I missed the part about there being some democrat president who actually wanted to cut retirement programs, but that (flattering-to-his-own-side) detail aside, I think Mr. Yglesias is basically right. A kind of all-time first.
The welfare state has entropy, Original Sin, and Man’s Fallen Nature on its side. Opposing it, reducing it, reforming it is hard. Being a liberal is like ordering a second Martini or agreeing to have dessert, easy. That’s actually why there are so many liberal politicians. The guys determined to be elected, at any cost, figured out long ago which side has the easier task.
What we learned, in other words, is that even with a Democratic President in the White House who’s eager to cut spending on retirement programs they still don’t get cut. That’s how robust the welfare state is. Recall that the last time we had a Republican President in the White House what he did was make Medicare benefits significantly more generous. Recall also that Mitt Romney ran on a pledge to increase Medicare benefits for ten years and then offset that by cutting benefits for younger people in the future. That’s how robust the welfare state is. Concern trolling about Democratic senators’ willingness to blink on taxes is neat, but all we’re seeing again and again is confirmation of Paul Pierson’s thesis from Dismantling the Welfare State?, namely that dismantling the welfare state is incredibly difficult.
If you want to worry about something, worry about the United States of America. What we’ve seen time and again for the past five years is a breakdown of responsible party government in the United States. Nobody gets their way legislatively, so nobody has to take the fall when things work out poorly.
A driver was stuck in a traffic jam on the highway outside Washington , DC. Nothing was moving. Suddenly, a man knocks on the window. The driver rolls down the window and asks, “What’s going on?â€
“Terrorists have kidnapped Congress, and they’re asking for a $100 million dollar ransom. Otherwise, they are going to douse them all in gasoline and set them on fire. We are going from car to car, collecting donations.â€
“How much are you willing to give?†the driver asks.
Mark Steyn measures the depths of America’s federal debt abyss.
In the weeks ahead, Democrats and Republicans will reach a triumphant “bipartisan†deal to avert the fiscal cliff through some artful bookkeeping mechanism that postpones Taxmageddon for another year, or six months, or three, when they can reach yet another triumphant deal to postpone it yet again. Harry Reid has already announced that he wants to raise the debt ceiling — or, more accurately, lower the debt abyss — by $2.4 trillion before the end of the year, and no doubt we can look forward to a spectacular “bipartisan†agreement on that, too. It took the government of the United States two centuries to rack up its first trillion dollars in debt. Now Washington piles on another trillion every nine months. Forward!
If you add up the total debt — state, local, the works — every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does). Every American family owes about three-quarters of a million bucks, or about the budget deficit of Liechtenstein, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Which means that HRH Prince Hans-Adam II can afford it rather more easily than Bud and Cindy at 27b Elm Street. In 2009, the Democrats became the first government in the history of the planet to establish annual trillion-dollar deficits as a permanent feature of life. Before the end of Obama’s second term, the federal debt alone will hit $20 trillion. That ought to have been the central fact of this election — that Americans are the brokest brokey-broke losers who ever lived, and it’s time to do something about it.
When conservatives struggle against the left-wing impetus toward more socialism and more statism, we have a fundamental problem because the odds are stacked against us. We are ourselves funding, through our taxes, the very same operations and organizations which constitute the real base of the democrat party.
Just look in Craigslist for Employment advertising in the not-for-profit category. The numbers of them out there are staggering.
Dan Greenfield explains that we can win in the long run by reducing the size of our adversary, simply by defunding it.
Take a look at your tax bill. Take a look at your property taxes, especially. Much of the money you pay goes to fund the infrastructure of the left, its government bureaucracies and its non-governmental organizations, which still rake in fortunes in government grants. That infrastructure is wrapped up in a thousand divisions and causes, many of which sound benign, from health to civil rights, from education to diplomacy, from the environment to better government, all of which sound nice at a distance, but exist to embed and perpetuate the power relationships of the left.
The right does not need this kind of infrastructure. A system that is not out to control everyone’s behavior all the time, that is not looking to turn every tenth person into another warm body in its endless war against individual freedom, does not need this kind of manpower or indoctrination. Grandiosity, the sheer size of the left, makes it vulnerable. That size is built on a maze of groups, agendas, laws and guidelines in the name of a thousand causes, which intersect with one another to form the beast that we are up against.
The beast is big, but it’s vulnerable. It needs power and money to live. It gains that power by serving as an intermediary between people and the government, even when it is the government. The more intermediaries it adds on, to demand one thing or another, to organize the people, while demanding that the government listen to the people it has organized, while paradoxically taking grant money from the government to organize the people to demand that the government listen to them– the more power and money it gains.
The first and most popular attack on the beast is to take away its compulsory powers. It’s popular because Americans don’t like being compelled to do things. Decades of brainwashing have gotten people to repeat some, “It’s for our own good” talking points. But it’s still unpopular, and most people are not so far gone, that they won’t cheer when given a way to opt out.
What we know so far is this: All eleven Secret Service men and all ten U.S. military personnel staying at the Hotel Caribe are alleged to have had “escorts†in their rooms that night. All of them. The entire team.
Twenty-one U.S. public servants. Twenty-one Colombian whores. Unless a couple of the senior guys splashed out for the two-girl special. “Some of them were saying they didn’t know they were prostitutes,†explained Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
“Some are saying they were women at the bar.â€
Amazing to hear government agents channeling Dudley Moore in Arthur: “You’re a hooker? I thought I was doing so well.†It turns out U.S. Secret Service agents are the only men who can walk into a Colombian nightclub and not spot the professionals. Are they really the guys you want protecting the president?
Congress is not happy about this. “It was totally wrong to take a foreign national back to a hotel when the president is about to arrive,†said Representative King.
It’s wrong to take a “foreign national†up to the room, but it would have been okay if she’d been from Des Moines? We’re all in favor of outsourcing, but in compliance with Section 27(e)viii of the PATRIOT Act this is the one job Americans will do?
Ezra Klein offers the left’s intellectually bankrupt and futile response. Young Ezra has nothing to offer but emotionally manipulative appeals to sentimentality. The Obama budget must be supported, regardless of consequences or affordability because it spends lots of money on the poor. “The poor” are a species of Brahmanic sacred cattle whose interests trump reality.
It doesn’t matter if you bankrupt the country and strangle economic growth affecting everyone. If you fail to immolate the American economy on the altar of bleeding heart social consciousness, you are just mean!
Ezra is a member of the economic school that wants to raise taxes (and stifle economic activity) now. After all, as unidentified “experts” cited by the Associated Press announced today, no study accepted by the left proves that drilling (and thereby increasing petroleum supply) reduces gas prices.
If you are simply an irrational emotionalist, economics is whatever left-wing studies say it is, and the proper operation of any economy really consists of transfers of wealth from the more affluent to the less affluent members of society.
