By Richard Alba, July 29th, 2011 
From the fracas in Washington, it would be impossible to know that Americans still live in the world’s richest country. In 2010, the U.S. GDP was about two-and-a-half times that of its nearest competitor, China—you know, the country that’s building new cities everywhere and a bullet train system to ferry citizens among them. But to listen to the political discourse that currently dominates the airwaves, the U.S. is facing financial collapse, if not now then in another decade, and it cannot afford another dollar for many collective goods, whether an improved mass transportation system or health care for senior citizens.
As a number of commentators have observed, the political crisis over the debt ceiling is a distraction from graver and more urgent problems: especially the stagnation of the economy, which is not generating enough jobs to make much of a dent in the unemployment rate or to give young workers solid footing for the beginning of their career climbs. The Great Recession, supposedly over, is threatening to turn into a Japanese-style stagnation that could endure for a decade or more.
The state of the U.S. economy is bound up with the plight of the American middle class, as Robert Reich has acutely observed. That plight has been developing for decades, a lot longer than the debt problem, which dates back just a decade, to George W. Bush’s entry into the White House. The economic gains since the 1970s have been concentrated at the top of the income distribution, in the top few percent, and little has trickled down into the middle class. One widely cited statistic has it that the top 1 percent now take home about a quarter of the national income, up from just 9 percent in 1976; the distribution of wealth is even more unequal. (By the standard statistical measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, the U.S. is now considerably more unequal than any other economically developed country and more resembles a developing nation like Nicaragua.)
![]( "Man at eulogy for the Middle Class, Santa Fe, New Mexico © </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") Loading the Debt Problem onto the Backs of the Middle Class
By Gary Alan Fine, July 28th, 2011 
If it can be said that the devil is in the details, Barack Obama is on the side of the angels. It has been legislative tradition for the party out of power to complain with piss’n’vinegar about raising the debt ceiling on American borrowing, and even in symbolic fashion to vote against the rise, as pre-presidential Obama did to his lasting regret. In the end the vote is anti-climatic. The debt ceiling is raised and despite promises to do better, politicians relying on the short memories of their constituents go their merry way. Depending on which party is in power, they continue to tax and spend or merely to spend.
But summer ‘11 is different. Unlike most Julys, this is not the Silly Season. The fresh crop of Republicans has that most dire of all political virtues: sincerity. It is not that these freshmen are insane or are terrorists, as flame-throwers on the poetic left suggest. Rather they share a perspective on government that, even if it is not always explicitly or candidly presented, is certainly a legitimate view of how a quasi-libertarian state should be organized. As boisterous tea party rebels, they are children of Ron Paul and, with less intellectual gravitas, of Milton Friedman. It is the task of Speaker John Boehner to hide their deep desires – currently unlikely to be enacted – from the public. These politicians wish broad principled cuts. Call them “radical” if you reject them, but, after all, this rhetoric mirrors the self-enhancing distinction: I am firm, but she is stubborn. As the Speaker’s plans evolve, it is increasingly unclear when and where these billions of cuts will derive. One can’t but imagine that this is a shell game with the American public as the marks. Boehner is the adult in the room, but like so many parents, he tries to misdirect his offspring’s attention hoping against hope that the promises will be forgotten.
![]( "Tea Party Protest, Hartford, Connecticut, April 15, 2009 © Sage Ross | </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") The Suckers March: Show Us the Cuts
By Gary Alan Fine, July 25th, 2011 
I’m puzzled. For as long as I can recall I have been assured that the Grand Old Party will do just about anything to advantage their wealthy friends and benefactors. Of course, no party desires no taxes – not even Republicans — and none – not even Democrats – want full confiscation. So the issue always comes down to the question of how one will square the circle. Should the top marginal rate be 35% or 40%? Aside from the flat tax advocates and a few outré progressives, few are now arguing for 25% or 50%.
Statecraft inevitably involves a distribution of responsibilities and benefits. And, as I have noted, it is traditionally the case that Democrats ask for more sacrifice from the wealthy and Republicans advocate for fewer benefits for the needy.
This being part of our political logic, how then do we explain a central feature of the Republican plans for Medicare and for Social Security, and how do we explain the hesitancy of most elected Democrats to embrace this plan?
One area in which there appears to be some measure of agreement between President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner is that means testing Medicare and perhaps even Social Security should be “on the table” – a Thanksgiving turkey, as it were. The argument is that the wealthy might receive fewer benefits or should have to ante up more in the way of co-payments. What’s up with that? In important ways, one should appreciate why Democrats would like that idea and why the Republicans should resist, but things have not quite transpired in that logical way.
Despite the element of soaking (or at least dampening) the rich, some Democrats have pushed back on the idea of means testing Social Security and Medicare. One could readily make the argument that it is unjust or undesirable for the federal government to send out checks to those same rich folks on whom Democrats wish to raise the marginal tax rates. Couldn’t receiving fewer benefits be a form of shared sacrifice so integral to Democratic talking points?
. . .
Read more: Means Testing: The GOP’s Surprising Class Warfare
By Richard Alba, July 20th, 2011 
The right, as has been frequently observed of late, has developed an “alternative-reality” view of how we have arrived at our current budget-deficit impasse, placing the blame squarely on the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats. A runaway federal budget since 2009 is the key element in their story. In a July 15th editorial (“The Obama Downgrade”), The Wall Street Journal states this view succinctly:
“The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.”
The editorial is accompanied by a chart to illustrate the basic claim–witness the remarkable uptick of the curve between 2008 and 2009:
At first sight, the chart appears to sustain the WSJ charge and to indicate that federal spending under Obama is of a different order of magnitude from the past. For a moment, it shook my own antipathy to the Republican position; maybe, in all fairness, the blame deserves to be more evenly divided between the two sides of the political aisle. My curiosity aroused, I probed more deeply into the numbers (which come from the OMB website). I’d like to share what I discovered. I make no claims about any special knowledge of the intricacies of the federal budget, just an affinity with numbers.
If you have followed me this far, you may have guessed what is coming—the discovery of a deceptive use of data. It begins with a disturbing piece of disingenuousness, if not dishonesty, in the WSJ editorial, which places the responsibility for remarkably high level of fiscal year (FY) 2009 expenditures entirely at Obama’s door. But a federal fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior year, and the Bush White House was therefore the source of the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and responsible for spending some of the money. The budget as proposed authorized $3.1 . . .
Read more: Pushing Back Against the Right’s Narrative on the Budget
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 23rd, 2011 
In his remarks to the nation last night on the way forward in Afghanistan, the leadership style of President Obama was on full view. He presented a clear rational position, addressing immediate concerns with precision and subtlety, placing a simple decision about the pace of troop withdrawals in a larger historical context. It was rhetorically elegant. It was, from a strictly formal point of view, a satisfying speech. It was substantively, though, challenging, concerning immediate military, political and economic calculations.
I watched the address having earlier in the week attended a local organizing meeting of “Organizing for America” (which will soon again become “Obama for America”). The attendees included those who are realistically pleased with Obama’s Presidency, and those who were once enthusiastic, but are now skeptical. I thought about both the skeptics and the realists watching the speech.
An anti-war activist was particularly concerned about Obama’s war policies. To his mind, Obama has continued Bush’s approach, with variations on a deeply problematic theme. While he had listened carefully during the campaign to Barack Obama, as the candidate promised to withdraw from the bad war in Iraq so that we could fight the good fight in Afghanistan, he has still been disappointed by that war’s escalation. He predicted that Obama would announce a minuscule reduction of forces. I recall: 5,000 this summer and 10,000 in a year. He didn’t believe that a real change in direction of an overly militarized foreign policy would be forthcoming.
The announced troop reductions more than double my neighbor’s expectation. But I suspect that he is not satisfied. After all, the announced withdrawal of 33,000 troops by the end of next summer will still leave twice as many troops in Afghanistan than at the beginning of the Obama administration. The Congressional Democrats who are criticizing Obama’s decision are representing broad public judgment that enough is enough in Afghanistan. I should add that I share this judgment.
There were of course no strong opponents of the President at our meeting. Although it is noteworthy that the first meeting I . . .
Read more: Obama on Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal
By Gary Alan Fine, June 13th, 2011 
Silly season comes early in Washington, along with the steamy weather. It is just barely June, and we are already watching the meltdown of Congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken liberal Queens Democrat and a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City. This disgusting and delightful episode began innocently enough with the question of whether the Congressman sent a photo of his filled-out jockey shorts to a West coast co-ed. She assured us that she was not offended by such japery. Stranger things have happened, even in the New York Congressional delegation. The episode seemed like a pleasant, if erotically-charged, diversion. As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out in another vein, it was “good to think.” Now we learn that the Congressman has checked himself into the Eliot Spitzer wing to deal with a whimsical mental illness that the DSM-5 might label “cad-atonia.” Weiner may be needy, but psychiatry is not likely to provide a cure.
At the time I marveled at how Weiner made such a hash of his own defense. If he did Tweet young women, admit it as ill-conceived teasing and move on. Taking seriously Weiner’s (at first) plausible assertion that his Twitter account was hacked, I worried about the prevalence of Candid Camera politics. I spoke of those luscious gotcha moments in which politicians were upended by trickery of which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and his associate James O’Keefe of the famous NPR-Arab donor sting have become so expert. In this case my suspicions of Breitbart were unfounded. Despite being an articulate defender of progressive policies, it has become clear that the Congressman was a fully engaged politician.
Here is yet another instance in which the cover-up proved far worse than the crime. Early on Weiner was accused of sharing lewd pictures of himself. “Lewd” seemed to be something of a term of art, although apparently there is a photo that is more explicit in the mix. Still, the original photo of filled out briefs, the basis of the scandal, would hardly qualify as foreplay in . . .
Read more: The Weiner Follies: The Personification of Politics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 14th, 2011 
Barack Obama is a centrist, trying to move the center left, defending it against the right. Health care reform has been his great legislative “left moving” achievement. Though far from perfect, he established the principle of universal coverage.
In the past months, he has been primarily on defense, fighting back against the Republican attack on government. Obama is not a left-winger, to the dismay of many on the blogosphere. He is now defending a new center, which he helped establish, against right-wing attack.
The opening shot of the attack was the Tea Party protest against the bank bailout, the stimulus package, and “Obamacare.” In the recent elections, Obama and the Democrats suffered a defeat, a “shellacking” as he put it. But now as we are approaching the main event, the Republican attack has taken the form of Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.
William Milberg asserted here that with this proposal the President is just about assured re-election. I have talked to a number of friends and colleagues about this. Their response, put bluntly: “from his mouth, to God’s ears.” But just perhaps, God won’t have anything to do with it. Perhaps, it will be a matter of leadership and political direction, along with the political economic fundamentals Milberg highlighted. The quality of the leadership was revealed in Obama’s speech on the deficit yesterday.
In his speech, the President was forthright in his rhetoric and policy recommendations. He addressed the problems of the deficit, emphasizing that deficit reduction will require taxing as well as cuts in spending. He drew a sharp distinction between his and the Republican plans. The contrast was stark. The political thrust of the speech was clear.
Obama and the Democrats promise to defend Medicare and Medicaid, while the Republicans will dismantle them. The Ryan budget provides many tax advantages for the rich, while what they present means that “50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.”
As the President declared:
“And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though . . .
Read more: President Obama on Taxing and Spending, and the American Center
By Gary Alan Fine, April 13th, 2011 
Time marches so quickly that it is unsettling to recall that barely two years ago, there was no Tea Party. Then on February 19, 2009 in a rant heard round the nation, CNBC business news editor Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange called for a popular rebellion against what he considered an out-of-control government that was then refinancing mortgages (see below). He asked traders to hold a tea party, dumping derivatives into the Chicago River. Soon there was a Tea Party, or many Tea Parties, or no Tea Party. But what IS the Tea Party?
Today there is much debate as to whether the Tea Party is growing in popularity or shrinking in consequence. Freudians once plaintively asked, “What do women want?” Today pundits echo Sigmund’s question, “What does the Tea Party want?” And in a year in which the politics of budgets will dominate domestic debate, our imaginaries of the Tea Party matter.
Space opened for a small government movement as many middle-class Americans felt that government spending, controlled by liberals, was spiraling out of control. Money was being spent too fast. There was the bank bailout, the automotive bailout, refinancing mortgages, and, most dramatically, the stimulus bill, cleverly renamed by some conservative commentators as the “Porkulus” bill. Rather than targeting government spending on easily justified projects, such as infrastructure, repairing aging bridges and highways, the government spent money without a plan. Republicans and independents argued that the Democrats dusted off their personal wish lists, lying in the bottom of their file cabinets, and proclaimed that those projects would save the republic. Any spending seemed to suffice to rescue the economy. Academics know fortunate colleagues who received stimulus spending to support their graduate students. Fairs and festivals were awarded tax dollars. Such a wild increase of the deficit was all-too-easy to mock. But beyond mocking, opponents made the argument, a serious one that even the President now embraces, that such spending poses existential dangers for the national welfare. When the unemployment rate sped (and remains) above the 8% level that President Obama promised would . . .
Read more: The Tea Party is No Thing
By William Milberg, April 12th, 2011 
The headlines this week were devoted to the high-stakes drama in D.C. that led to (literally) an 11th hour deal to avert a federal government shutdown and an $38 billion spending cut for 2011-2012. But the real news was that the 2012 Presidential election was effectively thrown to the Democratic incumbent (who also announced the launch of his campaign this week) when the leading fiscal policy visionary on the Republican side issued his long-term plan for the role of government over the next ten years. Congressman Ryan’s plan is so extreme in its proposed cutbacks on health insurance coverage and so regressive in its proposed reform of income and corporate taxes that it leaves most of the American political spectrum open to President Obama for the taking. He will no doubt begin the journey to this vast expanse of political turf with his speech on Wednesday.
Ryan’s plan has been much discussed in the press. It calls for a privatization of Medicare, with drastic reductions in funding. The key will be in how this funding reduction is distributed, and there is no indication that it would be done in a progressive way. This the major fault line of the plan, that it would put an even greater burden on the poor and middle class in accessing health care than is the case today. The plan calls for reducing the income tax on the richest individuals and corporations to the extremely low level of 25%. Finally, the projected effect of the plan on budget deficits hinges on wildly unrealistic assumptions that have already been questioned by the Congressional Budget Office.
We are in such a moment of political frenzy over the fiscal deficits that we often forget two basic economic fundamentals about deficits. The first is that deficits are not a function simply of spending levels but mainly of economic growth rates, since it is these that largely determine revenues. The second is that shrinking deficits generally reduce the economic growth rate and slow the creation of jobs.
. . .
Read more: Obama Wins!!
By James M. Jasper, March 31st, 2011 
The Democrats are right to be concerned over the consequences of anger. Look at Jared Loughner. Is it possible to direct anger against individuals, organizations, and groups without having that anger develop into hatred, contempt, and disgust – affective commitments that would aim to exclude the objects of anger from a role in politics or even (sometimes) from being recognized as human? Anger is a normal part of democracy, exclusion is not. The difference may lie in short- versus long-run feelings. Blame for particular outcomes need not become demands for permanent exclusion, anger need not build into hatred.
If permanent demonization is morally undesirable, can we avoid it without giving up powerful mobilizing tools? Short-run blame and anger can be used to demand structural reforms. But can the demonization let up then, when popular mobilization seems less needed? Or do we need it in order to remain watchful and suspicious, since we know that all laws can be gradually undermined by vigilant opponents?
The difference between the short-run and the long, or between specific actions and general villains, is like that between guilt and shame. People feel guilty over specific things they have done. They feel shame when they see their entire beings as unworthy. Shame can become an ongoing status of being morally unworthy. Can we focus our indignation on actions rather than on actors, by trying to attach guilt to actions instead of shame to actors? This will be easier if we are upset by a particular event than if we are reacting to an ongoing stream of activities. The financial meltdown of 2007-2008 was that kind of event, and – promisingly from an ethical viewpoint – had a number of potential villains rather than a single central villain.
Villains are powerful and malevolent. We try to portray opponents as villains to emphasize the threat they pose. (Weak opponents are clowns, objects for ridicule not fear.) Villains are more frightening, pose more of a . . .
Read more: Anger, Hate, Demonization, Villains, and Politics
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