meet our economic problems, if we could just take a look at the resources of the South and develop them. And he said, “Sammy, I wish I felt a little better. I would like to go back to old”-and I won’t call the name of the State; it wasn’t Louisiana and it wasn’t Texas–“I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is Negro, Negro, Negro!”
The story presumably lacks identifying details because it’s apocryphal. But the point speaks to what I was saying about the role of morality in political action. Johnson is saying that while many Southern Democrats may have been hard-bitten white supremacists others knew perfectly well that they were doing the wrong thing and just did it anyway. Johnson argued that it was time to knock it out: “we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it, and I think any man that is worthy of the high office of President is going to do the same thing.”
It seems convincing to me, but of course it wasn’t convincing to the people of Louisiana or the Deep South, all of whom swung rather suddenly to GOP nominee Barry Goldwater whose libertarian rationale for opposing the Civil Rights Act united the economic and cultural strains of the American right and laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement.
Meanwhile, thinking about LBJ should help put any liberal disgruntlement with Barack Obama in perspective. Very few people in American history (Lincoln, FDR) accomplished more for progressive policy. And yet, Johnson left office despised by an American left that—not incorrectly!—believed his administration had made horrible mistakes and committed terrible crimes in other fields of policy.
During a discussion on the future of newspapers and journalism on the Chris Matthews Show today, Time’s Joe Klein said that “on complicated stories, you can do this stuff on the internet.” Matthews responded by asking “who’s going to fact check?” As CNN’s Gloria Bolger began to answer that online editors would, Matthews interjected, “the bloggers don’t fact check.” “Nobody fact checks” online, added Klein. Watch it:
A strategy of blanket obstruction has, I think, worked quite well as a matter of political tactics for the Republican Party. So even though I join Faiz Shakir and Josh Kalven in finding it somewhat deplorable that Rep John Shinkus (R-IL) thinks that the Republican “chant for now until Election Day” should be “Just Say No!” on everything, I’m not sure he’s wrong:
Now of course that leaves aside the question of whether the country can really be governed on this basis. Sometimes to advance a progressive agenda, you might need to embrace some politically dicey ideas. Then you might hope that you could acquire some political cover from members of the opposite party. Of course they won’t just do that to be nice, so you make some substantive ideological concessions to the right. You propose, for example, a health care package that would raise taxes and extend coverage to the uninsured (woo liberals!) but also slow the rate of growth in Medicare, hoping that some substantial number of conservatives will find the latter attractive.
If instead conservatives choose to reject the deal, not put any other ideas forward, and instead characterize the Medicare idea as a secret plot to euthenize grandma then it seems to me the country will have a problem.
This morning on Fox News, the pundit roundtable discussed new charges leveled by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that politics played a role in the issuance of terror alerts in the Bush administration. Nicolle Wallace, who served as the Communications Director for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and later served as the White House communications director, complained that Ridge was making a “wussy” allegation:
We were having a very political discussion [in the 2004 campaign] about terrorism. … But that is quite different from what he very, I think in a kind wussy way, alleges. I mean, this is not a very precise attack. This is — he pondered and wondered if perhaps politics went into it. You know, it’s very fishy to me.
Tad Devine, a senior strategist on the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign, responded, “I don’t think he’s wussy to expose this. I think he’s shown a lot of courage, and I’m glad he did it.” Watch it:
Wallace’s criticism echoes that of former Bush speechwriter David Frum. “That is the most tentative possible way of advancing an accusation,” Frum said of Ridge’s accusation. Last week, a spokesman for John Ashcroft said, “Now would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”
Apparently on his show earlier today, Chris Matthews was talking about the future of journalism and worried that “the bloggers don’t fact-check.”
I find myself consistently surprised by how frequently this concern is voiced. The fact of the matter is that outside of peer reviewed publications by university presses, books aren’t fact-checked. Live or quasi-live television broadcasts of the sort Matthews hosts or that cable networks show all day aren’t fact-checked. Heck, newspapers aren’t fact-checked. Fact-checking is a fairly idiosyncratic element of the magazine publishing industry. What’s more, if you actually read magazines it’s clear that even a super-rigorous fact-checking process like what they do at The New Yorker doesn’t actually prevent significant errors of interpretation, omission, etc.
Fundamentally, for any kind of news source what matters is not whether or not the “facts” are in some sense “checked” but whether or not the people in charge care about getting it right.
Last week, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), the most conservative member of the so-called bipartisan “Gang of Six” working on the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill, stated that he preferred that Congress deal with reform incrementally. “I think the only way it will happen is we need to break it down into smaller parts than we have now and put it through one at a time,” he said.
Today on CNN, Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT), an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, embraced Enzi’s idea. “Great changes in our country often have come in steps. The Civil Rights movement occurred, changes occurred in steps,” he argued. Lieberman added that Congress should address the nearly 50 million uninsured at some point down the road:
LIEBERMAN: Morally, everyone of us would like to cover every American with health insurance but that’s where you spend most of the trillion dollars plus, or a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost. And I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy is out of recession. There’s no reason we have to do it all now.
Later, host John King asked Lieberman if he would vote with the Democrats if the reconciliation process is used to pass health care. “I think it’s a real mistake to try to jam through the total health insurance reform,” Lieberman said, adding, “It’s just not good for the system. Frankly, it won’t be good for the Obama presidency.” Watch it:
Noting that the insured currently pay for the uninsured through rising premiums, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) challenged Lieberman’s approach. “We’ve got to bring down the cost of health care,” he argued. “It’s difficult to do that by ignoring those who don’t have health insurance today.” A New York Times editorial today agreed:
If nothing is done to slow current trends, the number of people in this country without insurance or with inadequate coverage will continue to spiral upward. That would be a personal tragedy for many and a moral disgrace for the nation. It is also by no means cost-free. Any nation as rich as ours ought to guarantee health coverage for all of its residents.
Yet, Lieberman still sides with the Republicans on health care reform. “Joe Lieberman is not some right-wing nutcase,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said last November defending Lieberman against anger over his support for John McCain’s candidacy for president. “Joe Lieberman is one of the most progressive people ever to come from the state of Connecticut.”
