Ever since the first
homo whatzis traded a flaked flint ax for a stitched leopard-skin shawl, discussion of what should or shouldn’t be done to direct an economy has been, next to religion, the one area of discourse guaranteed to end in verbal, if not actual, fisticuffs. Mention a name in the field and you can almost feel the room fill with adrenaline: Smith, Mill, Marx, Hayek, Myrdal, Friedman, Galbraith, Greenspan. And, oh yeah, Krugman and Kudlow.
Many Bush Administration foes argued months ago here and at other ports in the blogworld that the - let me call it, “troubled” – economy would make for a powerful bit of artillery in the coming contest to regain the White House. And, indeed, it can.
However, deploying it to best advantage will require more than lobbing shells like “jobless recovery” in the direction of 1600 Penn. If this isn’t apparent already, it will be soon. The GOP’s smirking points are already: Look, they’re working; Bush’s policies – particularly the tax cuts – are making things better. GDP is up, joblessness is down. Life is improving, because, as Sean Hannity keeps saying, “the Clinton-Gore recession” has been beaten.
I didn’t say it. He did. And you can expect every Republican operative worth a damn to do the same thing from now until November 2. Over and over again, until widespread belief may very well become that the Republicans rescued us from eight years of Democratic economic catastrophe.
Don’t yell “But that’s a lie!!” at me. I know. And I think the majority of Americans know, too. Yet over the next nine months, how many will come to doubt their own knowledge under the barrage of Rovian BS oozing from their televisions and newspapers? How many fence-straddlers will fall for that message?
My prediction:
too many if the Democrats don’t craft a straightforward, believable, loaded-with-one-liners message about the economy.
A pre-Inaugural
Washington Post poll three weeks ago showed that 51% percent of Americans approved of the job Bush is doing “managing” the economy. However, by 58% to 39%, they rated the economy - not terrorism - as the bigger problem facing America. And, asked who they would prefer to handle the economy, 50% favored Democrats in Congress. while 43 percent preferred Bush. Other
polls show similar so-so results.
Hopeful results, but nothing really to instill us with glee given the it’s-getting-better propaganda with which the nation soon will be pumped brimful.
Obviously, the deficit is one of Bush’s major vulnerabilities, which Charlie Fisher deliciously exploited in the MoveOn.org working-children
ad. Even core constituencies are bristling at the Bush budget and its deficit outcome. But most of these folks will never vote Democratic. The best that can be hoped for is that they will stay home election day. The question is whether the swing voters can be lured away.
This is problematic because there’s no denying that Democrats also are vulnerable on the deficit. If there’s one fundamental element of Democratic philosophy most of us can agree on, it’s that the government should spend money on well-thought-out social, economic and environmental programs that benefit average Americans. This basic belief is at once both the party’s strength and its weakness in a campaign.
For one thing, a lot of government money has been wasted on badly thought-out programs that didn’t work and should have been retooled or scuttled long before they were. Moreover, spending means taxing, and there you’ve got the GOP meme for the past two decades: the tax-and-spend Democrats. This is the sloganeering veneer covering the solid battering ram of Grover Norquist’s manual for rightists: drown government social programs with a deluge of deficits.
Since not a single Republican voted for the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, the one that brought surpluses after record deficits under Reagan-Bush, pointing this out should by itself be enough to deflect any GOP tax-and-spend mockery. But it isn’t. Neither is countering with "credit-card Republicans." Democrats need to counter GOP claims with their own powerfully concentrated memes. Just above bumper-sticker stuff.
I’m lousy at this sort of thing, but something along the lines of: “Republicans don’t cut taxes, they shift them … and shaft us” or “Democrats spend your tax money to help everybody; Republicans spend it to help their friends.”
OK, those need polish from people with more skills than I, but you get the idea. Whether it’s taxes, the budget or the deficit, Democrats obviously need excellent economic programs. However, much as I wish elections were won based on who is best on the issues, for the typical voter it’s the perception of who is best. To win the election, Democrats need sound-bites that get under people’s skin and stay there.
Although I’m well to his left, I’ve always appreciated the zero sugarcoating analyses of economist
Bradford DeLong. He had an especially good one three days ago on the deficit over at the Center for American Progress. As so often is the case, you can’t get full flavor from excerpts, so I recommend reading the whole thing. But here are some nuggets:
Think Again: Deficit Coverage: 'What's Missing?'
by Brad DeLong
"Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," snapped Vice President Richard Cheney to about-to-be-fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill a little over a year ago. He's wrong – as wrong about deficits as he was about Ahmad Chalabi's popular support in Iraq or Saddam Hussein's capability to threaten America. Deficits do matter.
How much do they matter? How much they matter is what's missing from the mainstream press. In fact, you'll have a hard time finding deficit forecasts by reading the mainstream press.
You'll have an easy time finding the Bush administration's official deficit forecast for 2009: $237 billion. But reading through the news section of the Washington Post will tell you almost nothing more. You will read uncontradicted quotes from OMB head Josh Bolten about how "with Congress' help in enacting the budget… we will be well on the path to cutting the deficit in half within five years." You'll come away with the (false) impression that the Bush budget manages to do this and provide $1.24 billion in tax cuts too. You'll find news reporters writing with a straight face about Bush's "confidence" that the deficit can be halved by 2009 alongside big boosts in Defense and Homeland Security spending and the extension of all the Bush tax cuts.
You'll do somewhat better with the news pages of the New York Times: Edmund Andrews will tell you that "tough surgery on... spending... produce[s] only a tiny reduction in the... deficit," and that there are enormous unreported deficits after 2009. But you'll have to read down to and beyond the twelfth paragraphs of articles to learn that neither Democrats nor Republicans in Congress find the Bush forecast credible. Only the Wall Street Journal dares tell its readers in any article's first paragraph that the Bush budget is "fiscal sleight of hand."
You'll do much better with the editorial pages (except the Journal, of course).
Ah, yes, of any editorial writers in the country, those at the WSJ are the least likely to read their own news pages. But, face it, most economic news coverage in the U.S. media sucks. Even in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer and Knight there was usually a labor writer on staff at the biggest publications. However, writing about labor is considered too much like cheerleading, unlike, supposedly, what goes on in the typical business section.
So let me fill in what's missing, and give an honest forecast of what the policies the Bush administration espouses are likely to do. The honest forecast is for a deficit of $400 billion in 2009, rising to $600 billion in 2014, and then rising still further thereafter.
What effects will these deficits have on the American economy? The media tell you that deficits are bad. They may even tell you that deficits slow growth, and raise the chances of a financial crisis that will turn into not a recession but a depression. But we need to have a sharper picture. So let me once again fill in part of what's missing. I cannot put a number on the chance that Bush deficits will trigger a financial crisis and a depression. But I can put a number on how the growth slowdown: big enough to cut an average American family's income by $4,000 by the end of the standard 10-year budget forecast period.
Think of it that way: George W. Bush wants to give your family a $4,000 annual pay cut in a decade.
Now THERE’S a meme for every Democrat to repeat and repeat. Tax cut for them and pay cut for you.
A lot of the benefits from what would otherwise have been higher investment – a lot of the buildings and machines that would have helped America's workers do their stuff – will simply not be there. Productivity will be lower. And wages will be lower. That's $4,000 per family in lost income every year. That's a lot of clothes dryers not bought, a lot of vacations not taken, a lot of doctor's visits not made, a lot of old cars driven into the ground for an extra two years. That's a poorer America with less money to fund education or environmental cleanup. That's what will be missing.
And what will we have in exchange? Big cuts in taxes for the $300,000-plus-a-year crowd, profits for politically well-connected companies, and very little else. It looks to me at least like a very bad bargain.
This is not a partisan view. From the left my friends will point out that faster economic growth is not the only thing, and that budget surpluses plus faster capital accumulation are not worth the price they cost if they are funded by cuts in education or public investment or the safety net. And they are right. But they will also admit that budget surpluses and higher investment are better than tax cuts for the $300,000-plus-a-year crowd.
DeLong’s right about those to his left. As I’ve noted
here, growth in GDP is a poor measure of economic well-being. But that stuff is esoteric even to the arcanity of economists, much less anybody else. So I prefer the kind of campaign that can be delineated from DeLong’s evaluation. It offers just the right combination of class
counter-warfare and fiscal sanity. And it goes right to the heart of the battle in which Democrats must undercut what the Republicans pass off as conventional wisdom about Democratic economics.