Government Slimdown

I wrote a blog post last spring asking liberals why they were so self-congratulatory after Obama won re-election (for example, they couldn’t even get gun control legislation passed after a mass shooting at an elementary school). At that time there was widespread speculation that the Republican Party was weak and doomed. Six months later I’m hearing the same sort of predictions that the Republican Party is self-destructing with their hostage-taking tactics in both the government shutdown and the threat not to raise the debt ceiling.

But Republicans are geniuses at turning a defeat into a victory. Listen to FOX News; they’re not calling this a shutdown; they’re calling it a slimdown. Look at the polls that put almost as much blame for the shutdown on the Democrats and Obama as the Republicans. Last night I talked to someone who is, for me, a representative of the average person who doesn’t pay much attention to the news. She asked, “Why won’t Obama talk to the Republicans?”

Last spring’s sequester was a big win for the Republicans; it was supposed to be a worst-case scenario—a line no one would cross—that would force the two parties to a compromise; instead the Republicans chose to cross it and got what they wanted: smaller government.

What people don’t seem to realize is that the conservatives in the Republican Party hate government. They think there are only a few things the government should do, mostly provide for a military and service the national debt. Everything else should be eliminated. Remember Rick Perry’s meltdown in the debates last year when he couldn’t think of all the government departments he wanted to eliminate (he remembered Education and Commerce, Romney helpfully suggested EPA, later Perry remembered the third was Energy)? Liberals laughed at him instead of paying attention to what he was saying.

Now six months after the sequester the “self-destructing” conservatives are once again getting what they want: an even smaller government. The insanity in the Republican Party has spread so far that there is a growing number of congressmen willing to risk a default on U.S. Treasury responsibilities. What they are arguing is that there is enough tax revenue coming in to pay the interest on the U.S. debt that will come due. The New York Times had an article today quoting some of these Republicans: 

Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, a reliable friend of business on Capitol Hill and no one’s idea of a bomb thrower, isn’t buying the apocalyptic warnings that a default on United States government debt would lead to a global economic cataclysm.

“We always have enough money to pay our debt service,” said Mr. Burr, who pointed to a stream of tax revenue flowing into the Treasury as he shrugged off fears of a cascading financial crisis. “You’ve had the federal government out of work for close to two weeks; that’s about $24 billion a month. Every month, you have enough saved in salaries alone that you’re covering three-fifths, four-fifths of the total debt service, about $35 billion a month. That’s manageable for some time.”

… “It really is irresponsible of the president to try to scare the markets,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. “If you don’t raise your debt ceiling, all you’re saying is, ‘We’re going to be balancing our budget.’ So if you put it in those terms, all these scary terms of, ‘Oh my goodness, the world’s going to end’ — if we balance the budget, the world’s going to end? Why don’t we spend what comes in?”

Once again, my argument is that liberals need to do a much better job educating the public about what government does. The government shutdown is providing some education; every day it seems another agency is recalling workers to deal with a crisis: FEMA brought back workers when Tropical Storm Sandy threatened the Gulf coast, FDA is bringing back some workers to deal with an outbreak of salmonella. Other closings, like the national parks and monuments, are affecting the lives of tourists and those whose income depends on those tourists.

But these individual examples can get lost in the whirlwind of daily news. Liberals need to keep hammering on this point: government is good. Yes it can always be improved, but the basic system is sound.

Elizabeth Warren is one of the few prominent liberals trying to educate the average American about the value of government. In this video about the government shutdown she calls the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party “anarchists.” She defines government as a system where we work together to solve problems; we have decided that there are some things we do much better together. This is what government is. It’s not some scary boogeyman.
      

Update: Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, published an op-ed in the New York Times on Oct. 15 that says some similar things as this post:

Even if the immediate crises — the partial shutdown and the looming debt default — are resolved, we will still be living in a dangerous political moment. The danger in question is because of the recent emergence of a political philosophy — and I mean that in the loosest sense — which threatens to unravel our joint commitment to a common democratic enterprise.

What is the “political philosophy” I have in mind? The conservative writer John Tamny at Forbes.com puts it this way: “It quite simply must be asked,” he writes, “what the point of the Republican Party is if it’s not regularly shutting down the federal government?” No point at all, Tamny seems to think, suggesting that “shutdown should be a part of the G.O.P.’s readily unsheathed arsenal of weapons meant to always be shrinking the size and scope of our economy-asphyxiating federal government.”

This, Lynch argues, has two dangers. First, it weakens the commitment to the social contract, that sense that we work together within our democratic institutions to govern ourselves. The second danger in this strategy is to democracy itself:

Should shutdowns, debt-ceiling fights and the radical political legislative gridlock they represent really become a fixture of American political life, it will be more tempting, more reasonable, to think that someone should  “step in” to make the decisions. The chorus calling for action — for the president, for example, to go around the Congress — will only increase. If you are on the left, and Obama is still in power, you may even tell yourself that is a good thing. But it is a bad precedent, the type of precedent that causes democracies to erode.

Social contracts don’t have to be made for democratic intentions...

In the end, that’s the real danger we are now facing. Not just the shutdown, but the rise of the shutdown strategy. By unraveling the threads of our joint commitment to shared governance, it raises the chances those threads will be rewoven into something else: something deeply, and tragically, undemocratic.

Reputation is a Resource

Among the innumerable benefits of the Internet, I love the ubiquitous ratings systems. I really appreciate customer comments and ratings on products and services. Before I buy anything, or hire someone to do a job, I can find out what other people’s experiences were. Often I will look at the one-star reviews first—what was it that really bugged people?

No longer can companies dazzle us with advertising that hides a shoddy product—once the bad reviews start piling up no ad can make up for the bad reputation. Whole businesses revolve around reputation. For example, Angie’s list helps you find the best service professionals in your area.

Reputations also help me evaluate a book or blog post. When I’m reading about a subject in which I have no expertise, looking the author up online can give me some insight into whether I should trust his or her research and arguments.

As a young woman, I was taught to be careful of my reputation (that is, don’t be too easy with the boys) but other than that I never gave the concept much thought. But two of the books I’ve read this year mentioned the importance of reputation in human life.

The first book was on human evolution: Wired for Culture, by Mark Pagel. As the title suggests this book argues that the defining aspect of humanity is our complex social organizations, built on cooperation within groups. Reputation, Mr. Pagel says, is vital to making our societies work: cooperation requires trust, and we use reputations to tell us whether we can trust a person.

"Our social systems of cooperation and helping are revealed as sophisticated marketplaces, capable of generating both individual returns and goods that benefit others. They work like a monetary system, with our personal reputations acting as the currency we use to buy trust and cooperation. Reputations are valuable, so we have to earn or pay for them. Once purchased, a good reputation can then be used to buy cooperation from others, even people we have never met, just as we can use money to buy goods from people we have never met…Indeed, our reputations represent the first ‘monetary union’ or single currency. We could even see them as a form of credit, because a good reputation might allow you to negotiate an exchange on the promise you will produce your part of the bargain later (in this context it is noteworthy that ‘credit’ derives from the Latin credo or ‘I believe’)…So fundamental are our reputations to our social systems that comparing them to a monetary system is not merely apt, it should probably be made the other way around."

A Force That Gives Life Meaning

We’ve reached the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Iraq war. It’s easy to look back on that time and blame the Bush administration, various politicians, and media pundits for selling the war to a credulous population still reeling from the attacks on September 11, 2001.

But according to Chris Hedges this would be a mistake. Mr. Hedges was a war correspondent for 15 years, and in his 2002 book War is a Force that Gives Life Meaning he tells how war brings a sense of purpose and comradeship to people. He noticed that at the end of a war, people felt a sense of deflation. Even those who were the victims of the violence felt this emptiness. Yes, life is safer when the war is over, but it seems flat and stale. There is an intoxication to war, an addictive adrenaline rush of living life fully.

Mr. Hedges shows how leaders bring about war to solidify their position or prop up a failing regime, but he also shows that it is wrong to think that citizens are blameless in the calculus of war and peace.

For most of human history, the force that gave life meaning was survival. Since the very beginning of life on this planet the meaning of life was to survive and to reproduce.

At a certain point religion emerged as a force that gave life meaning. People believed that the gods had arranged the world and everyone had their place and purpose.

When nation-states emerged five centuries ago, kings learned that there was nothing like war to solidify a people’s identification with the concept of “country.”

We saw it in this country after 9/11. Anyone too young to remember Pearl Harbor finally got a lesson in how an enemy attack can bring a country to an almost complete unity of purpose. I can remember thinking, sometime right after the attack, that this was blowback for the things the U.S. had done in the Middle East over the previous decades. But this thought was unsayable at the time. Bill Maher was kicked off television for a couple of years for daring to say that flying into a skyscraper was not the act of a coward.

Mr. Hedges writes about living in Argentina before the Falklands War in the early 1980s. The ruling junta was faltering, and there was widespread and open discontent with the regime amongst the educated classes. But as soon as the army invaded the Falkland Islands and claimed them for Argentina, all dissent ceased and the entire populace united behind the government. No one spoke against the junta, even in private, and Mr. Hedges felt that, as a foreigner, if he had said anything negative he would have been physically attacked.

The sense of victimhood and unity brought by 9/11 was exploited by the Bush administration to sell the Iraq war. My husband can clearly remember how CNN had the sound of war drums accompanying their news stories during the “march to war” ten years ago.

Obviously leaders of governments use their power to manipulate people into war, but we the people are manipulatable. Why? Because so many of our lives are empty of meaning and purpose. This emptiness is reflected in the large number of people taking anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications in this country.

The human race desperately needs a new vision, a sense of purpose that is constructive, not destructive like war. How about working together to build a sustainable global society of opportunity and equality for all?

As a coda, in this time of budget deficit hysteria, let’s not forget how much the Iraq war has contributed to the federal debt. The Bush administration estimated the cost at $50 billion (do you remember officials saying, “it will pay for itself with oil revenues,” and the firing of the person who estimated the cost at $100-200 billion?). In 2008 economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the true cost of the war would be $3 trillion when long-term care for veterans and interest on the debt were factored in. In 2010 he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying $3 trillion was looking optimistic.

Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies released a “Cost of War” study that raises the price tag to $6 trillion. Mother Jones has a graph that breaks down where the money goes.

The Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress never included the costs of war in their budgets so all of this is going on the national credit card. Just remember this when you hear a Republican talk about fiscal responsibility.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber, is a very ambitious book, which attempts to tell the entire story of human economic systems from the very beginnings of human society until the present day. It is written by an anthropologist, not an economist, and he challenges many of the basic assumptions that the modern economics profession takes for granted. In addition, the author is extremely liberal. He participated in the social justice movement of the 1990s, which is more widely-known as the anti-globalization movement.

The main point that Graeber is trying to make, I think, is that the economics profession has built its entire theory on a simplistic model of humanity that is completely wrong. Mainstream economics posits that there was a time in our early history when people bartered with each other: “You have some eggs and I have a pair of moccasins, let’s trade.” Even in early hunter-gatherer societies, the economists say, everyone was looking out for their own self-interest.

Graeber says this image of human societies doesn’t match anything that anthropologists or historians have discovered. It’s a complete fantasy, and has led economists to propose some very strange theories.

Usually when I have read a history on a particular topic like this, the book has turned out to be very European-centric. This one is not that way at all. China and India are addressed as much as the West, and, in fact, he talks about how backwards Europe was in the Middle Ages compared to China and the Islamic world.

What becomes clear is that human beings have had a sophisticated grasp of money for many thousands of years. For example, people in ancient Sumer were creating debt instruments to finance trading expeditions, long before currencies were invented.

What also becomes clear is that there are alternatives to our modern form of market capitalism. In China during the Middle Ages they had markets but no capitalism—the Confucian ethos underlying Chinese society said that making money from money was wrong; the moral use of money is to produce something useful.

In the same era, the Islamic world created the “first free-market ideology.” But this system was based on the assumption that markets were a form of mutual aid—markets existed to benefit the entire society—rather than the capitalist assumption that markets are based on the self-interest and profit of the individual. Islamist theorists understood the need for competition, but stressed that the foundation for an economy was cooperation. Islamic laws strictly forbid usury, even with commercial loans, but this did not stop commerce from thriving, or stop the development of complicated credit instruments.

I was disappointed when I got to the modern era, however. In the first chapter Graeber had given a succinct critique of the Third-World debt crisis of the 1980s and 90s (the basis for the social justice movement), and I really expected that he would bring this same kind of analysis to the contemporary, post-2008 financial-collapse world economy (the book was published in 2011). But instead the book just peters out.

He merely says someone needs to come up with a new idea for how economies should work. His only specific suggestion is a biblical-style jubilee—a general global debt-cancellation.

If you are interested in economics, and would like an alternative to the capitalist dogma that currently serves as mainstream economic thought, this is definitely a book worth reading. [This is a short version of my review, to read the full one click more]

You Fix the Federal Budget

It didn't take long for the deficit commission chairmen's proposals to be criticized from every section of the political spectrum. I personally think their ideas were too slanted against ordinary people--just the choice of Erskine Bowles, Clinton's chief of staff, as the "liberal" made it obvious this was going to be a joke from the progressive point of view.

But how hard is it to balance the federal budget? The Congressional battles make it seem like it is a Herculean task requiring unbearable sacrifice. The New York Times has a fun feature this week that allows you to play budget czar. Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget, published on November 13, is an interactive feature that lets you choose from an assortment of budget cuts and tax increases to balance the federal budget.

And it was easy to balance the budget! I selected all the military cuts available (relatively minor force adjustments), taxes return to Clinton-era levels, a carbon tax (because that makes good sense in terms of converting us to a sustainable energy policy) and NOTHING ELSE, and the budget for 2015 is almost balanced. Adding a few other tax increases can balance the budget in 2030--without cutting any other federal spending or cutting Social Security and Medicare.

The reason I picked so many military cuts is because the military is obscenely bloated. The military--incredibly--accounts for 54% of the federal budget. We spend more on our "defense" than the next 28 countries put together, and most of those 28 countries are our allies! See my article "Reduce the Federal Deficit by Cutting the Military Budget" (April 27).

Clearly if we had grown-ups in Washington who cared about the best interests of the nation, we could solve our country's problems relatively easily.