Category Archives: Social values

Randy Wray: The Budget Compromise – Congress Creates a Rube Goldberg Doomsday Machine

By Randy Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from EconoMonitor

Don’t you feel relieved? After weeks of threats, hostage-taking, and other forms of deficit terrorism, our two political parties have finally “compromised” on what was always a foregone conclusion. (As I write, we still await the Senate vote—but it looks like a done deal.)

Washington got what it wanted—a down payment on destruction of the last remnants of progressive policy. Soon, it will be 1929 all over again. We can make believe that the New Deal and Great Society programs never existed, and go back to the good old days when it was every “man” for himself.

Team Obama Fiddles While Debt Ceiling Fires Burn

Some historical accounts of the Great Fire of Rome, which destroyed three of the city’s fourteen districts and damaged seven others, depict it as an urban redevelopment project gone bad. Emperor Nero allegedly torched the district where he wanted to build his Domus Aurea. Hence any lyre-playing was not a sign of imperial madness, but a badly-informed leader not knowing his plans had spun badly out of control.

President Obama’s plan at social and economic engineering, of rolling back core elements of the Great Deal out of a misguided effort to cut spending in a weak economy, is similarly blazing out of control. The debt ceiling crisis was meant to be a scare to provide an excuse for measures that are opposed by broad swathes of the public. Polls predictably show that voters want five contradictory things before noon: they are against cutting Social Security and care much more about more jobs than about less deficit, but yeah, they’d like that too if they can have it.

While members of the administration may dimly recognize what a firestorm they have unleashed, their crisis responses look to be no better than Nero’s.

More Shades of TARP: Latest Deficit Ceiling Plan to Establish Extra-Constitutional Legislative Process

We commented last night on the parallels between the pressure tactics used to railroad the passage of the TARP and our current contrived debt ceiling crisis. The similarities have increased in a predictably bad way. Even worse than the economic toll radical budget cutting will impose on ordinary Americans is the continued undermining of basic democratic processes.

Get Ready for TARP 2.0

Washington DC appears to be readying itself for a repeat of the TARP, namely, the passage of unpopular legislation to appease the Market Gods (and transfer even more income from ordinary Americans to the Masters of the Universe). It isn’t yet clear whether this drama will be played out via generating bona fide financial market upheaval or mere threat-mongering (the Treasury market seems pretty confident that well-trained Congresscritters will fall into line). But unlike the TARP, which was a classic example of well-placed interests finding opportunity in the midst of upheaval, this reprise is a far more calculated affair.

Why Liberals are Lame, Part 3: Why a Warren Run for Senate is a Terrible Idea

It’s bad enough that what passes for the left has been kneecapped by the Obama Administration. The ambiguous campaign promise “Change you can believe in” has turned out to be a Nixon-goes-to-China series of moves to the right that would have been well nigh impossible for a Republican to execute without incurring significant costs. Remarkably, Obama has increased both the number and scope of wars, used deficit scaremongering to cut Medicare and Social Security, and passed a health care “reform” bill that made overly expensive American health care even more uneconomical by enriching Big Pharma and health care insurers. And this is only a starter list in his campaign against average Americans.

Those visible moves have been accompanied by a largely stealth operation to neuter what were once called progressive organizations (“progressive” has been rendered meaningless by being adopted by pretty much everyone to the left of Attila the Hun). Groups truly committed to a left-leaning anti-corporate platform quickly learned the cost of crossing Team Obama: in their so-called veal pen, the Administration would get big company backers to yank their funding. This process has now moved up the food chain, but with bigger groups, it is less clear whether the Administration is the driver or whether like minded operatives are acting on their own initiative. Regardless, there is increasingly a vacuum to the left of Obama, which eases his continuing move to the right, as think tanks that are perceived to be reasonably independent, like the Economic Policy Institute, mysteriously lose the backing of significant, established funders.

But what is worse are the self-inflicted wounds. What little remains of the left seems to be rallying around Elizabeth Warren, which given the dearth of prominent figures who are serious about standing up for middle class Americans, as opposed to pandering to them and then selling them out, isn’t a bad impulse per se. But they are deploying their energies in quixotic missions or worse, falling completely in line with the Administration’s plans, which has been to subject Warren to a high end version of the veal pen treatment, to box her in and render her incapable of independent operation. And in case you wonder what I am talking about, I mean the plan, concocted by the Democratic party hackocracy, for her to run for the Senate seat now occupied by Scott Brown.