Goldman Sachs' Global Coup D'etat
Tuesday, 27 November 2012 16:07
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed
<http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12996-goldman-sachs-global-coup-de-tat>
Paul Krugman: Beyond Fiscal Cliff, an Austerity Bomb
Tuesday, 27 November 2012 10:12
<http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12974-beyond-fiscal-cliff-an-austerity-bomb>
The fiscal cliff is a lie
Only the rich win in a grand bargain on taxes and entitlements. We
can afford Social Security, and should expand it
BY MICHAEL LIND
TUESDAY, NOV 27, 2012 03:44 PM SAST
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/27/the_fiscal_cliff_is_a_lie/
--0--
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/27-5
Published on Tuesday, November 27, 2012 by Al Jazeera
A Grand Bargain is a Grand Betrayal: The Forgotten, Lonely World of Facts
That the United States is center-right and Obama needs compromise on
slashing the welfare state is a myth
by Paul Rosenberg
"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan once said, hilariously
misquoting Founding Father John Adams, your typical elitist
Enlightenment intellectual, who actually said, "Facts are stubborn
things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the
dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and
evidence." But in the contest between the real world of John Adams
and the fantasy world bequeathed to us by Ronald Reagan, stupid and
stubborn are on both on the side of the latter... and the latter is
winning, hands down, as can be seen in President Obama's pursuit of a
so-called "grand bargain" that would cut far more in spending than it
would raise in taxes. In the Reaganite fantasy world of Washington
DC, Obama represents the left. In the real world? Well, take a look
for yourself.
There is a political party in the United States whose presidential
candidate got over 60 million votes, and whose members - according to
the General Social Survey - overwhelmingly think we're spending too
little on Social Security, rather than spending too much, by a
lopsided margin of 52-12. The party, of course, is the Republican
Party.
There is as an ideological label claimed by over 100 million
Americans, who collectively think we're spending too little on
"improving and protecting the nation's health", rather than spending
too much, by a 2-1 margin: 48-24. The labelled ideology, of course,
is conservative.
Combine the two categories and the two spending questions, and you
find that a 51.4 percent of conservative Republicans think we're
spending too little on either Social Security, health care or both.
Only 28.7 percent think we're spending too much, and just 7.3 percent
think we're spending too much on both.
That's 7.3 percent of conservative Republicans in support of the
position taken by leaders of both political parties - Republicans,
who want to slash the welfare state drastically while making
permanent tax cuts for the rich, and Democrats, led by President
Obama, who wants a more "balanced" approach, with $2.50 cut from
spending for every $1 added in taxes. Other Democrats, particularly
in Congress, are trying to push back against Obama, without letting
their slips show, and Obama is doing his best to hide what he's up
to, but there is simply no way to get $4 trillion in cuts - almost $1
trillion already agreed to and another $3 trillion in his current
proposal - without deep spending cuts that even a majority of
conservative Republicans oppose.
Yet, as the Guardian reports, Obama's grassroots campaign
organization is being kept alive after the campaign, and pushing this
far right agenda is their first emailed call to action. "It's now
clear that ordinary citizens will also be subjected to a full bore
messaging campaign to persuade them that they should regard this
counterproductive sacrifice as good for them," notes leading
econoblogger Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. She also notes,
correctly, that "most Americans have a simple response to the notion
of 'reforming' these popular programs: Cut military budgets and raise
taxes on upper income groups".
Something we can all agree on
The figures cited above come from the General Social Survey of 2010.
The GSS is the gold standard of public opinion research in the United
States. Social scientists reference it more often than any other data
source except for the US Census. The GSS has been asking these same
questions since the 1970s, with similar ones added to its list over
time. The responses to those questions reveal a much broader truth -
the American people like the various different functions of the
welfare state, regardless of their political ideology or affiliation.
They like spending on highways, roads and bridges, mass
transportation, education, child care, urban problems, alternative
energy, you name it.
For example, in 2010, if we combine six questions - adding education,
mass transit, highways and bridges, and urban problems to Social
Security and health care - then the percentage of conservative
Republicans saying we spend too much on all of them drops to a
minuscule 0.4 percent, while two-thirds (66.5 percent) say we are
spending too little on at least one of them. They may philosophically
subscribe to the idea of shrinking government, but pragmatically they
know what works and they want more of it, not less. Americans are
famously described as being pragmatic, rather than ideological, and
in this respect, at least, that political cliche is absolutely right.
Indeed, 2010 was only remarkable as a year in which anti-welfare
state hysteria had been whipped up to a fever pitch. If one looked
instead at the combined surveys for 2006, 2008 and 2010, then
two-thirds of conservative Republicans (66.6 percent) thought we were
spending too little on one or both of health care and Social
Security, compared to just under one in seven (14 percent) who
thought we were spending too much on at least one. A mere 5.1 percent
thought we were spending too much on both.
In the world of stubborn and stupid, America is a center-right
nation, and it really does make no sense that Barack Obama beat Mitt
Romney. He's trying to compromise with the Republicans because he has
to: Their insistence on slashing the welfare state represents the
overwhelming consensus of American political opinion, regardless of
the last election's results. But in the forgotten, lonely world of
facts, none of that is true.
The need for a restatement
While GSS data since 1973 repeatedly confirms this pattern of welfare
state support even from self-identified conservatives, the pattern
was actually first described and discussed in the 1967 book The
Political Beliefs of Americans by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, two
towering pioneers of public opinion research. Their book was based on
surveys conducted in 1964, almost a full decade before the GSS data
begins. The disjunction between what they called "operational"
liberalism and ideological conservatism was one of the dominant
themes of their book (they identified ideological conservatism by
agreement with a set of five questions about government interference
versus individual initiative). In the final section of the final
chapter of the book, titled, "The Need for a Restatement of American
Ideology", they wrote:
"The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as
operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a
conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study.
We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with
people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting
according to another set of principles in their political behavior.
But the principles according to which the majority of Americans
actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated
in modern terms...
"There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of
American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of
people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols
incorporated, would focus people's wants, hopes, and beliefs, and
provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to
implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and
consistent manner."
This, of course, never took place. Two major political figures who
might have helped foster such a restatement - Dr Martin Luther King,
Jr and Robert F Kennedy - were assassinated the next year.
Philosopher John Rawls' Theory of Justice actually embodied that
restatement in a brilliantly simple abstract metaphor, the veil of
ignorance, but his ideas never found the sort of symbolic
amplification that Free and Cantril rightly recognized as crucial.
Instead, American politics took a much darker turn, one led by the
indulgence of racist animosity, whose influence only became more
deeply embedded over time, even as its initial expression was
formally abandoned, and condemned. This turn can even be seen
implicitly there in Free and Cantril's data. It's not just the case
that Americans as a whole are schizoid - operationally liberal (65
percent according to their data) while ideologically conservative (50
percent). It's particularly true of a crucial subset: 23 percent of
the population is both operationally liberal and ideologically
conservative. And here's the kicker: The proportion of people fitting
this description was double that in the five Southern states that
Barry Goldwater carried in 1964 - the only states in the nation he
carried aside from his home state of Arizona.
What this clearly implied, we can now see with hindsight, is that
this population could be tipped either way, and was particularly
vulnerable by tipping on the issue of race. Even though Goldwater
himself abhorred making racist appeals, activists and even party
organizations working for him had no such qualms, and the states he
carried reflected that. Indeed, we can even see this today in GSS
data, by looking at differences within the broad spectrum of support
for government spending.
If, for example, we consider two different spending questions which
bear on dealing with the problem of global warming - support for
spending on the environment and for developing alternative energy (a
new question just added in 2010) - we find a difference between
liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, but the
difference is entirely within the realm of overwhelming support.
Democrats say we're spending too little versus too much on both by
57.8 percent to 0.3 percent - a factor of almost 200-to-1 - while
Republicans agree by "only" 29.8 percent to 6.6 percent - a factor of
more than 4-to-1. For liberals, its more than 80-to-1 (65.2 percent
to 0.8 percent), while for conservatives its better than 5-to-1 (29.6
percent to 5.7 percent). So the differences are stark - but they're
all in the realm of overwhelming support for more spending. It's like
comparing a rabid football fan to another rabid football fan with
season tickets for his extended family.
When we look at spending on poor people and blacks, however, the
picture is starkly different. Liberals once again say we're spending
too little rather than too much on both by an overwhelming margin,
25-to-1 (39.8 percent to 1.6 percent), but Republicans are evenly
split (10.5 percent to 10.4 percent). For liberals the ratio is
roughly 20-to-1 (35.3 percent to 1.8 percent), while for
conservatives it's 3-to-2 (15.6 percent to 10.0 percent). But when
you combine the categories, that's when the depth of the difference
really stands out. For liberal Democrats, the ratio is 200-to-1 (40.8
percent to 0.2 percent), while for conservative Republicans it's more
than 2-to-1 in the other direction (6.4 percent to 13.8 percent). In
short, the one way to get conservative Republicans to be
operationally conservative is to talk about poor people and blacks -
in 19th century terms "the undeserving poor". And yes, since you
asked, they really do still think that way. If you want to know where
Mitt Romney's talk of the 47 percent came from, you need look no
farther than this.
Just the facts
But America rejected Romney's vision, didn't they? As the last few
million votes are still being totaled, his percentage of the vote has
dwindled down... to 47 percent, ironically. And yet, Obama's
reasoning, even his "progressive" argument to his base is articulated
within a conservative framework, one that highlights the deficit as
the focus of hysterical concern, even when it tries to sound sensible
and sober. Thus, the email call to his volunteers mentioned above
said that Obama was "working with leaders of both parties in
Washington to reduce the deficit in a balanced way so we can lay the
foundation for long-term middle-class job growth and prevent your
taxes from going up".
The idea of a bipartisan plan to grow the economy by balanced deficit
reduction is understandably quite popular. It ranks right up there
with the pizza-beer-and-ice-cream-heart-healthy-weight-loss-diet
plan: The perfect solution for a fact-free world. But, as a recent
letter from 350 economists points out, "[T]oo many in Washington are
fixated on cutting public spending to balance the budget, not on how
to put people back to work and get our economy going", but "there is
no theory of economics that explains how we can deflate our way to
recovery". To the contrary, as they pointed out, the opposite is
true: "As Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Greece have shown,
inflicting austerity on a weak economy leads to deeper recession,
rising unemployment and increasing misery."
But it's not just this popular proposal is a fantasy. It's also not
really that popular if you ask folks about specifics. Which is just
what Democracy Corps and Campaign for America's Future did with an
election eve poll. In particular, they asked about all the major
components of the Simpson-Bowles Plan, the informal background for
Obama's "balanced deficit reduction plan". Every single component
they asked about was deemed unacceptable by landslide majorities.
"Capping Medicare payments, forcing seniors to pay
more" was rejected 79-18.
"Requiring deep cuts in domestic programs without
protecting programs for infants, poor children, schools and college
aid" was rejected 75-21
"Cutting discretionary spending, like education,
child nutrition, worker training, and disease control" was rejected
72-25.
"Not raising taxes on the rich" was rejected 68-28.
"Continuing to tax investors' income at lower rates
than workers' pay" was rejected 63-26.
"Reducing Social Security benefits over time by
having them rise more slowly than the cost of living" was rejected
62-31.
Turning to the subject of preserving Medicare:
"Capping Medicare payments, forcing seniors to pay
more" was rejected 79-18.
But - taking a very different approach, "Save
Medicare costs by negotiating lower drug prices from drug companies"
was supported 89-8.
Robert L Borosage warned in a cover story for the Nation magazine,
which cites some of these same strong views opposing what the fantasy
rhetoric hides. "The grand bargain not only offers the wrong answer;
it poses the wrong question," Borosage writes. The right question, of
course, is what to do about the stranglehold of wealth and income
inequality that has developed over the past 30+ years, and how to
secure the future of the 99 percent that have been left behind. "The
call for shared sacrifice makes no sense," Borosage argues, "given
that in recent decades, the rewards have not been shared."
A truly progressive vision, stubbornly rooted in the world of facts
would focus like a laser beam on the right question. This is what
FDR's New Deal was all about at bottom - rebuilding the nation's
prosperity from the bottom up. The economic soundness of his approach
can be seen in the decades of broadly shared prosperity that followed
in his wake. The political soundness can be seen in the polling data
cited above - particularly the measures of conservative support.
Those are the stubborn facts that President Obama ought to be
attending to. And leave the stubborn fantasies behind. It's time he
set aside his love affair with Ronald Reagan. John Adams is waiting
in the wings.
© 2012 Al Jazeera
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