No doubt thanks to my timely intervention in the great $1 trillion coin debate, the Treasury Department explicitly rejected the possibility that the White House would mint a platinum “solution” to the debt ceiling debate this weekend. I put the word “solution” in quotation marks because I’m confident that the coin gambit would have solved exactly none of the problems that its supporters claimed it was designed to address. No matter how many clever arguments exist to justify the maneuver, the politics of coin minting would have been just terrible for the White House — and because public opinion would have shaped how both the markets and the other branches of government would have responded to the move, those terrible politics would have ultimately produced exactly the kind of long-run outcomes (from swifter spending cuts to a stronger and more radicalized G.O.P.) that most of the coin-minters wanted to avoid.
In general, this is a good rule of thumb for political parties working in a representative democracy: If you can’t tell a persuasive story about how your proposed gambit or maneuver will leverage public opinion against your opponents, then you should strongly consider the possibility that it will actually leave you worse off on policy than before. Which brings us, alas, to Congressional Republicans, whose continuing flirtation with debt ceiling brinksmanship is the subject of a Politico story this morning:
House Republicans are seriously entertaining dramatic steps, including default or shutting down the government, to force President Barack Obama to finally cut spending by the end of March.
… To the vast majority of House Republicans, it is far riskier long term to pile up new debt than it is to test the market and economic reaction of default or closing down the government.
GOP officials said more than half of their members are prepared to allow default unless Obama agrees to dramatic cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes.
Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Read more…
In the latest First Things, David Bentley Hart has an interesting essay on Carl Jung’s eccentric, esoteric, solipsistic and impenetrable “Red Book,” which includes some perceptive remarks on the difference between the modern manifestations of Gnosticism and the more ancient variety:
To the Gnostics of old … this world is an immense prison guarded by malevolent powers on high, a place of exile where the fallen and forgetful divine spark dwelling deep within the pneumatikos (the “spiritual man”) languishes in ignorance and bondage, passing from life to life in drugged sleep, wrapped in the ethereal garments of the “souls” it acquired in descending through the planetary spheres, and sealed fast within the coarse involucrum of an earthly body. The spiritual experience at the heart of the Gnostic story of salvation was, as Hans Jonas puts it, the “call of the stranger God”: a call heard inwardly that awakens the spirit from its obliviousness to its own nature, and that summons it home again from this hostile universe and back again to the divine pleroma—the “fullness”—from which it departed in a time before time.
Thus the spiritual temper of Gnosticism is, first, a state of profound suspicion—a persistent paranoia with regard to the whole of apparent reality, a growing conviction that one is the victim of unseen but vigilant adversaries who have trapped one in an illusory existence—and then one of cosmic despair, and finally a serenity achieved through final detachment from the world and unshakable certitude in the reality of a spiritual home beyond its darkness. The deepest impulse of the gnostic mind is a desire to discover that which has been intentionally hidden, to find out the secret that explains and overcomes all the disaffections and disappointments of the self …
In Hart’s telling, modern Gnosticism retains this “assumption that spiritual disaffection is something to be cured by discovering and decoding some forgotten, half-effaced text inscribed somewhere within the self,” but drops the sense of alienation from the created world and the desire to escape its toils. Instead of seeking reconciliation with an original uncreated realm, a true God beyond all gods, the modern Gnostic seeks salvation through “reconciliation with one’s own primordial depths,” and the sense of consolation that this purely personal experience provides. Read more…
Two years ago, when Mark McGwire finally publicly apologized for using steroids, I argued that extending forgiveness to McGwire was a necessary step toward a broader reckoning with the fact that the vast majority of steroid users from his era — other potential Hall of Famers very much included — will probably never be exposed:
… baseball fans need to make a choice. A whole era was tainted — that much we know. A small fraction of the players who used steroids across the last two decades — high-profile stars, for the most part, who’ve been the subject of drip-drip leaks and investigations — have had their shame publicly exposed. But the vast majority of steroid users are still anonymous, and likely to stay that way. This means that they’ll never have to do what McGwire just did. They’ll never admit that their achievements were tainted, they’ll never apologize to the fans that they let down, they’ll never face the music. …
If you want to argue that nobody who entered their prime during the steroid era should get a Hall of Fame vote, given the likelihood that they cheated somewhere along the way, I can respect that opinion. But I want consistency. Here’s a list of players who are likely to become Hall eligible in the next ten years: Jeff Bagwell, Bernie Williams, Curt Schilling, Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, Tom Glavine, Jeff Kent, Greg Maddux, Mike Mussina, Frank Thomas, Randy Johnson, Mariano Rivera, Ivan Rodriguez, Trevor Hoffman, Omar Vizquel, Gary Sheffield, Ken Griffey, Chipper Jones, Derek Jeter … the list goes on. If you think all or most of them deserve their place in the Hall of Fame, and the hearts of baseball fandom, just remember this: Everything we know suggests that some of them, and quite possibly a lot of them, used steroids as eagerly as Mark McGwire did. And unlike him, they’ll never, ever apologize to you for doing it.
Having tossed down this gauntlet, I have to tip my cap to the Hall of Fame voters whose combined ballots ended up putting exactly nobody from a loaded class into Cooperstown this year. The big shut-out, aptly memorialized by the Times’ sports page yesterday morning, does in fact represent a consistent approach to the question of what to do with players from the steroid era: If we can’t know, then just say no. Read more…
I don’t feel qualified to comment definitively on the technical legality or constitutionality of the widely-bruited proposal that President Obama should respond to House Republicans’ debt ceiling brinksmanship by threatening to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin. But I do feel qualified to raise some questions about the political consequences that proponents of “minting the coin” (a group that includes some very smart people not normally given to flights of ideological fancy) seem to think will follow from such a gambit. Here is Matt Yglesias, speaking for a multitude of would-be minters:
Obviously financing the government by exploiting an accidental loophole in a bill meant to create commemorative coins is a bad idea. But it’s equally obvious that forcing the executive branch to default on legally valid bills is also a bad idea. And if Obama once again evades default by making substantive policy concessions to House Republicans, then he’s going to normalize this hostage-taking process. Putting some other nutty ideas on the table, by contrast, might actually get us back to normal.
I would just ask platinum coin proponents, is this generally how politics works of late? One party behaves irresponsibly, the other side counters with a wave of irresponsibility of its own (because that’s the only way to make those crazies see reason …), and then the first party recognizes the error of its ways and everyone returns to behaving reasonably? Does that pattern describe the polarized Washington that we’ve come to know and love?
I think not. Instead, here’s what would actually happen if the president was understood to be taking the “mint the coin” option seriously. Those Republicans in Congress who believe that they’re justified in risking chaos in order to combat the White House’s fiscal irresponsibility would have their hand immeasurably strengthened. The internal pressure on the Republican leadership not to cut a deal with the coin-minting tyrant Obama would be ratcheted significantly higher. And public opinion, which currently favors Obama and the Democrats and regards Congressional Republicans as the more irresponsible party in these negotiations, would probably tilt sharply the other way, essentially validating Republican intransigence.
In other words, a White House that played the coin card in negotiations would be answering threats to sabotage the nation’s credit with a threat to … massively sabotage its own political position. Read more…
Okay, smart guy, I can imagine a reader of the preceding post saying, you’ve just explained why you don’t think a grand bargain is going to resolve our fiscal dilemma any time soon. But just last week, you were explaining why the Democrats’ willingness to define “rich” upward made it seem less likely that they would be able to raise tax rates high enough to pay for the government they want, and in the same post you noted the conservative, entitlement-reforming path to fiscal sustainability also has “an air of fantasy about it.” So if liberals can’t win, conservatives can’t win, and the two sides can’t strike a deal, how are we actually going to get our fiscal house in order?
I think one all-too-plausible answer is that we aren’t. That might mean a genuine debt crisis, a near-default scenario that forces a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, perhaps with some swift inflation worked in, that’s uglier than any grand bargain either side would countenance. But given the resilience of global confidence in the United States over the last two years, it might just mean living with structural deficits that drag on growth for years and decades to come. Read more…
In my Sunday column defending John Boehner’s record as Speaker of the House, I make the point that for all the talk about how much more bipartisan and effective Congress used to be, there really isn’t a modern historical precedent for the kind of “everybody hurts” bargain on taxes and entitlements that would actually be required to bring our projected spending in line with our projected revenue. The most plausible recent example of such a bargain is the deal that George H.W. Bush struck with Congressional Democrats in 1990, which brought him so much grief and helped inspire a generation of Republican resistance to tax increases: That compromise promised to cut $500 billion from the deficit over five years, which (per my back-of-the-envelope adjustments for inflation) is the equivalent of about $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years today. $2.5 trillion is a big number … but it’s only slightly more than the combined deficit reduction promised by last year’s debt-ceiling deal and this month’s tax increases combined — and that combination, of course, has only put a very modest dent in our long-term deficit problem.
A true grand bargain today, then, would require both sides accepting much, much more pain than either Bush the Elder’s White House or the Democrats were willing to accept twenty-odd years ago, in a significantly less polarized environment. And what would the two parties get for that shared pain? Read more…
A big part of the story of the fiscal cliff negotiations, now half-resolved and half-postponed, was that the populist wing of the Republican Party couldn’t quite figure what it wanted to actually achieve, or how. The broad goals of less spending and lower taxes were clear enough, but on anything more specific the politicians and activists on the grassroots right seemed confused about what they thought the party should to be negotiating toward, or what they expected that their calls for harder hardball and/or cliff-diving would actually win in the end. (The scenarios being spun out tended to either envision extracting never-gonna-happen concessions from the Democrats across weeks of brand-destroying brinksmanship, or embracing a truly massive defeat on taxes as a “the worse, the better” step toward eventual conservative resurgence.) This confusion was obvious throughout, but particularly during the brief window on Tuesday when there was talk of House Republicans sending the bill back to the Senate with some amendments tacked on. If there had been any kind of strategically-plausible consensus about how conservatives actually wanted the compromise amended, then that gambit might have made some sense. But there wasn’t, so it didn’t.
This is not a new problem on the right. As I’ve suggested before, Mitt Romney didn’t overcome the G.O.P.’s populist mood to win his party’s nomination because of a conspiracy between squishy party elites to nominate a moderate country club Republican like themselves. Rather, Romney won because the party’s populists never found plausible leaders or a plausible message to match the voters’ anti-establishment impulses. The strangest and most self-defeating feature of recent Republican politics is that while the party’s populists talk a good game about championing regular Americans and taking on the party’s Georgetown cocktail partygoers and Wall Street insiders, when it comes time to advocate actual policy they mostly just embrace more extreme, less workable versions of the ideas those same insiders already endorse. (Both the Mike Huckabee-endorsed Fair Tax and Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, to pick two prominent examples, are like parodies of the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s long-running view that taxes should be much lower on, well, Journal readers and slightly higher on the lower middle class.) The result, in the anti-Washington season of 2012, was a Republican primary campaign that was hotly contested yet intellectually sterile, with the anti-establishment candidates competing on style rather than substance, and the (obvious) populist case against Romney bubbling up in weird, substance-free ways, from Santorum’s sweater vests to the policy-free Gingrich-Perry attacks on Bain Capital.
Given all this recent history, then, it was very interesting to read this post-New Year’s post by Erick Erickson making the case for what he describes as a “new agenda” for conservatives. Read more…
If the tax debate could be simplified to a liberal desire to make sure the tax burden is borne by those who can most easily afford it and a conservative desire to keep taxes as low as possible on as many people as possible, the fiscal-cliff bargain that was struck between Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden over the last 48 hours — a bargain that could still fail to pass the House, but probably won’t — seems to offer something credible to both sides. One the one hand, it includes a real Democratic concession, which substitutes a top income rate threshold of $400,000 for the $250,000 threshold that President Obama had long insisted on. But at the same time, for liberals seeking progressivity and fairness, that should be the easiest possible concession to make. The $400,000 threshold still puts the top bracket close to where it was under Bill Clinton when you adjust for inflation, and that Clintonian definition of “rich” wasn’t an implausible one: While the whining of the upper upper middle class (or, if you prefer, the not-that-rich rich) can be unseemly, there really is a big difference between a taxpayer making six figures annually and a taxpayer making seven or eight, and setting the top rate in the mid rather than low six figures is a way of acknowledging that the near-rich and super-rich do not occupy the same financial universe.
It becomes more plausible, too, when you consider that many of the revenue-enhancing tax reform proposals that have been bruited about would probably raise taxes significantly on earners in the $100,000-$400,000 range, which means that exempting the near-rich this time around doesn’t mean that they won’t end up paying more down the road. (And, in fact, it looks like the proposed deal will include a de facto down payment on such a reform, by reinstituting a phaseout on exemptions for households making over $250,000.)
Alas for liberals, the tax debate isn’t that simple, because it’s taking place in the context of immense projected future deficits and a welfare state that seems unsustainable without substantial increases in revenue. Given these realities, fairness and progressivity are necessarily less important to liberalism over the long run than simple dollar figures, and the American left actually has a long-run incentive to make the federal tax code less progressive, because only a broader base can keep the liberal edifice solvent in the long run.
And here I think liberals have a real reason to be discouraged by the White House’s willingness — and, more importantly, many Senate Democrats’ apparent eagerness — to compromise on tax increases for the near-rich. Read more…
Here’s Adam Gopnik’s thought experiment on guns:
We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids. Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan! Most of us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could.
We do live in such a city. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control. We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife.
Since having written about God rather than gun control probably makes me one of the Tartuffes he has in mind, let me say again what I said the last time Gopnik went on a moral tirade against gun ownership: All of the arguments that he’s making could be made with equal force and feeling about alcohol — and indeed were made, plausibly enough, by temperance crusaders in the years leading up to our national experiment with prohibition. According to the CDC, there were 11,493 firearm homicides in the United States in 2009, and 18,735 suicides by firearm. Those are big numbers. But there were also 24,518 “alcohol-induced deaths,” a category that excludes “accidents, homicides, and other causes indirectly related to alcohol use, as well as newborn deaths associated with maternal alcohol use.” In other words, it excludes all of the firearm deaths related to drinking, the 10,000-odd deaths in drunk-driving accidents, and so on — which makes it reasonable to estimate that alcohol is implicated in many more American deaths than gunfire every year.
Now obviously booze and guns aren’t the same kind of thing (even if they are regulated by the same federal bureau). But there are some similarities. Read more…
The death of Robert Bork at the age of 85 has naturally turned attention back to the famous hinge moment in his long career — the confirmation hearings that transformed him from “Robert Bork, illustrious conservative legal scholar” into “Robert Bork, icon of the culture wars,” and made his last name a synonym for the demagogic, by-any-means-necessary takedown of a judicial nominee. How much of a turning point the hearings really represented in our progress toward polarization can be debated, but they certainly changed the way law and politics intersect: Everything from the shape of confirmation hearings to the career choices of would-be jurists to the trajectory of the modern conservative legal movement has been stamped by Bork’s defeat at the hands of Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and a united front of liberal interest groups.
It’s worth noting, too, that the hearings were also an important ideological hinge moment for liberalism itself. There was nothing pyrrhic about the liberal victory: The nominee who was confirmed in Bork’s stead, Anthony Kennedy, has indeed proven to be much more liberal on precisely those issues (privacy, sexuality, free speech) that Bork’s critics emphasized in their 1987 attacks. But the liberal focus on social issues in the Bork controversy, and the decision to prioritize them while accepting judicial nominees who would move the high court rightward in other ways, said a lot about the post-Reagan path that the Democratic Party would take, the concessions it would make and the lines that it would draw. Read more…
