Ross Douthat, Political Scientist

Douthat draws on political science research at New York Times, "Waiting For a Landslide." And for a second I thought he'd blow it, because "realignment theory," which he discusses, hasn't accurately explained, much less predicted, partisan trends for decades. But Douthat adds this, which is just right:

In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be. The next Republican president may find himself as hemmed in and frustrated as President Obama has become. Meanwhile, America will still have a credit rating to fix, and a deficit to close.

More at that link at top, and Douthat had a great piece a few days ago on the debt deal, "The Liberals’ Dilemma." Note especially:

... American liberalism risks becoming a victim of its own longstanding strategy’s success. Because yesterday’s liberals insisted on making universal programs the costly core of the modern welfare state, on the famous theory that “programs for the poor become poor programs,” today’s liberals find themselves defending those universal (and therefore universally-popular) programs at the expense of every other kind of government spending — including, yes, programs for the poor. It’s a classic example of putting liberal political interests ahead of liberal policy priorities. In the short term, the insistence on ring-fencing Medicare and Social Security has left Democrats defending a system that often just ends up redistributing money from the younger middle class to the older middle class while accepting caps on programs that might do more (both directly and indirectly) to help downscale Americans get ahead. In the long term, by postponing any reckoning with the cost of entitlements, it’s making it more likely that the inevitable crunch will hit the poorest recipients of Medicare and Social Security harder than it should.

Read that whole thing. Basically, progressives will never cut entitlements because gargantuan socialist welfare states form the core of socialist existentialism.



Douthat's coming of his own as a New York Times columnist, by the way. He had cold feet or something after leaving The Atlantic, but he's been more consistent in posting some excellent commentary of late.

America Gets Downgraded

At Wall Street Journal, "A spend and tax policy mix always leads to economic decline":

... is there anything that S&P said on Friday that everyone else doesn't already know? S&P essentially declared that on present trend the U.S. debt burden is unsustainable, and that the American political system seems unable to reverse that trend.

This is not news.

In that context, the Obama Administration's attempt to discredit S&P only makes the U.S. look worse—like the Europeans who also want to blame the raters for noticing the obvious. Treasury officials and chief White House economic adviser Gene Sperling denounced S&P for relying on a Congressional Budget Office scenario that overestimated the U.S. discretionary spending baseline by $300 billion through 2015 and $2 trillion through 2021.

But even adjusting for that $2 trillion would only reduce U.S. publicly held debt to 85% or so of GDP—still dangerously high. And that assumes that recently agreed upon spending caps are sustained over a decade, something which rarely happens.

We think the larger problem with S&P, Moody's and Fitch is that they make no distinction over how a nation balances its books—whether through tax increases or spending reductions. Like the International Monetary Fund, the raters care only about balance.

This takes too little account of the need for faster economic growth, which is the only real path out of a debt crisis. Britain's government has earned rater approval for its fiscal consolidation, but its increases in VAT and income tax rates are hurting its tepid recovery. Letting the credit raters dictate tax increases is the road to an austerity trap.

The real reason for White House fury at S&P is that it realizes how symbolically damaging this downgrade is to President Obama's economic record. Democrats can rail all they want about the tea party, but Republicans have controlled the House for a mere seven months. The entire GOP emphasis in those seven months—backed by the tea party—has been on reversing the historic spending damage of Mr. Obama's first two years.

Continue reading.

IMAGE CREDIT: The Astute Bloggers.

Death of Keynesianism? Not for Paul Krugman

Some have been speculating on the death of Keynesian economics, but folks need look no further than Paul Krugman to see how strong a grip discredited academic theories still hold on the establishment class. See Krugman's essay this morning, "Macroeconomic Folly":

All of a sudden, people seem to have noticed that policy is moving in exactly the wrong direction. We’re getting headlines like this: Debt Deal Puts U.S. on Austerity Path as Economy Falters.

I’ll need to write up my thoughts here at greater length, but let’s just say for now that what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece...

Well, that's fear alright ... fear-mongering.

Economy Grew at Weak 1.3 Percent in Second Quarter

At LAT, "The U.S. economy grew at a weak rate of 1.3% from April through June, another sign that the recovery has faltered dramatically."

And at Sundries Shack, "Let’s Stop the Clubbing of America":

It’s not so much that President Obama has hamstrung the economy but that he’s methodically stalked it over the past two and a half years.

And now he’s clubbing it to death.

And hear it from the Stalker-in-Chief himself:

See also, Dan Riehl, "O'petulance: Master Barry's Childish Temperament," and Weasel Zippers, "Obama Demands Congress Give Him Debt Bill By Tuesday, Still Refusing To Come Up With His Own Plan…"

Why Does Barack Obama Want to Cut Off Social Security Checks?

From John Hawkins, at Right Wing News: