A friend was talking to me recently. He observed that the post-election drama in Washington seems to be about more than taxes and spending. Everybody seems to feel that the stakes are high, and two visions of the future of America are being contested. “It’s really pretty amazing,” he said, “because we just had a national election. Isn’t voting supposed to settle things. Majority rule and all that.” Not that he was opposed to Republican resistance to Obama’s proposals. On the contrary, he’s a limited government guy. Still, he’s right. It says something about the political moment in which we live that elections don’t settle things the way they used to. Both sides seem to be playing a long game.
It was then that he said: “Ya know, the more you hear about the fiscal cliff, the more you realize that it’s a metafiscal cliff we’re heading toward.”
Metafiscal cliff. Perfect.
December 27th, 2012 | 4:04 pm
“Majority rule and all that.”
Democrats aren’t a majority in the House. How’s an election that creates a divided government supposed to settle anything?
December 27th, 2012 | 5:13 pm
A friend told me that a reporter conducted man-on-the-street interviews, asking people their opinions of the fiscal cliff. Many said they had never actually visited the fiscal cliff. Some admitted they didn’t even know where it is located. This is not a joke.
December 27th, 2012 | 8:45 pm
Perhaps it’s that the farther apart the sides are, the harder it is to settle and come together after an election. And, in my view, the two sides have grown much farther apart in the last few decades.
December 27th, 2012 | 9:29 pm
@Dr Woof, Unfortunately, I think that’s the entire country. Those who follow politics tend to view it as absolute. Read the pundits, only a few seem to find understanding of the side they disagree with. Most too easily lose all sense of proportion, accusing the other side of bad faith if not worse for disagreeing with them.
December 27th, 2012 | 9:31 pm
Everybody seems to feel that the stakes are high, and two visions of the future of America are being contested
And, in my view, the two sides have grown much farther apart in the last few decades.
These are two instances of rhetoric over reality. Reality there’s very little difference. A 34% top rate and 39% top rate is not exactly a huge difference. In fact, it’s the very rate voted on by Republicans since everyone who voted for the Bush tax cuts also voted for the ‘auto-destruct clause’ in them (oddly timed to hit after he left office, hmmm). And in reality the deficit has been falling rapidly as even modest economic recovery combined with the expiration of the stimulus bill(s) has created a situation where the deficit is going to fall no matter what actually happens.
Hence you have not actual difference but difference for the sake of drama. The Republicans need to demonstrate to their base that they are ‘standing up’ to Obama, even though he won the election. The Democrats hold a winning hand here. They can either let the Republicans push us off the cliff, and then propose a middle class tax cut and dare the Republicans to vote against it. Or they can dare the Republicans to come to the table with something reasonable.
In either case both sides require a sense of drama to make it seem like whatever happens is very important and therefore whoever makes that happen must also be very important.
December 28th, 2012 | 7:24 am
Read the pundits, only a few seem to find understanding of the side they disagree with. Most too easily lose all sense of proportion,
One way to follow this is the way one follows sports. If you’re a Giants fan whether or not they make and win the Superbowel again is a huge deal this year. But in terms of football it’s not a big deal. If they make it or if they don’t this year won’t be radically different from previous years.
I wish the media would provide less of the cheerleading type commentary and more of the proportion. A good example of this is something like this http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/opinion/krugman-that-terrible-trillion.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fPaul%20Krugman&_r=0
Deficit in 2012 $1.089T
Deficit required to keep debt as a % of GDP stable: about $400B
Difference about $600B. Economic recovery alone will automatically generate maybe $450B in reduced deficits.
So the argument is literally over $150B That’s on revenue of $2468.6 (6%) or spending of about $3795.6 (3.9%).
But neither the politicians or the media won’t talk about the mere $150B, they will include the other $450B of ‘natural deficit reductions’ as part of the ‘deal’ thereby letting both sides inflate the drama of the affair and the size of their contributions to it. It’s akin to a ‘cold crises’ in the middle of winter culminating in a plan to make things warmer by August, something which will happen with or without the plan.
December 28th, 2012 | 7:52 am
To take only two issues, the GOP platform says abortion is wrong, and it opposes the redefinition of marriage. The DNC spent three days celebrating the very thing the GOP says is wrong.
Not very long ago, no one would argue that abortion was wrong, and no one from either party would even know what you were trying to say if you suggested redefining marriage.
Not very long ago, both sides regarded our Triune God as the highest authority and central to every moral question. Now half of the country regards the state as the highest authority, and that any hint of God should be removed from political thinking. That side also believes God is now a relative term.
The real question isn’t whether or not the two sides can still find common ground like they used to. The real question is, on what basis could we find common ground?
Fr. Francis Grund, a contemporary of Tocqueville and fellow Frenchman, marveled at the American system and the simplicity of our Constitution but noted that if you changed the religious devotion of the American people and their common morality that springs from that, that it would not be necessary to change a single word of their Constitution in order to change their government utterly.
December 28th, 2012 | 7:54 am
The election didn’t settle anything because Obama’s victory was a personal one, not one of policy. He got his winning majority by data mining to find apathetic people who could be induced to register to vote, and then he got them to the polls to vote for him. His campaign was based on avoiding substantive issues and inventing things like the war on women, and on associating with celebrities and appearing on shows like “Pimp with a limp” in order to appeal to those who are completely ignorant of politics. Thus his victory didn’t give him a mandate for anything. Add to that the fact that Republicans held the House and increased the number of governorships and you see that there is no reason for Republicans to feel that they need to submit to Obama’s agenda.
December 28th, 2012 | 8:01 am
Peg,
In my opinion the fiscal cliff is a marketing term used by politicians and the media to promote their business. It’s part of the political-media wave, and not the grim old cliff of destiny upon which that wave must smash.
December 28th, 2012 | 9:25 am
After four years of trillion dollar deficits, “the deficit has been falling rapidly”? This would be great news but I have yet to see the reports. Some pointers please?
December 28th, 2012 | 11:22 am
Mike Melendez,
Check out Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It’s Barack Obama? in Forbes as well as Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph in the Washington Post.
Remember that it was scarcely within Obama’s power to halt the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan immediately upon taking office. Also, he could hardly have cancelled the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Remember that when Bush took office in 2000, there was not a deficit, there was a surplus. The steep rise in the national debt began under Ronald Reagan, and continued under Bush 41. The national debt declined under Clinton and soared under Bush 43.
December 28th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
Boonton, $1.1T minus $400B minus $450B is $250B, not $150B. $250B is more than what we’re talking about in the fiscal cliff negotiations.
It gets much worse. $400B is required to keep debt stable as a percentage of GDP. But it has to be higher during recessions and lower during periods of robust economic growth. It must AVERAGE $400B. Assume we plug the $250B hole so that the deficit is $850B today but $400B in a full recovery. That doesn’t average out to $400B. It has to be much less than $400B in a full recovery in order to offset periods of economic stagnation. Just for sake of argument, if we have equal periods of current economic conditions and full recovery, we’d need to run a budget surplus during periods of full recovery just to average a deficit of $400B.
And that’s just to keep debt stable which isn’t the ideal outcome. Ideally, debt as a percentage of GDP should be in the single digits to maximize economic growth.
December 28th, 2012 | 3:07 pm
David Nickol,
Really? You fall for that “Obama is really a penny pincher” canard? The Forbes article and Washington Post graph are excellent exhibits in how to lie with statistics.
The only way those numbers work is if you take the entirety of TARP and the large majority of stimulus spending and put that in the Bush spending column (because it technically happened in fiscal year 2009, which Bush’s 2008 budget, complete with TARP and stimulus spending baked in). The problem with this logic is that President-elect Obama (along with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress) set the priorities for this spending trajectory, sold it as temporary and then used those levels of spending as baselines for the spending in subsequent years. If you use the same logic for the Clinton/Bush transition – then Clinton was responsible somehow for burning through his own surplus.
I am not defending the spending during the Bush administration. It was horrible – we put two wars on the credit card, expanded a large entitlement without any sort of real spending offset and in general spread the pork around without any conscience. But Obama’s record is not any better – if anything it is worse. And to pretend that it is any different by sleight of hand statistical reporting is dishonest – to say the least.
December 28th, 2012 | 5:05 pm
If you use the same logic for the Clinton/Bush transition – then Clinton was responsible somehow for burning through his own surplus.
Steve Billingsley,
That is simply not the case. As is spelled out in the Fact Sheet from the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative, when the transition from Clinton to Bush took place, the CBO was projecting surpluses as far as the eye could see, with the national debt paid off by 2006 and the US government in the black by 2011 to the tune of $2.3 trillion. If ballooning deficits had been the probably result of continuation of Clinton’s policies, the CBO would not have predicted surpluses.
Take a look at Figure 2 on page 4 of the Fact Sheet I have linked to, and you will see what happened to the projected surpluses. The report says:
It is clear from Figure 2 what the major causes of the continuing deficits were and who enacted them.
Find any graph of national debt as a percentage of GDP and it is simply undeniable that the national debt fell precipitously during Truman’s second term and continued to decline under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter and rose dramatically under Reagan and Bush. It began to decline again under Clinton, but turned skyward during George W. Bush’s two terms. There is simply no doubt that Ronald Reagan initiated the rise in deficits and the national debt.
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