2010-08-09 to 2010-08-15

In a column titled “America Goes Dark,” Paul Krugman writes about the collapsing empire.

… a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

The question is, why can’t people see what we’re doing to our own country by refusing to invest in infrastructure and education? Of course, a big part of the answer is that people have been soaked in right-wing anti-government propaganda for so long they think rot is normal. But I’d like to think there are a substantial number of Americans who would support investing in infrastructure and education if someone would stand up and show some leadership in that direction.

In fact, I think that’s why a lot of people voted for Obama, but he’s gotten bogged down somehow. Maybe The System is just too big, too entrenched, for even a president to shake it.

BTW, on Right Wing News our buddy William Teach criticized Krugman’s column, and then in the comment thread wrote,

A person is only an expert as long as they are usually correct in their assumptions/predictions/etc. Krugman has been wrong time and time again, as has Obama and Co.

So I asked for a list of ten examples of Krugman being wrong, and of course they can’t come up with ten examples. One guy provided a list of Krugman’s most recent columns, but of course there was no proof that Krugman said anything wrong in those columns, just that the guy disagreed with the columns.

What’s actually come out of the experiment is that the wingnuts can’t tell the difference between opinion and fact. In other words, an opinion they agree with is the same thing as a fact in their world. I keep pushing for real-world examples, and they obviously have no idea what I mean by that.

But that’s part of the problem, I think. Apparently this crew is still insulated enough that they can live in their fantasyland, but one of these days the real world is likely to bite them in the ass. And then maybe they’ll notice what the difference is between fact and opinion.

"But isn't keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you'd notice. When we save a schoolteacher's job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there's a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle....

....How did we get to this point? It's the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can't do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud - to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we're seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole...."

Third World America: Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class...and the Solutions
August 15, 2010 8:12 pm

.....And it's not just about dismal unemployment figures and gloomy foreclosure numbers. As the New York Times reported last week, Hawaii has gone beyond laying off teachers and has begun laying off students -- closing its public schools on 17 Fridays during the last school year. In the Atlanta suburb of Clayton County, the entire bus system was shut down. Colorado Springs turned off over 24,000 of its streetlights. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Camden, New Jersey is soon to permanently shutter its entire library system. And last month the Wall Street Journal reported on the trend of cash-strapped states and counties giving up on the idea of maintaining paved roads, allowing them instead to turn back into gravel. And those localities that can't even afford to put gravel down are just letting the roads, as the Journal put it, "return to nature." A seminar at Purdue University on this trend was entitled "Back to the Stone Age."

Though the particulars of our country's transformation are painfully real to the rest of the country, Washington and Wall Street remain blind to our trajectory toward Third World status.

Witness the joint appearance on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show by former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill and Robert Rubin. According to both of them, we don't need a second stimulus. "We are moving forward at a pretty gradual pace," said O'Neill, "but I don't think things are terrible." Is "not terrible" the new definition of success? And I don't doubt that things are not terrible for O'Neill -- in fact, I bet the roads leading to most of his houses are still paved.

As for Rubin, he "wouldn't do a major second stimulus, because I think...we run a risk that it could be counterproductive in creating a lot of additional uncertainty and undermining confidence."

Uncertainty? I guess that's true in the sense that the nearly 15 million people without a job are currently quite certain they don't have one; if a new stimulus bill were passed, there will at least be some welcome uncertainty as to whether they would be one of the lucky ones getting hired.

In Rubin's mind, what would create more "certainty" is -- drumroll, please -- deficit reduction. "I would try over the next six months to put in place a very serious beginning of deficit reduction that would take effect at some specified time in the future," he said. "I think that could do a lot for confidence."

As Duncan Black writes:

Alf Landon, the Kansas governor running as the Republican Party's 1936 presidential candidate, called it a "fraud on the working man" and "a cruel hoax." The New York Times, in an editorial, said it was "ill-considered" and "very questionable." Harper Sibley, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warned that it would result in "more unemployment in the future, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."

Congressman John Taber, a Republican from New York, proclaimed that "Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people." His New York colleague, GOP Congressman Daniel Reed, warned that if it passed "the lash of the dictator will be felt." The American Medical Association denounced it as a "compulsory socialistic tax." Silas Strawn, former president of both the American Bar Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, described it as "economically preposterous and legally indefensible." It was, he said, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to "Sovietize the country."

What was this threat to American prosperity, freedom, and democracy they were all decrying? It was Social Security, which President Roosevelt signed into law on August 14, 1935 -- 75 years ago.

At the time, the opponents of Social Security were not right-wing lunatics (the Depression-era cousins of today's Tea Party), but rather the business establishment and the mainstream of the Republican Party.

In the early years of the Depression, more than half of America's elderly lived in poverty. But most business leaders and conservatives considered the very idea that government had a moral responsibility to help senior citizens retire with dignity to be outrageously radical, a dangerous trampling of individual liberty.

In addition to ideological objections, opponents had economic ones. They predicted that the new Social Security tax would bankrupt the country and make it impossible to bring the economy out of the recession. The powerful National Association of Manufacturers said the "so-called Social Security will mean industrial in-security." Senator Daniel Hastings (R-Del) predicted that Social Security would "end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European."

Opponents argued that Social Security was impractical, utopian, un-American, radical, and socialistic.

As the former Governor of New York, Roosevelt knew that the chambers of commerce, manufacturers associations, and other business groups had opposed the most important pieces of social legislation on that state's books, including the factory inspection law (passed as a result of the 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire that killed 146 women), the law limiting the hours of labor for women to fifty-four a week, unemployment insurance, pensions for the elderly, and public works projects to put people back to work......

....In retrospect, it is obvious that Social Security's Depression-era opponents engaged in fear-mongering, not economic reality. Their opposition was based on a free-market fundamentalist ideology that abhorred any attempt by reformers to utilize government to improve American's living conditions, working conditions, or public health.

In 1936, Landon and the Republican Party made the repeal of Social Security the centerpiece of their campaign. This year, GOP candidates for Congress are calling for repeal of the health care reform law enacted in March, using much of the same rhetoric.

Just like the early battle over Social Security wasn't really about old-age insurance, current fights over public policy are really place-holders for broader concerns. They are about what kind of country we want to be and what values we consider most important.

Indeed, business groups, Republicans, and right-wing zealots today not only oppose health care reform, but also tougher financial regulations, stronger workplace safety laws, policies to limit climate change, labor law reform, higher taxes on the rich, extension of unemployment insurance to the long-term jobless, and even providing medical benefits to the cops, firefighters and other 9/11 first-responders. The issues vary, but mantra is the same: This liberal (fill-in-the-blank) policy will kill jobs, undermine the entrepreneurial spirit, and destroy freedom.