They Have 24 Hours

Otherwise, one less Republican.

Is Paul Ryan Keynesian Now?

Rep. Paul Ryan is right about Barack Obama, the 2009 stimulus, and jobs:

It was President Obama’s first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.

It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs, and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.

What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn’t just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent, and wasted.

Maybe the greatest waste of all was time. Here we were, faced with a massive job crisis – so deep that if everyone out of work stood in single file, that unemployment line would stretch the length of the entire American continent. You would think that any president, whatever his party, would make job creation, and nothing else, his first order of economic business.

But this president didn’t do that. Instead, we got a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.

It sounds as if Ryan is saying that Obama and congressional Democrats should just have devised a smarter stimulus. That's astonishing, since according to the ideology that he and Mitt Romney now proffer, government is incapable of investing wisely in the private economy. Instead, Ryan implies that a smarter, more experienced Obama could have built that. And yet under Romney-Ryan, we wouldn't get a dollar of new stimulus. So maybe the smarter vote is for an Obama who has learned from experience and a Congress that will help him do what Ryan says he wishes they'd done in 2009.

NOAA Snark

Presidents usually avoid being critical of predecessors. But Barack Obama was yucking it up about Richard Nixon today as he announced his government reorganization plan:

There are five different entities dealing with housing. There are more than a dozen agencies dealing with food safety. My favorite example—which I mentioned in last year's State of the Union address—as it turns out, the Interior Department is in charge of salmon in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in saltwater. (Laughter.) If you're wondering what the genesis of this was, apparently, it had something to do with President Nixon being unhappy with his Interior Secretary for criticizing him about the Vietnam War. And so he decided not to put NOAA in what would have been a more sensible place.

Obama may have heard the story from William Daley, a Clinton Commerce secretary who just quit after a year as White House chief of staff. If you look at the dates alone, the accusation seems to add up. After the Kent State shootings in May 1970, Interior secretary Wally Hickel wrote a letter to Nixon criticizing him over the Vietnam war and urging him to spend more time listening to young people. That Nixon seethed for months is well known. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was created as part of the Commerce department in October. Nixon fired Hickel in November.

But there's a lot more to the story than that. According to NOAA's official history, the new agency was parked at Commerce on the recommendation of Commerce secretary Maury Stans, a Nixon friend since their Eisenhower years, in anticipation of a dramatic plan to streamline the federal government not unlike the one Obama proposed today. Nixon's was the brainchild of Roy Ash, who died last month:

One of [Ash's] proposals was to replace the Department of Interior with a new Department of Natural Resources. One of the elements of the Department was to be a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which would combine some elements of the Department of Interior with the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA) of the Department of Commerce. Then Secretary of Commerce, Maurice Stans, noting that ESSA would comprise more than two-thirds of this new Agency (some 10,000 employees and an estimated FY 1970 budget of approximately $200 million) countered with a proposal to, at least initially, consolidate and house NOAA within Commerce and transfer it to the proposed Department of Natural Resources at a later date.

NOAA's historians attribute Commerce's win to the logic of Ash's proposed natural resources department (an especially good idea today), Stans' persuasiveness (which I experienced many years later when he was raising money for the Nixon library), and "perhaps" tensions between Nixon and Hickel. Given all that, it looks as if 44 took a cheap shot at 37. If Nixon had succeeded in getting his reorganization plan through a Democratic Congress, NOAA would have ended up right where efficiency wizard Ash wanted. When the Republicans get done with his proposals, we'll see if Obama's still laughing.

Leadership Is Like Parenthood

Sometimes you have to tell the kids they can't have everything they want.

Faith, Magical Thinking, And Picking Our Pockets

Paul Krugman calls Republicans hypocrites for acting like deficit hawks all year only to acquiesce in a $800 billion tax-cut extension without getting a dollar's worth of budget cuts in return.

That's not fair. It's ironic instead of hypocritical. Actually, it's not even ironic. It's revelatory of a mindset that Krugman doesn't quite understand, at least intestinally, as he shows when he writes:

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona — who had denounced President Obama for running deficits — declared that “you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.”

It’s an easy position to ridicule. After all, if you never have to offset the cost of tax cuts, why not just eliminate taxes altogether? But the joke’s on us because while this kind of magical thinking may not yet be the law of the land, it’s about to become part of the rules governing legislation in the House of Representatives.

That's historical memory, not magical thinking. The federal income tax has been legal, in the form of a constitutional amendment that was ratified in 1913, just seven years longer than women have had the right to vote. I wouldn't say the idea that government can naturally confiscate 25-35% or more of our income is necessarily part of our DNA quite yet.

We obviously can't afford to abolish it. Indeed rational deficit and debt reduction means cuts Democrats and Republicans don't like (Social Security and defense) and more revenue from someplace (us). As long as everyone suffers a little for the sake of all, I'm game.

But Kyl's proposal -- that giving people their money back is categorically different than building an aircraft carrier or launching a new program -- isn't magical or mysterious. It's gratifying evidence that part of our political mind still remembers that the federal behemoth that has sometimes seemed to billow and burgeon of its own accord is all contingent on the consent and confiscated wealth of the governed.

Krugman's right that Reagan-addled Republicans aren't facing up to the deficit's stunning dimensions -- but again, that's not hypocrisy; it's faith. Many honestly expect that tax cuts will trigger an 1980s-style recovery leading to 1990s-style surpluses. In the meantime, going back to Krugman's charge of hypocrisy against Republicans, I wish progressive-minded elected officials would own up more openly to their ideological predisposition toward ever-larger government and permanently higher tax rates. As long as they don't, who's really being disingenuous?

In British politics, at least, you know who's for big government and who isn't. In the U.S., everybody's for deficit reduction, which means either irresponsible tax rate reductions or confiscatory gouging, draconian social welfare cuts or trillions in stimulus spending, depending on who's speaking. It's not just our governments that are impoverished. It's also the language we use to talk about public policy.

We Have Ways To Make You Flexible

Why did the weekend's blizzards on the East coast tie up air travel more than they would have back in the day? Why, it's the airlines' "inflexibility," according to the New York Times. Reporter Joe Sharkey runs through the particulars. Profitable airlines don't provide enough personnel to help stranded passengers book new flights. When travelers do get through to a human being, it's hard to get seats, because airlines have figured out how to run fewer flights so that most planes fly full. Pesky profit motive again!

Of course there's one more little thing making airlines inflexible. Sharkey interviews a pilot who says that in the old days, airlines at least tried to get flights off the ground during snowstorms. No more. In April, a federal law went into effect permitting the government to fine airlines up to $27,500 per passenger for every person who's stuck in a plane on the tarmac for three hours or more. "Now they’re often not even trying to take off," the pilot said. "They’re just going straight to wholesale cancellations."

And whose fault is that? And yet you can bet the cash-strapped feds are wondering if they can pass laws telling airlines how many operators to hire and airplanes to fly, or else. Our government's motto: Fined if you do, fined if you don't.

Ice Tea Already

Andrew Sullivan shows how the GOP's new manifesto weenies out on spending.

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

Pat Buchanan says the federal government should arrest the pastor before he burns the Koran.

Sugar Blues

Ross Douthat went to Glenn Beck's rally and had an experience that sounds a little like what it must've been like to go to the Iowa state fair in 1954:

It was a long festival of affirmation for middle-class white Christians — square, earnest, patriotic and religious. If a speaker had suddenly burst out with an Obama-esque “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” the message would have fit right in.

But whereas Obama wouldn’t have been Obama if he weren’t running for president, Beck’s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no “get thee to a voting booth” message. It blessed a particular way of life without burdening that blessing with the compromises of a campaign, or the disillusioning work of governance.

Let me boil all that down to its essence:

A festival..for middle-class white Christians...[which] blessed a particular way of life.

An event described like that doesn't need to be explicitly political to be a little ominous, especially when we have a black president whom many of these same folks (if we go by recent polls) think is pretending to be a Christian (thanks in part to Beck's own accusations) while secretly favoring the global triumph of Islamic law. The racial component loomed even larger on Saturday than it would have if Beck had not, inadvertently or not, chosen the anniversary of Dr. King's speech and if there hadn't been a largely African-American counter-demonstration going on nearby.

Also stressing the event's benignity, Reihan Salam put it this way:

They don’t feel as though their values are reflected by the country’s economic and political elite, and they worry about losing their economic and cultural autonomy, sensing that the further centralization of power will hurt rather than help that cause, a premise we can’t expect committed social democrats to understand.

If so, I wish Beck and Sarah Palin had actually made it political, or at least policy, by giving a three-hour seminar on marginal tax rates and the dangers of ballooning deficits and galloping federal growth. From Jane Mayer's New Yorker article about the libertarian sugar daddies who are sweetening the Tea Party, we learn that there's a rational motive behind all this, namely lower tax rates and less growth-stultifying regulation for the sugar daddies. I can understand that and, to a certain pragmatic moderate centrist extent, applaud it. But when policy preferences come cleverly hidden behind racial semiotics, no matter how gosh-darn middle America cuddly it may look on the surface, we're not going in a good direction or having the useful debate the country needs and deserves.

Fate Only Rhymes With Mandate

Walter Shapiro:

Fate and a discredited economy have granted Obama a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform public attitudes about the role and the competence of the federal government.