Well this is going to be fun. Deprived for neigh on four days of the prattling sycophancy and screeching disdain that I have become accustomed to, I have branched out to more reliable outlets of leftist thinking: The Huffington Post. Screeching and prattling abound.
The Big Lie
This is a particularly audacious title. This “Big Lie”—which I capitalize in deference to an assumed specificity—now has quite the billing to live up to. Besides simply being a Big Lie, it is The Big Lie. I’m expecting the solution to all of our political problems.
By Robert Reich
Published: Huffington Post, January 3, 2011
Republicans are telling Americans a big lie,
What? You can’t just backtrack like that. I was promised The Big Lie: the singular Big Lie that belies all of our social upheaval. I was promised a diagnosis for the loose thread that we continue to pull to unweave the proverbial sweater. Now he’s telling me that it’s just a lie? It’s not the lie. It’s not even a specific lie. It is just a lie as mundane as any other lie, like parents loving their children equally or Nancy Pelosi professing that she’s never had plastic surgery.
and Obama and the Democrats are letting them.
You know Obama; always coddling Republicans.
The Big Lie
Now it’s The Big Lie again? Make up your fucking mind.
is that our economic problems are due to a government that's too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.
Why is this a lie?
Reich slightly misstates the conservative position, which those on the other side of the aisle confuse as the Republican position, so I’ll clarify:
Our economic problems are due to regulations tinkering with the free markets. They were compounded in magnitude by poor judgment on behalf of private corporations, which exacerbated the natural downturn in the business cycle. By expanding the government, we have ensured that unsound economic circumstances like this will continue. By propping up corporations that have made bad decisions, we have enshrined moral hazard and progressed very far down a path of consolidating all of the economy’s risk within the federal government. Without invoking established mechanisms to address market failure, we have eliminated the incentive for risk-averse behavior. These incursions into the free market system are neither morally justified nor productive to their stated goals.
The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928,
Why is this the truth?
This is somewhat baffling to me. The depression started in the late 20’s, but not until 1929. The actual data that I searched for (42 seconds, thank you, Google) showed that 1916 was more inequitable with regards to the top 1% of wage earners. Similarly, 1935 was the highest year for the top 10% of wage earners. So why choose a minor peak in 1928 before a precipitous fall? Because there wasn’t a peak in 1929. All of this is, of course, irrelevant to social equality, because income and wealth are inherently different things, but then, I’m arguing data against a flippant off-hander from a political hack, so I’ll simply say: state your sources. FYI, mine comes from Berkeley
combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us.
Two issues: 1) As a member of the ruling class elite, Robert Reich is decidedly not the “rest of us,” with regards to income or any other relevant characteristic. The attempt at camaraderie rings false. 2) The metrics showing stagnation in the lower classes are specifically designed to be support an income inequality skew. How? Because success is what distinguishes the upper-class from—to borrow Reich’s forced attempt at a connection—“the rest of us,” is income. Of course the lower class has stagnant incomes; any precipitous rise in the outliers that skew the averages would be assimilated into the upper class. Similarly, formerly high-wealth individuals (think failed sole-proprietors) skew the figures at the low end of the spectrum, because their downward trend gets caught in the lower bucket, because individuals are constantly shuffled between the high and the low income classes. The relevant metrics, which Mr. Reich blithely ignores, involve class fluidity, which is still very high in the United States
The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity.
Production, not spending, stimulates the American economy. (That’s a bit misleading, as production, not spending, stimulates any economy, but I prefer to permit digressions into my own jingoistic fervor.)
Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can't borrow as before, and must save for retirement.
As though these were not pertinent issues before the recession. We’ve been hearing for decades that Americans don’t save enough, haven’t funded their retirement, and generally embraced high-risk behavior that jeopardized credit-worthiness.
The short-term solution is for government to counteract this shortfall
No! The shortfall is a natural course-correction for an economy that hasn’t been purely capitalistic in far too long.
by spending more, not less. The long-term solution is to spread the benefits of economic growth more widely
Economic classes dispassionately examine means of distributing resources. There’s the market, which is usually given a little gold star as the optimal means to distribute resources, but there are other means examined: command, force, lottery, personal characteristics, or first-come first-serve.
Keep in mind that when someone advocates tweeking the market, he is advocating the use of one of these methods. All of these methods are brutal and arbitrary. None of these methods is moral.
(for example, through a more progressive income tax, a larger EITC, an exemption on the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and application of payroll taxes to incomes over $250K,
Why $20K of exempted income? Why a tax increase on incomes over $250K? What part of this isn’t arbitrary?
stronger unions, and more and better investments in education and infrastructure.)
How the hell do unions promote economic growth in the short term? Stronger unions make companies less profitable and depress hiring. Increasing regulations on fluidity in the labor market discourages firms from taking on new people. Unions are notoriously inflexible and hobble a company’s agility in the marketplace. Nothing that unions do promotes short-term economic health or hiring. There’s a legitimate argument that strong unions promote economic well-being long-term by making exploitation of the labor force more difficult. In abstract, it makes sense. That said, this is more of a bone thrown to a key political constituency as opposed to reasoned economic policy.
But instead of telling the truth,
Again, why is this “the truth?” Is this an economic argument or a sermon?
Obama has legitimized the Big Lie
Again, WHY is this a lie, let along the “Big Lie.”
by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, freezing federal pay, touting his deficit commission co-chairs' recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase, and agreeing to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
The American people did that by forcing the President’s hand. The progressive agenda has failed, and the American people are thirsty for a return to conservative values. These weren’t Obama’s ideas; he had to be dragged to them.
Will Obama stand up to the Big Lie? Will he use his State of the Union address to rebut it
He might, if you would take the time to even attempt to rebut it right now.
and tell the truth? Maybe, but so far there's no evidence.
How is it that progressives whine so much? No president in recent history has been as successful at enacting his agenda as President Obama. In his mind, however, it’s a cruel trick of history that it isn’t succeeding.
In his weekly address yesterday,
Which only journalists, lobbyists, and political insiders listen to.
the president restated his "commitment" for 2011 "to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class."
That is, before he headed out to the back nine.
He added that it's important "to look ahead -- not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years"
It’s hard to believe that a political insider can’t recognize fluff from a presidential address. Maybe he has a word count he has to hit before Arianna’s check clears.
to find ways to stimulate the economy through innovation. And that it is critical that the U.S.
Novel concept: we can out-compete by actually allowing competition. The United States
Become more innovative? Out-compete? Who or what is he talking about? Big American corporations are innovating like mad all over the world, with research and development centers in China and India
::Sit back and waits for author to acknowledge the manifestly obvious point that I just so eloquently made::
And their profits are soaring.
Swing and a miss.
They're sitting on almost $1 trillion of cash.
Does anyone else get the feeling the Reich feels that it is their patriotic duty to be unprofitable?
But they won't create jobs in America
Demand for what? Jobs? There’s plenty of demand for jobs. The reason is because taxes and regulations overseas are far friendlier, even when political officials are corrupt.
In the Republican address in response, U.S. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) restated the Big Lie. "The American people sent us to Congress with clear instructions: make government smaller, not bigger,"
That’s a statistically provable truth, The American people sent conservatives like Ayotte to congress in droves to rebuke the progressive Big Government agenda. If you didn’t hear that message loud and clear, you have to have ear muffs on.
she said. Deficit reduction "isn't a Republican problem or a Democrat problem -- it's an American problem that will require tough decision-making from both parties."
I can understand the argument that the deficit is not an immediate problem, but I can find no conceivable way to square the idea that a deficit out-pacing economic growth isn’t going to be a problem eventually. If I were a liberal, I’d compare deficit hawks to premillennial dispensationalists from Revival-era America who thought they could, through intensive study of scripture, mathematically calculate the time of Christ’s second coming. But then, you have to explain premillennialism and everyone gets bogged down in a theological analogy.
And the way to shrink the deficit is to cut government.
There are two ways to reduce a deficit: increase revenues or cut costs. Since federal revenues have been a roughly constant 18.5% of GDP since, well, practically forever, any dispassionate observer will conclude that the only area in which politics can impact the deficit is spending cuts.
The extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over the next two years, she said, was an "important first step" to jump-start the economy. Starting Wednesday, when the 112th Congress convenes with a Republican majority in the House, we'll be hearing far more of the Big Lie.
How do tax cuts hurt the economy. The only rational argument against tax cuts has been that they impact the deficit. While Republicans have been playing defense against charges of deficit hypocrisy by arguing that it doesn’t really impact the deficit that much, or that the benefits out-weighed the costs, (both valid arguments) no one has put the progressive counter-argument’s feet to the fire:
If you don’t see a problem with federal deficits—indeed, if you deride deficit alarmism “The Big Lie,” foisted upon us by anti-governmental lunatics on the right-wing fringe—then how do you argue against the provable economic stimulus of tax cuts by raging that it will add to the deficit?
George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth.
Generally, this is meant to apply to those who merely assert an opinion, rather than those who convincingly argue it. I have asked repeatedly, why is what you call “The Big Lie” a lie. Why is it what you call “the truth” the truth? The failure to address these basic rebukes is the very nature of an assertion. These citations Reich includes for peripheral support serve only to undercut a rant based only on assertion.
Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that "the size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" and that members of the public are "more easily prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones."
Does a guy named Reich quoting Mein Kampf perturb anyone else?
Only the president has the bully pulpit.
Excellent point. With the monumental power afforded the President of the United States
But will he use it to tell the Big Truth?
Was that supposed to be the reveal? He finally calls “the truth” “the Big Truth,” lending weight to my original thesis that this man does not understand proper nouns. “The Big Lebowski”. That’s a proper Noun. BigGovernment.com: proper noun, even if the rules for websites are a little screwy. “Deficit spending is unfairly demonized and income redistribution is the key to economic growth” is not a proper noun.
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