What makes America great?  Is it the greatness of Americans?  Is it some special LOST-island-like quality about the land we inhabit?  Or is it our values and their expression in our system of government?  While geography, natural resources, and immigration have most certainly affected our history (often for the better), what makes America great is that we are a nation of laws, not of men, where values are institutionalized in the government; chief among them is freedom.

Freedom is more than just freedom to…  It’s also freedom from…  Freedom from constant fear about personal safety or random acts of violence; freedom from oppressive search and seizure; freedom from crippling exogenous, uncontrollable financial ruin; and freedom of access to lifesaving health care.

“Republicans believe in a simple principle: No American should have to worry about losing their health care coverage, period. We stand for universal access to affordable health care coverage.” (Jindal, 2/24/09)

Really?  Just as long as it doesn’t involve a government guarantee??  I think this depends on what your definition of “universal access” is.  If by “universal access” you mean that anyone who can afford to pay for it can get access, then you do not mean “universal”.  If you mean by “universal access” that you can get lifesaving care, but you’ll end up losing your house in the mountain of resulting debt, then you do not mean “freedom of access”.

“What we oppose is universal government-run health care. Health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not by government bureaucrats.” (Jindal, 2/24/09)

Again, what this really means is that health care decisions should be made by doctors, patients, and for-profit insurance companies trying to spend as little on your treatment as possible.  This, again, is a false freedom.  The freedom to have someone make a profit-based decision about your health is far less free than a government bureaucracy being involved.  The freedom of a doctor is limited by the profit motives of an insurance company.

Reject false dichotomies between freedom and government involvement!  Freedoms are guaranteed by the government, empowered by the people.  Your freedom of speech is inalienable but enforced by the government.  The free market is built upon government security, government provided stability, government issued currency, government enforced contracts, etc.  Your freedom to drink tap water without fear is secured by a government agency.

Instead of complaining about ineffective government, work to make government better.  You have the freedom to make and keep America great.

1. Inflation - Inflate your way out.  This is really bad, but preferable to another great depression.  We will do this if we have to, but it’s not that bad yet.
2. Monetary Policy – The central bank buys government bonds to entice business to invest in production.  This is the weapon of choice, but we’ve already exhausted its possibilities.
3. Credit Policy – The government tries new policies designed to loosen lending and get people investing in otherwise risky projects.  We’re trying this a little bit.
4. Fiscal Policy – The government borrows and spends, directly stimulating the economy.

From Dr. Delong:

This brings us to the fourth tool: fiscal policy. Have the government borrow and spend, thereby pulling people out of unemployment and pushing up capacity utilisation to normal levels. There are drawbacks: the subsequent dead-weight loss of financing all the extra government debt that has been incurred, and the fear that too rapid a run-up in debt may discourage private investors from building physical assets, which form the tax base for future governments that will have to amortise the extra debt.

But when you have only two tools left, neither of which is perfect for the job – credit policy and fiscal policy – the rational thing is to try both, at the same time. That is what the Obama administration in the United States and other governments are attempting to do right now.

If that argument isn’t convincing to you, perhaps it would be beneficial to contemplate for a moment that we are the only industrialized country where an unemployment crisis is also a health crisis!  We’re also the only industrialized country where a personal health crisis is also a personal financial crisis (as in if you get sick, you could lose your house, not because you can’t work, but because you can’t pay the bills!)

Health Care Now!

This ought to be the ultimate question, regardless of who is President or what party they belong to.  It’s what really matters, right?

We ought to ask the same question of the economic stimulus bill (HR1 – American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) that, though passing, failed to get any Republican votes.  As far as I can tell, the reasons are some combination of:

1. Not enough immediate infrastructure spending as a fraction of the total amount of spending
2. Insufficient reliance on tax cuts or too much reliance on direct spending
3. It was written by Democrats

I hope we can all agree that Representatives objecting on grounds of authorship–sacrificing the well being not only of their own districts but of the entire economy in order to play a petty game of irrelevant politics–are nothing short of idiotic.

The first issue is related indirectly to the second in that the questions we really want to answer are: how many jobs can we create through a combination of spending and tax cuts and will it be enough?

Direct spending creates jobs by creating demand and by enabling shelved projects to be completed.  People are needed to make the extra products being demanded and to implement the projects being carried out.  It’s fairly straight-forward.

Tax cuts create jobs by giving individuals more money-in-pocket to spend and by giving businesses more capital to re-invest in operations.  The problem here and now with this is that scared people don’t spend extra money, they save it or use it to pay down debt on money they already spent.  Businesses can’t re-invest in production if there is no concomitant increase in demand.

Ultimately, we want to get the biggest bang for the buck and the way that is measured is by the associated multiplier:  The government spends a dollar on building a road, so a firm gets a new dollar.  That firm hires two extra people and pays them each $0.40 from that dollar.  Those people each have $0.40 extra from that dollar and use it to spend another $0.20 they wouldn’t have otherwise spent.  That spending goes to another firm and the process repeats.  Ultimately, we’ve bought more than a dollar’s worth of stimulus with our dollar.  It works similarly with tax cuts.  But which one has a higher multiplier?  Direct Government Spending! (See the previous post on this subject.)

If you listened to House Republicans, you might not know that.  They even have gone so far as to fudge the analysis behind their tax-cuts-only alternative (which satisfies #3 also, by the way), saying it will produce 6.2 Million jobs when the analysis they cite indicates it’s only 4 Million jobs (See Dr. DeLong’s post about this.  He’s the one who knows what he’s talking about.)  By contrast, the Obama plan creates 8.7 Million jobs under the same analysis.

The current Republicans are idealogically bankrupt.  The standard lines of Cut Taxes and of Shrink Government are no longer applicable.  We may not be in a Post-Partisan or a Post-Racial world, but I think it’s clear that we are in a Post-2000s-Republicanism world.  Cutting taxes and cripling government is the problem, not the solution.

By presenting a plan based entirely on tax cuts and refusing to bargain or even debate the original proposal in good faith, the House Republicans have shown that they have no interest in reality, solutions, or functional government.  All they are interested in is an unequivocal adherence to a dead-end policy because it advances a political ideology.  They are deceiving their constituents at a crucial juncture when time and clarity are of the essence!  They are not interested in asking Will this work? but only in asking Will this match my ideology? Why don’t we question the patriotism of people who operate in this deceptive, counterproductive mode, sabotaging plans for a functional government in favor of party gain?

There is a place for conservatism, opposition, debate, and competition among ideas.  There is no place for deception, bad-faith negotiation, and pure partisanship.  It is time to put away childish things.

Edit:  This is exactly my point: Building a Conservatism That Can Win Again (Via David Frum’s blog no less… Yeah, the Axis of Evil guy.)

Now imagine if the GOP did not have such a knee-jerk opposition to spending and actually thought strategically.  The lede could have been “Republicans voted against the measure because it did not include enough large infrastructure projects and lacked imagination.”  Instead of fighting Dems on the dollar amount of spending, knowing that we would lose that fight in any event, we could have stood with Obama and called for large high-tech infrastructure projects that would employ large numbers of minorities in construction and white collar suburbanites in development.  These projects (high speed rail corridors as an example) would also capture the imagination of the green close-in suburbs that are turning viciously against the GOP and have the strategic benefit of jamming up the young Dem members (Webb/Warner/Hagan/McCaskill) who depended on these voters for their victories.

Not that I want to see my Junior Senator (McCaskill) lose, but this shows that your party interest doesn’t have to be contrary to the public interest! (c.f. Andrew Sullivan here.)

Edit 2:  Dr. DeLong talks about Good and Bad stimulus skeptics here.  It’s worth the read because it separates out ideological doubt from evidentiary doubt.  It’s fine if you have academic objections to the stimulus plan, as long as they are not demonstrably false, unacceptable academic objections.  It’s definitely not ok if your objections are “belief-based” instead of “reality-based”.  DeLong says:

The depressing thing is the number and credentials of the stimulus skeptics who are making arguments that are either theoretically incoherent or empirically irrelevant.

Read at the inauguration of Barack Obama:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.