"Forget all the numbers being tossed around in Washington," begins today's New York Post article about domestic policy. I think I've heard that one before. It's as good a starting out place as any when thinking about policy. After all, the point of any deliberative decision making process (or even a meaningful thought experiment) is to throw reality, constraints, and facts out the window. Who cares that the federal debt can't be paid for by discretionary spending cuts alone? Just ignore that fact. We already established that facts don't exist.
Allow me to respond to the New York Post:Think about a few key numbers that might help any person grope towards a reasonable macroeconomic policy in the next few years.
There's, for instance, the length of the current economic recession: 5 years and counting. There's the depth of the recession: 14 million unemployed Americans. Then there's the economy-contracting factor of taking money out of the economy in a period of anemic economic growth: for every dollar the Republicans take out of the economy, the economy will shrink by 1.6 dollars. For every dollar that the government spends by contrast, the economy grows by 1.6 dollars.
Those are the numbers that News Corp its business conglomerate allies want you to forget. They want you to ignore that 1 in 7 Americans is below the poverty line (The Koch-funded Heritage foundation even released a report attacking the poverty line yesterday). They want you to forget that the money that budget deficit we're facing was caused by shoveling $1.8 trillion of federal money into the pockets of the wealthy, super wealthy, and obscenely wealthy. And the current "debt crisis" was helped along by Republicans demanding an extension of additional tax cuts last December, costing Americans an additional $3.9 trillion. Incidentally, the obscenely wealthy got the most bang for their buck. And the middle class got a pittance back; less than the worth of government services to which they lost access.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the enactment of teh first Bush tax cut into law. Commentators are calling the Bush tax cuts an abysmal failure. The tax cuts ushered in stagnating growth in real wages, retarded GDP expansion, and decreased job creation. The government surplus evaporated, leaving trillions of trillions of dollars of debt. George Bush left an abysmal economic record even before the recession he ushered in. The economic numbers show that if the goal of the Bush Tax Cuts was to create "massive job growth, vast new wealth, higher incomes, smaller government, and balanced budgets," as many conservatives argued they would, they were a complete failure.
I am afraid that those goals are a total misreading of history. The Bush White House was not interested in continuing the government surplus; all other goals besides eliminating that surplus of tax recepits compared to government expenses were ancilary to Bush's goals. Look no farther than the Governor's rhetoric as he signed the tax cuts into law:"We recognize, loud and clear, the surplus is not the government's money," he said. "The surplus is the people's money. And we ought to trust them with their own money."
Goal #1 was to wipe out the surplus. The logic is plain: as long as government is taking in more money than it is spending, it is taking in too much money. Bush proceeded along ideological lines to zero out government balances without regard to consequences. The promised economic benefits were all made by outside voices, looking to defend the fateful decision to decrease tax receipts.
The Bush Tax Cuts achieved their only purpose: to wipe out the good governance practices of the Clinton administration, which estalished a sound fiscal footing for the federal government without enacting long-lasting socially progressive programs. Commentators are trying to fit the devastating consequences into a false narrative of enlightened statesmanship. There is little evidence that Bush intended for the tax cuts to benefit the American economy. The commentators who attempt to put the Bush tax cuts into this framework are dangerously misinterpreting history.
Last sunday, an American commando team stormed Osama Bin Laden's compound, killing him and the couriers who sheltered him. This is without a doubt the single largest achievement in the international war on Al Qaeda and its affiliates. This week, President Bush and his national security team have claimed credit for the killing of OBL.
It's a piteously selfish move, based on the pretense that they put in motion the events that led to OBL's death. And to some degree this is true; the Bush national security team allowed OBL to survive in Tora Bora and failed to focus singlemindedly on Al Qaeda. The failure of the Bush Administration's 'Global War on Terror/Struggle Against Islamic Extremism' led to this moment precisely because it had not achieved the goal that President Obama secured. Similar logic tells us that the economic recovery over which Obama is presiding is a result of President Bush's economic policies for encouraging the Great Recession.
Success has many fathers, but in this case the only ones who contributed to it are the intelligence officers, soldiers, military leadership, and analysts who focused on the capture or killing of OBL. Toppling Saddam Hussein's regime did not net Bin Laden. Nor did torturing key Al Qaeda prisoners. In fact, waterboarding merely succeeded in providing a flat denial of intelligence that eventually did lead to OBL, the involvement in Al Qaeda of the courier.
The death of Osama Bin Laden is due to the counterterrorism policy that President Obama and his national security team put in place. It is not due to the President personally, or even his team as a whole. The killing of OBL is a vindication of every national security thinker, intelligence operative, and military leader who supported a traditional intelligence/law enforcement/targeted strategy of focusing on Al Qaeda.
President Bush and his team failed to do that, choosing unnecessary wars and torture over the tactics that brought us the death of America's most influential enemy.
Politico elucidates a telling flaw of the 'both sides have points' journalism paradigm. Ben Smith has apparently been racking has brain to normalize the statistic that half of Republicans believe that President Obama was not born in Hawaii, and that consequently, a massive fraud was performed 50 years ago to fake his eligibility. The Politico leading light compares the shocking 45% of Republicans who believe that President Obama was born outside of the U.S. to Democrats who answered either 'very' or 'somewhat' the question:"How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"
This comparison is completely inadequate, inappropriate, and embarrassing for a major media outlet to make, even off-hand at a cocktail party. Ben Smith wrote it on his official blog.
First of all, the facts behind the questions are distinctly different. "people... taking no action to stop the attacks" is not exactly a statement that was contradicted by evidence. Evidence proving that inaction was due to an absence of knowledge is hard to imagine, much less come by. President Bush and his national security team had even been briefed with a daily update titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike U.S." about a month before the attacks. On the other hand, President Obama's birth certificate is a matter of public record, and the contention that "the President was born outside of the U.S." has been flatly contradicted by... well, reality. It would be difficult to disprove the 9/11 inaction theory empirically, though believing it certainly requires believing the worst about American leadership. On the other hand, birtherism requires a dogmatic rejection of reality.
Liberal American ideology would tend to provoke Democrats to believe that someone somewhere in the government had forewarning about the 9/11 attacks. The tendency among the party that erected the Great Society and offered the New Deal is to emphasize the government's capabilities. If someone in the government hadn't had prior knowledge of the attacks, it strikes at a core trust in the capability of the state to protect Americans. The error behind the "Bush Knew" conspiracy theory results from placing too much faith in government.
The pertinent question is: what does the error behind the Birther conspiracy say about the Republican party? Republicans are distrustful of government, sure, but distrustful to the point where they believe that local newspapers, every current media outlet, and the State of Hawaii perpetrate a fraud allowing the country to democratically elect Barack Obama? The only plausible lesson that we get about Republicans is that they believe their political opponents don't legitimately exist. Some democrats had doubts about the intentions of the Bush Administration; some Republicans steadfastly refuse to believe the reality around them. The two statements are simply not similar.
But even if they were equivalent statements (or said something fundamentally similar about the respondents), the numbers don't stack up to make Ben Smith's case.
