Don’t Know How To Party – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Serious question: can anyone point me to an economist saying that the Obama jobs bill wouldn’t help the economy? That it wouldn’t reduce unemployment?
I occasionally try to read the perspective from the other side. My go-to is The Corner at The National Review – which strikes me as having a nice balance between vaguely reasonable and totally crazy conservativism. So I stopped by there today to see the reactions to the jobs speech. Not to find out if they liked any element of it – obviously they will not. But just to see what rationale they could provide for rejecting it.
These are my findings:
Category 1: This bill is not as good as a more comprehensive thing that I support. Ergo, it must be rejected. Example.
Category 2: We already did stimulus and the economy is bad, lol. Example. Another example. This category is the most infuriating. It is taken as a religiously confirmed truth that stimulus ‘doesn’t work’ so it’s not even worth assessing the details here.
Category 3: I prefer to live in la-la land where ideal forms of private economic expansion are already taking place, so there is no need for the government to get involved. Example: “We don’t need more federal spending on infrastructure. Instead, we need higher-quality infrastructure spending financed and built by the private sector. We need private airports, private air-traffic control, private toll highways. When the federal government spends on infrastructure, it often misallocates the funds.” Yes, if such things were being built, it would be true that stimulus wouldn’t be necessary. Because, you know, we wouldn’t be in a recession.
As far as I can tell, that’s it. No evidence that the program won’t work. No economic support for any of the claims. Just snark.
Meanwhile, every reputable economist who has looked at it agrees that it would boost GDP something like 1-2% and produce a fair number of jobs. That’s not great, but it’s a whole lot better than doing nothing.
The whole thing is really depressing.
The premise of parties relies on an underlying unity – on a lot of non-controversial things there is general agreement within the bureaucracy. Fights take place at the level of how to implement general policy goals, rather than about the goals themselves. This allows for the stuff where there is a genuine contrast in positions to be shown in stark relief. The people get to express their will on those subjects, and those opinions filter down into the actual day-to-day business of governance, which mostly goes on in the background.
That ideal bears almost no resemblance to our current system. On the major crises of the day, there appears to be no interest in the actual operations of government. There is no background. Everything is an absolute disagreement.
Look, I have no problem with Republicans being opposed to the plan. But opposition and fingers-in-ears-refusal-to-listen are very different things. Responsible opposition entails being able to distinguish between 1) those things that the other party is doing differently than you would like and 2) those things the other party supports that you absolutely reject.
If Republicans are intransigent on issues of genuine moral distinction, that’s fine. But to be intransigent on the very idea that economics works is…stunning.
Putting on my political adviser hat: the best possible response from the Republican caucus will be to insist on breaking up components of the bill and passing a few of them. To absolutely reject the whole package will clue in even the most inattentive observers that something is seriously wrong in the state of Boehner. I’m genuinely curious to see whether the higher-ups in the party are capable of making this clear to the rest of them.
Of course, we’re talking about a party whose presumptive-ish nominee thinks (and thinks it’s politically useful for him to say) that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. So who the hell knows.