Republican Philosophy: Handouts to the Rich, Not "You're on Your Own"
The polls haven't been looking good lately. Part of this is simply erratic movements in polls and some post-convention bounce for the Republicans. But part of the story is real. The Republicans have again managed to paint the Democrats as wimps.
While some of this is just vicious/racist garbage (e.g. Rudy Giuliani's complaints that the Dems don't talk about "Islamic terrorism) some of the wimp riff was handed to them by the Dems. Specifically the "you're on your own" theme that Senator Obama and his campaign have seized upon.
The Republicans are no more about "you're on your own" than the Dems. They just think that the government is there to give a helping hand to rich people.
This can be shown in one policy area after another. When they designed a Medicare drug benefit in 2003 the Republicans didn't say "you're on your own." They said how can we design this thing to put as much money as possible in the pockets of the drug companies and insurance industry?
When the Republicans signed sweetheart contracts with Halliburton and Blackwater, they weren't saying "you're on your own." They were saying how can we put as much public money as possible into the hands of our friends?
And when the Republicans pushed the bankruptcy reform act in 2005, they didn't tell the credit card industry "you're on your own." They told the banks that they would use the power of the government to help them collect on their bad loans, in order to help boost their profits.
When it comes to being a wimp, Senator McCain tops the charts. He has repeatedly shown a willingness to use the power of the government to help the rich and powerful. Senator McCain can be a tough guy when it comes to standing up to retirees who are dependent on their Social Security and Medicare. He can also stand tough against kids trying to pay for a college education. But when the rich and big corporations come calling; Senator McCain is prepared to serve.
When we say that Senator McCain and the Republicans are about "you're on your own" we flatter them immensely and paint ourselves as losers. The Republicans want the government to interfere in the economy every bit as much as Democrats. The difference is that the Republicans want the government to intervene to make the rich even richer.
This may have been news in 1840 or 1880 or in 1929 BUT this Standard Operating Procedure now.
Milton Freidman is THE lying sack of crap that Adam Smith warned us about in the Wealth of Nations.
We doomed to repeat becuase we go out of our ways to fail to remember.
September 8, 2008 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Additionally, you should understand that this is a selling point to the majority of American's who dream of being wealthy w/o the 'work hard' part. 'Every-person' knows that they are simply the next rich person in waiting.
The problem is that our ecomonic system as presently constituted is designed to limit the number folk who become wealthy . . .
I believe we will have a great impact, if liberals/progressives punch the to great truths:
1. Republicans lie.
2. Republicans steal.
Even the Rapturian rabble can get that this in outside 'good'.
September 8, 2008 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I have to agree. We should tell the banks and GSE's and marginal homeowners that they are on their own. Along with the housing industry, corporate farmers, unions, and every country that has one of our 704 overseas bases.
September 8, 2008 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
airgun177,
I'm baaack!! Sorry, about those sled dogs. I was sure you would go to the citation and feel like your leash had been jerked. I never dreamed you would expose yourself as a credulous bozo by complaining.
So you're also an expert on economics? Really? I'm sure Dean would be interested in your real views. So don't hide behind irony. Open the raincoat.
Cheers,
z2v
(No actual sled dogs were harmed in the PWNING of airgun177 at Lawyers, Troopergate, and Questions.)
September 8, 2008 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you've got something to contribute to the thread, zeno2vonnegut, great.
Otherwise, take it outside!
September 8, 2008 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen,
Sorry if troll-hunting annoys you as much or more than trolls. I understand your point.
September 8, 2008 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
It never occurred to me that someone would be adolescent enough to use the idea of slaughtered dogs to bait a response and then crow about it. It's sad and sick and stupid. All of which earns you an "ignore" from here on in. With all the intelligent people present on the blogosphere I certainly don't need to waste time with someone like you.
To Ellen: Thanks, and I hope they get the avatars back up. Yours is quite striking.
September 8, 2008 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
ag155,
Wait until you see mine!
I'd give yours a bone.
Cheers,
z2v
September 9, 2008 1:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
To: Both of you
From: Your own Miss Manners
Subj: Flaming
Msg: Knock it off!
September 8, 2008 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gee Shooter, but if we closed all those 704 overseas bases, the child prostitution industries in all those countries would collapse overnight. Without GI Joe, who is going to buy all that 13 year old poontang?
Of course Unions are already on their own, been cut adrift for forty years now. And Marginal homeowners have long since gotten that message.
So I guess you're halfway home.
September 8, 2008 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dean, I believe the "You're On Your Own" (YOYO) mantra is meant to apply to We the People, who ostensibly ARE the government and for whom it ought to be working (at least in theory). In other words, in contrast to the way thing should be, the Republicans tell the little guy "you're on your own".
The Democratic mantra that is the opposite is that "We're All In This Together". I haven't heard that line expressed as much as the YOYO line just recently, but I think it makes a nice contrast.
I don't dispute any of your facts, Dean. I guess you're point is that you don't think the slogan sells very well. I don't have a strong opinion about that -- I think the words are quite descriptive of the reality, however.
-- ARG
September 8, 2008 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
McCain is the Great White Hope, the aged white warrior with his bible thumping priestess who will get the Republican Party and ergo the country back on the path set by God. That is what the Bush04 crowd seems to believe.
September 8, 2008 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course McCain and the Republicans are all about the rich. Part of the problem is that the Democrats to some extent are too. They talk a good game on occasion but when push comes to shove will not play the 'class war' card. The narrative of the American Dream has been changed. What the American Dream is now about is all of us having the potential to become the next Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, with enough hard work and a little luck that is...as the billionaires laugh themselves silly all the way to the bank. America is no longer a country of free people it is a country where freedom is defined as the right of the few to make as much as they can...and anything said to the contrary is considered 'un-American'.
When did unregulated capitalism become equivilant to freedom? Milton Friedman, whose name Richard Adlof mentioned earlier, was one of the architects...along with his compatriots like Alan Greenspan, the man mostly responsible for the mess we have now. Friedman was able to hijack and corrupt the Libertarian movement, basically a socialist movement up to that point, by saying it is the right of any individual to make as much money as he/she can...and effort to regulate the economy was tantamount to infringing on all of our civil rights. An economic position the republicans and their fat cat corporate benefactors seized on and ran with. Now anyone who suggests that unfettered capitalism is bad is an anti-American Commie or Socialist.
But of course the D's won't stand up and fight because to some extent they buy into Friedman's economic vision...why else were Rubin in Clinton's cabinet and Alan Greenspan, Freidman's protege, allowed to continue being the steward of the US economy for all 8 years of the Clinton administration. So why would the D's as a party fight against something that right now they really believe in and profit from almost as muchas the R's? So nobody is interested in changing the narrative...
It is an Orwellian Ponzi scheme in its rationale...letting the rich have more actually doesn't mean you'll have less, it means you'll have the opportunity to have more and therefore less is more. And the American people to some degree buy into this nonsense. P.T. Barnum was right...there is a sucker born every minute.
September 8, 2008 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with you on Greenspan being the man mostly responsible for the mess we have now. It was his responsibility to keep the economy from going into meltdown.
However, I think you need to include Congress as well. Specifically the repug Senate in 1999, and a bill introduced by Gramm that basically gutted the Glass-Segal Act. Nine years later, we can see why it was written and should have been kept on the books.
September 8, 2008 5:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure...I agree Congress too. And, implicitly, didn't Clinton have to sign off on its repeal also? So what would be the chances that if Obama wins, and the Congress is controlled by the D's, that a new act like Glass will be passed?
September 8, 2008 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Glass Steagal Act repeal has nothing to do with the current mess. Mortgage securitization (which is what lies at the root of the trouble) began years before GS was repealed.
September 10, 2008 6:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well,now -- and without being an expert --
It seems to me that the too-big-to-fail Wall Street commercial banks wouldn't have been parking so much (if any) MBS and other securitized financial instruments on their balance sheets if it weren't for the investment bankers' promises that they'd be selling the garbage lickety-split -- "Hey; you're talkin' 'bout my bonus; just hold your horses; any minute now, we'll sell it to some fool." Only they ran out of fools.
Under Glass-Steagall those investment bankers wouldn't have been there, right?
September 10, 2008 7:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
And just for the record will I seem to be focusing on the D's role in all of this. Bottom line is the R's who make this corporate welfare scheme a top priority...the D's just seem not to be able to resist the urge to help 'the cause'.
September 8, 2008 6:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great topic and good comments. To Dean's point of the official slogans of the D's and R's and its relationship to making a decision on how the D's (Obama) have to fight back, I think that he will fight back in many ways. I think the grassroot activists and upper-income activists will attack the Republican messages head on and tough, and I also think it is important for the D's (Obama) to attack this stuff at its face value and in public (I think the debates could be overwhelming for Obama and Biden but I fear the "Victimization" card that McCAin will surely play if he looks bad. On the other hand what worked for JFK vs NIxon may be interpreted differently by our current culture and maybe not to the same conclusions. However, I think Obama can back up his compelling argument as an agent of change vs McCain who has been there for 25yrs and provide specifics about how his policies will affect the 95% of us he wants to give a general tax break to.
September 8, 2008 4:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dean's shortcoming is his extreme parochialism -- he sees rich v. poor but always as Americans.
If he weren't such a dyed-in-the-wool conventional macroeconomist, he'd be looking abroad and telling China, Japan, and the oil exporters -- those countries that benefited from our middle class's willingness to go into debt to support those foreigners' mercantilist fantasies* -- that they're going to be the ones to take the haircuts. No bailouts!
Go get 'em, Dean!
* A current account deficit must be financed by borrowing. If the country's government and businesses don't borrow enough, then, it's left to the consumer which in this case means home mortgages, car loans, and credit card debt.
September 8, 2008 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen,
I don't think a current account deficit implies borrowing and especially don't think it implies intra-national transfers. As I understand it, the US current account deficit means we buy more goods and services from foreigners than they buy from us. Often we sell them debts. Sometimes we sell Rockefeller Center or Hawaii or Budweiser.
I don't see the connection between inter and intra national asset transfers you think exist. I don't deny a secondary linkage, but it's not like terms balancing on opposite sides of one equation. There are two different equations.
September 9, 2008 4:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sell for dollars, you wind up with dollars.
While there's a small dollar market outside the U.S. which has been around for 30+ years, almost all dollars earned by foreigners and not used to buy American goods and services must be invested in U.S. assets.
You're right to say they can buy assets other than bonds but central banks which wind up with most of the money can't and desirable assets for sale to private foreign investors other than debt are too little to soak up the deficit (and too, try buying Unocal if you're CNOOC). Thus, we (governments, businesses, and households) have to soak up foreign earnings by borrowing them.
Quaere: Had we kept a tighter rein on mortgage and consumer lending, who knows how low the interest rate on government and corporate bonds might have gone as foreign buyers squeezed into those markets as the only port in the storm.
And that's why I say they should suffer a bit, now, because they got a windfall -- higher agency debt interest rates which they wouldn't have gotten if we'd been sensible (They've eaten our lunch in manufacturing and oil imports; they don't get dinner -- excess interest rates -- too).
September 9, 2008 7:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen,
We're in agreement that most of the current account deficit winds up buying debt. I thought that most of the debt, particularly that bought by central banks, was US Treasuries.
Where I am still either in disagreement or confusion is the tightness of the link to consumer debt. Can the the Treasury just not print up more debt to soak up the deficit?
Also warning foreigners that the US government is going to go Bear-Stearns on them would be suicidal because if the US ever offers 90 cents on a dollar of treasuries, we're toast. The foreigners (UBS, etc) are already taking a market-delivered haircut on CDO's.
September 9, 2008 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
As far as I know (I don't have a link; doubtless, wikipedia will have something), the powers that be don't "print money" any longer.
When the government (Treasury) needs money to pay its creditors, the FRB issues a bond and credits the Treasury's account in an equal amount (the UST writes a check to Lockheed, Mrs. Not-Got-Rocks, etc. to pay its bills). The FRB, then, sells that bond to the domestic and/or foreign public (including foreign central banks) or in the worst case holds on to it itself.
But there's always a bond (increased debt) involved.
A week or so ago (no link) the head of the Chinese central bank (it owns $387 billion of GSE debt)warned us not to allow the GSEs to default -- to the substantial harm of investors. He recognized some haircut was understandable implying only a large one would cause him to go on strike.
But neither China nor the speculators like PIMCO took any haircut at all.
September 9, 2008 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why is this man smiling?
You'd be smiling too if the government had just made your firm $1.7 billion in one day by bailing out Freddie and Fannie.
September 9, 2008 7:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
er, it appears Obama is not taking your advice
Obama: Recession could delay rescinding tax cuts
September 8, 2008 4:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tiffany & Co. shares soar near 6% on Obama's announcement of his new "Outreach to the Wealthy" plan.
September 8, 2008 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dean,
It's more than that. Look at the bail outs in the financial markets. They're not bail outs. They're doing exactly what they refuse to do with universal health coverage. They're socializing the market. And the financial market has fought tooth and nail for years to keep the government regulation out, but need their help to keep from drowning in their own sea of debt they created.
Perhaps it may be a blessing if Obama doesn't win this time. Let McCain get it so everything will fall down on him.
September 8, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Everything will fall down on the average American, and one might say they may well deserve it after electing Bush twice.
No matter how much the Bush Base hates taxes the bills are piling up and will be paid, primarily by the middle class and those on fixed incomes if McCain gets elected.
September 8, 2008 11:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
The mantra of the Republican/Conservative is: Deregulation spurs competition.
The reality is that deregulation spurs monopolyism.
September 9, 2008 9:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I thought YOYO was Jared Bernstein's tag line.
September 10, 2008 3:50 AM | Reply | Permalink