He opposes it:
"With the host of problems this country is currently facing, the fact that our president is devoting time to the human process of aging is an affront to Americans everywhere," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who advocated a provision to keep Obama 49 at least through the fall of 2013.
Ruy Teixeira says Obama is irrationally fixated on them:
[I]ndependents are the Rorschach test of U.S. politics—you see in them what your beliefs and preferences incline you to see. Obama and his team want to see teeming hordes of voters who are above the partisan allure of party, untroubled by the bad economy (or, at least, not planning to vote on that basis), and pining for a Washington where the parties, darn it, just work together. So that’s what they see.
Please. I'm not privy to how Obama thinks, but this has to be a caricature. What if he just considers that many pragmatic non-ideological Americans are deeply worried about the short-term economy and the long-term debt and are trying to find a reasonable leader whom they can trust to thread the needle through both problems. Forget the taxonomies. These people exist and I'm one of them. Do I find Palin or Perry or Romney more plausible on these questions than Obama? Nope. Do I want Obama to go all left-populist on me? No. Call me an Independent if you like, i.e. someone who has shfted support from one party and president to the other over time, depending on my flawed judgment. But what I really am is just someone trying to be an adult and looking for an adult to echo this in office.
Far from dismaying me on this front since he took office, Obama has been a rock. And I'm sick to death of all this ideological posturing and told-you-sos.
The most prescient and persuasive piece I have read on the Great Recession was Don Peck’s pellucid package of doom in the Atlantic a while back now. Which is why I have just pre-ordered his book-version, Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It.
It's worth tackling this one head-on, since it seems to be the main theme of the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, and of the admit-no-error right. Have Obama's policies actually made the economic situation worse? I'm afraid I find none of the arguments plausible. Once again, David Frum says what needs to be said:
Obama’s only tax increases – those contained in the Affordable Care Act – do not go into effect until 2014. Personal income tax rates and corporate tax rates are no higher today than they have been for the past decade. The payroll tax has actually been cut by 2 points. Total federal tax collections have dropped by 4 points of GDP since 2007, from 18+% to 14+%, the lowest rate since the Truman administration.
If so minded, you could describe Barack Obama as the biggest tax cutter in American history.
Thanks to the right's post-modern propaganda channel, most Americans probably believe that Obama has increased their taxes, while the obvious solution is to lower them some more. Indeed, that's now the mainstream view in the GOP. It's nuts. If tax cuts were a miracle cure, why the anemic growth as GWB bust the budget in the first decade of the new century? Why haven't Obama's tax cuts in the stimulus worked the way the GOP says they would? Until I hear a credible, factal answer to that, I tend to lose interest as I hear Republican bombasts repeating talking points from the 1980s, as if they were irrefutable, or hadn't actually been, you know, refuted.
Some reaction to the launch of our new Facebook page:
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Dan Drezner pours cold water on claims that the debt ceiling debacle means America's global leadership is done for:
The eurozone remains a basket case, Japan and Russia remain demographic disasters, and China has domestic political problems that make partisanship in the United States look like child's play. Even a cursory glance at military spending reveals no peer competitor to the United States. So yes, the United States will endure a rain of rhetorical horses**t for a while… right up until the next crisis in which the world demands America "do something" because it's still the only superpower still standing.
His colleague Joshua Keating collects international tut-tutting on the issue. But the truth is that American leadership will still matter not because we are strong, but because the rest of the world is not much better; and China and India are too preoocupied with their internal struggles to make too much mischief. But the leadership we offer will be more modest, less decisive and more marginal in impact.
I have to say that doesn't alarm me. The last decade has persuaded me that military power is not an efficient way to shift the direction of world events. Those events are being driven by deeper forces – of economic and social change, technological innovation, the response to modernity by religion – than any military can alter, shape or prevent.
"Of course, the government wants their hands on your children as fast as they can. That is why I opposed all these early starts and pre-early starts, and early-early starts. They want your children from the womb so they can indoctrinate your children as to what they want them to be. I am against that," – Rick Santorum.
"Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?" – David Frum.
As is obvious by now, I agree with him, which is why I find the doubling down by the right on their previous policies to be misguided, and the cultural wars to distract from this failure to be dangerous.
Politico has a classic piece today on the grim background for the president's re-election campaign next year. I think it overdoes things a bit – I guess they had to sell the piece somehow – but its content tells us something important, even if it's something we already know.
America has hit a wall. Its long term growth trend faltered at the end of the last century and has flatlined and then collapsed in this one, as Nate Silver grimly reminds us (also today). It is not as bad as the Great Depression (that's the only good news), but it is the next worst thing. You can attribute it to several things: the surreal debt-financing begun under Reagan and turned into "deficits-don't-matter" dogma under GWB; globalization which increased competitive pressure on the middle-class American worker more drastically than any other event in the nation's recent history; the resources gobbled up by a welfare state bequeathed when Americans saw it as their birth-right to get richer and richer and richer for ever; or something we don't quite yet understand.
But the upshot is that the music stopped on Bush's watch, like a needle scratching across a vinyl record, and the continued silence is deafening. It's foolish, I think, to believe that the stimulus hurt; it helped short-term and may well have prevented a second round of the 1930s. Ditto the astonishing turn-around of America's automobile industry (see today's GM news); and extension of unemployment benefits way past their due date. But none of this works up against the powerful forces now arrayed against higher growth or middle class revival.
For me, the scariest thing is that company profits are booming, and yet we still are trapped in this decline. The reason? Not just globalization, but our attempts to disguise the new challenges by bubbles: tech and real estate. These tonics gave us a temporary sense of still gaining wealth, but only intensified the crash when their snake-oil ran out. This seems to me to be the real issue here. It's deeper than Bush or Obama. The weak recoveries that follow financial crashes have made matters worse. The delusion that the US is still rich enough to police the whole world doesn't help either. And there's no reason this will end any time soon, except by a grim and difficult paying down of collective and individual debt, in the context of a depressed global economy (with China's growth still highly unstable).
Sorry, but elixirs won't change this. We have no money for them. There are things we can do – agree on long-term debt-reduction, reform taxes, cut the defense budget, hope education can help middle and lower middle class Americans compete better on a global stage. But until we get used to this new period of austerity, and accept it, we will bang our heads against walls.
I confidently predict that Americans have so little experience of stasis or relative decline, let alone long-term hardship, that they will continue to take out their woes on various presidents required to govern at a time like this. My fear is that this despond and despair will be exploited by crazies on the populist right, as they have been in history. But culture war won't create jobs. Even a civilizational war, as some on the far right are itching for, won't help. We are not in the era when mass mobilization can be achieved in war or peace.
The best outcome, I suspect, will be a return to American realism, a determination to do the things we can while avoiding the things that will only give us a temporary hit. In this, the president's best hope is continued honesty with the American people, calm, and resilience. In hard times, radicalism appeals. But so too does small-c conservatism. In dark economic times, people sometimes keep a hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. But all this requires a stoicism at odds with American character and history.
I guess I'm saying that the long great ride seems to be over. The question is simply whether Americans can or will handle it without losing their heads.
A reader writes:
You approvingly quoted Bruce Bartlett’s assertion that revenue has plummeted because of its recent decline as a percentage of GDP, but it is not at all clear why this is the correct metric. Given how much GDP has grown over the decades (even adjusted for population and inflation), isn’t this a bit like arguing that your dessert portion has shrunk because you are being handed 15% of a wedding cake instead of 20% of a cupcake?
Back in 1955, when the US had a 91% top marginal tax rate, per capita revenue from the income tax was $2595 in 2008 dollars. In 2010, in the midst of economic torpor? $4418. Why was $2595 sufficient to run the country back in the mid-1950s – a time period described by Paul Krugman as an economic and political “paradise lost” – but yet $1500 more than that today is regarded as evidence that taxes must be raised? In fact, the US is currently collecting more per capita income tax revenue today that every year prior to 1987.
We have no revenue problem, only a spending one. Percentage of revenue in GDP terms is a silly metric that is only used to obscure this essential truth.
The obvious answer is demographics (an older and more costly population), Medicare, created after 1955, and the major source for our future bankruptcy and current debt, and a defense budget that remains at Cold War levels, despite having no major militarized opponent on the world stage. If we keep revenues where they are, we’ll have to gut or end Medicare, as Paul Ryan wants, or gut the Pentagon, as Ron Paul wants. I’d prefer the more modest and practical option of returning tax rates to Clinton levels (far lower than Eisenhower’s), major tax reform, eliminating corporate welfare and most individual deductions apart from charity, serious defense cuts (an end to nation-building anywhere and everywhere but the US), and means-testing and rationing within Medicare.
Not that hard with a little help on the revenue side – and, more to the point, politically feasible. With no help from revenues, the result is either brutal on the middle-class, elderly, sick and poor or ending the military-industrial complex as we know it. That’s why I’m fine with the way the Super-Committee has been set up. It forces Republicans to make that choice, if they will not relent on revenues.
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