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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (6969)	12/16/2005 8:41:42 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543052

The New Worn-Out Ideas By E. J. Dionne Jr. Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A35 Who is running out of ideas now? It has been a cliche of American politics for more than two decades that those poor, tired liberals were bereft of big thoughts and wallowing in a swamp of old commitments, old ideas and old promises. Their allies in the Democratic Party were thought to be similarly geriatric. In 1989 a headline in the Outlook section of The Post confidently rendered this diagnosis on the liberals: "Tired and Defensive, They're Out of Ideas." In 1997 Charles Bray, who was then president of the Johnson Foundation, argued that liberal anemia had created the opening for a conservative jolt. "[T]he entry of new ways of thinking into the American intellectual bloodstream after two generations of liberals' monopolizing the public-policy debate has been good for the country," Bray declared. Let's accept -- for the sake of argument, but also because the critique contained some truth -- that at some point during the 1970s, liberalism became tiresome, arrogant, unreflective and hidebound. Let's further stipulate that this image gave conservatives their opening to seem fresh, creative, exciting and all those other virtues that marketers love to claim for their products. It can be asserted beyond a reasonable doubt that each of the disapproving words about liberalism in the previous paragraph now applies to conservatism. The most compelling evidence for this is the contorted, contentious and incoherent struggle by Republicans in Congress to produce a budget. The Republican leaders may or may not pass their cut-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget. It takes a degree of political incompetence usually associated with Democrats for the side that wants to preserve the true spirit of Christmas to invite so many coal-in-the-stocking metaphors at this time of year. But there is something more important about this failure. It marks the dead end of a worn, haggard argument that conservatives have been peddling for 30 years, ever since that energetic guru of supply-side economics, Jude Wanniski, published his first articles on the subject and his exciting 1978 manifesto, "The Way the World Works." Supply-siders asserted that cutting taxes on the wealthy -- and especially on savings and investment -- would help everyone, including the poor, by promoting economic growth. Tax cuts would produce so much growth that they would pay for themselves. Since government programs were flawed, private investment was always more productive than government spending. And deficits, if they did come, need not worry us very much. For many of us, this whole argument was always a highfalutin rationalization for giving the rich what they wanted, and often even more. Bill Clinton's economic policies should have definitively destroyed supply-side claims: Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and cut the deficit, and an exceptional period of economic growth followed. But it took until this moment in 2005 for Republicans themselves to realize (even if many won't acknowledge it yet) that the help-the-wealthy, damn-the-deficits approach doesn't hold together, either as policy or politics. They are learning that the public doesn't buy the idea that cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains should take priority over providing health coverage and child care for struggling Americans. The tax cuts, it turns out, don't pay for themselves. The poor have not fared well since the big supply-side tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. And given how much Republicans want to spend on defense, farm subsidies, homeland security, roads, bridges, subsidies for energy companies, a flawed drug program for seniors and lots of other stuff, there's no way they can cut enough from programs for the poor to offset the costs of their tax giveaways. As a result, the Republican Party is fracturing before our eyes. Moderate Republicans know these cuts in programs for the poor are unsustainable. Very conservative Republicans want to cut spending far more than the rest of the party (or its voters) will allow. Republican leaders tilt this way and that, juggling this tax cut with that spending cut. In the process, they alienate just about everybody. The old faith is dying. It took liberals a long time -- too long -- to adjust to the popular sense all those years ago that they were just trying to sell the same old nostrums. I'd like to hope that today's graying of conservatism will invite liberals to a new era of innovation. What's clear is that if Republicans and conservatives keep trying to sell their long-playing supply-side records in the age of the iPod, they'll confine their audience to antiquarians and ideological hobbyists. It's the way the world works.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (6969)	12/16/2005 9:14:26 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543052

BECAUSE THEY DON'T LIVE IN THAT ECONOMY THAT'S DOING GREAT, THEY LIVE IN THE OTHER HALF THAT IS LOSING GROUND, DUMMY! The problem with this is that there are two different things going on. One is creative destruction and the other is just plan destruction. The folks in the "other half" don't distinguish between them nor do those in the doing-great half. The former don't distinguish because they just want the pain to stop and the latter don't because they're on a roll. Those suffering from the effects of creative destruction, generally as a result of globalization, are temporarily displaced. Some people respond to their suffering by wanting to stop the world, which won't work. Others, either out of lack of empathy or recognition of the temporary and creative roots of the suffering, want to keep the world moving so they counter those who would stop the world. What we end up with is a lack of focus on the just-plain-destruction problem. That's what concerns me.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (6969)	12/16/2005 9:56:53 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543052

Certainly not compared to someone who quit and tried to get back on a healthier lifestyle before it was too late. I saw a photo the other day of a pregnant woman standing in her front yard watching some street construction and smoking a cigarette. The caption on the photo was something to the effect that the woman in the picture was worried that the jack-hammer noise was bad for her baby. End anecdote. On to small essay... We know that smoking shortens life spans and that quitting smoking can restore some or all of that lost life span. We know that. There are a lot of other risks out there that are not so well researched and clearly demonstrated. People have all sorts of concerns about disastrous outcomes that might be avoided if we just did this or that "before it was too late." The one in the article you posted is a good example. Some of them resonate with us as that one did with both you and me, albeit perhaps somewhat differently. Some of them resonate with other people but seem unpersuasive or even silly to us. What the concerns all have in common is a cadre of true believers who "get it" and who are impatient with and scornful of others who "don't get it," the latter group obstructing the former group from doing whatever needs to be done "before it's too late." Some of the believers are zealots in pursuit of the one correction that will save the world. They can get downright nutty in their overreaction and hysteria and total consumption in their cause. The less persuasive they are, the nuttier they get and the more hostile they get towards those who "don't get it." I was talking to a friend the other day who was caught up in a particular disastrous event resulting from terrorism, a risk about which I tend to be relatively nonchalant. I have learned over the years that the worst thing you can say to someone who is over-reacting is that he is over-reacting but I do it anyway. We got onto the subject of terrorism when I used that as an example of over-reacting. Our original subject was the anti-anti-Christmas over-reaction. Terrorism turned out to be an unfortunate example. So I tried switching to an over-reaction that I knew he would consider to be such, global warming. But by that time he was no longer listening to me. I do find it interesting, though, how people who find nuttiness in other peoples over-reactions cannot see their own. End essay. A few things that I think of as potential disasters that we should do something about before it's too late are the social-security ponzi scheme, education, and immigration. I like to think, though, that I'm not nutty about any of them. (I would add resurrecting federalism but I think that's already too late.)