As the big debt ceiling deadline nears, it is becoming increasingly clear that our government is not up to the task of writing a bill that will raise the debt limit and allow the government to function as normal. I am completely persuaded that not raising the debt limit will have disastrous consequences. I am also convinced that President Obama unilaterally raising the debt limit may forestall total disaster, but it won’t save the credibility of the United States government.
We have raised the debt ceiling dozens of times, and the fact that we cannot do so now underscores the fact that the federal government is now completely dysfunctional. Make no mistake — this dysfunction is the fault of the Republicans. For a bill to pass, it has to have the support of Republicans in the House of Representatives and Democrats in the Senate and of course a signature from the President. The House Republicans have chosen to ignore this fact and instead take hostages.
Tonight, it looks like their plan blew up in their face. In the next 72 hours or so, a few dozen Republicans are going to have to decide whether to hold firm with their caucus and destroy the economy, or vote for a bill that Democrats in the House will support. I honestly can’t predict which path they will choose.
Update: This Paul Krugman column makes the case that the media’s failure to clearly point out that the entire debt crisis is the result of Republican attempts to extort policy concessions from the President by threatening the credit line of the US government is a big part of the problem. How are voters supposed to hold politicians accountable if the media is not accurately reporting the degree to which they are complicit in creating our problems?
Last night, I watched Hot Coffee, a documentary that’s extremely critical of the tort reform movement. It occurred to me a long time ago that the civil court system is one of the few avenues by which regular people can seek redress against the rich and powerful, especially against corporations. The others are by voting for politicians who are pro-regulation and consumer rights, through organized labor, and in more recent times, by publicizing your cause on the Internet.
Corporate interests consistently work to undermine those channels to insulate themselves from being held accountable by regular people. Hot Coffee makes it clear exactly how business interests have spent tons of money to weaken the court system and even eliminate it entirely through binding arbitration clauses in contracts.
These practices are fundamentally undemocratic, and the money that has been spent on them has an effect that distorts the legal system in a way that is profoundly negative for regular citizens. Businesses spend huge sums to elect judges who will rule in their favor in civil cases and more importantly, will uphold state legislation that caps the damages that can be awarded in civil trials. Those same judges are consistently right wing on every social issue imaginable, and tend to take a narrow view of civil rights as well. Corporations spending money to expand and protect damage caps for plaintiffs are keeping people like Radley Balko in business when it comes to the rights of defendants in criminal proceedings as well.
Most importantly, the documentary shows how the corporations built public support for laws that almost nobody would be in favor of if they actually understood how they worked. It’s a must-watch. It’s airing on HBO now, and will be available on Netflix sometime in the future, I guess.
I’ve been thinking persistently about the difference between politics and activism basically since Barack Obama was inaugurated. As the old saying goes, politics is the art of the possible. Activism is about fighting for principles regardless of their possibility. We run into problems when we expect politicians to be activists, or expect political campaigns to be activist movements. Likewise, activists oftentimes make poor politicians. That said, political change is contingent on effective activism. In short, activism creates the changes in public opinion that result in political change.
I have a lot more to say about this, but Ta-Nehisi Coates just posted a useful illustration of what I’m talking about.
This is all that needs to be said about the budget deal:
Details on the appropriations deal are still hard to come by, but you don’t need the details to know that substantial short-term cuts in domestic discretionary spending will hurt the poor while harming macroeconomic performance. The problem with not agreeing to the deal, of course, is that a government shutdown would also hurt the poor while harming macroeconomic performance. If you genuinely don’t care about the interests of poor people and stand to benefit electorally from weak economic growth, this gives you a very strong hand to play as a hostage taker. And John Boehner is willing to play that hand.
The other problem is that Democrats somehow think that cutting a bad deal to free the hostages is something to be proud of. Here’s Senator Claire McCaskill on Twitter:
Compromise. That wasn’t so bad was it?
Ugh.
O’Reilly Radar republishes a blog post imagining what Steve Jobs would do if he were President of the United States and needless to say, the writer supposes that Steve Jobs would do lots of cool stuff. What the article really shows is that the writer has no clue how the government actually works. Our government is structured in such a way that it’s incredibly difficult to get a lot done, regardless of who you are, and the sort of silly thinking that this article espouses only makes the problem worse. What the country needs is structural change that makes it possible for our leaders to be more effective, not magical thinking about the persuasive powers of great leaders.
Thinking about what should happen is easy — the hard part is figuring out the mechanisms by which it can happen, whether it’s political reform at the national level or setting up a continuous integration platform for your software development project. After seeing the excitement and hope of the Obama campaign transition into two years of excruciating political trench warfare, I just don’t have any interest in hand waving and big, silly ideas.
The federal government is full of smart, competent, persuasive people working in a system that prevents them from rapidly addressing even the problems with obvious solutions. Let’s see some realistic thought experiments that address that.
Libertarian economist Scott Sumner talks about the “marshmallow test” and says that he doesn’t trust Democrats:
What do we do if Social Security needs to be trimmed in order to balance the budget? I hear lots of talk about cutting back on benefits for those who “don’t need it.” That would be people like me. Here’s why I don’t trust the Dems—I see them as the party of one marshmallow eaters. They represent people who have less self-control. I fear they will cut my benefits, but not cut the benefits of people who didn’t save for retirement. I fear they will use “wealth” as the criterion to determine who is needy and who isn’t; not lifetime wage earnings.
In my view there is nothing egalitarian about redistributing income from two marshmallow eaters to one marshmallow eaters. They’ve already had their fun when young, loading up their three car garages with all sorts of fun toys. I’ve never even had a garage.
My take on this is that Scott Sumner is a selfish bastard who’s painfully out of touch. There are plenty of people in America and around the world who were never offered the first marshmallow. The Democrats don’t do much to help them out, but Republicans and libertarians don’t seem to believe the government should help them at all. In fact, their main concern is that people with many, many marshmallows can eat them all themselves, and they justify that stance the same way Scott Sumner does. If you’re poor, it’s because you’re inferior to people like them.
I’ve been reading the new Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog with interest. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I find myself in agreement with many of the principles that underpin it as a political philosophy. Jacob Levy gets at the heart of the differences between liberals and libertarians and then explains why, from a political perspective, they are not really very important:
So libertarianism as a doctrine in political philosophy had this distinctive contribution to make: it rejected state activity to increase the material well-being of the poor. I think by gradual drift, that came to seem like all libertarianism was concerned with.
But in the real world, state action to improve the material lot of the poor is not a very large portion of state action. This is politically predictable, almost trivially so. But that means that the focus on libertarianism’s apparent philosophical difference with Rawlsian liberalism gives us a very distorted sense of the work libertarians could do politically in the world. We don’t live in a Rawlsian world, separated from Nozick’s by the existence of poverty-alleviation programs. We live in a world characterized by massive state action of all sorts, most of which does nothing to alleviate poverty and a great deal of which is actively regressive or harmful to the worst-off.
If everyone in America understood those two paragraphs, this country would be a much better place.
Mark Bittman has a list of food-related political reforms that would improve Americans’ diets and be good for the environment. Here’s how he introduces them:
… we’ve come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions, and animals are produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system.
It’s unlikely that any of them will be enacted, but it’s nice to dream.
What’s the role of the federal government? Here’s one answer, courtesy of Matt Yglesias:
One of the main things the federal government does is transfer resources from high-productivity urban areas to low-productivity rural ones.
In principle, I don’t have a huge problem with this. However, I do have a problem with the fact that the people in the more subsidized areas fail to understand that this is how things work, and indeed consider themselves to be exploited by the federal government rather than exploiting it.
Mainly, I just appreciated reading that sentence. I had never really thought of things that way.
Ezra Klein sums up the current state of the union as briefly and accurately as you could hope for:
When they were asked about shifting their focus to the future when the economy was so bad in the present, they explained that they got pretty much everything they thought they could get — and, in fact, more than they thought they could get — in the tax-cut deal, and it was time to let that work. Left unsaid is that they can’t get anything more out of a Republican House, and so there’s little point in begging.
In the meantime we’re treated to Republicans repeating the words “failed stimulus” over and over as if they cannot be used separately, in spite of the fact that state governments all over the country are facing massive deficits in the absence of the federal stimulus dollars that saw them through the worst of the crisis.
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