When Stupid Is an End In Itself

Of all the many signs the U.S. is no longer a great nation — big, still wealthy, powerful, conspicuous, yes, but not great — the fact that we can no longer organize ourselves to so much as fix the flippin’ bridges, never mind build new ones, stands out. Much of the nation’s greatness, and weatlh, came from doing big, splashy things — the transcontinental railroad; the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the moon landing.  Some of these things were done primarily by government, and some by public and private partnership. For example, while the transcontinental railroad was built by private companies, those companies depended on government land grants and loans, and the route itself was laid out by government surveyors. If Washington hadn’t pushed it, it never would have been done.

Paul Krugman writes that infrastructure investment is precisely what the country needs, economically and otherwise. It would both boost the economy by getting more dollars into peoples’ pockets and, y’know, fix the bridges before they fall down. But because of current prevailing political ideology, no, we can’t.

And it’s all about ideology, an overwhelming hostility to government spending of any kind. This hostility began as an attack on social programs, especially those that aid the poor, but over time it has broadened into opposition to any kind of spending, no matter how necessary and no matter what the state of the economy.

We’ve reach point at which stupid is an end in itself.

You can get a sense of this ideology at work in some of the documents produced by House Republicans under the leadership of Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee. For example, a 2011 manifesto titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy” called for sharp spending cuts even in the face of high unemployment, and dismissed as “Keynesian” the notion that “decreasing government outlays for infrastructure lessens government investment.” (I thought that was just arithmetic, but what do I know?)

Here’s a crucial point —

Never mind that the economic models underlying such assertions have failed dramatically in practice, that the people who say such things have been predicting runaway inflation and soaring interest rates year after year and keep being wrong; these aren’t the kind of people who reconsider their views in the light of evidence. Never mind the obvious point that the private sector doesn’t and won’t supply most kinds of infrastructure, from local roads to sewer systems; such distinctions have been lost amid the chants of private sector good, government bad.

If you look closely at most of the prominent Republicans in Washington, one of the striking things about them is that their bios often reveal them to be the creatures they claim to hate — lifelong political / government apparatchiks.  Although they pride themselves on being friends to business, most of them have worked most of their lives in government and politics. I’m sure there must be some exceptions, but most have never actually run a company or so much as managed an assembly line. Paul Ryan is a good example; according to bios I have read, his only non-political private sector employment was a summer job for Oscar Meyer, during which he got to drive the weinermobile.

I can never tell how much they believe their own crap, but basically we’re dealing with people who are long on ideological theory and short on experience. Unfortunately, you can say the same thing for most of our Captains of Industry, most of whom have no idea how the products they are selling actually get made.

It’s like a perfect storm of derp. The people in charge of things, public and private, have no idea how stuff gets done and no idea what stuff needs to get done. And the country is at their capricious and greedy mercy.

And it hardly matters that the states that have put the “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy” mantra into practice have had disastrous results. See, for example, “The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster” by Mark Binelli:

“That word, “experiment,” has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his “pro-growth tax policy” would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy,” but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas’ neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he’d enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.

“Brownback hardly stands alone among the class of Republican governors who managed to get themselves elected four years ago as part of the anti-Obama Tea Party wave by peddling musty supply-side fallacies. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich – whose press releases claim he’s wrought an “Ohio Miracle” – has presided over a shrinking economy, this past July being the 21st consecutive month in which the state’s job growth has lagged behind the national average. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, whose union-busting inadvertently helped kick off the Occupy movement, cut taxes by roughly $2 billion – yet his promise to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs during his first term has fallen about 150,000 jobs short, and forecasters expect the state to face a $1.8 billion budgetary shortfall by mid-2017. A recent analysis by the Detroit Free Press, meanwhile, laid out how the tax policies of Gov. Rick Snyder, a wealthy entrepreneur who campaigned in Michigan as a nerdy technocrat, have resulted in businesses paying less ($1.7 billion less per year, to be exact), individuals paying more ($900 million per year) and – here’s the kicker – job growth slowing every year since Snyder’s cuts have been enacted.”

It will not matter that teabag economics crash and burn in the real world, because stupid has become an end in itself. Not taxing and not spending is an end in itself; that it sinks budgets and costs jobs does not matter.

And when the bridges begin to buckle, some Reince Priebus clone will trot out and say those bridges were built by Democrats and the fact that they finally collapsed after decades of neglect proves government doesn’t work.

8 thoughts on “When Stupid Is an End In Itself

  1. And these same feckin’ Republican eedjit’s are the ones who want to finally put a stake into the heart of the Federal Government baby, before finishing it off by drowning it in the bathtub, and flushing it down the toilet:
    “The Federal Balanced Budget Amendment.”

    That one is the pinnacle – the Mt. Everest – of “TEH STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID!!!”

  2. Yes, as long as there are still any taxes and regulations at all, you can tell yourself that’s what’s holding up the economy. The problem isn’t that you’ve cut too much, it’s that you still haven’t cut enough!

    And I know what you mean about these people having no idea how things actually work. I keep coming back to the fact that the biggest proponents of capitalism don’t understand that capital doesn’t do anything when it just sits there. The whole point is that economic activity is fueled by the flow of capital, not its accumulation in the accounts of Job Creators.

    As for the balanced budget amendment, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that if the Continental Congress had been operating under a balanced budget requirement, Washington wouldn’t have had an army. And not only that, but the debt accumulated during the war is what got things moving when Alexander Hamilton figured out how to convert it to so much capital by properly funding it:

    It is a well known fact, that in countries in which the national debt is properly funded, and an object of established confidence, it answers most of the purposes of money.

    The horrible truth is that government debt is the very foundation of American capitalism.

  3. I remember how the Republicans used to talk about running government “like a business”. Now, a government *isn’t* a business, though there *are* times when we can make good businesslike decisions.

    One of those would be, “if you need to do some work, and you have access to super-cheap funds, and you can get the work done extra-cheap because the labor market it depressed, *and* if that will boost your revenue in multiple streams going forward, do it.”

    Any good business (wo)man would have at least picked the most crucial infrastructure needs and funded them. The things that would most likely have the biggest safety and financial impact. Sure, they might not go all in – there were people legitimately concerned about that “OMG 90% of GDP in debt!” but they would have said “Okay, we need 3-4 trillion in infrastructure long term – let’s at least borrow another trillion.”

    We have to ask ourselves if they really are horrible at business, or if they were trying to delay things so they could claim credit.

    If so… politics is filthy-dirty sometimes, and waiting for the 2010 midterm is hideous, but at least it would have been defensible. Now, we have to ask if they really have put the country’s needs on the back burner for *six years* until they could claim credit – or even just deny it.

  4. Around the time of the Revolutionary War, there were multiple roads in and out of New York City/State. Some of those roads were privately owned and had tolls on them. Hamilton worked to consolidate them under government operation because he felt it would be more efficient if the manufacturers and other travelers knew exactly what a toll would be, who cared for the road and they intersected and it was easy to change from one to another road. Hamilton was a capitalist, he believed in making money, it’s why he came to the colonies and stayed for the opportunities. But he also knew that some things were better handled by a main power like government to make things equally useable by all people. In that I think he was a liberal — the government can and should solve certain problems.

  5. We have to ask ourselves if they really are horrible at business, or if they were trying to delay things so they could claim credit.

    Part of it, I think, is that they really do believe in magic.

    And then, ideologically, I think they’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to make a distinction between the states and the federal government. Back when infrastructure projects were known as internal improvements, Thomas Jefferson was firmly convinced that the federal government had no business getting involved in them. This did not mean, however, that he thought they shouldn’t be undertaken at all. This is from a declaration that he wrote for the general assembly of Virginia in 1825, complaining about the usurpations of the feds:

    They claim, for example, and have commenced the exercise of a right to construct roads, open canals, & effect other internal improvements, within the territories and jurisdictions exclusively belonging to the several states, which this assembly does declare has not been given to that branch by the constitutional compact, but remain to each state among it’s domestic and unalienated powers, exercisable within itself, and by it’s domestic authorities alone.

    So you’re supposed to hate the federal government, not all governments. But then add in all this libertarian garbage about the miraculous powers of the Market, and you find that you can dispense with state and local governments as well.

    And then, magic.

  6. “If you look closely at most of the prominent Republicans in Washington, one of the striking things about them is that their bios often reveal them to be the creatures they claim to hate — lifelong political / government apparatchiks. Although they pride themselves on being friends to business, most of them have worked most of their lives in government and politics. I’m sure there must be some exceptions, but most have never actually run a company or so much as managed an assembly line. Paul Ryan is a good example; according to bios I have read, his only non-political private sector employment was a summer job for Oscar Meyer, during which he got to drive the weinermobile.”

    They are grifters, pure and simple. Their goal is to cut taxes on the rich, sell them government assets at pennies on the dollar, and then to pay them dollars on the penny ro run them.

  7. Pingback: Links 10/30/14 | Mike the Mad Biologist

  8. If the Republicans ever retake the US Presidency, they will quickly reverse course & run high deficits because they know that the big secret of Keynsianism economics: it works. But to them, “it works” means that they could ( AGAIN ) get the economy cooking and take credit for it (see: Reagan, Bush II). Knowing that it works is also precisely why they prevented any fiscal solution to the Great Recession from happening. They don’t really hate America, they just hate Democrats so much that a little collateral damage (like destroying the middle class) is acceptable.

Comments are closed.