Monday, June 11, 2012

Did Republicans Deliberately Crash the US Economy?

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Did Republicans Deliberately Crash the US Economy?

Michael Cohen [w/ Mark Thoma commenting]

Did Republicans deliberately crash the US economy?, by Michael Cohen, CIF:
So why does the US economy stink?
Why has job creation in America slowed to a crawl? Why, after several months of economic hope, are things suddenly turning sour?
The culprits might seem obvious – uncertainty in Europe, an uneven economic recovery, fiscal and monetary policymakers immobilized and incapable of acting. But increasingly, Democrats are making the argument that the real culprit for the country's economic woes lies in a more discrete location: with the Republican Party.
In recent days, Democrats have started coming out and saying publicly what many have been mumbling privately for years – Republicans are so intent on defeating President Obama for re-election that they are purposely sabotaging the country's economic recovery ... in order to hurt Obama politically. Considering that presidents – and rarely opposition parties – are held electorally responsible for economic calamity, it's not a bad political strategy.
Then again, it's a hard accusation to prove: after all, one person's economic sabotage is another person's principled anti-government conservatism.
Beyond McConnell's words, though, there is circumstantial evidence to make the case. Republicans have opposed a lion's share of stimulus measures that once they supported, such as a payroll tax break, which they grudgingly embraced earlier this year. Even unemployment insurance, a relatively uncontroversial tool for helping those in an economic downturn, has been consistently held up by Republicans or used as a bargaining chip for more tax cuts. Ten years ago, prominent conservatives were loudly making the case for fiscal stimulus to get the economy going; today, they treat such ideas like they're the plague.
Traditionally, during economic recessions, Republicans have been supportive of loose monetary policy. Not this time. Rather, Republicans have upbraided Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, for even considering policies that focus on growing the economy and creating jobs.
And then, there is the fact that since the original stimulus bill passed in February of 2009, Republicans have made practically no effort to draft comprehensive job creation legislation. Instead, they continue to pursue austerity policies, which reams of historical data suggest harms economic recovery and does little to create jobs. In fact, since taking control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Republicans have proposed hardly a single major jobs bill that didn't revolve, in some way, around their one-stop solution for all the nation's economic problems: more tax cuts.
Note to self: 
Here, there needs to be a discussion of the empirical historic track record [and theoretical underpinnings] for tax cuts as a job creation policy.  Based on the evidence I have seen to date, along with the plethora of known fatal flaws in the macroeconomic underpinnings of mainstream neo-liberal/neo-classical theory, tax cuts - alone - as a solution for job creation/restoring & sustaining full employment is at best inadequate and at worst may be wholly self-destructive for modern American capitalism.  But, lacking the data at my fingertips, it will have to wait for a later post.
Still, one can certainly argue – and Republicans do – that these steps are all reflective of conservative ideology. If you view government as a fundamentally bad actor, then stopping government expansion is, on some level, consistent. ...
It is also completely destructive of the very idea of democracy... even for our inspired Constitutional Republic. Those who do not believe in governance cannot but be bad at it.  See Thomas Frank (e.g.,  'The Wrecking Crew' and/or 'What's The Matter With Kansas?').
Presidents get blamed for a bad economy... The obligation will be on Obama to make the case that it is the Republicans, not he, who is to blame – a difficult, but not impossible task.
In the end, that might be the worst part of all – one of two major political parties in America is engaging in scorched-earth economic policies that are undercutting the economic recovery, possibly on purpose, and is forcing job-killing austerity measures on the states. And they have paid absolutely no political price for doing so. If anything, it won them control of the House in 2010, and has kept win Obama's approval ratings in the political danger zone. It might even help them get control of the White House.
Sabotage or not, it's hard to argue with "success" – and it's hard to imagine we've seen the last of it, whoever wins in November.
[Here Mark Thoma comments:

Has the Republican Party's strategy been deliberate? Yes, of course, the things the Party proposes do not fall randomly from the sky, they are the result of GOP choices. So the question of whether they did this on purpose is easy to answer, it's yes.

Is it intended to undermine the president's agenda? Again, of course it is. The alternative would be to support Obama's policies, and they aren't about to do that. So Republicans have been deliberately obstructive, and it would be hard to argue otherwise.

Have they intentionally done harm? This is where flip-flops from what Republicans supported in the past matters.

If they truly believed that all Keynesian type policies are harmful, then blocking them, and in the process blocking any policy at all -- which is essentially what they are doing since they surely know their pet policies have little chance of escaping a veto -- could not be considered an act of sabotage.

The policies may be quite harmful in reality, but if they truly believe they are avoiding harm by blocking stimulus policies it would be hard to accuse them of sabotaging the economy in order to make political gains.

But the fact that they have flip-flopped time and again on policies they supported when Republican presidents were in office and the economy needed help leads to the strong suspicion that blocking Obama's policy initiatives is a political strategy. The strategy is justified by a story about Keynesian economics being harmful that they clearly do not believe in their heart of hearts (witness, for example, Romney worrying about the consequences of the fiscal cliff, or their knee-jerk appeal to Keynesian principles when defense cuts are proposed). They have also concocted a story where a confidence fairy can make austerity work to support their ideological pursuit of smaller government.

But this is quite a departure from the stimulative polices that Republicans presidents have pursued in recent years giving it every appearance of a belief of convenience rather than of true conviction. To me, the refusal to support policies they would have supported had the president been a Republican tells me everything I need to know about whether this is strategic or a true belief.
    Posted by Mark Thoma on Saturday, June 9, 2012 at 10:36 AM]