It looks like David Brooks has finally discovered that our national political discourse is incredibly stupid. He even seems to almost sort of get where the root of the problem lies.
The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. Gigantic tax cuts — if they were affordable — might boost overall growth, but they would do nothing to address the structural problems that are causing a working-class crisis.
Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012.
But, of course, none of this is sufficient for Brooks to take leave of the Republican Party. He must craft a narrative in which the Democrats are equally at fault.
As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing. They acknowledge huge problems like wage stagnation and then offer… light rail! Solar panels! It was telling that the Democrats offered no budget this year, even though they are supposedly running the country. That’s because they too are trapped in a bygone era.
Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity. They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won’t be for decades. Democrats dream New Deal dreams, propose nothing and try to win elections by making sure nobody ever touches Medicare.
Covering this upcoming election is like covering a competition between two Soviet refrigerator companies, cold-war relics offering products that never change.
Never mind that the Democrats successfully raised the minimum wage in 2009, or that they’re the party that believes in progressive taxation, taxes on unearned income, and an estate tax to keep the nation’s richest from gobbling up all wealth we collectively create through increased productivity.
The number of business start-ups per capita has been falling steadily for the past three decades. Workers’ share of national income has been declining since 1983. Male wages have been stagnant for about 40 years. The American working class — those without a college degree — is being decimated, economically and socially.
Does Brooks not make the connection between Reaganomics and these thirty year trends? Here he is pooh-poohing clean energy and efficient transportation as “nothing.” Which party is standing in the way of creating a green economy with new green industries that create new manufacturing jobs?
The Democrats offered plenty in 2009-2010. They offered so much, in fact, that they created a political backlash. They’re not offering much now because the Republicans have the power and the willingness to block anything and everything.
The Democrats have adjusted to the times. They’re not offering to go back to the New Deal. They realize that old solutions will not work as well in our modern age. Defending Medicare and Social Security is not some ossified ideological rigidity. It’s basic decency.
Seventy-five percent of the problems we’re facing in this country we either caused by the Republicans (unemployment, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, income disparity, the budget deficit) or are going unaddressed because of Republican opposition. Another 15% of our problems are caused by stupid rules adopted by the U.S. Senate which give the minority party as much power as the majority power. That leaves about 10% left over for blaming the Democrats. And I’d say about 9% of the that 10% can be laid at the feet of our campaign finance laws (or lack thereof) that only exist in present fashion because of Republican-appointed judges.
Our country is totally screwed up, but it’s not the left’s fault. And the Democratic Party is the only institution we have in this country that can at least keep the country running without destroying everything it touches. Find me another institution that can do that much and I’ll give it my support instead.
“They’re not offering to go back to the New Deal. They realize that old solutions will not work as well in our modern age”
Oh, I see. Keynes, despite having been proven completely right, is to be ignored. We are too modern to use government stimulus on infrastructure to get us out of a depression. Well, hey, thank you BooMan for undermining the main economic argument of the left. Wouldn’t want to defend the basis for the party’s existence, after all.
(Seriously, did you read Klain? He’s arguing against dam building, as if anyone were arguing for it. Yes, that’s his entire column — dams are bad. He points out that the majority of the New Deal projects were smaller infrastructure — as if that weren’t what liberals had been arguing for all along. Then he touts cutting Social Security taxes as more job producing than, you know, actually hiring people to fix roads and bridges.)
BoBo is stupid. It would be nice to have pundits and politicians who didn’t enable him by agreeing with his premise that the New Deal was a failure.
What did Klain ever do besides work for Senator MBNA?
I don’t think the New Deal was a failure at all. And, in this context, I am only talking about the jobs programs of the era, not the safety net elements.
The Democrats have not argued that we should emulate New Deal make-work programs, for example, even though many progressive commentators have.
BoBo acts like the Dems are trying to relive the 1930’s. I see no evidence of that.
The Democrats have adjusted to the times. They’re not offering to go back to the New Deal. They realize that old solutions will not work as well in our modern age.
What’s wrong with the New Deal? The same basic rules apply now. Sure, there are some technological updates needed, but the general points still work. It just needs to be done on a bigger scale since we have a much bigger economy now. In fact, some might say Social Security could be strengthened and improved by paying out a larger benefit.
The New Deal is what saves the rats from being clobbered by angry mobs, and I mean these days.
It should be expanded and we know the Repubs won’t want anything to go forward that would help Obama.
The problem with Social Security is that for the disabled, they have to have other kinds of help because the check is too small. It costs more money to have the agency workers and everything else to do the paperwork etc.
I’m on Social Security Disability. It basically covers my health insurance and my out-of-pocket drug expenses. That’s it. (And that’s in a year when I don’t have any major hospitalization.) If I want frivolous amenities like food, housing, clothes, or transportation, regardless of how poor my health is, I have to work. That was how I got into writing. Even on bad days, I can generally crawl to a keyboard.
There are a lot of disabled people in the same boat. As health care costs keep rising sharply, far above SSD COLAs (SSD amounts have stayed flat for two years), the problem is getting steadily worse. And that’s for people who have health insurance. The health care reform bill’s ban on refusing to cover people with preexisting conditions is a godsend – but the lack of cost controls will have much the same effect. Little wonder so many of us go bankrupt. Even with SSD and anywhere from one to five part-time jobs at a time, I’ve exhausted my savings in the time I’ve been chronically ill.
Nobody’s even close to talking about helping out the disabled. Quite the contrary: it’s become eminently clear many leaders consider us an expendable drain on society. To be eligible for SSD, you have to have been in the workforce for 10+ years first, so it’s not like people didn’t pay in. Now we’re collecting on our insurance policy because, you know, that’s why you have insurance, and even receiving the pitiful sums we do gets painted as some sort of moral failing. Assholes.
Obama only knows how to play small ball.
Why does everything have to do with Obama? When you die will you whisper Obama like Kane whispered Rosebud as his snow sled burned? Whatever..vote Romney as you will enjoy his brand of big bat baseball.
You’re saying that Rosebud was something Kane was terribly disappointed with? That had failed him miserably? Go back and watch the film again.
As to Romney – he and the rest of the Republicans think even smaller than Obama. That’s our problem. We have no leadership.
But politically Brooks is right: If Obama and the Dems don’t want another wipeout, they’ll have to do better than talking up high-speed rail and other great stuff that kicks in a decade or more from now. Obama is doing an excellent job planning for the middle-term, but that won’t get him any votes next year. FDR’s solutions might not work today, but the idea of immediate relief is as relevant now as it was then. All it takes is some intelligent determination to make it happen — or at least to make the enemy sabotage it.
So, um, yeah. Do you actually sympathize with Klain, or is this like a pundit thing where you’re combating Brooks’ false straw men with someone else’s?
Because what is this “megaproject” bullshit? Nobody cares about the relative size of what is being built. They care that the administration’s job creation record is the second lowest in the last seventy years. Even though seven million people very much had jobs producing something somewhere in the economy all of four years ago and therefore can’t totally be useless going forward. Then he goes on to say it’s a shame he was too awesome at his job at being efficient and preventing wasteful labor surpluses and that we should go cut some more taxes again instead.
Bravo Ron Klain. Thank you for telling the hard truths.
what I took away from it was not that building dams is not the answer, but that we can’t rely on transportation projects and the like to fix unemployment because they don’t create enough jobs. We should be rebuilding bridges and repaving roads and working on green projects, but what we need are new industries, not public works programs, because the scale has changed from the 1930’s in terms of how many jobs the government can create per dollar spent. It’s changed so much that we can’t really fix this problem with public works. Politically, it is impossible anyway, but even practically, it’s not the best use of resources. I think Klain makes that point quite well, and I was depressed to have to concede his point.
His opening two sentences:
are all the evidence that the NYT needs to show that they are wasting huge amounts of ink, pixels and a big fat salary on this pathetic jerk. They should get rid of him if he just admits he’s gonna be phoning in his coverage of the upcoming 2012 election.
With a handful of exceptions, phoning it in is a job requirement for the NYT opinion section. Paging Mr. Mustache. Ms. Dowd, white courtesy phone, please. It’s by the minibar.
We should start calling Bobo “Theodoric of New York” as an homage to the classic Steve Martin character from the early days of SNL.