Trumpian economic policies

Lonnie Shekhtman describes some of what we need to be looking for in Trump's economic policies in The American economy under a President Trump: a primer Christian Science Monitor 11/10/2016:

... a Trump presidency likely means less regulation of some industries, such as finance and pharmaceuticals, plus corporate and individual income tax cuts. ...

And some economists predict that Trump’s tax cuts will only help the wealthy.

“Historically Republicans get elected promising tax cuts and they deliver,” says Aaron Klein, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank. But, adds Mr. Klein, “those tax cuts have traditionally benefited the holders of capital which exacerbates income inequality.” ...

Tax cuts are tried and true Republican territory, but Trump has also put forward one proposal that is more commonly spotted across the aisle: a massive investment in America’s infrastructure. The president-elect has vowed to spend $1 trillion to rehab America’s roads, tunnels, ports, and bridges in a national project that he says could create millions of jobs.

I don't expect the Republicans to enact anything like that expansive an infrastructure program. And that what they do enact will be heavily weighted toward Republican cronies. Watch for the Trump family business to wind up getting a not-inconsiderable share.

This is an Al Jazeera English report on the topic of what we might expect on economic policies, 'Trumponomics': Putting America first - Counting the Cost 11/12/2016

And Paul Ryan, loyal servants of financial vultures everywhere, is pushing for an immediate phase-out of Medicare, which will have major economic effects, not to mention making life worse for just about everybody:

With all the other things we've discussed so far today, I wanted to return to one critical one. It's not about mights or maybes or fears of what's to come. It's about what's coming just after President-Elect Trump's inauguration. Paul Ryan has been pushing to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance for several years. But now it's real with unified Republican government. He just said he will try to rush it through early next year while repealing Obamacare.

Robert Reich on his Facebook page predicts this, but the way he criticizes it scares me:

The deficit will soar, the debt will explode. Trump’s plans for infrastructure and military spending along with a tax cut (mostly for the wealthy) will cause endless red ink. You might think that Paul Ryan and other Republican deficit hawks would object. Think again. Reagan and George W. Bush created giant deficits, too. Republicans talk as if they’re deficit hawks but when in office they create giant deficits, so that Democrats – when they gain power again – have no choice but to cut them, and can't get much of anything new done. I've been there, done that. [my emphasis]

Republicans haven't cared about the deficit for the last 35 years, at least. That includes Republican voters. Also swing voters. Also most Democratic voters. It would be interesting to see a poll testing how many voters can correctly distinguish between debt and deficit.

For the Republicans, the deficit is just a tribal slogan for them that means, "Stop giving money to Those People!"

And if the Democrats use the green-eye-shades argument against Trump's tax cuts that they will increase the deficit, it will fall on deaf ears most places, though some of the donor class will like it. For exactly the reason Reich disappointingly takes as valid, "Republicans talk as if they’re deficit hawks but when in office they create giant deficits, so that Democrats – when they gain power again – have no choice but to cut them, and can't get much of anything new done."

But that's a political death wish for the Democrats to take that approach. First, because it isn't sound economically. The US borrows money in its own currency, which is also the reserve currency for the world. There is no default risk as long as we're borrowing in our own currency. Japan's debt has been running for years at about 200% of GDP, more than twice the proportion of the US. And second, it means they will be using an argument nobody cares about - the deficit - instead of pointing at the real and immediate problem with cutting taxes for the One Percent: rising inequality and encouragement of reckless behavior by CEOs.

It's more critical than ever that the Democrats start creating a sharp profile for the whole Party to distinguish them from the Reps' devotion to the One Percent. Taking the word "budget deficit" out of their political vocabulary would be a good place to start.

Normalizing Trump

The Republicans are falling all over themselves doing it. The corporate media is scrambling to fit Donald Trump's Presidential candidacy into their favorite scripts and to protect their current and future "access" to him, his campaign and (gulp!) his Administration.

Eric Alterman looks at an emerging Pod Pundit narrative: the Meal Libruls are to blame! Of course, aren't they always?

Trumpism and the ‘Liberal Elite’ The Nation 05/13/2016:

When Donald Trump first began to dominate the Republican debates last fall, right-wing politicians pushed the same “blame” button they have hit reflexively just about every day since January 2009. “Let’s be honest,” Bobby Jindal explained to readers of The Wall Street Journal, “there would be no Donald Trump, dominating the political scene today if it were not for President Obama.” Writing on the Journal’s editorial page, neocon Bret Stephens agreed. “Donald Trump is Barack Obama squared,” he insisted, calling both men “epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but fundamentally broken.”

As the Trump phenomenon grew and other GOP candidates’ prospects dimmed, a more complex explanation was required. As with global warming, gun control, evolutionary theory, and birth control, Trumpism was discovered to be part of a global media conspiracy. “He’s being treated with kid gloves by many in the media, in the hopes that he’s the nominee,” whined media darling Marco Rubio. “The media knows Donald can’t win the general, that Hillary would wallop him,” added Ted Cruz.

And he notes, plausibly enough in the American political definition of "liberal":

Both blame games — the pundits and politicians who attack liberals to explain the rise of Trump, as well as the Trump voters who believe that immigrants, Muslims, and anyone who can be defined as “other” are responsible for their misfortunes — share one key similarity: a purposeful blindness to reality. The pundits and politicians know quite well that the base of Trump’s support is not liberal. Indeed, it is antiliberal.

Digby Parton looks at how the Trump Republican Party is coming to grips with their new leader (The GOP’s terrifying Trump ignorance: They think they can control him, but that just isn’t going to happen Salon 05/13/2016):

Luke Russert on MSNBC reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senate Committee endorsed Trump with enthusiasm. He also reported that many Republican leaders believe the whole ugly “Mexicans are rapists” and “Muslim ban” stuff was in the past, but they do wonder if he might say something untoward going forward.

To that I say: Of course he will. ...

... the GOP political establishment, led by Paul Ryan, has been concerned with one thing only. They say it doesn’t matter to them what cockamamie policies Trump proposes just as long as he can show them that he has “conservative principles.” They particularly hope that he will tone down all that crazy talk about protecting “entitlements” which grates on them like fingernails on a chalkboard. They can probably relax just a little bit since his “plan”, such as it is, is to get such a tremendous amount of growth from his masterful stewardship of the economy that money is no object.

I've never taken the threat of an actual Republican Party split over Trump seriously. It could still happen. But it's highly unlikely.

Derek Davison and Jim Lobe in Neoconservatism and the Trump Effect Lobe Log Foreign Policy 05/09/2016 looks at how Butcher's Bill Kristol's third-party talk has pretty much gone nowhere.

Ed Kilgore (After the Trump-Ryan ‘Summit,’ Both Sides Can Pretend the Other Is Surrendering New York 05/12/2016) has this take on Trump normalization in the wake of Trump's meeting this week with Paul Ryan:

Like a truce between Roman generals and a barbarian chieftain in late antiquity, the "summit" will probably be regarded by each side as representing the first stage in the other's surrender. For Trump, the very ritual of meetings with the RNC chairman, the House Speaker, the House leadership team, and (later today) the Senate leadership team connotes the conferral of respectability on a figure each and every one of these potentates has almost certainly disparaged in private as a buffoon, an overgrown juvenile delinquent, or a proto-fascist. And for said potentates, Trump's day on Capitol Hill represents his coming domestication. This dance could go on for quite some time before any push comes to shove in a public disagreement. And by then Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party will be stuck with each other for the duration.

On Wednesday, Trump's little-known top policy adviser, the former Iowa politician Sam Clovis, offered a good example of how easy it might be for Trump and Paul Ryan to blur their differences on even the most inflammatory issues. Pressed about whether "entitlement reform" was indeed off the table, as Trump himself seems to have said in debates and on the campaign trail, Clovis allowed as how a Trump administration might actually mosey over in that direction if fiscal circumstances so indicated. I'm sure Paul Ryan was pleased to hear that, and perhaps he was exactly the intended audience for that small but significant shift. Having spent much of the 2012 general election pretending to love Medicare more than life itself after issuing budget after budget proposing to gut it, Ryan knows how to blur his positions as well.

Ryan and the latest House Republican crazee crisis

Paul Krugman is perennially amazed at esteem with which pundits refer to scamster Paul Ryan as a brilliant policy, wonk one of what Krugman calls the Very Serious People.

Even Andrew O'Hehir in Salon writes about Ryan as "devious and intelligent" and a "fiscal whiz kid." (The Republican suicide ballad: The party that can’t govern, and the country that hates its guts 10/10/2015)

Krugman emphasizes how fixated the national press and pundits are on their Both Sides Do It model, no matter what the reality:

What you need to understand about political commentary these days — including the de facto commentary that poses as news analysis, or even reporting — is that most of the people doing it have both a professional and an emotional stake in portraying the two parties as symmetric, equally good or bad on policy issues and general behavior. To stray from this pose of even-handedness is to be labeled a partisan — and to admit that the parties aren’t the same, after all, would mean admitting that you’ve been wrong about the most basic features of the situation for years.

Unfortunately for professional centrists, the parties aren’t remotely symmetric. Compare the policy proposals Hillary Clinton has been releasing with those being put out even by establishment Republican candidates like Rubio and Bush. Whether you like Clinton’s proposals or not, there’s some serious wonkery behind them, and they’re the kind of thing you could easily imagine being put into effect. Meanwhile, even the supposedly moderate GOPers are peddling voodoo, puppies, and rainbows. What’s a professional centrist to do?

The answer is that he or she desperately needs to find conservatives they can take seriously, people who produce policy ideas that, even if you don’t support their priorities, add up and generally make sense. And that’s Paul Ryan’s game: he has put himself forward as the serious, honest conservative of centrists’ dreams, someone they can cite approvingly as a way of showing their centrism and open-mindedness. [my emphasis]

Krugman speculates that if Ryan were to become Speaker of the House, it would require him to play ball with the self-style Freedom Caucus in ways that would undermine even the broken press corps' centrist image of him.

O'Hehir takes off on the House Freedom Caucus name:

It’s easy to make fun of the vainglory and self-importance embodied in the group’s name, but it strikes me as accurate enough. They have declared themselves free of all the responsibilities of government, free from the need to discuss or negotiate or pass any legislation that has the slightest chance of being enacted. They represent freedom in precisely the same sense that death represents freedom from being alive. They could just as well be called the Suicide Caucus..."

He continues, "or the Satanic Caucus, in the grandiose spirit of Milton’s fallen angel, who fights on with no hope of victory: “To do ought good never will be our task,/ But ever to do ill our sole delight.”

I suppose that last could be considered literary demonization. I try to avoid the Satan comparisons, because at best they tend to come across as puerile. And I actually do think there's a problem in "demonizing" opponents.

Not that the Republicans have any problem with it!

It would be a good outcome if the Democrats could make a deal with a small number of Republicans to elect a House Speaker in exchange for doing away with the Hastert Rule, in which the Republican majority refuses to allow a bill to come to the floor unless it has majority support within the Republican caucus.

(Michael McAuliff and Jennifer Bendery, Republicans Fear They May Need Dems To Solve Their Speaker Crisis Huffington Post 10/10/2015)

Biden-Ryan debate: Iran and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

Joe Biden's performance in Thursday evening's debate against Paul Ryan reminded me of Abe Lincoln's famous comment about General Grant: "He fights."

Bill Press picks up on that aspect of the debate in Bill says Vice President Biden saved the day 10/12/2012:

Since I can't offer a better analysis of what went right for Biden than Charlie Pierce, I'll refer you to his post from the early AM, VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America 10/12/2012.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick.

There were some substantive problems with what Biden had to say, much as I enjoyed his clobbering the Ayn Rand fanboy. They were points on which the Romney-Ryan ticket is worse than the incumbent President's trajectory. But for those of us who don't look at national policy as purely a binary partisan matter, they're worrisome. (See the transcript for text.)

Biden used the Republicans' bluster against them on the subject of Iran. Biden said, "The last thing we need now is another war." And, "War should always be the absolute last resort." Peace is good politics. He also did a good job of debunking the scare talk about an Iranian nuclear weapon. I like that he said in this connection, "facts matter."

But he also said of the Iran sanctions, "These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period, period." That sounds an awful lot like being only one short step from war. The US policy toward nuclear nonproliferation is dangerously one-sided in the Middle East. Nuclear nonproliferation is extremely important. But it doesn't justify an unprovoked attack on Iran. "Aggressive war", aka, preventive war, is a threat to peace, international law and nuclear nonproliferation. The Obama Administration's Libya policy can also be faulted in that regard. Muammar Ghaddafi's regime had cooperated with the United States on nuclear nonproliferation and gave up their nuclear weapons program. Then the US sided military with rebels against that government.

The other big concern was Biden's weasily-worded comments on Social Security and Medicare. People following the grim negotiations on the "Grand Bargain" to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, what Biden said wasn't entirely reassuring, though he drew sharp and necessary contrasts with Ryan. David Dayen looks at those moments in VP Debate: The Constrained Discussion on Social Insurance FDL News Desk 10/12/2012:

... the myth that Biden didn't confront sprung from the very premise of the question.

"Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process," said Martha Raddatz, marring an otherwise good moderating performance. Social Security has nothing to do with the federal budget. It has a dedicated funding stream from the payroll tax, and is fully funded for the next two decades, which is more than you can say about pretty much any other government program. A good portion of Medicare comes from its hospital insurance tax, another dedicated funding stream. That Medicare is taking a larger share of the federal budget is an artifact of higher health spending in the United States generally, and Medicare is the least important driver of that. In fact, the antidote for higher health spending is more Medicare, a single payer program that can bargain down these higher costs. ...

But he didn’t challenge this premise, this idea that these vital programs are “going broke,” and that the role of government is just to hang onto them rather than design them in a more adequate way to increase security for older Americans. We need a Social Security system that increases benefits to those who need it. We need a Medicare program that covers really everyone, but certainly more people, to increase its bargaining power. But Biden, inside the contours of the question, and determined to maintain the wiggle room the President clearly wants, could only say that he opposed a voucher system for Medicare and privatization for Social Security. I agree, but that’s not the only answer.

The Obama Administration created a (still relatively small) exception to the very useful argument that Social Security does not draw on the General Fund budget. He and Congress financed the temporary payroll tax reductions by having the General Fund reimburse the Social Security Trust Fund for the cost. This always bothered me from the standpoint of defending Social Security. If it's supposedly going broke, why would we cut the taxes that pay for it? Well, the answer is that the General Fund is reimbursing Social Security. But that opens the program up for the Republicans to call it a "welfare" program that draws down General Funds. The obvious alternative would have been to provide those subsidies in the form of refunds coming directly to payroll tax payers.

Here's what Biden said:

Look, I was there when we did that with Social Security, in 1983. I was one of eight people sitting in the room that included Tip O'Neill negotiating with President Reagan. We all got together, and everybody said, as long as everybody's in the deal, everybody's in the deal, and everybody is making some sacrifice, we can find a way. We made the system solvent to 2033.

We will not, though, be part of any voucher plan eliminating the voucher says, Mom, when you're when you're 65, go out there, shop for the best insurance you can get; you're out of Medicare. You can buy back in, if you want, with this voucher, which will not keep pace will not keep pace with health care costs, because if it did keep pace with health care costs, there would be no savings. That's why they go the voucher they we will be no part of a voucher program or the privatization of Social Security. ...

Quickly, the bottom line here is that all the studies show that if we went with Social Security proposal made by Mitt Romney, if you're 40 in your 40s now, you will pay $2,600 a year you get $2,600 a year less in Social Security. If you're in your 20s now, you get $4,700 a year less. The idea of changing and change being, in this case, to cut the benefits for people without taking other action you could do to make it work is absolutely the wrong way.

These look, these guys haven't been big on Medicare from the beginning. Their party's not been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they've always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this? A man who introduced a bill that would raise it $6,400 a year, knowing it and passing it, and Romney saying he'd sign it? Or me and the president? [my emphasis]

This formulation clearly leaves the door open for cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in a post-election Grand Bargain.

The politics on this is kind of twisted. Because the Republicans got away in the Congressional campaigns of 2010 with claiming that projected savings to Medicare that do not reduce benefits to recipients were actually cuts to Medicare, they've recycled it in 2012 with the "$716 billion" meme. Instead of attacking Obama on the cuts he actually proposed in the debt ceiling negotiations last year and clearly intends to propose again in the lame-duck session this year, the Reps are attacking him with a phony claim. Shameless prevaricators that they are, even they don't seem to have found a way to attack him on the Grand Bargain proposals o cuts benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because they are actually down with that program.

Biden repaired some of the damage Obama did to their campaign in the first debate when he said there were no real differences between him and Romney on Social Security. But there's still a Grand Bargain fight coming after the November election between supporters of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on one side and Obama and the Republicans on the other.

Finally, Biden's answer on abortion was a strong variation on the standard Democratic politician's position - to say they're personally against it but support choice for women - and it very effectively made the point that the Democrats are pro-choice and the Republicans anti-choice. And that helps the Democrats.

But given the success of the fanatical anti-abortion movement in passing restrictions to access to abortion services, their newly visible front against contraception more generally, and their success in framing the issue to the point that violent and even murderous attacks against abortion clinics and providers aren't even called "terrorism" by politician or the government or the mainstream news media - the I'm-personally-against-it-but-support-a-woman's-right-to-choose really isn't good enough any more. Advocates of choice, including Democratic politicians, need to be making a case on the medical facts central to the Roe v. Wade decision: that a fetus cannot survive outside its mother womb until the third trimester and is therefore medically a part of the woman's body. The mushy, subjective dodge just doesn't work well enough any more. Law needs to be based on medical realities. Because "facts matter."

Tags: 2012 election, abortion, joe biden, paul ryan

Biden-Ryan debate tonight

After last week's Obama-Romney debate, we all got to be theater critics for a few days. This week I've been seeing a lot of analysis and criticism of the theater criticism. This is how we news junkies entertain ourselves.

I'll give my own pre-theater criticism of tonight's debate and say that I would expect Joe Biden to come across better than Paul Ryan to most people, unless he has a stroke or something just beforehand and walks out on the stage buck nekkid and babbling incoherently. Biden's old-fashioned political glad-handing style is kind of enduring, though it does produce the occasional hyperbole that our star pundits gleefully treat as one of the "gaffes" they love to chatter about. But he also conveys a seriousness about public service and a sense that he actually enjoys the process of democratic politics.

Paul Ryan, on the other hand, is a pompous stiff. Charlie Pierce's epithet for him, "zombie-eyed granny-starver", catches his general style pretty well.

As I was writing this, I went to the Esquire Politics Blog to pick up the link to a clip of Ryan that Pierce recently used, and I see he already did the same pre-theater criticism I did in the above paragraphs in just the headline alone, The Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver Takes on the One Man Who Relishes This Mess: Your 2012 VP Debate Preview 10/11/2012. But I'll go ahead and post mine anyway, though any thin claim to originality is clearly shot already. As Exhibit 1 from his post shows:

Joe Biden is not riven with self-doubt. Joe Biden is not exhausted by the hurly-burly of politics. Joe Biden is not burdened by the weight of events and laid low by the constant battle against know-nothing obstructionism. Joe Biden is not going to take the stage tonight and find himself wishing he were anywhere else. I mean, god be good to him, as my gran' used to say, but Joe Biden actually likes all these silly performance pieces in which we insist he be engaged in order to stay vice-president. He revels in them. He would do ten of them a day, if he could. When I consider Joe Biden, and I look at the enthusiasm with which he throws himself into the various cataracts and torrents of hogwash that constitute our politics these days, I find myself looking at him the way I look at people who sky-dive or drive in demolition derbies. I have no idea why they do what they do, and I have absolutely no intention of doing it myself, ever, but, goddamn, do those people look like they're having fun.

I'll go ahead and add to Pierce's observation that Ryan "is as ambitious as Satan," that Ryan is likely to look better to a lot of people after this because it will be the first major exposure a lot of people have to him. At least partisan Republicans are likely to be jazzed by his presentation. Shoot, partisan Republicans were jazzed by Sarah Palin's performance against Biden in 2008. Some audience segements are easy to please.

Here's the BuzzFeed video of Ryan being a prickly jerk, Paul Ryan Gets Testy And Ends Interview 10/08/2012:

Aside from his testiness, it also seems to me in that clip Ryan is struggling to string together several favorite conservative cliches into a coherent whole. He probably wished he hadn't said that not even Obama was proposing new gun laws, because his base believes that Obama is part of a massive UN conspiracy to take away everyone's guns so the federal gubment can force us all into homosexual marriages and unisex bathrooms. Or something like that.

And he also seemed to slip when he blurted out that the answer to crime was to create opportunity in the inner cities, which sounded in the context like he was suggesting that social conditions and economic situations might actually have some meaningful effect on causing crime! It was as if Ramsey Clark had taken over his mouth for a few seconds. But then he proceeded to the Christian-Right-ly Correct position that all those black people in the ghetto inner-city dwellers need to learn Discipline. Culture-of-poverty and all that, you know.

While I'm on the topic of debates, the discussion about whether debates matter in Presidential elections has taken on metaphysical overtones, or at least the after-work-drinks version of metaphysics at the local pub. Political scientists and sociologists and (gulp!) economists can come up with analyses and even models showing that debates have no effect on Presidential elections at all. Because their models need data that can be quantified and correlated, and it's hard if not impossible to isolate quantifiable measures that would isolate perceived debate performance to its effect on the final vote.

Of course the debates matter, because they are in this and the last several Presidential elections, major focuses of the Presidential campaign and voters ultimately make a choice based on a variety of factors. Voting matters, so turnout matters, so get-out-the-vote operations are important. TV is the single most important communication channel for the elections, so ads and ad buys matter.

And what candidates say matters. Even if we have to read their lips very carefully. William Saletan offered a good analysis of Willard Romney's weasel-words on abortion in Romney’s Abortion “Agenda” Slate 10/10/2012. It's worth paying attention to what major Presidential candidates say and how they say it.

Tags: 2012 election, joe biden, mitt romney, paul ryan

Christian Right values at the Republican Convention

I haven't posted much about this week's Conservative White People's Tribal Festival, aka, the Republican Convention. I haven't had much to add that I'm not seeing other people say better.

But I will mention a couple of things here. One is Mike Huckabee's speech on Wednesday 08/29/2012. From Politico's transcript:

Let me clear the air about whether guys like me would only support an evangelical. Of the four people on the two tickets, the only self-professed evangelical is Barack Obama, and he supports changing the definition of marriage, believes that human life is disposable and expendable at any time in the womb or even beyond the womb, and tells people of faith that they must bow their knees to the god of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care. [my emphasis]

This is a good statement of the priorities of the Christian Right. Their position is a religious one. But their religion produces political priorities for them that override denominational or confessional affiliations in their voting and political donation behavior.

To most of the religious factions of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney is a member of a non-Christian cult, the Mormon Church, and is headed to Hail. But they will support him with enthusiasm against Obama, who Huckabee calls a "self-professed" evangelical. A large percentage of Huckabee's Party are "self-professed" believers in the idea that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist atheist Muslim fundamentalist.

Huckabee has a more pleasant public face than many Christian Right activists and leading Republican politicians. But he used his ecumenical moment to promote the sleazy notion that Obama is persecuting Christianity in the United States: "The attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me. The Democrats have brought back the old dance the 'Limbo' to see how low they can go in attempting to limit our ability to practice our faith." (my emphasis)

From NPR's transcript of Ann Romney's Convention Speech 08/28/2012 (video here):

I want to talk to you about that love so deep only a mother can fathom it — the love we have for our children and our children's children. ...

They are here among us tonight in this hall; they are here in neighborhoods across Tampa and all across America. The parents who lie awake at night side by side, wondering how they'll be able to pay the mortgage or make the rent; the single dad who's working extra hours tonight, so that his kids can buy some new clothes to go back to school, can take a school trip or play a sport, so his kids can feel ... like the other kids.

And the working moms who love their jobs but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids, but that's just out of the question with this economy. ...

And if you listen carefully, you'll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It's how it is, isn't it?

It's the moms who always have to work a little harder, to make everything right.

It's the moms of this nation — single, married, widowed — who really hold this country together. We're the mothers, we're the wives, we're the grandmothers, we're the big sisters, we're the little sisters, we're the daughters.

This is the Christian Right's vision of the proper "traditional values": it's a woman's place to be a mother, a daughter, a wife, someone whose life is defined by her relationship to the men in her family. And maybe a tiny bit by a female sibling.

Her version of this Traditional Family doesn't say it's bad for a woman to work. But if you do, you will be one of those "working moms who love their jobs but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids." In other words, you should feel guilty for being a deficient mother.

And single fathers? He has to worry about making sure "his kids can feel ... like the other kids." Because, you know, if a kid has no mother in the house - or worse, two mothers, or, worse yet - two dads, well, they just aren't going to "feel ... like the other kids." Because you're a bad parent.

Yes, I'm interpreting a bit. But I'm interpreting it based on what I know about the Christian Right's concept of the Traditional Family, and how important it is to restrict women's roles in it. And outside it.

Both male and female adherents of this view often speak defensively about phantom feminists out there who criticism women who work as full-time mothers and homemakers. If there are any actual feminists who do so, I haven't encountered them. In fact, I doubt that most self-described feminists would even recognize them are feminists, since the women's movement has emphasized improving the security and protecting the dignity of women who are full-time mothers and homemakers. At the same time they have worked to prevent opportunities available to women from being restricted from irrational prejudices and laws based on a rigid, ideology model of the Traditional Family.

One result of that has also been that it is becoming more common the US for men to take a period of time off from working to be full-time fathers and homemakers while their spouses work. Doing so is scarcely considered a resume "gap" any more as it once was for men taking on that role. Even though Lady Romney no doubt considers that a father performing such a role would deprive his kids of being able to "feel ... like the other kids."

Finally, this from the Boston Globe/AP Transcript of Rep. Paul Ryan's remarks 08/29/2012 (video here):

Mitt and I also go to different churches. But in any church, the best kind of preaching is done by example. And I've been watching that example. The man who will accept your nomination tomorrow is prayerful and faithful and honorable. Not only a defender of marriage, he offers an example of marriage at its best. Not only a fine businessman, he’s a fine man, worthy of leading this optimistic and good-hearted country.

Here again, politics trumps denominational affiliation. This has been true of the Christian Right since it became an organized force in its current form during the Carter Administration.

Our different faiths come together in the same moral creed. We believe that in every life there is goodness; for every person, there is hope. Each one of us was made for a reason, bearing the image and likeness of the Lord of Life.

Here's where it's important to pay attention to tribal-code usages of words and phrases. "Life" mentioned in the abstract in such a context signals opposition to abortion, even for those whose "method of conception" (Ryan's phrase elsewhere) was being raped. "Lord of Life" just strengthens the signal. But it also is discreet, because to those in the home audience not so familiar with the term, it would just sound like a conventional reference to God. They wanted to mute their anti-abortion priorities, especially after Todd Akin so inconveniently let slip on TV something of the general attitude toward women that the antiabortion movement promotes.

He continues directly:

We have responsibilities, one to another — we do not each face the world alone. And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.

This again would be heard by the convention audience and faithful Republicans as primarily antiabortion slogans. That's pretty much the only context these days in which you hear Republicans taking such a non-Ayn-Randish position as "the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak." That's strictly antiabortion talk for the Reps. It doesn't apply at all to anyone who is a post-birth person. Especially not women. Or African-Americans. Or Latinos. Or immigrants.

This immediately following piece of boilerplate also caught my attention:

Each of these great moral ideas is essential to democratic government — to the rule of law, to life in a humane and decent society. They are the moral creed of our country, as powerful in our time, as on the day of America’s founding. They are self-evident and unchanging, and sometimes, even presidents need reminding, that our rights come from nature and God, not from government.

First, I would be surprised if there are even two people, Ryan included, attending the Republican convention who could give any kind of decent description of what the philosophical concept of Natural Law alluded to by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Because outside of Catholic theology, the concept pretty much isn't used any more. Fundamentalist Protestant theology completely rejects it.

And, wait, our rights come from our Creator and the laws of Nature's God, like the Declaration says? What about Lee Greenwood:

I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me

According to Lee Greenwood in the unofficial national anthem of the Republican Party, it was American soldiers who gave us our rights! Soldiers who were, uh, paid by the gubment.

Ryan continues on immediately with a verbal tribute to The Troops. Although it was surprisingly brief and entirely conventional: "The founding generation secured those rights for us, and in every generation since, the best among us have defended our freedoms. They are protecting us right now. We honor them and all our veterans, and we thank them."

If I thought this signaled some kind of a restrained attitude toward foreign policy, I might see the light treatment of military themes as some kind of hopeful sign. But since the Christian-nationalist theme of American Exceptionalism is so prominent at the convention, and since Ryan was preceded by not-yet-convicted war criminal Condi-Condi Rice talking about the need to continue the Cheney-Bush foreign policy, I'm going to restraint any surges of hope on that score.

Here's Steve Earle performing his song about Condi-Condi in 2005:

Tags: ann romney, mike huckabee, paul ryan, steve earle

Ryan and Ayn Randism mainstreamed

Tristero rightly observed when Romney announced Paul Ryanas his Vice Presidential pick, interpreting advice he once got from Dave Neiwert ("Two Distinct Ideologies?" Are You Kidding? Hulabaloo 08/11/2012):

The problem is that elevating extremism to the level of serious discussion tends to confer enormous status on bad ideas and that makes it more difficult to fight against them. It also tends to move the discourse towards treating the bad ideas as reasonable ones - the Overton Window concept, more or less.

The standard conventional wisdom about the 1964 election was that the Republican Party embraced radicalism with the Barry Goldwater nomination, and since then they've stayed away from it, having learned their lesson.

Now that the mainstream press operates so reliably with "scripts" cooked up in the Washington Beltway, they continue to recite the notion that the Republican Party is composed of reasonable conservatives. And so they largely ignore the most defining feature of mainstream politics, the cycle of radicalization in which the Republican Party is caught. With no end in sight.

Paul Krugman in Romney/Ryan: The Real Target describes how that feature works in the Ryan case:

Like Bush in 2000, Ryan has a completely undeserved reputation in the media as a bluff, honest guy, in Ryan's case supplemented by a reputation as a serious policy wonk. None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air — huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned. ...

So whence comes the Ryan reputation? As I said in my last post, it’s because many commentators want to tell a story about US politics that makes them feel and look good — a story in which both parties are equally at fault in our national stalemate, and in which said commentators stand above the fray. This story requires that there be good, honest, technically savvy conservative politicians, so that you can point to these politicians and say how much you admire them, even if you disagree with some of their ideas; after all, unless you lavish praise on some conservatives, you don’t come across as nobly even-handed.

The trouble, of course, is that it's really really hard to find any actual conservative politicians who deserve that praise. [my emphasis]

Even-the-liberal Kevin Drum at Mother Jones plays this game in Programming Note: Ryan 2013 Is Not Ryan 2012 08/17/2012, scolding liberals for not, uh, pretending Ryan's plan to end Medicare isn't completely sensible, someway somehow. KJ does make some good observations sometime. But ever since he played this liberal troll game in the lead-up to the Iraq War, this stuff coming from him has really annoyed me. Even a catastrophe like the Iraq War didn't persuade him to clean up his act. Basically, he tries to pretend that Ryan is the "bluff, honest guy" of Beltway scripting that Krugman analyzes so well.

Here is the eminently respectable PBS Newshour bringing us Sleepy Mark Shields and National Reviewer Rich Lowry talking about Paul Ryan, Shields and Lowry on GOP Veep Choice Paul Ryan, Medicare 08/17/2012 (with transcript):

In reality, Ryan's selection as VP nominee (which formally happens at the Republican National Convention) is both a sign that Ayn Rand extremism is now respectable in the Republican Party and an furtherance of the radicalization process that made it so.

This is a nihilistic view, because Rand's philosophy that everyone should be sociopaths isn't a realistic view, even for a rightwing dictatorship. It completely rejects the entire view of a political community as a meaningful entity. As Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey wrote in Ephemera 2009 (7) 03/19/2009:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and [Ayn Rand's] Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

As George Lakoff warns in his "don't think of an elephant" example, even refuting a bad idea makes the audience think about the "framing" the bad idea employs. Lakoff makes a valuable point that the Democrats often try to use the Republicans' framing (e.g., gubment needs to tighten its belt) in a way that undercuts the Democrats' ability to build an alternative framing. But somebody also has to spend the time to understand the Republicans' ideologies, both nominal and real, and has to analyze and refute them in some way.

Although it's reflective of Rand's Sociopaths Rock! philosophy having been mainstreamed in the Republican Party, Ryan's prominence in national politics the last few years has helped produce some useful analysis of Randism, both the fantasy kind and the real existing versions.

The Atlas Society, a group of Rand admirers, provides a video and partial transcript of a speech Ryan gave to one of their meetings in Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand's Ideas: In The Hot Seat Again 04/30/2012, in which he references how he sees his own politics as reflecting Rand's outlook.

Digby and Alternet have been carrying lots of information on the Ayn Rand ideology the last few years: Digby, Randy Conservatives 10/06/2007; Bruce Levine, How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation Alternet 12/15/2011; Jan Frel, Paul Ryan's Biggest Influence: 10 Things You Should Know About the Lunatic Ayn Rand Alternet 08/12/2012

Think Progress carried two posts with the same title: Jeff Spross, [UPDATED] VIDEO: The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand 04/18/2011 and Climate Guest Blogger, VIDEO: The truth about GOP hero Ayn Rand 04/24/2011

Mark Ames describes the development of Rand's thought in a post whose title indicates his, uh, lack of sympathy with it: Paul Ryan’s Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls The eXiled 08/12/2012.

Tags: 2012 election, ayn rand, paul ryan

Ryan's candidacy and the Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid debate

David Dayen has a good post putting the Ryan nomination and its likely effect on the Presidential race into the context of the larger need to defend Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Thoughts on the Paul Ryan VP Selection FDL News 08/11/2012.

One of the failures of the Obama Administration from the progressive viewpoint is that he has made a willingness to cut benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid his own position and made it respectable in the Democratic Party. Those cuts are at the core of his cherished goal of a Grand Bargain that he apparently sees as a triumph for postpartisan harmony, but it actually just cuts benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and maybe ends home mortgage interest deductions. Because all he's asking from the Republican side as concessions are cosmetic adjustments to tax rates for the wealthy.

David makes a couple of important points. One is that the conventional assumption that Ryan's nomination shifts the focus of the debate somewhat away from unemployment and the economy and more toward the debt, the deficit and social insurance programs is probably right. Although if that is the case, it reflects a real weakness in the political system's ability to focus on the results of the current depression and remedies to it:

The Obama campaign will attack on the budget, on Medicare, on Social Security, and with Ryan as a true believer, the Romney campaign will defend it. And the fact that we’re wasting human capital by maintaining a low aggregate demand, tolerating slow growth, keeping millions of Americans out of work and on the sidelines, will not get more than a passing inference. It's really amazing.

But he also points out that Obama's own Grand Bargain support for benefits cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid means that the terms of the debate have shifted very much against those programs compared to 2008. The Republicans want to end those programs, though the Romney/Ryan campaign will not say that exactly, despite the reality that Ryan's voucher program for senior health care would end the Medicare program, whether or not they christen the voucher program "Medicare". The Democrats don't want to end the programs, "only" to cut the benefits they provide in major ways.

This will complicate the campaign, because Obama's support for cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has blurred the Democrats' ability to straight-up defend those programs. I'm a bit optimistic about this, in that a campaign in which the Democrats try to convey a message that the Republicans want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and the Democrats defend them will provide supporters of those programs a more favorable political context in which to fight Obama and the Republicans over the Grand Bargain in the lame duck Congressional budget fight.

Van Jones is right in saying that progressive have two major fights on the national level this year, November: getting Obama re-elected; and, December: preventing Obama and the Republicans from cutting benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I like David's formulation of the options in the December round, which is the second important point he makes:

That’s the firmament on which this election will be decided [Romney/Ryan oppose the programs, Obama only wants to cut them badly], and unless more leaders go into government who shift that fault line to the left, around adequate safety nets and progressive taxation, nothing will change. Either that, or an independent movement outside government makes it impossible for the side touting their protection of Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security to do anything but actually protect it. I believe this is a real choice; there is a difference between ending it and just cutting it. But we shouldn't fool ourselves about what that choice is. [my emphasis]

A Grand Bargain that includes the kind of cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will put American politics into what I think of as a post-New Deal phase. Right now, with both parties dominated by corporate money and committed to a neoliberal ideology that at best leaves democracy only a minor role in state affairs, the range of choices in politics is dangerously narrow, as in the case of Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid cuts.

And to be clear, it is not economics that requires cutting those benefits: it's ideology and class politics of the wealthiest against the rest.

And the drift that David identifies on social insurance is broadly true on issues across the board. There are real and substantial differences between Democrats and Republicans. But the Republicans are driving the drift their way, and are willing to block any progress at all on individual issues in order to wrest concessions from a Democratic Administration and a Democratic Party that are far, far too willing to offer them up.

Tags: 2012 election, grand bargain, medicare, paul ryan, social security

Paul Ryan and Obama's Grand Bargain

I'm looking forward to seeing Charlie Pierce's comments on the man he calls the "zombie-eyed granny-starver", Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's Vice Presidential pick. Jim Newell gives this decent summary of what the man stands for (Meet Your New Vice Presidential Candidate, The One and Only History’s Greatest Monster, Paul Ryan Wonkette 08/11/2012):

A few things about Paul Ryan: He wants to end Medicare and give people (those who are 55 and younger at the time of passage) coupons to buy private insurance plans on the market instead. Those coupons would be explicitly designed not to keep up with medical inflation, ensuring seniors pay higher out-of-pocket costs each year until the market collapses.

He wants to convert Medicaid and food stamps into block grants sent to the states and sharply reduced levels. He wants to bring non-defense discretionary spending down to 3% of the federal budget. He wants to slash taxes on the wealthy, giving them an average 12.5% in additional after-tax income. The only reason his budgets haven't said a word about privatizing or dramatically cutting benefits in Social Security is because his fellow congressmen demanded he not take that on in addition to everything else, at this point. He voted for the Iraq War, Medicare Part D, and TARP.

In thinking about this year's national politics, I'm keeping in mind Van Jones' perspective that progressives face two major battles this year: November (getting Obama re-elected and Romney not-elected) and December (defeating Obama's cherished goal of a Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).

Democrats need to remember all year what Obama told the New York Times (Amy Chozick, Obama Is an Avid Reader, and Critic, of the News New York Times 08/07/2012): "He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security."

And since Ryan's star selling point has been his proposal to abolish Medicare, to exploit that the Obama campaign will need to defend Medicare in some way or another. Which they hopefully will do aggressively, because it's one of the Democrats' best programs and most popular ones.

That will also make it more difficult for Obama to get the Grand Bargain through Congress in the lame duck session. And that would be a very good thing for the Democrats in Congress to be worried that a vote for the Grand Bargain could be political suicide for them. The ideal situation would be for every Democrat in Congress in December to be in fear that a vote for the Grand Bargain would be the end of any political future for them in the Democratic Party. And it should be the end for anyone who votes to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Tags: 2012 election, grand bargain, medicare, paul ryan, social security