The Stupid Party | OurFuture.org

The Stupid Party | OurFuture.org
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The GOP: Grand, Old and Preposterous

The GOP is unable and unwilling to have a serious conversation with Americans about the fix we are in. Instead the party's leaders posture and pose, as practiced as a Gregorian chorus in chanting their poll tested messaging that makes utterly no sense.

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Instead the House Republican leader, the perpetually tanned John Boehner, greets the president's proposal with poll-tested message:

"President Obama is submitting another budget that spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much. Filled with more reckless spending and more unsustainable debt, the president's budget is just more of the same at a time when the American people are looking for Democrats in Washington to listen and change course."

Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, fresh from voting against what was his own wrong-headed enthusiasm, the bipartisan deficit commission, says "'Look, I don't think anybody in the country thinks we have a problem because we tax too little, I think the problem is we spend too much." So, I like the commission idea, just as I said a few months ago. I think a better way to do it is target spending.'

"Spend too much, tax too much and borrow too much." Clearly, Republicans believe that we can reduce our deficits by cutting spending even while cutting taxes. So what would they cut?

Boehner refers the president to the 2009 Republican budget, put together by Rep. Paul D. Ryan, who passes as the party's idea man.

That budget would freeze domestic discretionary spending till 2014, but Obama's budget does that. It would increase spending on the military over the Obama budget, and pledge all the money needed to fight two wars (with Republicans insisting that the military get more, not less resources to do so). It would create a "trigger" on Social Security that might cut benefits for "high income earners," but not until 2036. No savings there.

So where do the cuts come from? The Republican budget would repeal any spending remaining in the recovery act and oppose any new spending for jobs. This includes repealing the "Make Work Pay" tax credit that gives most Americans a small tax break, and presumably the support for food stamps, aid to states to avoid layoffs of teachers and police, and the infrastructure construction projects that remain. But there isn't a lot of money left in the recovery plan and the president's new proposal is modest, at best.

The big cuts come from Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans now rail against any "Medicare cuts," referring to the end of billions in subsidies to enable private insurance companies to compete with Medicare. But the Republican budget would abolish Medicare for everyone under 55, replacing it with a voucher program that would be outpaced by inflation over time. The Center for Budget and Policyh Priorities estimates that means about $600 billion in cuts over 10 years would come from Medicare spending. ...

Zack Exley: The New Right's Secret Sauce

Zack Exley: The New Right's Secret Sauce
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Today, the worldview of post-war Liberalism is gone. It's not coming back: It can't solve America's problems, and Americans can feel that in their gut. Post-war Liberalism was the idea that the American economy was on a roll and we just needed to steer it in the right direction with smart regulations, incentives, and investments in Research and Development, and Infrastructure (R&D&I).

That doesn't ring true anymore. People know that our economy has been decaying for decades. They know it is sliding in the direction of more decay faster than ever. They know that the bubbles of the 90s and the 00s only covered over the decay. They know the stimulus and bailouts -- in the way they were structured -- are final desperate measures to keep the decay covered for another few minutes.

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Even a bigger plan -- which almost no one is talking about now -- to invest trillions in R&D&I, going far beyond energy, is a purely positive idea. But that still leaves Americans wondering where our new competitive industries will come from. They know instinctively what economic historians know academically: that any smart industrialist will build his or her factories in China or Mexico before the United States as long as American workers' standard of living is many times richer than it is in those and other countries.
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In opposition to vague and muddled R&D&I schemes, the New Right's worldview gives people an ideal to fight for: individual entrepreneurship -- and a cause to fight against: anything that's not individual entrepreneurship.

The New Right worldview says:

Don't waste our money on incentives and R&D&I investments, I don't trust you (politicians) to spend it wisely. I think you're just going to waste my money on earmarks that won't amount to a better economy or society. You can talk about green jobs, but I think you're going to blow this money on pet projects or poorly run projects. I think it would be smarter if you let people keep their money and let them get America back on track in their crowd sourced/ free market way: we'll start new businesses, invent new things, etc... If you look at American history, it's that kind of decentralized action that has always moved us forward, and the big collective efforts have been footnotes.

That rings pretty true to a lot of Americans. It rings true to a lot of Democrats and Progressives. But the important thing is this: It inspires millions of Americans -- not a majority, but a significant and vocal chunk. Meanwhile, there is no alternative story that inspires.

Parts of the New Right's story is true, but as a whole, it is wrong. It holds together only if you accept all of its presuppositions, but most of those presuppositions are inaccurate. No economy in the history of the world has ever revitalized itself purely through decentralized, spontaneous action by disconnected individuals. That kind of action is half the story. But without the other half -- forethought and limited but important collective undertakings -- economies do not transform, they stagnate.

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What happened next was that Europe and East Asia succeeded in transforming their economies (mostly using that common sense mixture of entrepreneurism and planning) into powerhouses that gave the U.S. a run for our money. At first, their great transformations created jobs for Americans, as we supplied the steel, the machines and the know how. But soon, their cheap, quality goods put many Americans out of work. For the past 30 years we have kept unemployment relatively low and incomes relatively high by blowing financial bubbles and borrowing money unsustainably from abroad. Also, real wages have been falling the whole time -- precipitously for the bottom ....half of U.S. income earners.

America finds itself in a position now where we need a massive transformation of our economy. But we find ourselves without access to any worldview that can imagine it. Reconstructing such a worldview is the great task of our age. We have to be careful to do it with full awareness of the very real threats from Socialism and Fascism. Especially if America's economic crisis deepens into a depression, both of those paradigms will become tempting to many once again. ...