Deficits Do Not Matter

Before our economy blew up in 2008 and before George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses, a guy named Paul O’Neill, who you might remember as Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, was shut down by Vice President Cheney when O’Neill attempted to throw cold water on another round of tax cuts the Bushies were plotting for 2003. According to O’Neill, Cheney brusquely observed that “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” The tax cuts got enacted and O’Neill was shitcanned shortly after his face-to-face with Cheney. 

But a funny thing happens any time a Democrat is handed the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Suddenly, those profligate Republicans who gladly starve the government of actual money and borrow it instead, become very concerned about budget deficits and debt. It happened when Bill Clinton was President and came back with even greater force once Barack Obama took office. 

Once Republicans took over the House, and continuing when they assumed power in the Senate, any time Obama wanted to do something like extend unemployment insurance to people who were out of work because of the crippling effect of the Great Recession, there was a demand for a so-called “offset” - a dollar for dollar removal of funds from place A to fund priority B. It got so bad that emergency funding for New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy was held up for weeks while Congress quibbled over the small details. That tens of thousands suffered needlessly seemed of no moment. Of course, none of this was required when George W. Bush was spending hundreds of billions in Iraq, Medicare was expanded to provide a prescription drug benefit, or when tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003 that drained the Treasury of needed money just as we were embarking on that grave error of an invasion in the Middle East.

There were few voices louder in demanding austerity and cuts to social programs, while simultaneously cutting taxes even more than Paul Ryan. While his economic view was roundly panned when he was made Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate in 2012, Ryan never gave up the ghost. Now that he has risen to the third-most powerful office in the land, you would think a journalist such as Chuck Todd would devote a significant portion of time when interviewing now-Speaker Ryan about the recently enacted federal budget and a companion bill that cut taxes by nearly $700 billion over ten years. Yes, you read that right, SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS - but you would be wrong. Here is their entire exchange:

What does this even MEAN? “by keeping taxes where they are that means we’re keeping them where they are.” Yes, yes you are, sir. “Not raising taxes is not cutting taxes.” WHAT? This is the same guy who helped block a $9.7 billion unemployment extension in 2014 because it did not have offsets and the same guy who voted against the emergency relief bill after Superstorm Sandy, but is totally fine with handing almost $700 billion in tax cuts, mostly to corporations and businesses, without cuts elsewhere to make up the difference. No mention of how this will require more borrowing and increase the deficit over time. No questioning of why it is suddenly okay to increase the deficit when it was supposedly such a huge problem less than five years ago. Nope. Nada. Nothing. 

Unsurprisingly, this steaming pile of horse manure got no follow-up from the guy who hosts the top rated Sunday morning talk show in America. The media literally spent months not too long ago obsessing over the need for a “grand bargain” that would rein in the supposedly swollen deficit that risked destroying the nation. Of course, as the budget deficit has receded, less and less time has been spent reporting on it and even less interest in calling out shameless politicians who are happy to stick it to people without jobs or a home so long as the bill being signed has a whiff of bipartisanship and a novelty beard attached to it. 

To recap, Chuck Todd asked a whole ONE question about this apparent hypocrisy, Paul Ryan gave a word salad answer that literally made no sense, and Chuck Todd moved on. So, the next time Republicans refuse to pay for something or claim we cannot afford it, do not expect Chuck Todd, or anyone else in the Beltway media to question it. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy 

Donald Trump Is All In

A while back, Chris Hayes hosted a Facebook chat where he was asked a question about why MSNBC airs Lock Up, a show about life in prison, for hours on end during the weekend when the network, in the questioner’s view, should be airing news or talk. Hayes’s answer, as is his wont, was rational, thought through, and a bit contrarian. Essentially, he said that Lock Up is a ratings winner for the network, indeed, the show’s viewership was greater than Hayes’s eponymous weeknight show, and that you should not presume that just because you think a program is lowest-common-denominator and a waste of time, that others feel the same.

I have been thinking about this question and answer in the context of the all-consuming political Berserker that is Donald Trump. You see, the endless hours of cable TV time, column inches in print and online, and predictable “this will be the end of Trump” thought pieces have done nothing to stop Trump’s rise. If anything, he is stronger now than the day he entered the race for President, with much bombast (and predictions of his immediate demise) declaring the need to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. 

What is being missed, either intentionally or through ignorance, is the phenomenon that Hayes neatly captured – what is said along the Acela Corridor or on Meet The Press by journalists and pundits who consume political conventional wisdom like oxygen is far removed from the “ordinary” Americans in fly-over country who have fueled Trump’s rise. Trump has broken every rule of politics and not paid a penalty for it and the people who analyze it are unable to interpret it because they cannot see why he is getting away with it. And they cannot see that because they are not willing to admit there is a virulent strain of nativism, racism, and xenophobia that courses through the veins of today’s Republican Party. To the Beltway crowd, the problem is a lack of bi-partisanship exemplified by Obama’s failure to invite Republicans to the White House for cocktail hour or Senators no longer getting all chummy after hours. 

This facile diagnosis of what ails us ignores the extreme rightward tilt in the Republican Party that would run off Ronald Reagan (he of the 1986 “amnesty” law, tax increases, and “cut and run” strategy in Lebanon). And this anger should not come as a surprise to anyone. It was less than six years ago that Tea Party activists shouted down their elected officials at town hall meetings, bought into right-wing paranoia over “death panels,” and protested against the Affordable Care Act waiving signs that depicted the President as a bone-in-his-nose witch doctor, Adolf Hitler or Heath Ledger’s Joker. That same virulent strain of bigotry and intolerance that still questions the President’s birth place or religion is simply being transferred to fears over people illegally entering our country and Muslims. 

Of course, Trump may not get to the finish line, but the media downplays the fact that many of his competitors are simply peddling a lightly sanitized version of his basest prejudices. Whether it is Ben Carson’s opinion that a Muslim should not be President, Marco Rubio’s call not just to close mosques but places where “radicals” might congregate (as if they would hold up a sign or something?), Ted Cruz’s effort to allow states to “opt out” of accepting Syrian refugees, Jeb Bush’s call to only allow Syrian refugees who are Christians into the country, or Rand Paul’s proposed legislation that would bar immigration from 32 majority Muslim countries, these ideas all traffic on the same side of the street, but are just a click or two to the “left” of temporarily barring any Muslim from America.  

For almost six months, the media has dismissed Trump’s rise as a novelty act that would wear thin or an ego that would implode. Instead of continuing to discount or denigrate his campaign, the media would be far better served trying to understand why he is doing so well and not simply fulminating against it.

Trump and Truthiness

The media has taken a brief pause from scaring the living shit out of Americans with hyperbolic reporting on terrorism to return to their political bête noire - the debunking of whatever slur-du-jour uttered by Donald Trump. Two recent examples illustrate the power of "truthiness" - the Stephen Colbert dubbed term generally defined as an idea having the "feeling" of truth, evidence to the contrary. 

The first had to do with Trump's re-tweeting of a debunked statistic regarding murder in America:

While the numbers were well off the mark, there was a patina of "truthiness" embedded in the bogus graph. To wit, it is not true that 97% of African-Americans are killed by other African-Americans, but according to PolitiFact, that figure is around 90%. [1] Everything else in the graph is way off base, [2] but if you are a Trump supporter who thinks the Black Lives Matter movement is undermining law enforcement or fails to focus on the pandemic of black-on-black violence, the inaccuracies are less important than that kernel of truth.

The media has also freaked out about Trump's statement that "thousands" of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey celebrated on 9/11. Again, this idea has been widely debunked but Trump has clung to a Washington Post article from a week after the attacks that talked about the FBI investigating claims that a couple of people had engaged in such behavior. Here again, the "truthiness" of Trump's claim is more important than whether what he said was literally true. If you are a Trump supporter suspicious of Muslims and fearful of terrorism, whether Muslims celebrated in Jersey City, Paterson, or the West Bank (where they actually *did* celebrate) is less important than the fact that some people cheered the fact that we were the victims of a terrorist attack. Arguing over the number of people who celebrated or where is not nearly as important to Trump supporters as whether it happened or not. 

And the media scrutiny is also curious. Most cable and Sunday talk shows are content to simply allow politicians and their surrogates to spout easily debunk-able talking points without pushing them to defend their statements. Indeed, while Chuck Todd cross-examined Trump on his 9/11 claims, he blithely allowed panelist Hugh Hewitt to repeat lies about Planned Parenthood selling "baby parts" later in the same episode. [3] More generally, there are gaffes and policy claims that go largely unreported, from the tax plans that tilt heavily to the wealthy to Marco Rubio's off-handed comment that the Paris terrorist attack was "good" for his campaign. This is not to say that the media should let Trump off the hook, but rather, why it is that they are not holding other candidates to the same standard.

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

Notes

1. http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/updated-look-statistics-black-black-murders/

2. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/23/donald-trump/trump-tweet-blacks-white-homicide-victims/

3. http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-november-29-2015-n470871. Hewitt appears to conflate "baby parts" with "fetal tissue." A lengthy exegesis can be found here: http://www.snopes.com/pp-baby-parts-sale/