Fighting for real ‘shared sacrifice’
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Published: September 20
At Hyde Park N.Y. , this past weekend, hundreds of young and
old New Dealers
I could get more
people to go to an Ace of Bass reunion concert on a Tuesday night in downtown Detroit
gathered to mark the 70th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Four Freedoms speech.
Also, the Four Freedoms
speech was inherently directed towards foreign policy, specifically a rebuke to
isolationist tendencies. Even though I’m relatively certain Katrina’s going to
parlay this (somehow) into a domestic policy piece, I’d still bet you $10 she’s
going to promote isolationism at some point.
Delivered in January 1941, it laid out a bold commitment to
freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and
freedom from fear.
Only three of those
are actual freedoms. “Freedom from want” is a petty attempt to wish away
scarcity, a universal condition that underpins the entirety of economics.
So, this whole thing
has nothing to do with the Four Freedoms speech and the 70th anniversary,
and the gathering of hundreds in Hyde Park . The
entirety of your little introduction is a structurally unsound bridge of free
association and intellectually lazy meanderings to the “Economic Bill of Rights?”
This is bullshit. I MADE AN ACE OF BASS REFERENCE FOR YOU!
This is still the message of tomorrow.
Democratic veneration
for their heroes always makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Republicans don’t
even get this weepy-eyed over Reagan, and he was a far, far better president. Hell,
Nancy Reagan doesn’t even get this weepy-eyed over Reagan.
In so many ways, FDR’s leadership offers more than
nostalgia. He demonstrated what we yearn for so clearly now: a moral voice,
grounded in basic values; a clear stance on the side of working people; and a
willingness to challenge the entrenched interests that stand in their way.
This is also the guy
who tried to pack the courts, forced Congress and the States to ratify the 22nd
Amendment, and started Japanese internments. It is no surprise that the “moral
voice” of today’s left built a policy platform entirely out of consolidating
power in the Executive Branch punctuated by brief, but galling
misappropriations of that power.
Over the past few weeks, President Obama has reached for
that voice. He has now framed an argument that, given its scornful rejection by
Republican leaders, will define the 2012 election debate.
The president favors
higher taxes and the Republicans do not? I’ll take that argument ten times out
of ten.
He would “jolt” the economy now to put people to work, by
investing in teachers and infrastructure,
This is precisely why
the first stimulus failed to jolt the economy. After all, why would it?
Teachers and infrastructure projects don’t actually produce anything that leads
to economic growth in the short-term. Indeed, it has precisely the opposite
effect. Hiring more teachers out of the existing labor market reduces the size
of the economically productive skilled workforce, plus it forces new training
to accommodate career changes. Infrastructure construction, in the short term,
slows travel times and increases transportation costs. Both of these adversely
impact short-term economic growth and provide the precise opposite of a jolt.
cutting taxes on payrolls and small business,
Now that’s a
staggeringly dishonest description of Obama’s plan, but I’ll take it. It is a
deliberate and forceful acknowledgement that reducing taxes propels economic
growth.
and extending help to the unemployed.
Also, someone please
explain to me how paying someone to do nothing helps the economy. Anyone? Nancy
Pelosi? Anyone? Anyone?
Republicans dismiss these common-sense and popular
proposals, calling for more spending cuts and less regulation.
Considering that of
the five job creating ideas above, three actively undermine economic growth in
the short term and two are purely Republican ideas that aren’t really in Obama’s
plan, this seems like an odd column to be writing.
To get our books in order, Obama would raise taxes on the
rich
22 words ago, she
argued that tax cuts propelled economic growth. I remember because it was only
TWENTY TWO WORDS AGO! Yes, I counted. Now, either KVH has short-term memory
loss on par with the guy in Memento, or she failes to understand that the
inverse of a tax cut propelling economic growth is a tax hike impeding economic
growth.
while gaining savings by ending the wars abroad
Of course, this was
going to happen anyways, making these “savings” somewhat disingenuous.
and reducing Medicare and Medicaid’s unnecessarily high
payments to drug companies.
In other words, not
paying the drug companies market value for their products, thereby imposing a
pseudo-tax on drug companies, further inhibiting growth and undermining their
forward-looking research efforts.
Republicans rise in defense of tax cuts for the wealthy
We rise in defense of
all tax cuts, which--if memory serves from a mere fifty four words ago--propel
economic growth. The idea that we can tax the wealthy to cure our woes is not
only economically backwards, it’s morally unjustifiable. Taxes on the wealthy
are government-backed barriers to the fulfillment of our own American Dreams. They
are impediments to class mobility that have been designed to hobble the notion
of free enterprise and rebalance the calculus in the risk and reward equation.
This is they tyranny of the majority at its worst. I refuse to validate the
economic lynch-mob that has decided that the wealthy are to blame, and that
some sort of self-gratifying lust for revenge will actually improve their own
standing. It’s lazy and it’s self-serving. America is, and deserves, better
than that.
and insist that deficit reduction come solely from cuts in
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other “entitlements.”
No air quotes. Social
Security, Medicare and Medicate are, without qualification, entitlements. What’s
more, each one of the holy trinity of liberal sacred cows is structurally
unsound as American demography shifts to an older population.
The president stands for shared sacrifice; the Republicans
for sheltering the privileged few.
One would figure that
if Obama wants to tax only the rich, he doesn’t promote sharing the sacrifice
at all. He favors concentrating it. Indeed, the sane would come to the
conclusion that “shared sacrifice” is merely a bumper-sticker euphemism for a
job-killing, American Dream-killing, class warfare.
Progressives will have no problem standing with the
president in this fight.
We know. It’s the 80%
of the country that isn’t batshit
crazy that is at issue.
But with a head filled with the clarity of Roosevelt’s Four
Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, I can’t help challenging the definition
of this debate. Shared sacrifice has become the establishment trope, and it is
used by liberals in contrast with the Republican politics of privilege.
In other words, “shared
sacrifice” is universally acknowledged as bumper-sticker euphemism for left-wing
tripe. It’s fun to be right.
But shared sacrifice in the circumstances of this country,
where the rewards of the economy are not shared, isn’t a moral posture. It is a
moral outrage.
So once again, we see
that Katrina vanden Heuvel is a flat-out communist. I know because she thinks
the economy spits out “rewards” like fucking gold bars coated in shamrocks to
the lucky rich. So that’s fun.
Look at the past thirty years. America
Every transaction in
the modern economy is a transaction of choice, except those with the government.
There is no force of compulsion in modern economics except taxation and fraud. No
one became wealthy (legally) by exploitation. They produced something of value
and sold it to another party who believed that they could derive more value
from it. The wealthy are wealthy because you and I decided that they should be
by the value of what they produced.
Deciding to
re-allocate this wealth ad-hoc through the blunt instrument of government is
foolish, inefficient, and a clear invitation for America
Freedom is a scarce
asset, and there is only a fixed amount to go around. Every bit of freedom we
grant the government is a freedom we take from ourselves. I was raised to
believe that freedom, no matter what anyone says, is my birthright.
while most families have struggled to stay afloat. The
median wages of men age 25 to 64 declined by nearly 30 percent over the past 40
years.
That’s not even close
to true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income_men_women_1953_to_2005.png
A bipartisan conservative consensus, enforced by powerful
corporate interests, defined our politics.
Uh…she’s serious,
right?
Corporate trade policies purposefully exposed working people
to global competition,
You can thank
conservative free trade policies for the boom of new products now available at
low prices, providing millions of jobs in different sectors of the economy.
Also, did I call that
she’d go isolationist or what? You owe me $10.
while launching a war on unions.
We saw what unions
did to Detroit
CEO remuneration purposefully gave executives
multimillion-dollar personal incentives to cook the books,
And yet, of the
thousands of publically traded corporations, audited annually, only a handful have
engaged in fraud over the last 20 years. This is because the Boards of Directors,
the CEO’s bosses, have a vested interest in not permitting fraud. The idea that
fraud is rampant in the business world is a silly conspiratorial fantasy.
or to merge and purge their companies.
First, there is
nothing wrong with merging two companies, downsizing a company’s workforce, or
shutting down operations all-together. However, it is another silly liberal
conspiratorial fantasy that these actions often produce wealth. Wealth is
created by growing a business, not by shutting it down. Also, mergers, by nature
of the markets, virtually always favor the acquired firm over the acquiring
firm.
Bankers freed themselves from adult supervision and opened
the casino.
Far from being a
sobering adult influence, the government is the most childish and irrational
force in the market. What’s more, the stock market is not a casino.
The few benefited enormously, while most of us fell behind.
You who took no
risks. You who produced, created, invented nothing. You who did not have
marketable skills to meet the new economy. You who expected to be taken care
of. You fell behind. Get rid of the income tax model and a boatload of
regulations, and you could catch up. I’d love for you to be wealthy. I’d love
to be wealthy. Take risks. Create something. Develop your unique skills.
This ended, of course, in a financial wilding — the housing
bubble — with bankers peddling what they knew was junk.
And subsequently
losing their asses.
They kept dancing, in the famous words of hapless Charles
Prince, former president of Citibank, hoping to get out in time.
The problem wasn’t
that the bankers bundled complicated new securities; it was that there were
underlying assets--debt obligations--that could never be repaid.
But they danced with the confidence that if they blew
themselves up, the government would put the pieces back together. And so it
did.
Unless you’re Lehman
Brothers. Or Bear Stears. Besides, conservatives were the ones calling for allowing
the system to fail. We agree that moral hazard is bad for the efficiency of the
markets. However, you think that moral hazard is the unavoidable result of
having a market; I think it’s the unavoidable result of having a government
involved in the market.
The resulting crash wiped out about $8 trillion in housing
value
Actually, the
intrinsic value never matched market prices. This is pretty much how you define
a bubble. The value was never there.
Only the price was.
and blew up the economy. Unemployment soared, as did federal
deficits as tax revenue plummeted
Hey! Another cogent
point! Tax revenues are far more contingent on the market cycle than they are
on tax rates. This concerns me, because if liberals understand these basic points,
as KVH appears to here, then their arguments should crumble under the weight of
their own contradictory premises. Yet the liberal mind manages to forget basic
ideas like this when they matter.
and payments for food stamps and other support for the
jobless rose. From 2007 to 2010, the national debt increased as a percentage of
GDP from 64.4 to 93.2.
Yeah. We know.
No one should forget. Wall Street and big corporations had
the party.
What party? They went
through the same downsizing as every other company in America
They rigged the rules.
Rigging the rules and
writing complex derivatives to be sold to sophisticated investors are two very
different things.
They pocketed the rewards.
What rewards?
They created the mess.
People not being able
to pay their mortgages created the mess. Government policies to encourage
people getting mortgages that they couldn’t afford created the mess. Banks and derivative
financing merely exacerbated a market inefficiency that they failed to
adequately valuate.
They got taxpayers to save them.
Please. Government jumped to save them. It’s not like they
had to beg.
The conservatives argue that the vulnerable should pick up
the whole tab.
No, we argue that the
banks should have been allowed to fail, enter bankruptcy, renegotiate their
debt obligations and write off some assets, and emerge in a growing economy.
Now that it hasn’t
happened, we argue that conflating errors of judgment from some banking
analysts with the nefarious and ill-defined sins of all rich people is simply
too stupid to actually be tax policy outside of Zimbabwe
And even some liberals call for a “shared sacrifice” that
would mean the most vulnerable in the society — the seniors, the poor, the
disabled and the sick — should help to clean up the mess.
The structural instability
of Medicare and Medicaid has absolutely nothing to do with the recession. Social
Security is only proximally related, but the recession only sped up a process
that was already destined to occur.
The fact is that most Americans have already sacrificed.
They are the victims of bad policies skewed to benefit the privileged.
Really? Outside of the
owners of Solyndra and LightSquared, which policies are those that benefit
which of the privileged?
Real shared sacrifice would require that we send the bill to
those who had the party and created the mess, and ask them to pay their fair
share.
That’s not shared sacrifice
at all. It’s basic free market pricing, which I find very heartening for KVH’s
sake. Here’s the problem: the government created the mess. The government can’t
collect from the government, and the only way for the people to collect from
the government, hilariously, is to reduce tax rates—which is precisely the
opposite of what KVH is proposing.
That’s where Roosevelt ’s
clarity is so important. It reminds us that we must ground our policies in
moral vision
Again, Roosevelt was the least active champion for freedom in
the 20th Century. Internment camps. Packing the Supreme Court—or at
least trying to.
— the freedoms that we would protect,
And those that KVH
would jettison.
the economic justice that we would champion.
And the basic
equality that KVH would ignore.
Let us build our policy out from there, not by positioning
carefully to contrast with an extreme right.
The extreme right has
the moral vision. The left only has warmed-over Marx.
Let our values — not our extremists — drive our policies.
I’ll agree to that.
Conservatives believe in liberty, thus favor low taxes. Conservatives believe
in equality, thus are opposed to taxes that target any specific demographic. Conservatives
believe in justice, thus are opposed to imposing penalties on “the rich” in
retribution for some imagined crime against the middle class. Conservatives
believe in the power of the people, thus our rejection of cries for “power to
the people.”
We know that this is
where the erosion of our liberties always comes from: an intellectual
lightweight with a shrill voice spouting off vaguely formulated articulations
on fairness and sacrifice. This woman is a dangerous buffoon. She deserves nothing
but lament, scorn, and ridicule.
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