Tag: 2012

On Complexity

Dave Weigel (via two Tweets):

Anyone else bored with these campaign launch weeks that focus on tiny gaffes? […] You get more heat for flubbing a founder’s name than for saying tax cuts always up revenue.

Jay Rosen replies:

Of course you do. Why? The sweet spot is a mistake that allows the press to prosecute the error without sounding too political.

I think it’s a bit more than that. While I agree that the political calculation enters into it, there’s also a strong bias towards the simplest construction possible. John Wayne != John Wayne Gacy. Haw ha.
This is much easier to write than an explanation of exactly why it is that a certain package of cuts is more likely to impact poor and elderly than another, or to explain, with facts, figures, and charts just why it is extraordinarily likely that revenues will not increase subsequent to a tax cut in these United States using any current/future circumstance you wish to model. You’re just not going to fit that into a tweet, or even a 90 second NPR focus piece. The several sentences that emerge from the four paragraphs you wrote will, inevitably, come off as political shorthand. And the angry letters will pour in. Better just to do he-said, she-said and be done with it. Conservative message discipline in commercial media: achieved.

This is the fundamental GOP advantage. Death tax, death panel, tax and spend, short form birth certificate, taxed enough already! It’s hard to think of any conservative sloganeering in the past 20 years that a) is longer than 140 characters –and– b) actually holds up to intellectual scrutiny. Yet neither of these facts matters. In fact, it’s this emphasis on message simplicity that has ultimately captured the willingly compliant, stenographic impulses of the modern media. Who wants to do a bunch of research, after all? Stephanopoulos knew he was going to be asking about John Quincy Adams. Why not be ready to follow up? He receives a salary that is likely in the millions of dollars per year and has a staff, but (apparently) can’t be bothered to call up Wikipedia? Bob Schieffer, likewise quite well paid, also can’t be bothered to pick one issue on which Bachmann has notably lied and really hold her feet to the fire about it, not allowing a “well, we should really be talking about Obama…” dodge? Instead, we’ll just note the pattern of systematic lying on the website somewheres. Journalism!

This is precisely how George W. Bush ended up with the Oval Office. How’d that work out for everyone? Then why are we as a nation so desperate to repeat the experience?

Bachmann on GMA

Stephanopoulos: In your announcement you said ‘my voice is part of a movement to take back our country.’ From whom?
Bachmann: Well, from the people all across the nation. […]
Stephanopoulos: […] the Pulitzer Prize winning website, Politifact, has found that you have the worst record of making false statements of any of the leading contenders. And I wondered if you wanted to take a chance to clear up some of your past statements. For example earlier this year you said that the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence worked tirelessly to end slavery. Now with respect Congresswoman, that’s just not true. Many of them including Jefferson and Washington were actually slave holders and slavery didn’t end until the Civil War.
Bachmann: Well you know what’s marvelous is that in this country and under our constitution, we have the ability when we recognize that something is wrong to change it. And that’s what we did in our country. We changed it. We no longer have slavery. That’s a good thing. And what our Constitution has done for our nation is to give us the basis of freedom unparalleled in the rest of the world.
Stephanopoulos: I agree with that…
Bachmann: That’s what people want…they realize our government is taking away our freedom.
Stephanopoulos: But that’s not what you said. You said that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery.
Bachmann: Well if you look at one of our Founding Fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true. He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father’s secretary. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery….
Stephanopoulos: He wasn’t one of the Founding Fathers – he was a president, he was a Secretary of State, he was a member of Congress, you’re right he did work to end slavery decades later. But so you are standing by this comment that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery?
Bachmann: Well, John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy but he was actively involved.
Stephanopoulos: Well let me move on […]
Lemkin: You cannot “move on.” Media Pro Tip: when faced with statements like these, just consider the rest of your planned interview over. Relentlessly dig on this point. JQA was nine years old at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Actively involved? Founding Father? You’ve got to hammer these points, George. Same goes for Bob Schieffer; if she’s actively not answering your questions, don’t just note it in passing at the end of the show, stop asking new questions until the one on the table is addressed. You have all the time in the world for video online. Start using it.

What Ezra Said

Mitt Romney: We have all been distressed by the policies that this administration has put in place over the last two years. We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, antijob strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it’s harder and harder for people to find work.
Ezra Klein: By any measure, this is absurd. Taxes are at a 50-year low. The Dow has staged a roaring recovery. Business profits are near record levels. And the economy has gone from losing 780,000 jobs a month to gaining about 160,000 jobs a month. That is to say, it’s getting easier and easier for people to find work, even if it’s not nearly easy enough.

How to square the circle: Assuming Medicare for all tomorrow and that you can find a way to return the dollars in-between the red and blue lines to the people paying it: the American worker with employee provided health insurance. Right now, that’s all invisible income, spirited away into the employer-shared costs of providing coverage. It’s the underlying reason that real wages have been stagnant for most of my lifetime. Turn that into real wages and the broader economy would explode. There would suddenly spring into existence a middle class with (gasp) actual purchasing power. Who knew?!?

Naturally, the plutocrats would, at least initially, turn that space into more profits for themselves. Sooner or later, though, it seems likely that constraints on quality workers would gradually bring the money over into regular salary as companies competed to find highly trained folks. You’d still have to solve the manufacturing issue and/or something to do with all that idle but essentially untrained labor force out there…but it would be a start.
At any rate, a few more than the 17 Americans vaguely cognizant of this cost gap need to be made painfully and continually aware of it. Every day, every hour, every time a microphone is switched on with a Democrat behind it. Complete with this graph. That Medicare, far from being “expensive,” saves money in dramatic fashion. And that, since they, the average hardworking healthcare consumer, cannot buy into that massive bargaining pool or something very much like it, they are being robbed. Every. Single. Day. With malice aforethought. And that they have precisely one party, the GOP, and Joe Lieberman to thank for it.

But that would be shrill. And Weiner lied to his fellow Democrat. That’s what’s important here.

Source: The New York Times

If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four — what is more important is you are putting the government in a materially better position to better pay its bills going forward.

Paul Ryan being serious and courageous and, yet again, showing just how absolutely determined the GOP is at all levels, extreme far right or merely far right, to have a default on the debt of the United States. Why, we’ll barely notice it’s even happened.
It’s the only way they see getting the White House in 2012. It’s been the plan all along. They assume Obama will get the “egg on his face” and they’re probably right. Once in control it’s goodbye filibuster (assuming the Democrats lose the Senate), goodbye social safety net, and hello freedom is just as free as what of it you can afford to buy. After that, when the money’s gone: kindly go die in the streets.
But hey, taxes will be pretty low. On the already rich, anyway.

Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom. Average Americans. The very Americans that our government now, and this president, does not trust to make a decision on your health care plan. Those Americans risked everything so they could make that decision on their health care plan.

Rick Santorum, mulling the true evil of Hitler: an under-appreciated penchant for wanting to provide affordable health care.
Source: tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com

2.96

Emphasis added:

…if even 1/50 of the austerity-induced decline in current output flows through to reduce the economy’s productive potential, that austerity today worsens the debt burden.

This is an unusual result: it applies only to a country with a substantial fiscal multiplier that can fund its debt at very low interest rates. But we are a country with a substantial fiscal multiplier that can fund it’s debt at very low interest rates…

Indeed we are. But no one seems interested in noticing. We can borrow against a 10-year Treasury at a 2.96% yield. The money behind that rate is clearly not concerned with either deficits or the capability of the United States to meet the debt incurred by their purchase yesterday or all the days before that. As Jared Bernstein notes, the current “budget math” still strongly favors a jobs target and not a deficit target.

This is very simple stuff. How many ways do you have to prove that cuts today worsen our long-term fiscal situation before somebody with a D after their name starts talking about this in a compelling, no-nonsense fashion? We can borrow, cheaply, and those dollars (when pumped into the economy) would hasten the closing of our current output gap. This would simultaneously a) obviate the need for further borrowing, b) close the revenue shortfalls of Great Recession, and c) coupled with a do-nothing legislative approach relative to the Bush tax cuts would almost entirely close the existing budget deficits within a few years.

But, by all means, let’s go on pretending that deep, punitive cuts to the social safety net and eliminating access to abortions are the only Serious Person positions possible given the current situation.

2.96

Who has egg on their face if there is a sovereign debt crisis, House Republicans or the president?

A “Senior GOP Lawmaker,” making explicit the GOP’s intention to shitcan the sovereign debt of the United States in the hopes of short-term political gain. Make no mistake, they plan to default. They think it’s a good idea. It’s the only way they can imagine winning the White House in 2012; they’re sure as hell not going to get there on the back of their brilliant “end Medicare, give proceeds to the rich” gambit. Default is the plan, was the plan, will always be the plan.
And, no, they haven’t considered whether it will be worth winning executive leadership of a country utterly crippled by a combination of existing debts and the inability to borrow on the global markets (such as they will even exist after default) for eternal wars and deep tax cuts for the wealthiest. They’re not big thinkers in the GOP. In fact, they are actively and openly against thinking about anything. So that’s just the sort of governance we’re going to get from President Bachman, elected in a landslide post default and post economic apocalypse.
Source: politico.com