Hullabaloo

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

 
The human sacrifices being dragged in the water

by digby

Adele Stan attended an event featuring Krugman yesterday and asked him an important question:

While the right has legions of mouthpieces reading from the same economic playbook, Krugman has emerged as the go-to guy for mainstream shows when they seek a progressive voice. So I asked him to assess, as a communicator, what progressives need to do to even up the score. Here’s his reply:

I will say, [conservatives] have a remarkable shortage of guys who are actually competent on the economics...

One thing that’s really true, though, is that progressives, they still spend a lot of time trying to appease, trying to sound moderate and reasonable. I’ll give you a case that’s actually interesting: Larry Summers -- Larry Summers -- is actually on the substance, at this point, indistinguishable from me on macro-policy. And he may be a bit to the left, because he’s even more certain than I am -- I believe it’s true, but he’s definite that some extra spending now will actually help us more in fiscal terms. So Larry’s come out.

So he published a piece in the Financial Times that was meant to be a big statement about this. But before he got to that, he spend three paragraphs about the importance of dealing with the deficit in the medium term -- which was all, I think, to establish that ‘I am a respectable person; I am not like that rabble-rouser, Krugman.’ And then I watched the reactions, and nobody inside the Beltway -- you’re inside the Beltway, so you know who I mean -- none of the usual suspects got past those first three paragraphs. Larry was just clearing his throat, and that wound up drowning out the message. And that’s very typical.

Look at the president...Since the fall of 2011, the administration’s been on the side of the angels here. The American Jobs Act didn’t go anywhere, but it was definitely bolder than we expected; it was the right kind of thing. What they pushed for, relative to what I’d like to be hearing from them, it’s nothing, but relative to what the other side is saying, it’s very much on the right side -- but they are stuck in the language of deficits. It would be great if the president could just say: ‘This is not the time for spending cuts,’ instead of saying: ‘I want to replace the sequester with a smarter package.’ This is a ‘progressive lite.’

I understand where this comes from: It comes from many years of electoral defeats and always feeling that, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, always finding that you needed to appeal to conservative voters -- and the quest for respectability. At the higher levels, you find yourself in rooms full of bankers -- a lot...It’s very hard to stand up to them, and not just because they have power but because they’re, by and large, actually pretty smart. They have fantastic tailors. And to get over that and say, ‘Look, you’re just wrong,’ and, ‘My side is right’ -- that’s something that progressives still have a hard time learning to do.

So my advice has , obviously been -- part of it is that we need infrastructure, and there’s not enough people -- but also, yeah, you need to take a look at the way people express things. I you think it’s really stupid to be cutting spending now, you should start your article by saying, ‘It’s really stupid to be cutting spending now’ instead of saying, ‘the deficit is a significant problem over the medium term, and then, four paragraphs in, say, ‘I do not think it is a good idea to be cutting spending now.’

‘Look, you’re just wrong,’ and, ‘My side is right’ -- that’s something that progressives still have a hard time learning to do. Sadly, I suspect that many Democrats don't agree with that. They are deficit hawks too. The devil's bargain they are prepared to make in service of Krugman's reality-based assessment today is to trade the near term cuts of the sequester for medium and long term cuts to the social safety net. I call that robbing Paul to pay Pete Peterson.

Who's pushed this idea that we should do deficit reduction with long term cuts to Social Security (despite the fact that it has no bearing on the budget deficit?) The right wing? Not exactly. Former Obama budget chief Peter Orszag:

From 2017 to 2022, Social Security’s normal retirement age is scheduled to gradually increase to 67. And I’ll bet that not only happens as planned, but does so with little fanfare -- which is pretty much what happened several years ago when the age rose from 65 to 66.

Therein lies an important point: When policy makers put in place measures carefully designed to reduce the federal deficit in the future, most of them happen[...]

The increases in Social Security’s retirement age were legislated in 1983 -- almost 30 years ago -- and Congress has allowed them to take effect. The same holds for most Medicare changes Congress has passed, even those phased in over time.

A careful study of lawmakers’ record on Medicare, published in 2009 by James Horney and Paul Van de Water, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, concluded: “The history of health legislation in recent decades demonstrates that, despite some critics’ charges, Congress has repeatedly adopted measures to produce considerable savings in Medicare and has let them take effect.

For example, Congress took such action as part of major deficit-reduction packages in 1990 and 1993 and as part of more modest deficit-reduction packages in 1997 and 2005. Virtually all of the cuts that it enacted in 1990, 1993 and 2005 went into effect.”

Even in the special circumstances surrounding the aftermath of the 1997 deal, when the budget briefly moved into surplus, Congress allowed about four-fifths of the 1997 reductions to take effect.

Though he never says it outright, the logic of his argument is that you just have to get "entitlement" cuts passed and then everyone will forget about it because it doesn't hit the old duffers until its too late for them to realize what's hit them. (That's certainly why they all assure the near term seniors that they won't be hurt...)

Orszag framed his argument as the need for short term stimulus in exchange for long term deficit reduction.  That' didn't work out, did it? But you have to admit that the argument works even better now that we have stumbled into drastic cuts in the short term. How convenient.

Regardless of whether they read that very clever Orszag column, I'm going to guess that it hasn't escaped the notice of many pols that the real pain of whittling away at these vital programs won't be felt by the people until many of them are out of office getting their just desserts feeding at the corporate trough. It's not as if we have a culture of accountability for the powerful or anything. What's not to like?

I wish I thought these people were capable of planning this whole thing because at least there would be some sense that all this isn't happening out of chaos. But I honestly believe it's just a matter of sharks swimming toward blood in the water. They act on instinct and every move in this series of budget negotiations has led them toward the human sacrifices that are being thrown overboard.

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digby 3/06/2013 01:02:00 PM