"You don't get what you deserve. You get what you get."
This simple saying, which expresses basic wisdom about how life works, is incompatible with both the conservative mythos as a whole and the pro-corporate mythos that drives the Obama Administration's economic policy. It's this obsession with people getting what they "deserve" which is the origin of the bipartisan project to destroy America's social safety net.
Barack Obama is something of an enigma; he talks a superb game, and he is occasionally excellent. For example, both of his nominees for the Supreme Court are outside the white male WASP/Catholic paradigm which has dominated the process until now. In addition, two of his most effective interventions were the bailout of the US auto industry and the $600 billion semi-stimulus* in 2009.
So why has Barack Obama also been so adamant that 9% unemployment is the New Normal, and that nothing can be done about either the Great Recession or the financial collapse which both caused it and is still ongoing? That is, why does he agree completely with the Republican Party that the New Deal programs which saved this nation in the 30s are impossible and inappropriate now?
We get a clue from the batch of blog posts of which this is a sample, based on this quote:
But then there’s this: There will be no WPA-type programs in our near future. There was no appetite for them in the Obama admin in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and there’s a lot less now. The reasons for that are interesting and I’ll speak to them another day. But it ain’t happening.
And please don’t accuse me of “negotiating with myself” here. I stressed above the importance of making those arguments, and I frequently made them myself as a member of the President’s economics team.
It’s also congenitally hard for politicians to get behind “a serious program of mortgage modification.” Those who advocate for this (the NYT editorial page, e.g.) are right, but they’re also downplaying a very binding constraint. The politics of this idea are deeply wound up in moral hazard. People forget, but it was precisely this action—giving mortgage relief to someone at risk of default and not to someone who was struggling to keep up their payments—that birthed the Tea Party.
By the bye, that's not what birthed the Tea Party -- what birthed the Tea Party was mortgage relief to wealthy bankers and the fact that the President is black. Apparently, both of these concepts are so verboten in the Administration that they cannot be expressed.
The underlying concept which weaves throughout this statement is, "People should get what they deserve." And the Powers that Be should expend enormous effort making it happen. But it's worse than that, because the wealthy are exempt from all this hand-wringing over moral hazard, despite the fact that we lit a couple trillion dollars on fire in order to bail them out, and nothing's changed. So that leads to the other irrational belief, the one that defines the Obama Administration's failures:
People generally get what they deserve.
This is the core of President Barack Obama's economic failure -- he believes, on a nonrational level, along with his people, that people generally get what they deserve. So if you intervene in the economy, you are by definition mostly helping the "undeserving." That's why there was stomach for helping UAW and for a too-small stimulus; the first were people who "deserve" support, and the second was too small to actually have any long-term effects. And it's why the Obama economic team was adamant that the stimulus was large enough for so long. It had to be, nonrationally.
9% unemployment (and 25% underemployment) is the New Normal, because Barack Obama believes that if you deserved a job with a living wage, you'd already have one. And a HAMP program designed to kick owners out of houses while squeezing a last few payments out of them is the signature housing policy of the Obama Administration, because he believes that if you are underwater, you deserve to have your house taken from you. It doesn't matter what mass default does to the economy. It doesn't even matter that nobody "deserves" to happen to have access to a rich nation's economy.
What matters is that to the Obama Administration, accountability is for the poor and middle class -- even to the point where we will be punished for the wealthy's sins. He is, in his own way, as tribal as the conservatives.
That's why Obama and the Republicans agree that nothing should be done to help the economy. Because where it matters most, he shares their ideology. And if we want to change the Obama Administration's policy decisions, we need to persuade them by attacking the nonrational values which underlie it, rather than continuing the useless task of attempting to force them to comprehend history.