Another month into the Obama presidency, another horrid economic report. This from Hot Air:
The August jobs report from BLS offers yet another installment on the four-year stagnation period after the Great Recession. The US economy added 169,000 jobs, just above the 150,000 needed to keep pace with population growth. The U-3 jobless rate edged downward to 7.3%, but that’s because the labor force participation rate hit another 35-year low. . . . [A]lmost twice as many people [312,000] left the work force as found new jobs.
Obama, and indeed, the entire left, are simply economically incompetent. They shouldn't be allowed to run a lemonade stand. They see businesses as, at once, an enemy to be regulated and punished and as a cow to be milked for all they want.
The only thing keeping this economy afloat, even in this sad state, has been the Federal Reserve's "quantitative easing" - running the printing presses overtime, printing money to buy up government bonds in something akin to the world's biggest ponzi scheme. The danger of that is run away inflation, and indeed, the Fed has indicated that it intends to start unwinding this massive accumulation of debt at some point here in the near future as unemployment numbers fall.
The only part of the U.S. economy that is doing well is the stock market - and that is a bubble derived by Quantitative Easing (QE) that will burst the moment QE and the Fed's easy money policy stops. There is a reason today that Wall St. is celebrating the horrid economic numbers from the August BLS report - it means that QE will continue. This via Bizzy Blog:
Speaking today, at least one very famous economist says that we have suffered through five "years of tragic waste" under Obama:
[B]y any objective standard, U.S. economic policy since Lehman has been an astonishing, horrifying failure.
I couldn't agree more. That is indeed a damning indictment, but who is the economist that said this? Thomas Sowell? Art Laffer?
No. It is former Enron Advisor, Obama cheerleader and far left economist Paul Krugman writing in the NYT. As Krugman points out:
[T]he failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.
Some of that immensity can be measured in dollars and cents. Reasonable measures of the “output gap” over the past five years — the difference between the value of goods and services America could and should have produced and what it actually produced — run well over $2 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars of pure waste, which we will never get back.
Behind that financial waste lies an even more tragic waste of human potential. Before the financial crisis, 63 percent of adult Americans were employed; that number quickly plunged to less than 59 percent, and there it remains.
Do remember that Krugman blessed off on Obama's "stimulus" plan several years ago, both in design and size. Now he claims that the real problem is that the stimulus was three times too small. As Powerline describes it:
Of course, Krugman thinks the problem with Obama’s policies is that the stimulus was too small, the United States isn’t far enough in debt, and we don’t have a big enough public sector. More cowbell! The salient point, I think, is that we can say it is now unanimous: Left and Right agree that Obamanomics has been an utter failure. The only question at this point is whether to go even farther left–to, what, the policies of Fidel Castro or Kim Jong-un?–or return to the principles of limited government and a free market that produced our prosperity in the first place. Seems like an easy choice.
Art Laffer is an economist famous for his rule, the Laffer Curve. Unlike Paul Krugman, who is a NOBEL prize winning economist, Laffer has, one, actually had his theories work in the real world, two, he hasn't been proven horribly wrong by advocating for a near trillion dollar stimulus as the school solution to our economic meltdown, and three, unlike Krugman, he hasn't yet been economic advisor to a failed criminal enterprise like Enron. I realize these things render Laffer less than qualified to the left, but let's listen to him explain the Laffer Curve anyway:
The Laffer Curve is at the heart of supply side economic theory. Under his theory, tax policy is dynamic. The opposite of that is the claim of the left, that tax policy is static - that raising rates by x percent will always yield x dollars. When the left claimed that the Bush tax cuts caused our deficit, they did so using the canard that, if only we had left taxes high, we would have taken in that much more revenue. The reality was that the Bush tax cuts raised government revenue significantly.
The Laffer curve applies equally in the positive and negative at the state level. Just compare Texas and California.
In response to the Great Recession, Texas resisted the urge to raise taxes and instead cut its spending "to the bone." Today, its economy is "humming," with revenues up over 20% over 2011 and sales tax receipts at an all time high.
California, on the other hand, did not cut spending, it raised taxes to the highest in the nation, fully expecting the money just to roll in. The opposite has occurred. After the vote on increasing tax rates, tax revenues actually fell 10% by a billion dollars.
I wonder how many times the Laffer Curve has to be proven before someone on the left finally admits to its validity. Ha ha - just joking.
At any rate, we are going to get another chance to test it this year, with Obama tax rates taking us back to the Carter era. Anyone want to bet against the curve - that the government will actually collect the $600 billion in new revenues over the next ten years. Only Krugman, Pelosi and a few others living in a fantasy world of socialist economics would ever take that bet. But we as a nation will pay for it.
Just One Minute may just have the single best example of the hypocrisy of the left's campaign to tar the right with responsibility for Jared Loughner's mass murder in Arizona:
"Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him [Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor] and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks."
And as Tom goes to point out, this same person who called for the murder of a Republican candidate for governor now appears today as a guest columnist in the NYT pontificating about the need for civility in our political discourse because of "how easily political differences can degenerate into violence."
The cherry on top of this cake of hypocrisy comes when you remember that Paul Krugman, the man who, along with his employer, the NYT, are leading the charge to blame the right for the the acts of Jared Loughner, said in a NYT op-ed the other day:
[T]here isn’t any place [in our democracy] for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized.
No, NYT, no, Paul Krugman, it's not hard to imagine at all. One merely need take the briefest look at the facts over the past ten years.
Mark Halperin, last seen musing that what Obama needed was a “horrendous act of violence” that would save his Presidency, is now advising people on the right that they should turn the other cheek when falsely accused of murder after the hoped-for “horrendous act of violence” occurred. To avoid “escalation,” don’t y’know.
Bull. Now Halperin is throwing bible quotes at us to try and stamp down the backlash against the left for this scurrilous attack. Perhaps he and his commrades should have read the rest of the bible before engaging in this outrageous attack. Proverbs 19:5 - "A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape."
As Ezra Klein recently pointed out, archaic language, such as that found in the Constitution, confuses the modern left. With that in mind, and in respect of the left wing's attempt over the past few days to tie the mass murder in Arizona to the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, I would suggest a change in our national lexicon.
So out with . . .
. . . McCarthyite, a hopelessly old word used to describe hyper-partisan witchhunts undertaken with no evidence in order to destroy political opponents . . .
In with . . .
. . . Krugmaniacal, a new word with exactly the same meaning.
. . . [S]ome Republican leaders in Congress don’t seem to have learned any lessons from the past few years. They’re pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress this fall. . . .
That agenda is wrong for seniors, it’s wrong for America, and I won’t let it happen. Not while I’m President. I’ll fight with everything I’ve got to stop those who would gamble your Social Security on Wall Street. Because you shouldn’t be worried that a sudden downturn in the stock market will put all you’ve worked so hard for – all you’ve earned – at risk. . . .
The left is on a major push to scare the electorate in advance of the midterms with the bogeyman of 2005 - Republicans want to destroy Social Security. One, it is disingenuous to say the least, given how Soc. Security is being run and the problems it faces. Two, can this strategy possibly work in today's environment, when we face mounting deficits that could well destroy our nation?
First off . . . repeat after me . . . Social Security is the World's Biggest Ponzi Scheme.
Let's say that again . . . Social Security is the World's Biggest Ponzi Scheme.
Were anyone in the private sector running an investment the way Congress has run social security, they would be sharing a jail cell with Bernie Madoff.
We pay into Social Security every year of our working lives, but not a one of us has even a dollar of that money invested anywhere.
Every year, taxes are collected for Social Security. The Social Security Administration takes out of those taxes what it needs to pay out benefits that year. The rest goes into the general funds which a profligate Congress then immediately spends. In exchange, Social Security gets IOU's from Treasury in the form of non-negotiable bonds - i.e., they are bonds that the Social Security Administration can't sell on the open market; they can only be redeemed from Treasury. And when they do redeem them, Congress, having already spent the money received for the original bonds, must either take money from the the general funds or have Treasury borrow money from the public by issuing more debt - i.e., new bonds (with interest) on the open market. To top it off, the IOU's are not accounted against the federal budget deficit.
Update: A clearer explanation comes from at Karl Denninger at Market Ticker in the article, Revoke Paul Krugman's PhD:
This is similar to you coming to me with $100,000 and I "promise" to hold on to it for you and keep it "safe." I give you a promissory note to this effect. But I never hold the funds - I immediately go blow them on hookers, coke and limousines. You now have a bunch of IOUs, and I have no money.
Now perhaps I can manage to sell someone else some bonds when you come to redeem those IOUs. Perhaps. But what is unmistakable and true is that the money you allegedly "deposited" with me was immediately dissipated, not invested, saved, held or secured.
This little scheme seems to work just fine provided that each year the Social Security system takes in more than it spends on benefits - that is, so long as the file cabinet full of IOUs continues to get bigger. Treasury gets the appearance of "Free Money", Social Security is able to pay benefits, nobody's the wiser.
But it's a scam, because in point of fact the so-called "Special Bonds" are nothing more than a bare promise to pay and the asset against which they were issued (tax receipts) was instantly dissipated!
So what happens when Social Security starts to eat into that so-called "trust fund"? Immediately, Treasury needs to sell more debt. Ok, that sounds reasonable - but on what terms - that is, at what interest rate - will Treasury have to pay in order to sell that debt?
If you surmise that there's every possibility that we'll face a "Greece" moment long before 2037, you're correct. In fact, we could face that as soon as three or four years from now.
And like all ponzi schemes, Social Security will start to fall apart when the money coming in isn't enough to cover the current money being paid out. And we are there today. Already this year, Social Security is in the red $41 billion. It will soon be permanently and massively in the red as more baby boomers retire. Since all of their contributions to Social Security have already been spent, it means that payouts for Social Security will have to come from our taxes. The projected unfunded liability for Social Security is in excess of $7.7 trillion. (And to make this doubly scary, if you follow the link above, you will note that Social Security is the least of our entitlement problems. It is dwarfed by Medicaid and Medicare. I have no idea how much Obamacare is going to add to that unfunded liability, but if Massachussets is any indication, it will be substantial.)
Social Security is broken. Social Security is corrupt. Social Security and all of our entitlements must be fixed or they will destroy America.
Bush tried to fix Social Security in 2005 by privatizing it. That certainly would have permanently taken care of the unfunded liabilities problem. It would have taken away a large chunk of funds for Congress to blow every year - always a good thing. It would have left people actually owning the money they put into social security - perhaps the best part of it. And it would have made all Americans realize that they have a stake in businesses prospering in America.
Indeed, as to Obama's demagouging about the vagaries of the stock market, the simple truth is that what he is complaining of is the payout stream. That is something seperate and apart from the potential annual growth of each person's involuntary investment in Social Security. And indeed, in the private sector, people have the option of taking their retirement funds at the point of retirement and purchasing an annuity that will guarantee a steady income stream. There is no reason Soc. Security could not be run similarly - beyond the fact that it is, today, a Ponzi scheme.
As to growth during the years of people paying into Social Security, Obama is divorcing the importance of our economic growth from government hand outs. If businesses are prospering, then our economy is growing and Social Security payouts represent a pittance in growth on investment. If businesses and our economy are in the tank, then the only way the government can fund Social Security payouts at their current level is to raise taxes and / or print a lot more money - something which inevitably leads to inflation. Regardles, under each scenario describe above, all of us paying into Social Security are screwed.
Yet Obama demagouges the issue like the left did in 2005. It is easy to see why. One, the left's legislative record going into the midterm elections has America spitting blood. Two, Social Security was a winning issue in 2005 and Obama is hoping and praying for anything to distract from his record to date. Three, and most important by far, the left makes a living out of class warfare and demonizing businesses. The last thing they want is for everyone in America to realize that they have a stake in all businesses in America prospering. Most people are blinded to that today. But give them a stake in those businesses in the form of a dedicated Soc. Security account invested in a DOW Index Fund, for example, and the class warfare cannon fodder of today would soon become a nation of stock ticker reading investors who would not appreciate government interference in the markets.
None of that is acceptable to the left today, nor was it in 2005. They demagogued the issue in 2005, claiming that there was no problem with Social Security and that it would be solvent long into the future. Indeed, they refused to even engage with Bush in a bipartisan dialogue on the issue. They won - and then celebrated:
Bastards.
Paul Ryan, in his Roadmap For America, has put out a number of proposals for Social Security. He has floated the issue of privatizing social security and he has floated the proposal to change the age at which people become eligible for Social Security pay outs. Every Republican should jump on the Ryan bandwagon. It is a disgrace that only a few of our craven Congressional Congresscritters have done so. They are deathly afraid to touch this issue because of the how the left turned this issue nuclear in 2005. I think that our craven Congressional Republicans are not seeing the reality - we aren't in 2005 any more. Indeed, while we may only be five calendar years removed from 2005, given the degree to which our national paradigm has changed, it might as well be a century.
With the left's effort to use the Social Security bogeyman to gain traction on at least one issue going into the midterms, the far left punditry has sprung into action. Paul Krugman addressed the issue in his weekly column at the NYT. In it, he has the unbelievable chutzpah to say that critics of Social Security are acting in "bad faith:"
So where do claims of [a Social Security] crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.
Krugman is either incompetent or lying through his teeth in support of the left - or (my vote) both. Those "years of surpluses" in fact don't count. That is not "bad accounting." Those surplus funds were spent as soon as they were recieved. How do you think Clinton showed a budget surplus in his final years in office? He paid down the national debt with surplus funds from Social Security. Because the IOU's held by Social Security were accounted seperately, it created an illusory budget surplus. That, to every sane person, is bad accounting. No, actually it is worse. It is ENRON accounting.
Krugman is also pretending that Social Security operating massively in the red should not be an issue. This man is an utter charlatan. With deficits at historic levels and poised to go rapidly higher, Krugman's prevarication is criminal. As NRO notes:
Anyone who accuses critics of the Social Security trust-fund shell game of “bad-faith accounting” is running some serious flimflam of his own. The IOUs in the trust fund represent money that the government owes to itself. As long as the program remains as it is currently structured, that money has to come from somewhere: QED, higher taxes, fewer benefits, or some combination of both. To just pretend the problem doesn’t exist, however, is flimflam of the highest order. Only a master such as Krugman could say it with a straight face.
Jonah Goldberg wrote in an essay several weeks ago that the rules are changing. People in this bad economy are not looking for the government to solve their problems, but rather are demanding it get out of the way so that the people of America can solve them. The middle class is supposed to forever hold onto entitlements, but a vast majority of Americans want Obamacare repealed. I would add that unions, once popular in America, are now being seen by a majority as the penultimate leech on taxpayers. It is also becoming obvious that the race card is rapidly losing legitimacy - something that foreshadows disaster for the far left.
In this environment, I think Obama and the left's attempt to raise the spectre of the destruction of Social Security will ring hollow indeed to many Americans. And it only makes matters worse for the left when someone like Krugman comes out with a fire and brimstone missive based on patently false assertions. I have not seen any recent polls on this issue, but with Americans watching their economy fall apart, they are ripe to listen to reality. Thus I believe that if you ask Americans today whether it is time to substantively reform Social Security, seven in ten will say yes, and the majority will demand that it be done without raising taxes. I think Obama has latched onto an anchor issue - an anchor heading to the bottom of the electoral abyss. The rules have changed. Obama and the left just don't want to believe it. I have no problem with that. I only demand that Republicans realize it.
The Agenda Project’s goal is to build a powerful, intelligent, well-connected political movement capable of identifying and advancing rational, effective ideas in the public debate and in so doing ensure our country’s enduring success.
This is part for the course for our modern left. Demonizing and dismissing out of hand the arguments of their opponents is their only strategy. The Tea Party challenges Obama's profligate spending and vast new statist programs - the left plays the race card. State that Obamacare's mandate is a tax, utterly ridiculous says Obama. Raise ethics charges against Maxine Waters, it's racism. Challenge the building of the Ground Zero mosque - religious bigotry, says Mayor Bloomberg. Paul Ryan's ideas to bring us back to fiscal sanity - flim flam says Paul Krugman. Indeed, as to the last example, WSJ recently ran an article on how Krugman is merely one of many on the far left who would like to see Paul Ryan disappear without having to address the substance of his arguments.
We have seen this same meme played out hundreds of thousands of times over the past decades. Indeed, the same Democrats who created the massive housing bubble and who destroyed our credit system in the process did so on the grounds that any challenge thereto was racist.
And now with November fast approaching, it's down to the left's final argument, f*** tea. These people are as intellectualy dishonest as they are intellectualy bankrupt.
Tim Cavanaugh has a devastating cite from just-retired Obama economic adviser Christina Romer:
The generally precise Romer spells out the difference for us: Using this approach, the estimated multiplier for monetary policy is 0.823 and the estimated multiplier for fiscal policy is -0.233.
You don’t say. Gee, that would have been nice to know a few trillion dollars ago.
Democrat Party water-carriers like Paul Krugman love Keynesian economics, with its assumed large fiscal multiplier, because it meshes so perfectly with leftism’s general preferences: more government, bigger government, more public-sector employees, higher pay for those employees — and, naturally, higher taxes to go with all that. Their continued insistence we need to spend (and tax!) more, more, more even as unemployment goes higher and deficits mushroomm is growing ever less credible with each additional “unexpected” signal of economic failure.
If there’s one positive to come out of the Great Recession, it should be the end of Keynesian economics as a serious policy choice. The notion you can grow the economy via North Korea-style command economics should have been long-dead even before Romer’s 1992 paper, but Obama’s miserable failure may finally drive a stake through this productivity-sucking, economy-killing meme.
Let me put this simply — and contradict a too-widely-held assumption of macroeconomics:
Keynesian economics, coupled with our modern welfare state, has been a disaster. And if the only thing that comes out of this "Great Recssion" is the discrediting of Keynesian economic theory, than it will be a postive thing indeed.
On a related note, if you missed it, you can read Paul Krugman's defense of his beloved Keynsianism and his attack ad hominem attacks on Paul Ryan for articulating a conservative economic plan here.
And on another related note, do see this exceptional short video explaining the fallacy of the Broken Window Theory - a theory related directly to Keynesianism as well as, more generally, the Democrat's seemingly innate desire to tax and spend.
I am not surprised that Paul Krugman, in his most recent column, has demonized Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan as a "fraud" and a "flim flam man." Demonizing one's ideological opponents rather than engaging in reasoned debates is, after all, central to how the left operates. And there are few further to the left than Krugman, a "Nobel prize winning economist" who has made a career at the NYT acting as a shill for the far left. And indeed, Krugman has been one of the foremost champions of the Obama administration's economic policies that today have us mired in the worst recession since World War II.
Rep. Paul Ryan is rapidly becoming recognized as the intellectual leader of House Republicans. Months ago, Ryan drafted a "Roadmap For America's Future." It is a detailed and comprehensive economic plan that addresses deficits, taxes, and entitlements. It is a very serious plan aimed at putting America back on a robust economic footing. And it is a plan that has been getting a lot of positive press as Obama's Keynesian solutions to our severe economic distress only have us heading further into the swamp.
Krugman starts off his diatribe with a statement that, coming from him, is the height of irony:
One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans.
If anyone could attest to the truth of that statement, its Paul Krugman.
At any rate, Krugman relies heavily on information from the Tax Policy Center, a left leaning organization that, Krugman claims, has determined that Ryan's plan is based on faulty assumptions and is, therefore, unworkable. Krugman then goes on to rake Ryan over the coals." Krugman claims that, in reality, Ryan's road map would cut taxes for the rich (ahhh, there's that class warfare again), slash entitlements generally, and destroy Medicare.
This has to be one of the sloppiest hack jobs ever written.
Krugman charges Ryan with fraud in part because Ryan did not have the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) score the revenue side of his plan. Krugman apparently doesn't know that that job is not within CBO's purview, but rather has to be done by a different organization - the JCT (Joint Committee on Taxation). The JCT is responsible for providing the official revenue score of tax legislation - and they did it for the Roadmap.
But perhaps most damning of Krugman's hackery is the fact that the members of the Tax Policy Center were so disturbed by Krugman's distortion of what they had written that they felt it necessary to post on their website a detailed defense of Rep. Ryan and a refutation of Krugman's ridiculous charges of "fraud:"
In Defense of Congressman Paul Ryan
Given that columnist Paul Krugman relied on Tax Policy Center estimates to level claims that Congressman Paul Ryan is a “flimflam man” and that Ryan’s plan to address our fiscal problems is a “fraud,” I think a defense of the Congressman is in order. . . .
Similarly, Meagan McArdle at the Atlantic, no right winger herself, also rises with a defense of Ryan. And then, of course, Rep. Ryan himself has responded to Krugman:
Despite watching European welfare states collapse under the weight of their own debt, those running Washington are leading us down precisely the same path. With the debt surpassing $13 trillion, we can no longer avoid having a serious discussion about how to address the unsustainable growth of government.
Unfortunately, rather than make meaningful contributions to this conversation and bring solutions to the table, Democrats have attempted to win this debate by default. Relying on demagoguery and distortion, the left would prefer that entitlements - often labeled the "third rail" of American politics - remain untouchable, and the column by Paul Krugman of The New York Times is indicative of the partisan attacks leveled against the plan I've offered, a "Roadmap for America's Future." . . .
You can find Ryan's lengthy response to Krugman here.
As an addendum, let me ask, what is it about left wing economists? There has yet to be a centrally controlled economy that can compete with a capitalist economy (and a less regulated one the better.) There has yet to be an instance of which I am aware where Keynesian economics has actually worked as hypothesized. Indeed, just ask Obama's now retiring Chairman of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer. Every time for the last century, when we have cut tax rates, our economy has expanded to the point where government revenues increased. Yet the left, pointing to Krugman and his ilk, have a death grip on their Keynesian beliefs, their desire to use tax policy to punish our most productive citizens, and to use government to redistribute wealth. I can only conclude that Krugman is as worthy of his Nobel prize in economics as Robert Merton and Myron Scholes were. They are the two Nobel prize winning economists who started a hedge fund that failed after losing $4.6 billion in less than four months in 1998. I suspect, before all is said and done, Krugman will join them in ignominy.
One of the keys to understanding the left is how they invariably resort to 'projection.' By projection, I mean they foist their own shortcomings and failings onto others, then criticize them for acting with such base motivations. Projection is psychiatric term that Dr. Sanity explains in detail here. ____________________________________________________
The above was the opening line of a post I had decided to craft in light of statements by Pelosi and others on the left to the effect that those people who show up at town hall meeting and embarrass Dems with tough questions are mere thugs, controlled by evil Republicans and an insurance industry motivated purely by . . . dare I say it . . . "profit" [shudder]. Knowing that Dr. Sanity has explained the concept of projection on multiple occasions in her previous posts, I went to her site to run down a link. And what should I find but . . . . a posting she did on Thursday that hits many of the key points on which I intended to expound. I won't repeat them. Do read her post.
The only things that I would add are in regards to Paul Krugman and Cynthia Tucker of the AJC, both of whom play casually play the race card on the protesters of Obama's economic and health care programs. Krugman opined in the NYT that the people who are protesting are being manipulated by disingenuous special interests following "a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites." Tucker, a black opinion columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, opined on Hardball that "45 to 65% of the people who appear at these [protests] are people who will never be comfortable with the idea of a black president."
It is more than a bit ironic that they should make their statements the day after the beating of a black conservative, Kenneth Gladney, who was protesting the Obama socialized health care plan outside of a Democratic townhall meeting in Missouri. Gladney was beaten by Obama-supporting SEIU thugs. Gateway Pundit has the videos and story on that incident here, here, here, here and here. But I digress.
I know of nothing that would support either Krugman's or Tucker's statement. Indeed, I know of no racially motivated backlash to the election of Obama occurring anywhere in the U.S. Perhaps I missed the reporting on such events in the NYT or the Washington Post, two notoriously conservative news organizations who might well repress such facts if they existed. In many respects what Krugman and Tucker say is nothing more than the classic 'blood libel' of labeling any opposition that somehow involves a black person, in this case Obama, as being racially motivated, wholly irrespective of the facts. But the more I think about it, the more seems also a form of projection.
As I wrote here, you will find racism nowhere more ensconced today - and historically - than on the left. That could be the loud and horrific reverse racism of Jerimiah Wright and his ilk of race baiters, the equally vile but far more nuanced reverse racism of academia and exponents of "critical race theory," the casual reverse racism of a Justice Sotomayor, or the many adherents of whatever ethnicity to the left's identity politics - an inherently racist philosophy that holds that blacks - and every other victim group - are victims of white (male) wrongdoing and are incapable of competing with white males on a level playing field. Nowhere was this more apparent than in reaction to the Supreme Court's Ricci decision.
Krugman is a deeply committed member of the far left - and thus it is not surprising to see Krugman view the world through an identity politics lens. While no one I know in conservative circles entertains even the tiniest iota of animus towards Obama because of his skin color - it is utterly meaningless - I have no doubt that many on the far left, for whom race and other indicators of victim class are paramount, should project their beliefs onto conservatives and other protesters. As to Tucker, it is much the same. I dare say she could not give a single instance of a person at a single protest who is motivated by race. But in her world - and I read her columns regularly - it is safe to say that she views race as a paramount issue. The fact that Obama was elected President has not ameliorated her racial paradigm - nor Krugman's - but rather just shifted it a little. As Tucker sees it - if you do not support Obama in each and every one of his radical proposals, then race must be at the heart of it - because that is how she views the world. For such people as her - and Henry Louis Gates of recent "beer summit" fame - if something happens that they do not like and a white person is involved, then racism must be involved.
I lived 32 years in a distinctly uncloistered and racially mixed world, working with, for, under, and over blacks and minorities of all stripes until I saw my first example of true eye-popping racism. I remember it vividly. It was watching perhaps one of the most vile speeches I have ever heard. The speaker was Louis Farrakhan. His targets were whites and Jews. It was utterly despicable and so alien to all that I had seen and known, that I actually started asking my black friends about him. Of the probably ten that I asked, only one even said that he knew who Farrakhan was - and that Farrakhan was an evil nutter of the first order.
In my world, which was the military up til then and awhile afterwards, neither racism nor reverse racism existed in any form that I had ever observed. When I match my personal observations up to that point against what I see in the political world of today, it is apparent that there is a huge disconnect between reality in working class America, where racism is far more the anomaly than the norm, and the political class, where race is a means of stoking passion and obtaining power. Obama promised to end all of that. To the contrary, he seems only to have thrown fuel onto the fire.
Paul Krugman is such low-hanging fruit that his inane rantings generally elicit little more than a yawn. Today, however, his intellectual dishonesty and projection of identity politics onto the right goes beyond the pall. The one positive note coming out of the Democratic primary is that the selection of Barack Obama as nominee is a marker that mainstream America is firmly in the middle of post racial politics. And even though NYT columnist Paul Krugman is miles to the left of that mainstream, he too makes that connection:
Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.
Thus does Mr. Krugman prove with his article today the broken clock theory - that even he, like said clock, can be right once or twice a day. And just like a broken clock, beyond that single moment of accuracy, Krugman immediately starts getting it wrong thereafter.
Mr. Obama’s nomination . . . [is] possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.
And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.
Whoa. This is projection at its worst. The conservative message is simple and, indeed, can be summed up in a few bullet points: strong national defense, be fiscally conservative, less government regulation and interference in our lives, respect our Constitutional rights, law and order. Marxian identity politics, of which racial division is one subset, quite literally defines the left. While conservatives are about equal opportunity and equal treatment, the left defines people by their victim sub-group. Racial division in today's America is a construct of the left, from affirmative action to people like Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton and their enablers.
Krugman continues:
Take, for example, that old standby of conservatives: denouncing Big Government. Last week John McCain’s economic spokesman claimed that Barack Obama is President Bush’s true fiscal heir, because he’s “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything.”
Now, the truth is that the Bush administration’s big-spending impulses have been largely limited to defense contractors. But more to the point, the McCain campaign is deluding itself if it thinks this issue will resonate with the public.
For Americans have never disliked Big Government in general. In fact, they love Social Security and Medicare, and strongly approve of Medicaid — which means that the three big programs that dominate domestic spending have overwhelming public support.
If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.
Bush has spent like a drunken democrat and Krugman's assertion that it has been limited to defense contractors is so patently false - think the prescription drug program, etc. - as to defy belief. Indeed, defense spending, even with two wars going on, is 4% of the federal budget. McCain has been critical of Bush since day 1 of the Bush Presidency for lack of fiscal discipline. Bush failed to impose any fiscal discipline on Republican lawmakers who took their lead from him and have gone hog-wild with spending. Fiscal restraint is one of the three pillars of conservativism and thus is non-negotiable. That is why Republicans got slammed in 2006. When at least a portion of the base did not turn out, Republicans lost in close elections across the board.
Krugman's citation to Reagan and welfare is simply incredible. If a Republican challenges the socialist state, Krugman attributes to them racial animus. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more clear example of the marxian identity politics to which Krugman and his ilk are wedded. In the 1980's, welfare was a huge problem and an incredibly abused system that promoted a non-working class. That was an issue that had nothing to do with race. Indeed, you can see what is occurring with an unreformed welfare system of similar ilk in Britain decades on, where there is today permanent, non-working underclass.
And while Reagan wanted to reform welfare, the person that ended up making that reform was none other than Bill Clinton, the first black President. As I recall at the time, he was not charged with racism for reforming welfare. Krugman actually lauds Clinton for making race less of an issue by reforming welfare. The incredible cycnicsm and hypocriticalness of his positions seems to pass him by:
But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?
Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.
. . . It’s true that 9/11 gave the fear factor a second wind: Karl Rove accusing liberals of being soft on terrorism sounded just like Spiro Agnew accusing liberals of being soft on crime. But the G.O.P.’s credibility as America’s defender has leaked away into the sands of Iraq.
Let me add one more hypothesis: although everyone makes fun of political correctness, I’d argue that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse. For example, I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.
Wow. Is this idiot deaf? Somebody play the Jeremiah Wright National Press Club tapes for him. Or read the passage in Obama's book about the sermon that gave his life meaning - where he writes "white folks greed runs a world in need." What a "politician today" is getting away with is far different than the Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton, by the way, was released early from jail by Dukakis and committed an utterly brutal rape and multiple murder. That ad was only racist if you believe the truth itself is racist. What the left is allowing Jeremiah Wright and the left to get away with is overt racism that is not only accepted as a part of the left's marxian identity politics, but encouraged as a part of that mindset.
And apparently, Krugman hints that an Obama loss in November, should it come to pass, will come about in part from racism. Moreover, he states that raising the issue of Obama's twenty years in a Church preaching the vile racism of Black Liberation Theology will be a sign of racism by the right. Indeed, any criticism of a person is spun by the left as a criticism of the identify group that person has been assigned by the left:
Anyway, none of this guarantees an Obama victory in November. Racial division has lost much of its sting, but not all: you can be sure that we’ll be hearing a lot more about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and all that. . . .
Krugman's intellectual dishonesty and his identity politics turn truth on its head.
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