Category: Politics

In fairness, many of us are guilty of wanting the benefits of something — whether it’s board certification or full campaign coffers — without paying the price.

Like the Gulf Coast residents who want government off their backs, until a hurricane or oil spill comes along.

Or the Farm Bureau that wants government off the farm, except for the mailbox which is always open to subsidy checks.

Or politicians who rail against out-of-control spending but show up to take credit when a ribbon is cut or oversized check presented.

Or all the rest of us, who resent the chunk of change that government extracts from our pockets but want smooth roads, good schools, police and fire protection, national security, personal security in old age, free markets governed by laws, student loans, flood walls, lakes and parks and the list goes on.

The Tea Party movement, of which Paul is both a leader and beneficiary, feeds the comforting illusion that we can have all we’ve come to expect from government without paying for it. We buy into this illusion at our own peril.

We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles
in creating our own problems. We — both parties — created an awful
set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street
to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to
create new products that improve people’s lives. We — both parties —
created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages
available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them.
And we — both parties — sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much
oil as possible at the cheapest price.

He’s just wrong.  It’s not “both parties.”  For the most part, he describes the logical outcomes of the conservative policies that have held prominence since Ronald Reagan’s Administration.  The fact is that one party is actively trying to address these problems and the other party either denies their existence or simply obstructs solutions for political reasons.    So, here’s Friedman later in his piece:

We need to make our whole country more sustainable. So let’s pass an
energy-climate bill that really reduces our dependence on Middle East
oil. Let’s pass a financial regulatory reform bill that really reduces
the odds of another banking crisis. Let’s get our fiscal house in order,
as the economy recovers. And let’s pass an immigration bill that will
enable us to attract the world’s top talent and remain the world’s
leader in innovation.

Let’s see, now.  Who is trying to enact the legislation he says we need and who’s blocking it?

Only by calling out the obstructionists (read: Republicans) can we really move the policy.  But Friedman prefers his posture a an objective observer, above it all, damning both houses, and accomplishing nothing.

We’re in the aftermath of a financial crisis — and there’s overwhelming evidence (pdf) that recovery from financial crises is almost always protracted and difficult.

The harsh reality is that Bayh has been wrong about virtually everything. And the country suffers not because partisanship blocked action, but because the establishment consensus got too much of his agenda enacted.

Bayh supported the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. He joined the bipartisan celebration of banking deregulation. He favors more military spending. He favored tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in an age of Gilded Age inequality. He was an advocate of corporate free trade policies that encouraged multinationals to ship jobs to a mercantilist China willing to subsidize them. He’s a champion of bipartisanship — bipartisan folly.

Even in his departing, he got it wrong. Bayh announced on CBS’s Early Show that he was looking for a job in the private sector because “If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months,” This echoes the Republican assault on the recovery plan as summarized by newly elected Senate Scott Brown of Massachusetts, that the stimulus plan “didn’t create one new job.”

These moderates are so damned frustrating.  They build their identity around the fact that the best policy lies somewhere between what Democrats want and what Republicans want.  If all sides were operating good faith, this might work some of the time.  But when what one party wants is for the other party to fail, the concept breaks down.  Then, all the moderates do is facilitate a nihilistic approach to government by creating gridlock.

So, here we are the Republicans, who handed Obama two unfinished wars and an economy heading into another depression, have had some success painting Democrats as either incompetent failures who can’t get anything done or successful socialists who are taking the country into the dictatorship of the proletariat.  And the result, if achieve their goal, will be to hand the government back to them to do it all again.

Grrrr!