Olympia Snowe and the Poor Moderates

So Olympia Snowe has written a self-justifying op-ed about why she is retiring:

Some people were surprised by my conclusion, yet I have spoken on the floor of the Senate for years about the dysfunction and political polarization in the institution. Simply put, the Senate is not living up to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Naturally the MSM will eat this up.  There's good stuff on this from Matt Yglesias and Jon Chait that really makes the point. This is Chait:

When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.

The characteristic Snowe episode came during the health care fight. The Obama administration, desperate to win her vote, wooed her with endless meetings and pleas, affording her a once-in-a-generation chance to not only help pass health care reform but make it smarter, more efficient, and more compassionate. Instead, Snowe tormented the administration by dangling an elusive and ever-changing criteria before their noses. She at first centered her objections around the inclusion of a public option. Democrats removed it, and she voted for the bill in the Finance Committee, only to turn against it when it reached the decisive vote on the Senate floor. Snowe complained that the process was happening too fast, and that it was too partisan, which seemed to be her way of saying she wouldn’t vote for it unless other Republicans joined her.

Look Olympia Snowe, like other moderate Republicans, had no good options.  Join with Democrats on the Health Care bill, and she would have faced a primary challenge in Maine.  So since the election of Barack Obama she has been unable to demonstrate her moderation because the leadership of the GOP demanded perfect discipline so Democrats wouldn't be able to use her vote as bipartisan cover.

When this happened to Arlen Specter, though, he went a different route.  He took a couple of moderate votes, saw that he was going to get primaried by the radical right, and switched parties.  The fact is that moderate Democrats (not my favorite people, by the way) can survive right now, but moderate Republicans can't- party discipline is too strong.

Olympia Snowe's problem was caused by Republicans, though.  It would be nice if she'd say that.

Radical!

A year ago I would have said that the Republican party could not possibly move any further to the right.  After all, here was a party that had invented the individual mandate for health care in the 1990s, and now believed it to be akin to fascism.  A party whose leader in 2001 refused to blame Muslims for 9/11, but was now in fierce opposition to the building of a mosque two blocks and around the corner from the WTC site.  A party that had a nearly maximalist position on abortion.

But then the 2012 presidential primaries started, and I found out I was wrong.  Think about the new positions being staked out, not by fringe candidates, but by the frontrunners for the nomination:

• Rick Santorum isn't just against abortion, he's against contraception.
• Mitt Romney's new tax plan calls for a 20% tax cut on top of the Bush tax cuts
• Rick Santorum's tax cut is even bigger
• Santorum's criticism of Romney's tax plan is that it borrows too much from Occupy Wall Street, presumably because the top 1% still pay something.
• Supporting Israel isn't enough anymore; now Republicans are expected to absolutely support every policy and practice of the Israeli government, unless they can figure out a way to be even tougher than the Israeli government wants to be.

I've said this before; the Republican party has turned so far right that it's just staggering.  And this isn't about "polarization" in a neutral sense- Democrats have not made a similar turn to the left.  I've challenged some Republican friends to come up with one issue on which Democrats are now further to the left than they were in 2000 other than gay rights/gay marriage.  I've never heard an answer.

"Obama Derangement Syndrome" seems to have overtaken the right.  Hell, as soon as Michelle Obama began her campaign against childhood obesity, much of the Republican establishment started criticizing her while proudly eating high-fat foods.  These guys are crazy!

A Quick Point about Mitt

Lots of chatter about Mitt Romney's insistence that the US shouldn't have bailed out the auto industry.  He's getting hammered for this, as he should, seeing as the bailout has been a smashing success by any measure.  But one point is getting lost here- Romney's disingenuousness.

I know, I know- Romney is disingenuous all the time, so it's hard to call him out on it constantly.  But this is what I mean here: If Mitt Romney had been present in 2009, and in the same situation as Obama, he would have done the same thing as Obama.  He would have studied the situation, he would have seen that there was no funding for an ordered bankruptcy, and he would have bailed out the industry for the same reasons the Obama administration did it.

He just can't admit it now, because anything Obama does immediately becomes Socialist in RepublicanLand.

...In Which I Try to be Fair to Conservatives on Health Care

I was thinking about the health care debate this week, in light of this article someone sent me about the failures of ObamaCare and the private sector improvements that are coming about (in spite of health care reform presumably) to make insurance more affordable.

I'm certainly ready to agree that ObamaCare is imperfect in a lot of ways, but I'd frame it in the sense that the problem is that it doesn't solve enough of the current problems our system has, rather than that it creates new problems.

But here's what it boils down to: liberals have a goal of universal coverage for health care. To reach that goal (or get close to it- ObamaCare gets close), it is necessary to make some sort of major change involving increased government involvement. ObamaCare changes the health care system as minimally as possible within the frame of reaching its goal.

Conservatives are aghast at the increased role of government- which is fair enough. But of course Conservatives also don't share the goal of universal, affordable health care for everyone. They feel that the downside of increased government isn't worth the upside of insuring everyone.

So there's a stalemate, but it's not really an argument about the technocratic outcomes or unintended consequences of legislation. It's not about a secret Democratic party plan to turn the whole country into a socialist dystopia. It's not about a secret Republican plan to ensure poor people die off faster. It's just about priorities. I care about all Americans having access to health insurance more than I care about government control of my life.  It seems that Conservatives feel the opposite.

 

Yet when I suggest such a formulation, in which I think I'm being fair to Conservatives and their sincere urge to keep government as small as possible, I get pushback- "what do you mean, we don't want universal coverage? Of course we do!"

 

But that's ridiculous- many of the ideas that Conservatives throw out there to improve the health care system in America are fine, good thoughts, which really might improve things- increased competition, less opaque payment systems, making sure consumers see prices, malpractice reform, etc.  These proposals are just fine, and would probably lead to more efficiency and lower prices for many of us.  But none of these ideas would do anything to ensure universal coverage.  People who work in low paying jobs for companies that don't offer health insurance would still be out in the cold.  People with pre-existing conditions would still have nowhere to turn for affordable coverage.  Remember there are 50 million uninsured people in the US.  Go with these Conservative ideas and maybe some small percentage of them would be able to afford it, but the vast majority still wouldn't.

 

We should at least have honest debates.  There's no way to make health insurance accessible to everyone without lots of government action.  It's still perfectly legitimate to oppose universal health care- government doesn't provide universal automobiles for everyone, for example, so maybe health care shouldn't be provided either- but let's dispense with the pretension that Conservative plans would produce health care for all. 

Supposedly Respectable Conservatives Going Over the Cliff

Pres Obama took office in 2009

Wow.  Someone sent me this piece from Peter Ferrara at Forbes magazine:

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

I told my correspondent who sent me this that I was planning to parse the piece on this blog, but reading it just exhausts me- it's so densely packed with poor reasoning, misleading arguments, and the like that I can barely face it.  But I'll give it a try, and see if I can slog through the whole thing.

Ferrara starts by noting that

What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

He then notes that Obama entered office when "the recession was in its 13th month", i.e. it was already over the average and only three months from the record before he was even in office.  In the end the recession lasted 18 months- i.e. it was over five months after Obama took office.  What could a president possibly do in his first five months in office that would improve that?  Ferrara goes on to take some gratuitous shots at Keynesian theory, which doesn't really merit a response from me- there aren't any facts to respond to.  But he also goes over lots of legitimate stats about how weak the recovery has been, and how unemployment continues to be at a very high level.

Ferrara notes that economists say that recessions resulting from financial crises are worse than other recessions, but then completely ignores that point when talking about how great Ronald Reagan's recovery was compared to Obama's.  But of course the recession of the late '70s was wholly a creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, intentionally inflicted to beat back inflation, and followed during the Reagan years by lowering interest rates.

What's needed when one criticizes the results of government policy, moreover, is to create a narrative explaining what should have been done.  Without explaining the mistakes, you don't have a credible argument and you're just left repeating the same thing- "look at the results!  Lalalalalalalala!"  I didn't see much of that until later in the piece.  But think about the issue with respect to the 1980s vs. the 2008 recession- tax rates are lower now than they were then.  Hell, Reagan increased taxes later in the decade!  Where's the explanation of what Reagan did right that BHO did wrong?  Instead we get this:

Indeed, exactly none of President Obama’s policies have been well designed to restore economic recovery and traditional American prosperity. They have consistently been the opposite of everything that Reagan did to end the American decline of the 1970s, and restore booming growth for 25 years.

Wow!  The opposite of Reagan!  That's serious!  I wonder what he means by that?  Sorry, the reader can keep wondering, because there's not a single example given.  The writer goes on to talk about the looming tax increases in 2013 and how they're going to really screw us up.  But of course that just points out again that taxes have been cut during the Obama years so far- the Magic Reagan Formula- and these are the results.

So next comes the Jeremiad against the tax rates scheduled to increase in 2013, tax rates that are essentially the same as existed during the Clinton years, which coincided with greater prosperity than was ever seen in the 2000s during the last conservative Golden Age.

Finally there's a screed about how "the Obama administration is in the process of imposing a blizzard of new regulatory costs and barriers that will be building to a crescendo by 2013 as well".  The examples given are Dodd-Frank (not yet implemented significantly) and the Health Care bill (also not yet implemented).  No examples of any expansion of regulation so far- so how is it that we've had this terrible recovery?  Taxes are lower, regulation hasn't changed.  The one thing that conservatives usually criticize, the exploding deficit, isn't mentioned here- I guess even a cynical hack like Ferrara can't bring himself to blame the lack of growth on a defict, which clearly has nothing to do with it.

And of course we know that the President is going to get the credit or blame for whatever happens in the economy, but supposed intellectuals writing for highbrow magazines ought to at least acknowledge that in fact presidents don't have absolute power and can't dictate policy- that's why it takes more than a view from 50,000 feet to explain why a recovery isn't taking hold.  Why not?  Would it be different if Congress had passed the jobs bill Obama proposed last year?  Did the Republicans propose something in particular that would have helped?  I guess Ferrara would say that we should have cut taxes more, but that argument is patently ridiculous given that the US currently has the lowest tax rates it's had since WW II, which didn't stop the recession from rocking us badly.

Anyway, what a piece of drivel.

UPDATE: This piece by Jon Chait makes some of these same points.

The Panama Canal and the Case for Government to Do Stuff

I've been reading David McCullough's book about the Panama Canal.  It's not a politically partisan book or anything, and I haven't been thinking about it in the context of today's political debate.  But now, toward the end of the book, he describes how some commentators of the time were critical of the Socialist nature of the enterprise.

The Panama Canal was started by a French consortium in the 1870s, funded by stock bought by investors both big and small.  It failed spectacularly for many reasons including poor decisions made by the main visionary who insisted on building a sea-level canal even though a lock canal was plainly required.  But even with better decisions, it seems that the task was just too big for the private sector to accomplish.

So the US government, driven by President Teddy Roosevelt, took it over and built the canal.  The enterprise could not have been more controlled by government- all the engineers and workers were employed directly by the US government, which built company housing, hospitals, social clubs, owned the railroad, and owned the steamship line that brought workers back and forth.  And it worked out pretty well.

This isn't an argument against Capitalism- it's just to make the point that some things can't be accomplished by private enterprise and sometimes the government is all that's left to do it.  Properly administered, governments are capable of great things like the building of the Panama Canal, which has benefited the world economy many times over.  So I don't want my government owning the auto companies, but then again in 2009 that industry was failing, and it required the government to bail the auto companies out- nobody else could do it.

The Iranian Threat

From Matt Taibbi:

Virtually all of the Iran stories of late have contained some version of this sort of rhetorical sophistry. The news “hook” in most all of these stories is that intelligence reports reveal Iran is “willing” to attack us or go to war – but then there’s usually an asterisk next to the headline, and when you follow the asterisk, it reads something like, “In the event that we attack Iran first.”

This builds on this Glenn Greenwald piece I've discussed before.

I’ll just note that she [Erin Burnett on CNN] begins her remarks by announcing that “no one buys Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes,” and to prove her point, she immediately introduces footage of yesterday’s Congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper which, she said, “drove that message home.” Except the clip then showed Clapper saying this: “Iran’s technical advances . . . strengthen our assessment that Iran is more than capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders, specifically the Supreme Leader himself, choose to do so.” Is there really not a single brain in the entire CNN apparatus that stirs in the presence of a contradiction this glaring that it virtually screams its demand to be recognized? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Leon Panetta just yesterday said “the intelligence does not show that they’ve made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon,” a fact that Burnett did not manage to mention, even though the same fact was also expressed last month by Israeli officials (“The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon”).

Look, I'm not a pacifist.  I am willing to consider that an attack on Iran may be necessary.  But I'd at least like to see a sober analysis in the media of what's going on.  The US is a huge threat to Iran and its government- the statements from US government officials and talking heads in the media make it pretty clear that we're considering armed belligerance against them.  To then turn around and be outraged that Iranians may be considering defending themselves if we attack is just nuts.

The "axis of evil" government that is the safest from US attacks is North Korea.  Why?  Because they have a nuclear bomb!  Iran is a terrible regime with plans to destroy Israel and anyone else they can, but their attempt to get The Bomb is completely sane- considering our rhetoric, it's the best guarantee the regime could have that we won't pull an Iraq on them and send in the Marines.