(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
.
Now this would be a promising fiscal development, if only we can hold the line: ‘austerity’ is beginning to look like last year’s model, something no fashionable econo-wonk wants to be caught defending. Alex Pareene at Salon asks “What if Simpson & Bowles threw a debt reduction party and nobody came?”:
…Since the president idiotically appointed them to his deficit-reduction panel, Simpson and Bowles have become the most respected human beings in all of Washington. It was necessary, for two years, for every serious politician to announce that he supported “the Simpson-Bowles plan,” even though in reality almost no one actually did. Recently, though, their brand has lost some luster. The economy is barely growing and joblessness is still a major crisis. The longer that is the case (and it has already been the case for the entirety of the Obama administration) the less urgent deficit-reduction seems.
Simpson and Bowles, amusingly, released their newest plan on Friday, April 19 — which you may remember as the day everyone in the country was following the search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This deprived the roll-out of a bit of the publicity that attended their previous plans. Also, since their initial plan, British and European austerity measures have caused massive suffering with no economic benefit. The famous Reinhart-Rogoff paper arguing that high debt led to economic contraction was found to be massively flawed.
In other words, the bipartisan “sound serious about the debt” consensus is suddenly in danger. Minutes after the Simpson-Bowles Op-Ed went up, the Post published an Op-Ed by Washington Post moderate liberal E.J. Dionne denouncing the debt obsession and calling for expansionary fiscal policy. (Madness!)…
And Kevin Roose at NYMag explains “How the mainstream media broke up with austerity“:
… Just like a compliant media sped the ascendance of the austerity movement, a newly skeptical media (perhaps prodded by hybrid old-new media publications like Wonkblog) seems to be bringing austerity to its knees. Finance leaders at the G20, reportedly citing the mistakes in the Reinhart-Rogoff study, backed away from the austerity agenda. Within days, it was no longer fashionable to support cutting government spending and reforming entitlements, no matter how many “Harlem Shake” videos Fix the Debt put out.
As if to cement how much the debate has changed, this weekend, Politico — the same Politico that all but carried Simpson and Bowles’s briefcases last year — ran a story about the “intellectual shift away from austerity” among high-profile politicians on Capitol Hill. To add insult to injury, that day‘s “Morning Money,” the Politico newsletter that carried the story, was sponsored by the pro-austerity Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
fuckwit
I think all the credit belongs to Krughthlu, DeLong, and others, who have been relentlessly, endlessly, repeating the same point over and over and over again, like trying to train a child, it’s eventually sinking in.
The prophet Nostradumbass
The A’s and Angels are headed to the 19th inning in Oakland.
Suffern ACE
I thought reporters were the ones who needed to support Simpson Bowles? Serious politicians didn’t bother with them. The only person I know personally who expressed support was an academic economist/high school friend in an offhand comment on Facebook. I think it was only the press who kept it going.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Wow.
Josh Hamilton is 0 for 8, 3 strikeouts and, it looks like, some sort of sacrifice for an rbi.
ETA: Brandon Moss of the A’s hits a walk-off homer in the bottom of the 19th to win, 10-8.
Darkrose
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): That was AWESOME. Though I was kind of hoping they’d go to the 20th, but still.
19 INNINGS.
I love baseball.
Baud
@Suffern ACE:
Yeah. Say what you want about Simpson Bowles, conservatives don’t like their plan either. They’re propped up by the media “bipartisanship” fetish.
TheMightyTrowel
@Darkrose: Dude. That’s nothing. Start watching cricket. It literally lasts for DAYS.
(says the american shacked up with a brit. i never thought ever in my life i would know as much about cricket as I do now. I wish I didn’t know any of it. I have other things I could put in that brain space.)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Darkrose: @TheMightyTrowel:
If you like long baseball games, read W.P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.
raven
Yea, it’s so wonderful that there was nobody there when it was over.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@raven:
Spoilsport!
Linda Featheringill
An end to the austerity craze would be welcome. It would be nice if that particular form of sanity would trot on over to the UK and infect the Powers That Be in that part of the world. They’re getting close to “Let them eat cake” over there. And we all know what that led to.
Schlemizel
it would be marvelous to figure out how exactly the media morons sense reality and reach their conclusions.
They are like a flock of little birds or a school of small fish. If you have ever seen birds or herring in huge numbers you know they move as a single mass whirling and weaving almost as a single entity. How they decide to move is a mystery to me but they will suddenly peel off all in one direction.
If we could learn how to steer them maybe we could have gotten them out of their austerity fixation sooner and save a lot of people a lot of misery.
Schlemizel
@TheMightyTrowel:
Yes but they are civilized, they break for tea. They also don’t play til 2 in the friggin AM B-{D
Baud
Does Politico actually release a newsletter with their name on it that is “sponsored” by a private foundation? Or is this just sloppy reporting (maybe the Peterson Foundation runs ads and hence “sponsors” the newsletter)? If the former, then wow.
@Schlemizel:
This is why I do not like the whole “Overton window” philosophy. The media can’t handle a non-binary concept, so when Democrats are attacked from the right and the left, the media believes the whole country hates whatever the Democrats are doing.
I think that’s partly what happened with the stimulus. It was attacked from the left and the right, so the media automatically deemed it a failure and ignored the reason it was attacked from the left. We’ve been trying to claw ourselves back from that messaging failure ever since.
TheMightyTrowel
@Schlemizel: That’s true. and they have an algorithm they use to calculate a winning score if there are delays or breaks due to rain or other inclement weather – goes by the charmingly british name of “the Duckworth-Lewis method“.
Xenos
@Baud:
That is definitely the case with the ACA. If you added the numbers for those supporting the ACA to those supporting single payer and single provider plans you had well over 50% support. Republicans add those farther-left numbers to the anti-reform number to get more than 50% opposed, and claim that since less than 50% supported that specific reform it was antidemocratic.
And press repeats this claim every damn time without comment!
gene108
@TheMightyTrowel:
Dude. That only applies to test matches.
The 50 over games go about 5-6 hours, while the 20/20 matches are about as long as typical American sporting events, i.e. 3 hours.
gene108
@Baud:
This.
I’d just go one step further that the people, who aren’t political junkies – though they do vote – grab onto the “everyone hates the Democrats policy” and either tune out or decide to vote Republican.
TheMightyTrowel
@gene108: Ah, but a true cricket lover/snob (and Mr Trowel the umpire certainly is one of those) only classes test matches as ‘real cricket’. one-day is good for amateurs and touring teams and 20/20 is for the plebs.
HUGE SIGH GUYS. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH CRICKET IS ON MY TV ALL THE TIME???
low-tech cyclist
Those of us of a certain age can remember when “I support the Contadora process” was a similarly magical phrase.
(Mark Alan Stamaty did a great Washingtoon on this topic, which I wish I could find. When I Google it, all I get is my own references to it!)
cvstoner
Nothing has changed. The so-called ‘austerians” just don’t want to be seen with their short hairs hanging out now that their major fig leaves have crumbled to dust.
Give it a couple of weeks: Austerity 2.0, new and improved, is undoubtedly around the corner.
Kay
I think austerity failed at the state level both substantively and politically before it was (fully) enacted at the federal level.
GOP governors said there would be growth in the real economy if they cut taxes, gutted government and moved towards policies that lower wages.
Kay
We need to knock a couple of media celebrity cheerleaders/lobbyists out while we have the chance before they bring it back.
I nominate Ed Rendell.
Focus on one at a time. He just deserves to be ostracized and mocked until he’s ignored completely.
Baud
@gene108:
I completely agree with your further step.
Schlemizel
@Kay:
And I believe they can point to several successful examples of how well this works. Bangladesh for instance has huge job growth (I bet they are looking for an additional 4-500 today alone!) because of minimal government and low taxes.
Kay
@Schlemizel:
There’s a great piece in the NYTimes on how Bangladesh needs labor unions. I love how it’s crafted, because it uses libertarian-conservative framing; no top-down solutions from “outsiders”, pro-growth, a ground-level counterweight to industry/government power.
I agree with that :)
We’ll see if the Slate crowd takes this solution to the roundtable! I’m betting…NOT.
Southern Beale
So, this happened: Sandra Day O’Connor told everyone she now thinks maybe it was a mistake for SCOTUS to take up the Bush v Gore case.
Head ——> Brick Wall ——> REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT
Keith
It must be a sign of my immaturity that the first thing that pops into my head every time I hear Erskine Bowles’ name is those weird glasses he wears. They’re like the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection glasses George Costanza bought…or what Mitch McConnell wears. They make them all look like old women rather than old men. That’s just what my brain keys “Erskine” to. Women’s eyeglasses.
Schlemizel
@Kay:
THey have labor unions in China that I am sure the NYT could get behind 100%. These unions are run by the government, which also happens to be deeply entwined with the company owners so you KNOW they have the workers best interest at heart.
HEY! The installed nets at Foxxconn to prevent suicides, what more could you want?
catclub
It is highly premature to say that austerity has been shouted down and slunk off in disgrace. It is more like standing there doing nothing, but still dumbly taking up the space that a better product needs.
Rex Everything
@Kay: George Bernard Shaw pointed it out long ago, and it’s still true: there is no valid capitalist/free-market case against labor unions. Labor unions aren’t actually a leftist institution at all; they’re a capitalist institution (but one that actual capitalists happen to dislike).
HERE’S THE DEAL: The first thing every capitalist defends is the right of Industry to charge the maximum possible price it can get away with in the market. For instance if Ivory can induce people to pay $20 for a bar of soap, then they absolutely should & more power to Ivory. And this same line of reasoning applies to labor. There is no reason, none whatsoever, from a purely capitalist point of view, that labor should not seek the maximum compensation possible.
Of course, capitalists evade this point completely. But that’s because they don’t actually hold principled beliefs, they just fight like enraged hynenas for the interests of the rentier class. The fact remains that a totally consistent capitalist/market-based argument in favor of unions is easily made.
Ben Franklin
Selling the family farm; both sides do it. Could this be interpreted as ‘aiding the enemy’?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/china-pentagon-satellite/
Relying on Chinese companies could be a problematic solution to the bandwidth crunch, however. U.S. officials have in recent years publicly accused Chinese telecommunications firms of being, in effect, subcontractors of Beijing’s spies. Under pressure from the Obama administration and Congress, the Chinese company Huawei was rebuffed in its attempts to purchase network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com; in 2010, Sprint dropped China’s ZTE from a major U.S. telecommunications infrastructure contract after similar prodding. Last September, executives from the Huawei and ZTE were brought before the House intelligence committee and told, in effect, to prove that they weren’t passing data back to Beijing. “There’s concern because the Chinese government can use these companies and use their technology to get information,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, said at the time. The executives pushed back against the charges, and no definitive links to espionage operations were uncovered. But the suspicion remains. And it isn’t contained to these two firms.
“I’m startled,” says Dean Cheng, a research fellow and veteran China-watcher at the Heritage Foundation. “Is this risky? Well, since the satellite was openly contracted, they [the Chinese] know who is using which transponders. And I suspect they’re making a copy of all of it.”
Even if the data passing over the Apstar-7 is encrypted, the coded traffic could be used to give Chinese cryptanalysts valuable clues about how the American military obfuscates its information. “This is giving it to them in a nice, neat little package. I think there is a potential security concern.”
For his part, Loverro says the Department of Defense will be reviewing its procedures to ensure that future satellite communications deals both let troops talk and let them talk in private. The Pentagon will get another opportunity shortly: the Apstar-7 deal is up on May 14, and can be renewed for up to three more years.
Ben Franklin
The computer network on the U.S. Navy’s newest class of coastal warships showed vulnerabilities in Navy cybersecurity tests, but the issues were not severe enough to prevent an eight-month deployment to Singapore, a Navy official said on Tuesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/24/us-usa-cybersecurity-ship-idUSBRE93N02X20130424
Kay
@Rex Everything:
It’s a great point, thank you.
I was following the Hong Kong dockworkers strike for a while. The various factions are so interesting. There’s the anti-labor government faction, the pro-labor government faction (who aren’t sincere, but are just trying to cut a deal for business interests), the hugely powerful business interests and labor.
I don’t get why labor is somehow less legit than the others.
WTF? There’s supposed to be NO opposition? That’s nice, for business interests. Why won’t they compete in the Marketplace Of Ideas? :)
Origuy
@raven:
BART stops running after midnight. Half of the people in the stands would have been stuck there until 4.
Jebediah
I met a girl. Just wanted
bragshow offshare.Her name is Chuckie, which I now declare is a perfectly cromulent name for a girl.
ETA: And she seems to like me a lot.
Kristine
@Jebediah: Puppy!
Congrats!
Jebediah
@Kristine:
Thanks – she is very sweet, and likes to sit on my lap. She is a fairly rangy 70 lbs, so she doesn’t really fit…and she might be a bit smarter than I am.
Rex Everything
@Kay: I know. It’s really incredible. Labor is categorized as illegitimate from the get-go and nobody questions this.
Anna in PDX
Oh gracious, I hope this new narrative takes off. Years and years of budget slashing have taken their toll, and the local climate is only getting worse… If only we could really have a serious conversation about doing real fiscal stimulus. I am so hopeful that the tide is starting to turn, no thanks to Simpson/Bowles.
SFAW
Is “massively flawed” the current euphemism for “bad science, bad methodology, and totally fucked up”?
Because if it isn’t, then I apparently am NOT aware of all Internets traditions.