What's Blame Got to Do With It?
In recent posts, Von, Jim Manzi and I have fretted about President Obama’s fiscal recklessness, noting the massive structural deficits he intends to run, a domestic agenda that promises to exacerbate them, and a dearth of serious proposals addressed at returning America to fiscal health.
Andrew is kind to link us. He is also among the fiscal conservatives who fretted about these issues during the Bush Administration, while a lot of “team players” held their tongues. In reference to our posts, he notes:
Context is needed. That context is a) an inheritance of unprecedented debt accumulated under Bush and Cheney – debt that is largely already built in to the fiscal future Obama is now blamed for (two wars, huge tax cuts and Medicare D); and b) a phenomenally brutal downturn which had the potential to turn into a global depression (a potential that still exists if in milder form). I don’t blame Obama for failing to turn all this around in five months, and for running a debt this big right now.
Fair enough. I neither blame President Obama for creating this mess nor fault him “for failing to turn all this around in five months,” especially given the arguably wise decision to aim fiscal stimulus at averting a possible global depression. What I object to, however, is the notion that accurately apportioning blame is the proper lens through which to view all this. I blame the Bush Administration for its profligate spending, but that isn’t a point that mitigates the harm that will be done by the planned, non-emergency outlays of President Obama. The Bush era’s two costly wars, huge tax cuts and prescription drug benefit make costly endeavors by a successor administration that much more unaffordable, and thus even less fiscally responsible, than they’d otherwise be.
There is a crucial larger point to be made here. On numerous fronts, President Bush’s tenure proved a disaster for the United States. Let’s take the abuse of detainees as an example. The photographs at Abu Ghraib, evidence that the United States tortured innocent men, and the prison put at Gitmo in a calculated attempt to skirt America’s legal system all represent catastrophic hits to America’s reputation and its perceived moral authority. These missteps also exacerbate anti-American sentiments in Islamic communities worldwide, making it marginally harder for Muslim moderates to to defend America, and marginally easier for radicals to recruit new members, whether as terrorists or merely as sympathizers.
The Bush Administration bears the blame for the foregoing. What does that imply about how those who care about this issue should interact with the Obama Administration? On that question, I agree with the approach Andrew has taken — he’s demanded that the Obama Administration cease torture and close Gitmo, drawn attention even to temporary wavering, and generally written as though the shortcomings of the Bush Administration compel drastic, immediate changes by the current president.
The insight beneath Andrew’s approach? We must judge the Obama Administration on its actions, and whether its policies address America’s problems or ignore them to our detriment. The pundit’s impulse to treat the new president fairly is an understandable one, but it should never lead us to extend benefits of doubts when instead demanding accountability and exerting pressure for better policies would serve the national interest. Judge any future president on a curve set by the Bush Administration, and he’ll underperform, as any student would if assured a passing grade for below average work.
Andrew concludes:
I don’t blame Obama for failing to turn all this around in five months, and for running a debt this big right now. I will blame him if he does nothing serious to tackle this in the next year. That does not mean bromides about how healthcare reform will save us all money. It means serious cuts in defense, entitlements and corporate welfare (and perhaps a VAT or a serious gas tax).
I’m amenable to withholding blame, but I’ll not withhold comment or cease efforts at exerting public pressure until we’re given some indication that President Obama intends to make a serious effort at fiscal sanity — especially when the deficits he projects for ten years hence suggests there isn’t anything doing. Public pressure is being applied now in hopes that Obama enact health care legislation and allow gays in the military and pursue all sorts of other priorities a year from now. So long as all these priorities are garnering noisy public support, and prominent fiscal conservatives are deferring for a year to be fair, guess which wheel isn’t going to get greased 12 months hence?
The focus on presidential culpability always misses the point. We can’t afford the diversions of partisanship or cultish favoritism — the fundamental problem is a statist system of government which grows more powerful and expensive as time goes on — I’m for forgiving all presidents if we can change the system by limiting the power of government, free up the power of enterprise and stop this march to financial collapse and economic catastrophe caused by government intervention, unintended consequences, then more intervention to deal with the consequences. We’re in a spiral which has to be stopped. A couple of presidents are unimportant when compared to systemic failure.
— mike farmer · Jun 10, 04:09 PM · #
I’m sure many other people share your concern Conor. Perhaps you should organize a political action committee. Call it Hypothetical Punditry Umbrage Projected into the Future, (HPUPF). It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but as political theater, or satire, it’s a worthy contribution. I say this as a sometimes exasperated reader of your posts.
— ron · Jun 10, 04:22 PM · #
Public pressure is being applied now in hopes that Obama enact health care legislation and allow gays in the military and pursue all sorts of other priorities a year from now. So long as all these priorities are garnering noisy public support, and prominent fiscal conservatives are deferring for a year to be fair, guess which wheel isn’t going to get greased 12 months hence?
This misunderstands the situation in two ways. For Keynesian reasons alone it makes sense to defer deficit hawkery. The long-term budgets can be adjusted later. Announcing to everyone that we plan to raise taxes and cut entitlements could have unpredictable effects on the economy, especially consumer confidence.
But the bigger error here is that the harder you make it to pass legislation, the more grease Obama is going to have to apply. If fiscal conservatives want their wheel greased, they have to compromise. That’s how this game works—you give Obama a few Senate votes, then maybe he can cut a few pet projects on his side of the aisle. But if fiscal conservatives all hold fast and oppose him absolutely, then Obama has no choice but to give in to every pork demand on his side of the aisle to rally every single one of his own legislators.
— Consumatopia · Jun 10, 04:34 PM · #
Let’s break this down a little farther.
1. Soc.Sec. runs a surplus. And, given that millions of baby boomers just lost half the value of their 401(k)s, that’s not a program that’s going to change.
2. Which leaves revenue increases, defense cuts and changing Medicare/Medicaid. Republican rhetoric makes the first two impossible, and Obama has committed major resources to the third. Note, even assuming that a public option passes and the newly created MedCAP starts imposing Mayo Clinic-style management practices on doctors taking public insurance, it will likely take at least a decade for those practices to work their way into the system.
So, what would YOU do different?
— Francis · Jun 10, 04:41 PM · #
”I’m amenable to withholding blame, but I’ll not withhold comment or cease efforts at exerting public pressure until we’re given some indication that President Obama intends to make a serious effort at fiscal sanity”
That seems like wisdom to me. Capitol hill is second to none in its ability to obfuscate and redirect the public’s attention, escaping responsibility rather than accepting it. We would all do well to continue to observe and comment, and argue for the future of the country, rather than for the political future of any individual or party.
— nicholas · Jun 10, 05:13 PM · #
Consumatopia, you write, “if fiscal conservatives all hold fast and oppose him absolutely, then Obama has no choice but to give in to every pork demand on his side of the aisle to rally every single one of his own legislators.” Well, I didn’t propose that fiscal conservatives oppose Obama absolutely — just that insofar as they can, they demand that returning America to fiscal sanity be made a priority.
Also, a president always has a choice to veto wasteful spending, even when the politics don’t work out in his favor.
But the main concern here isn’t pork anyway.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jun 10, 05:59 PM · #
Conor:
History will have to judge, but I don’t think that GW Bush was a very successful president. But this is a case where numbers matter. Yes, GWB ran deficits during good times when we should have been able to be more responsible and run surpluses. Yes, it would almost certainly be a reckless experiment to try to run a balanced budget right now. But the President and Congress are running a deficit equal to 13% of GDP right now. The President is proposing to run an annual budget deficit, every year, about as large as a % of GDP as we have had in any single year since WWII. This would drive debt / GDP to about 80% within 10 years. That’s Third world territory (or US at the close of WWII). And, as per all of our posts, this is a sunny day forecast.
I’m no GWB fan, and never haver have been, but this isn’t about relative moral worth of alternative presidents, or even their supporters; it’s about the ability of the US to manage to avoid an economic catastrophe. The current spending plans of the current President and Congress are putting the country at risk in a way thhat the prior Adminstration and COngresses did not.
— Jim Manzi · Jun 10, 08:14 PM · #
yes, there is big difference in the amount of spending and long term commitments — it’s like Bush teed it up, and Obama has crushed a 340 yd drive.
— mike farmer · Jun 10, 09:02 PM · #
Manzi is correct to note that there is a world of difference between $400 billion and $2 trillion in annual deficits. What bears mentioning as well is that no President is ultimately responsible for fiscal discipline – that honor goes to Congress. It was Democrats in Congress who slammed the door on Bush’s very responsible campaign for entitlement reform. They will do the same to Obama, assuming he follows through on his pronouncements. It was Democrats in Congress – granted, given infinite latitude by Obama – who threw together the “stimulus.” The Democratic Congress is in the process of turning the US into a S – L – O – W growth economy, if that, perhaps permanently. What will that do for their many constituencies?
— Jim Pier · Jun 10, 09:21 PM · #
Mike Farmer – Right On! The discussion needs to be about structural change. A big fuel for the fire is deficit spending – taxpayers get the government they want without paying the price. So, let’s make deficit spending unconstitutional.
— Jim Pier · Jun 10, 09:27 PM · #
The point that we may be overlooking is the issue is not personality driven. The world wide economic down turn came cascading off the mortgage industry/real estate collapse of 2006 to present. This occurred as a result of unsound lending practices coupled with aggressive leveraging of assets, especially in the subprime market. Attempts to address this issue were made by the administration, but were blocked by the congressional oversight agencies, with assurances that no problem was actually in evidence.
For my part, I believe our economy was strong enough to have weathered the subprime mortgage industry collapse without threatening the entire world economy if the market had been allowed to take its course. Instead, tremendous sums of money have been parceled out to banking and auto industries without actually preventing their eventual failure. The result is a marked increase in Federal debt with little to show for it. The current levels of National debt engendered from enormous Federal funding of failed industries, along with so-called economic stimulus funding that was more political payback then economic in its intent, has not only delayed recovery and forestalled a relaxing of the credit market, but has changed the relationship between the government and the governed.
In my view, this does not portend well for our future as a nation.
I would welcome any comments.
— nicholas · Jun 10, 09:59 PM · #
I think you are absolutely correct; if anything, you may be understating the magnitude of the long-term problem. I agree that the responses to the “crisis” have been misguided and probably unnecessary. On top of that, Congress is about to double down on entitlement spending, even though every one of them knows we are already drowning. The US is 40 years behind Europe in the course of socialized medicine, medicare notwithstanding. Their systems are nearing the breaking point, and they are tacking toward private provision. Rather than see the long-term futility of their systems and going in the opposite direction, we are about to go full-speed ahead into the same quagmire. Pile those huge expenses on top of the bailouts and the “stimulus,” and in my opinion there is little chance for much more than a 1% growth trend in US GDP. It is difficult to envision a scenario where we eliminate the deficits and keep debt manageable without serious inflation (take tax revenues from less than $2 trillion to $3-4 trillion overnight, under an unprecedented burden in terms of GDP?). Politicians absolutely refuse to attack entitlement spending (to be fair, Bush made a bona fide effort). Can that issue be resolved without some sort of collapse? I am starting to believe that we ought to look at the long term, and anticipate that there will be another “crisis” worse than this one within 10 or 12 years. Anticipating that, we educate the electorate in economics, and champion a Balanced Budget Amendment. It will seem ludicrous at first, but that would have been true of Reaganomics in 1965 or 70. There is no reason on earth the federal budget needs to be anywhere near 20% of GDP. Balancing the budget would put the true cost of government, including entitlements, on the taxpayers. Medicare would have to be financed like private insurance, as opposed to the current partial payment. Social Security would have to be funded like a pension, and everybody would be clear that it is a transfer program, not retirement insurance. I believe Americans would decide it isn’t worth the cost, and real reform would be doable.
— Jim Pier · Jun 14, 05:12 AM · #