It looks like that we're going to have a debt ceiling agreement soon. But what a bad deal. And the road that we took to make this deal is full of ashes and dead bodies.
I'm horrified that our country was taken hostage in order to make political points. That's what just happened.
Paul Krugman writes,
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
On Friday night, my babysitter didn't leave when we got home. Instead, she stayed in my kitchen and vented for an hour. She and her boyfriend can't get married, because, four years after getting his college degree, he still can't find a job. He's caddying at the local golf course. She's a classroom aide and never expected that she would have to support a family. They are selling their gold at Sell Your Gold parties. Perhaps they are clinging too long to a traditional suburban family arrangement that no longer exists.
Where can he find a job, she begged. I told her that he should get a nursing degree.
The economy is in the pooper and this deal isn't going to help the unemployed 2o-somethings.
But that bothers me less than the ruthless and cynical politics that happened this week. More Krugman,
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
Bloggers are hating this Krugman column, because he blames Obama for this crappy deal. I'm not sure that Obama did badly here. He was dealing with political psychopaths who don't give a crap about the political costs of shutting down government. There's little room for negotiation when you're dealing with insanity.
Apt. 11d 
It’s bad… real bad. And even though our family relies totally on Social Security (I’m disabled, and have disabled kids), I’d rather have held off and faced a month or two of homelessness than to deal with continued uncertainty about my benefits, health insurance, and the economy that effects my children’s futures, their job possibilities, and their health care.
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Your babysitter’s boyfriend should probably think about leaving New Jersey.
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“Your babysitter’s boyfriend should probably think about leaving New Jersey.”
Yeah, that might be a good idea. A side business is also a good idea. If you have three or four small things going that all make money, it’s possible to make a living. (In my hometown, there’s a guy who is 1) the UPS drop-off guy 2) a locksmith 3) an ordained minister and 4) an undertaker.) It also occurs to me that a golf course isn’t a bad place to (very discreetly) ask if clients are hiring.
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If he comes to your door carrying a really big box, do you sign for it or run?
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I have never seen a better argument for term limits. If you’re worried about the next election instead of, oh, wrecking the world economy, you’re no good and need to go. Right now.
I have also never had so much political rage. I’ve ended up with a few more names added to my “I cannot trust myself not to snap into a red fury” list after Jenny McCarthy. She used to be the only one.
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I have never seen a better argument for term limits.
Term limits tend to increase officials’ attentiveness to the next election, not decrease it. The people in their first couple of terms are usually the most vulnerable to challengers. Some of that is because the least gerrymandered seats switch more often, but much of it is just because they haven’t had any time to accumulate a set of accomplishments, committee assignments from which to spread the wealth, and campaign funds.
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I remember David Axelrod saying that Paul Krugman had never gotten a bill through Congress. I agree with you Laura, that these people are insane and would happily have driven the bus off the cliff (and still may do so).
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MH, I guess I wasn’t clear on the limits I want. One and done. And a rest period before the next position anyone could campaign on.
I would take as an alternative much of Congress and party leadership going to hell and dying. Maybe some news media too.
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“If he comes to your door carrying a really big box, do you sign for it or run?”
I don’t think he delivers. He just runs the UPS office. We also have a version of my multitasking hometown guy in our town in Texas at a local box and ship place. If you go there, you can pack anything up, send anything, get stuff notarized, buy greeting cards, rent a defensive driving video to fulfill your traffic court obligations, not to mention rent U-HAUL trailers and do a bunch of stuff I may not have noticed on my quick visits. It’s a standard box and ship place, but on steroids.
As far as economic indicators go, I may have mentioned that my relative the architect/structural engineer recently got a job after two years of unemployment. He’d gone to school for a long, long time and got two MAs, got a job, bought a house and then immediately got laid off as the economy soured. The timing was terrible, because he had to have to have a certain amount of on-the-job experience before he could get the final certification that allows him to strike out on his own. But he’s got a real job now. A second young relative (also a structural engineer by training) has been very successfully leapfrogging between a number of different engineering positions, a number of them not actually the field he was trained in (which I believe is rather unusual in engineering where they routinely have huge die offs of entire industries). I have no idea how the second structural engineer does it, but he’s done surprisingly well during the recession, considering that the entire sector of the economy that he trained for has almost dried up and blown away. My second engineer relative has had to keep switching states further and further from where he started. His wife likes her old job where she is, so that complicates things, as I’m sure it does for a lot of young families in the same position.
I personally wouldn’t make any plans based on the economy getting dramatically better over the next five years.
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A bit of political nihilism is fine, but I can’t imagine “one and done” would do anything but strengthen party leaders (which may be good but doesn’t seem to be what you want) or induce total chaos (which, meh). Every two years, you’d need 468.33 new people in Congress. They’ll either have to be rich or depend on some established group for campaign funds. For good or ill, there wouldn’t be nearly as many people in the legislature who have their own base.
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My above comment was to LMC.
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“MH, I guess I wasn’t clear on the limits I want. One and done. And a rest period before the next position anyone could campaign on.”
Two years is barely enough time to find the cafeteria, the gym and the men’s room. Wouldn’t a short term actually select for more extreme members of Congress? Being in Washington DC for just two years would be extremely disruptive to a normal person.
I kind of like the idea of one term for senators, though. They seem to get REALLY comfortable up there.
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I’m not sure that Obama did badly here.
I would love to know what Obama’s pollsters were telling him. Based on what happened, probably that he’ll get blamed for any problems that come from not coming to a deal.
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I think Calif is a telling example of what is wrong with term limits. These guys have six years. This means, yes, after two years of finding the restroom, they are thinking ‘what am I going to do next?’ and the result is, that they are unusually receptive to (depending on flavor) lobbying from power companies, or teachers’ unions, or prison guard unions, or whatever special interest comes their way. And then those interests hire a lot of ex-legislators who have done them favors.
AND ANOTHER THING, back to the ‘find the rest room’ idea: they don’t know much. Used to be in Calif., you had people in the Assembly who had been there fifteen years and really knew their brief in the committees they served on. Now, these guys are newbies, and they lap up whatever soup the lobbyists are serving them, because they don’t know anything independently.
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If the past few years of trillion dollar deficits haven’t produced a job for the babysitter’s husband, why would anyone believe that a few trillion more will do the trick?
Here’s what I don’t understand about our hostess and so many others: how anyone can combine an entirely justified agnosticism about the causes and cures of our current economic problems with such rage against people with different political views. Since no one knows the answers, how can we know that the other side is wrong?
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“Since no one knows the answers, how can we know that the other side is wrong?”
Well, because one side agreed to cuts they really really didn’t want, while the other side is completely unwilling to talk about increasing revenues at all, motivated by ideology that cannot be modulated by fact.
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(iPhone. With kid. At swim club. Excuse typos.)
What pisses me most about all of this isn’t the deal itself, but the process. Bothconservative AND liberal pundits and economists agreed that defaulting was a very, very bad thing. But the tea party types were willing to run out the clock in order to win. They really didn’t seem to care. It’s impossible to negotiate when one side has no fear of death.
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Used to be in Calif., you had people in the Assembly who had been there fifteen years and really knew their brief in the committees they served on. Now, these guys are newbies, and they lap up whatever soup the lobbyists are serving them, because they don’t know anything independently.
That is the usual concern with term limited (or otherwise unprofessionalized) legislative bodies. However, I’ve been following the news and I don’t think you can ignore the possibility that Californians across the board have gotten much stupider in the past 15 years.
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I agree that term limits are a fantastical solution to the complexity of making government, whether the calls come from the right or the left.
I agree, too that making any decisions in the hopes that the economy is going to improve significantly would probably be an unwise personal decision (and, that therein also lies the significant problem of how and whether we are going to get out of this slump). I can only hope for Japanese style stagnation rather than the full-fledged depression I worry we might be flung into.
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“Well, because one side agreed to cuts they really really didn’t want, while the other side is completely unwilling to talk about increasing revenues at all.”
As I understand it, nobody but Obama was seriously talking about higher taxes. His private jet stuff and millionaire and billionaire rhetoric was totally removed from the real horse-trading that was going on. That’s typical Obama to be floating ethereally over the fray, without any attention to detail. If you want to know what legislation is under consideration, he’s not really your go-to guy.
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“If the past few years of trillion dollar deficits haven’t produced a job for the babysitter’s husband, why would anyone believe that a few trillion more will do the trick?”
Because people like you consistently fall prey to the wrong-headed idea that giving rich people lots of tax breaks will cause them to create jobs. Instead, what has happened is that they’ve hoarded and speculated on all that money while making the government cut jobs because it has no money to hire people.
Also, somehow you thought going to war with no way of paying for it was a good idea.
EVERY SINGLE EXPENSIVE THING in the economy that has contributed to the deficit has been a Republican initiative. Did you think the war was going to fucking pay for itself?
If I sound really frustrated, that’s because I live with a 12-year-old hormone-addled girl whose first response to every mistake she makes is “It’s [insert someone else’s name here]’s fault.” I don’t expect to hear the same thing from adult members of a political party.
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I feel others’ rage, and when my air conditioning went out over a week ago, I fired off a letter to my Tea Party-oriented congressman. I told him I’d never been so frustrated in my life and that I would be doing everything within my power to make sure he is not in office next time around. My rage is not only about the process, which just seemed like a giant pissing match (with our money!) to me, but also, as someone else mentioned, that we got zero tax increases. I, personally, would be willing to see my taxes go up by 5% if it means that we can pay down our debt and cover some means of expansion of jobs, keep Social Security, etc. I’m even willing to investigate change to SS like raising the retirement age.
My other reason for being crazy angry is that we could have had a clean vote on the debt ceiling–up or down–and then the Tea Party or Republicans or both decided now was the time, with just weeks to go, to start making some damn tough decisions. My thought was, dudes, wait till after this vote. We could have raised the debt ceiling at the beginning of July, and then spent July, August, September figuring out the budget/deficit. It absolutely infuriates me.
And let me say, too, that I’m also pissed at Obama. There may have been a lot going on behind the scenes, but I sort of felt like he washed his hands of the whole thing–kind of like health care. He never came out and said, “This is what I want. Get it done.” No, he didn’t want to be too pushy (just like with health care).
There’s a lot of anger for me to spread around. Almost no one is spared.
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“We could have raised the debt ceiling at the beginning of July, and then spent July, August, September figuring out the budget/deficit. It absolutely infuriates me.”
That’s exactly what Obama didn’t want. I can’t find a link right now, but earlier during the negotiations he specifically opposed a short term (for instance 90 day) rise in the debt ceiling.
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…and then the Tea Party or Republicans or both decided now was the time, with just weeks to go, to start making some damn tough decisions
Nobody who didn’t think like that would last two minutes in the leadership of either party. If you cede control of the order and timing of votes, you will lose.
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“We could have raised the debt ceiling at the beginning of July, and then spent July, August, September figuring out the budget/deficit. It absolutely infuriates me.”
Government just doesn’t work that way, nor do most organizations of which I have been part. If it’s not a crisis, no one will think about it or do anything. (Some times our family is a little more responsible, but that is a very small organization knit by strong ties of mutual love and dependence, unlike my law firm or our country.)
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Anyway, either the minority of a majority Tea Party is the most devious politic force in U.S. politics or the Democratic party is has very poor leaders or too many of the people who might vote Democrat don’t want their taxes increased.
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Amy–I wasn’t talking about a short-term debt-ceiling deal, but separating the debt-ceiling from the budget. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have raised the debt ceiling through the elections–as we are now. And then separately, have discussed cuts and revenues, etc. And MH and y81–yes, I get that there’s a game to be played, and clearly my ideas don’t work well in the political arena. But, I can still find it frustrating.
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I’m a little fuzzy on the final details (having gotten lost in the details of the previous five or six iterations), but aren’t all the potentially scary things backloaded? The real stuff in the deal is whatever happens in 2011 and 2012, while everything else (2013 on or whatever) is pure CGI/blue screen. There’s no point in hyperventilating over any details relating to the “out years,” because they probably aren’t going to happen, at least not in that form.
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I think the right crisis to play this brinksmanship game over was the shutdown of the government, not the debt ceiling. We’d already spent the money that required the raising of the debt ceiling. Not raising it is the equivalent of doing jingle mail, except mailing our country to the bank (or the Chinese?).
Refusing to spend any more money until we have a plan for how revenues are going to match expenditures? Well, I can see the argument for that (even if I don’t agree with the simplistic arguments behind a balanced budget amendment).
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“What pisses me most about all of this isn’t the deal itself, but the process.”
Note that Paul Krugman now urges a vote against the current deal, and half the Democrats in the House took his advice. So our hostess is rather alone in her process-oriented stance.
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“Note that Paul Krugman now urges a vote against the current deal, and half the Democrats in the House took his advice.”
!!!
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Getting really drink and taking the bus home does wonders for mental health and appreciation of teh government.
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MH: the bus is not the essential part of the process!
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Too hot to walk, too drunk to drove, too cheap for a taxi. Plus, a taxi probably would have taken hours to get there.
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“Plus, a taxi probably would have taken hours to get there.”
Call and tell them you’re going to the airport. (Just kidding–I would never endorse willfully deceiving a taxi company. But it would work.)
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My next post will require more drinks.
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(burying this idea in a comment, because I don’t want to drive away readership with a political theory post.)
I am losing patience with everyone (Krugman, Wilkinson, whoever) who is debating about whether or not this process was democratic or not. Because there are so many different definitions of democracy.
Someone like James Madison would have been outraged. He wanted checks and balances between the branches of government. Checks and balances did not refer to the parties. He didn’t believe in parties. While he thought they were inevitable, he wasn’t happy about them. He was very worried that a group of people – a majority or a minority of the population — would organize to use the system to destroy the democracy. These factions would have some common interest that would unite them and cause them to make decisions that were not in the interest of the country.
He thought that our country had certain safeguards against these factions. We were part of a large country divided up into states — the distance and the different elections would make it hard for factions to organize across the entire country. He also thought that a system of representation would enable cooler heads to make decisions that regular Americans didn’t have the time or the education to properly process.
So, Madison would have said that what happened last weekend was completely counter to his notion of democracy. Decisions were not made based on logic or rational debate, but by extortion and threats. Maybe that’s the way that American democracy has alway worked, but it isn’t the best way of doing business and the idealist in me hopes for something better.
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I think the debt ceiling is a perfect storm of “very important” and “nobody cares.” I mean, honestly, if the Democrats were the insane hostage-taker/ chicken-players, saying they wouldn’t raise the debt ceiling unless John Boehner personally performed an abortion, would it impact my vote for the Democrats in the next election? Not at all.
I already disagree with the Democrats about 1/3 of the time, but the things I don’t agree with them about are much, much less important to me than the 2/3 of the things I agree with them about, so I’m nowhere near a swing voter. I’m sure Republicans are the same way, and are voting about taxes/abortion/affirmative action/government regulation, irrespective of their views on the debt ceiling.
So, I am also unclear what the question means when we ask, “Was this democratic?” It was in the sense that everyone who is really pissed off about what the Republicans did can vote against them in 2012. The fact that that won’t happen isn’t a sign that the it wasn’t democratic — just that nobody cares that much.
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“I think the debt ceiling is a perfect storm of “very important” and “nobody cares.”
Actually, raising the debt ceiling is unpopular with the public. Back in April, only 27% of those polled wanted to raise it. That may have shifted somewhat with all the we’re-all-gonna-die talk.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056258-503544.html
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I vote to hear more about Madison and his views on factions. I think arguing about whether something is “democracy” is foolish, and ends up being similar to other semantic arguments where one argues that someone can’t be a liberal because I’m a liberal and I disagree with them (or someone can’t be a Christian because they did something bad, or . . . .).
But, I think your Madison cite is really about talking about democracy and how it can play out differently in different empirical situations. In this particular case, what I’m worried about is not the dynamics in Congress, but the development of non-competitive congressional districts. The NY times graphics categorizes just 83/432 as being “competitive.” I don’t know history so I can’t say that this is a change.
If it were a change, though, then one could be concerned that the lack of a middle ground results from the segregation of factions (done more effectively now because of polling and better data about how individuals are distributed by their political inclinations) rather than by a real polarization in the voting patterns of individuals. Translated, that means that instead of individual people becoming more partisan/less middle ground (say, because of isolation or selective viewing of information), it’s populations that are becoming more factional (i.e. congressional districts). And, in my theory, they are becoming more factional because of trends in the interaction between democracy and modern data analysis.
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“And, in my theory, they are becoming more factional because of trends in the interaction between democracy and modern data analysis.”
Non-competitive districts have been created (along with the obvious incumbent-protecting reason) because of civil rights concerns. The idea is that if you stick enough minority voters in a single district, you ensure that they get representation, rather than winding up as small, unimportant constituencies in mixed districts. Of course, creating these concentrated minority districts may also cut down on the total number of Democratic members of Congress.
http://sexcashandpolitics.com/post/6825177708/redistricting-could-increase-minority-districts
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“Non-competitive districts have been created (along with the obvious incumbent-protecting reason) because of civil rights concerns. ”
Folks often cite to that issue — that gerymandered districts are a a result of trying to tweak our regional representation with the characteristics of proportional representation used in other countries (for national minorities). But it’s wrong to attribute the characteristics of modern redistricting practices purely to goal.
There are at least three things that play heavily into district formation: 1) protecting incumbents 2) leveraging benefits to the party in control of redistricting and 3) accounting for the interest of minorities. It’s the combination of all three that results in the engineering districts.
Decades ago, there was an interesting analysis by he Chicago Tribune on redistricting in Chicago. They showed that using an automated algorithm for redistricting resulted in the same number of “minority districts” (i.e. districts with high enough proportions of minority voters to likely result in a win for the minority-supported candidate). But, such districts didn’t satisfy the other two aims, and thus, contentious political maps were drawn instead. In the context of that study, it’s more reasonable to say that the “random” redistricting produces minority districts, but doesn’t protect incumbents, and that drives the engineering of districts.
Since seeing that study, I’ve become an advocate of computer algorithms for redistricting — I believe they’re more likely to protect the interests of racial minorities than the politically motivated plans.
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That’s interesting. I’d love to just let the computers do the work too, but there are a lot of interested parties that wouldn’t like the results.
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Actually, raising the debt ceiling is unpopular with the public. Back in April, only 27% of those polled wanted to raise it.
I’m not sure what the point of this poll is. I’m sure less than 27% would also agree with the position “we should default on our debts” or “we should slash entitlements to such a large degree that we don’t need to raise the debt ceiling.”
Any poll question will get over 90% of respondents to say they “agree” or “disagree” with a stated position. That doesn’t mean that any of them actually “care.”
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“That doesn’t mean that any of them actually “care.””
I expect people actually do care, but we suffer from the paralysis brought on by contradictory desires. On the one hand, people don’t want more taxes. On the other hand they don’t want more debt. On a third hand, they’d like somebody else to continue picking up the tab for grandma’s (and eventually their own) medicine, doctors, nursing home and Social Security.
It’s like Buridan’s ass–midway between two desirable items, it dies because it can’t choose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass
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Decisions were not made based on logic or rational debate, but by extortion and threats.
How would you classify Obama’s
threatpledge to veto Boehner’s bill? How would you classify Obama’s 2006 vote against raising the debt ceiling? Or his failure to even show up for the 2007 and 2008 votes?“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
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Robert Stacy McCain says of the deal, “in an event unprecedented in the history of spin wars, conservatives and liberals rushed to claim that the other side won.”
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That seems accurate to me, Amy. I get most of my news from The Atlantic these days, but yesterday ended up on a Fox News article about the biggest winners and losers from the debt deal: it was like they were covering an entirely different event.
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I expect people actually do care, but we suffer from the paralysis brought on by contradictory desires.
The thought of direct democracy makes me angry.
I always get angry when I go to vote, and there’s a local ballot question, asking (in many more words) “Should we issue a $2 million bond to repair the Whatchama Bridge?”
Well, I don’t know. How dangerous is the Whatchama Bridge in its current condition? What is the expected life of the repairs to the Whatchama Bridge? Would it be more cost effective to tear it down and replace it, even if it costs more up front? Is there a plan in development to build the Whoosis Bridge nearby, making the Whatchama Bridge obsolete in 5 years?
I read these questions and I think, “I elect people to use their good judgment to decide what needs to be done, and what the best time and cost to do it is.” Life is about tradeoffs, so how am I supposed to know if this bridge project, even if it is a good idea, is the best use of the $2 million bond?
I elect local politicians to use their good judgment, so I don’t have to become an expert on land use and bridge construction. I elect national politicians to figure out what the country needs to be strong and safe, and what taxes we need to pay to cover that.
For me (like for everyone), there’s a point where I’d think “You’re raising my taxes to pay for THAT?” and a point where I think, “This is important! Do it no matter what it costs.” Between those two points, I vote for politicians who I think have the same values I do to go become experts and decide how much debt we need and what spending we can cut.
I address my “contradictory desires” by ceding authority to Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez to due to the balancing for me. Don’t come back to me with an opinion poll asking what I think about any particular point of balance.
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I elect local politicians to use their good judgment, so I don’t have to become an expert on land use and bridge construction.
If I had contested local elections and bridge maintenance, I’d probably feel better about politics.
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“I always get angry when I go to vote, and there’s a local ballot question, asking (in many more words) “Should we issue a $2 million bond to repair the Whatchama Bridge?””
Boy, me too. And, I live in the land of initiatives, where we not only vote on bridge repairs, but vote on them over and over again. For example, people voted 5 times on the one of our contentious projects project. It was eventually killed. We now have two competing (and contradictory) ballots on a new big project to replace a failing bridge. Since they are two independent ballots, it’s completely possible for people to vote to both end the project and continue it.
That is, not even the problems of balancing, but the ability to actually vote yes and no on a particular project at the same time.
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As the demotivator goes, none of us is as dumb as all of us.
http://quizilla.teennick.com/stories/6272742/demotivators
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