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TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2011
Charlie’s clash of the titans: David Brooks is snarking hard in this morning’s New York Times. We’ll take a bit of a guess: He may be making up for some very bad conduct on last Friday’s Charlie Rose show.
On that program, Rose produced an eighteen-minute clash of the titans—a discussion of the budget mess which matched Brooks with his colleague, Paul Krugman. Brooks told a bit too much of the truth that night. Today, he may be making up for that indiscretion.
Whatever! We thought that Charlie Rose segment was very much worth noting. We’ll direct your attention to four aspects of the titans’ discussion. To watch the whole segment, click here:
What would Krugman do: At one point, Rose asked Krugman a simple question—if someone died and made him boss, what would he do about our budget problems? We’ve often wondered about that very question as we read Krugman’s columns and blog posts, which are often written in reaction to specific unfolding events.
How would a King Krugman handle this problem? We were glad Rose asked. We thought Krugman’s answer was very much worth recording:
KRUGMAN (7/22/11): What the long-run solution to the U.S. budget problem is, is controlling health-care costs. It means more of the kinds of things that were already in the Affordable Care Act. A lot of serious, serious efforts to bring the rate of growth of health-care costs down, bending the curve—horrible metaphor, but bending the curve. Which we know can be done because other countries do it, and then we need revenue. In the end, we’re going to need three, four percent of GDP in additional revenue. You can get some of that by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, but we’re going to need more than that.
So in fact I have a prediction. If David and I are still around here 25 years from now, I predict that we will have a much more controlled health-care system that sort of matches the cost performance of other countries, and we’ll have something like a value-added tax to increase revenue. And that is how America will be solvent in the end.
For the record, we assume that Krugman is talking about letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, not just those on the highest earners. In the end, he says that even that amount of new revenue won’t be enough. Unless we’re mistaken, “three, four percent of GDP” is a lot of new revenue. Current US GDP is something like $15 trillion. Using your multiplication skills, you can compute the amount of recommended new revenue from there. (Start by computing one percent. Then, multiply by three or by four.)
We were surprised by Krugman’s assessment. By the way: In our manufactured public discourse, voters constantly hear about the alleged need for spending cuts. They virtually never hear about the alleged need for new revenue. One side has played this game very hard, for decades. The other side has sat and stared.
Brooks on all the hatred: Brother Brooks got way out of line when Charlie asked about something he called “the dysfunctionality of government.” In his first answer, Brooks pretty much trashed the Republicans. In his follow-up answer, he began walking that heresy back:
ROSE: There are two questions. One, if you look at the dysfunctionality of government, as in this case, who’s responsible?
BROOKS: I don’t pretend—I wouldn’t say it is symmetrical here. I do think the president and the Democrats have been much more flexible than the Republicans have been. I say that with a little pain maybe, but that’s just simply the case. The president, to his credit, has made his allies extremely uncomfortable. And if you are around Washington yesterday when the entire Senate Democratic caucus erupted in fury, you saw that firsthand. And so I think the Republicans are—it’s a good short- term negotiating strategy, but they are not seizing a deal which should be out there for them.
I’m sort of mystified why, if the president is offering $3 trillion reduction in the size of government, why they are not seizing upon that and potentially settling either for nothing or maybe $500 million. It’s just mystifying to me why they don’t take this deal.
ROSE: Well then, take a guess. What’s the answer?
BROOKS: Well, there are a lot of things. One, they will tell you, “We go home and nobody wants any more taxes. We ran on that. We’ve pledged it.” Second, and I think this part is bipartisan, the hatred is so strong, there is great personal resistance to doing a deal with the devil. And they regard Obama or Boehner and Cantor as the devil. There’s just sort of this emotional resistance to getting in a room, shaking their hand and having your picture taken. And so even beneath the substance of it, there is a great deal of emotional resistance. And when, even when the president makes an offer which is a pretty good offer for Republicans, they’re always looking for the weaknesses in it.
Is “the hatred” equally strong on both sides of the aisle? We don’t know, but if it is, that doesn’t explain why the Dems are being so much “more flexible”—why they would exhibit so much less resistance to “doing a deal with the devil.”
We think Brooks’ statements here deserve examination. We will only note that this demonization of major Dem leaders dates back to the demonization of Clinton, then Gore—a demonization which career liberals leaders, to this very day, largely prefer to avoid. If you’re a liberal, your “leadership” is largely in the bag—has been for a long time.
A talking-point shot down: At one point, Brooks recited a highly misleading talking-point; Krugman shot it down. This talking-point is everywhere. Do liberals know how to approach it?
BROOKS: To be fair to [Republicans], they would say, “Hey, we’ve had government at a certain level of GDP for decade after decade, it’s been roughly the same. Over the last couple of years, it has leaped up significantly. So if we want to bring it back to that level, to the 2008 level, are we radicals?” That is the argument they would make.
KRUGMAN: All of that is the recession. All of that is that the ratio of government to GDP is higher because GDP is down. And safety net programs, unemployment insurance and Medicaid and a few other programs that respond to hard times, are up. If you take that out, there has been no increase in the size of government. This is entirely myth.
Government spending has leaped up significantly! When Republicans make that familiar claim, they fail to note that the level of taxation has dropped down significantly at the same time—also in significant part because of the recession. Their talking-point is highly selective—but do liberals now how to respond? (In this July 6 blog post, Krugman went into more detail about what all that new spending is.)
Krugman’s emerging theme: A profoundly counterintuitive theme has been emerging from Krugman’s journalistic work. When Charlie asked about all the “deficit panic,” he expressed this theme again:
ROSE: You said the disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only seven percent named the deficit. But those seven percent are in the Tea Party.
KRUGMAN: … Too many of those seven percent are actually inside the Beltway. That we have too many people who are, you know, who are serious and responsible in their own minds, who are actually, you know, fighting, fighting the wrong war right now. What we really need to do is do something about nine percent unemployment. And yes, we do have a long-run budget problem, but we have nine percent unemployment right now.
[…]
People who believe that if we resolve the budget problems, that that will somehow cause a surge in the economy, I have been calling those people who believe in the confidence fairy. It’s not going to happen. If you want to fight unemployment, fight unemployment. And if fighting the long-run deficit comes at the expense of doing something about unemployment, if it makes it worse in the short run, then you’re actually—you’re actually probably worse than even the long- run budget picture, because nothing hurts your long-run budget picture worse than an economy whose growth rate is depressed by a prolonged period of economic weakness.
So it’s all wrong. What passes for being reasonable and wise and serious inside the Beltway is in fact deeply foolish.
Say what? Our most respectable pundits and journalists are “in fact deeply foolish?” This is a highly counterintuitive claim, and Krugman has been taking this theme even farther in recent months, arguing that academic authorities in the world of economics are routinely behaving like total fools too, even in their high-profile professional work.
Such a claim is highly counterintuitive. It contradicts every presumption we have about the way our society works. And yet, we ourselves have often found this claim to be true—when we’ve reviewed the work of our “educational experts” over the past forty years, for example.
Man [sic] is the rational animal! This iconic claim lies at the heart of the western world’s self-understanding. This iconic claim is painfully inaccurate—but the authority figures about whom Krugman increasingly speaks will never say so.
They sit at the top of a broken discourse—and they have no plans to leave.
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