1. A couple of days ago I wrote about how some younger strongly Obama-approving voters had inclinations that overlap with the center-right. I’d like to add that I don’t think any statistically significant number of these voters are going to come around to a center-right political identity all on their own. Their media stream, their already-chosen identity as Democratic-leaners, and peer pressure are all pushing them in the direction of social democracy and social liberalism. Conservatives need a policy agenda, language, and media strategy that will reach them or else they will not only stay Democratic-leaners, they will become ever more strongly ideological left-Democrats as they get older. The problem of reaching these voters (and their younger siblings) is urgent.
2. I heard Ted Cruz on the replay of Fox News Sunday. He was terrific. I’m not sure I agree with everything he said, but his every word seemed to be chosen to appeal to the undecided voter and to make his policy positions seem like common sense. He reminded be a lot of Reagan – and Obama. In the last Republican nominating contest, too many of the candidates didn’t seem to have any interest in winning over the median voter. They seemed more interested in becoming the breakout character of a reality show (even if their character was a joke in the minds of most of the Americans.) Candidates shouldn’t be judged on their rhetoric alone, but to the extent that rhetoric matters, we would be much better off if the political incentives were to sound more like Ted Cruz and less like Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich.
Though come to think of it, the political incentives are to sound more like Cruz than Bachmann if we look at the behavior of Republican presidential primary voters rather than right-leaning media consumers and poll respondents (these are often the same people acting in different capacities.) I just don’t think that it has sunk in that Republican presidential primary voters are much more pragmatic and responsible than the liberal-leaning media, the conservative-leaning media, and the Republican political consultant class seem to think.
January 6th, 2013 | 7:42 pm
[...] 1. A couple of days ago I wrote about how some younger strongly Obama-approving voters had inclinations that overlap with the center-right. I’d like to add that I don’t think Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 8th, 2013 | 3:55 am
I have neither a center right nor a center left identity, albeit I think your use of center is highly confused, and confusing. It sounds like it wants to feed off of baseball, and knowing the conservative marketing folks this seems about right. (not that there is anything wrong with baseball). It is just that if there is a right as a meaningful concept it comes from our legal system. The idea of a center right seems to me to come from the Harvard notion of a multi-door courthouse. Rather than simply being right v. left some Harvard genuis partially envisioned what was already occuring due in large part to the efforts of labor lawyers and the folks in Wisconsin (the true progressives that actually existed/built that). So in some sense if someone tells me they are center-right or center-left I assume they are wanting to be hired to sit on an arbitration panel. 3 person panel arbitration actually does exist. The right hires an expert who is center-right, the left an expert who is center-left and a neutral third party who I suppose could be labeled “centrist”.
My goal is simply to scour history for the most creative ideas possible as answers to foreseable problems and watch as years latter Nobel Prize economists quasi-advocate them. So I am happy that on No Left Turns ages ago(check the archives) I articulated a plan for a trillion dollar coin. Now Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) has tried to put foward a Bill ruining my moment of Glory! The difference being that in his articulation of the plan Krugman is quite vindicative and wants to “honor” Boehner. (screw that I will volunteer:) Krugman I believe lacks vision(or has plenty of his own, and a very strong center-left brand). I and others who have gone much further in developing MMT (I didn’t invent my ideas but derived them from history) see different legal possibilities, including the possibility that we need not be troubled by the myth of paying for it(at least as currently articulated). The trillion dollar coin possibility among others, means that if it wanted to congress could even do this, and earmark the money to pay down debt or retire bonds. In terms of being worried about a legal fiction I for example didn’t see why we couldn’t do the trillion dollar coin and retire all our debt in theory.(except that our debt is not “bad”, or debt is a record, it is in a sense pure History, or a tally if you will.)
I actually agree with some modern malthusians, or those who believe we still have limited natural resources. But I am pretty much conviced that what folks mean when they say “pay for it” ends up being a fallacy of composition fueled by candidates trying to bend policy to common sense. If we had ballanced trade(instead of a pretty massive deficit), I would argue that we pay for it immediately, on relatively Austrian grounds. That is if we cap-traded exports/imports, I would suddenly have a much better feel for our situation. But this might be very bad economic advice, just for the sake of knowledge and is potentially illegal under international treaties. That is one thing our imports do is allow us to give money and get things.
So the “true” common sense argument(not sure if this is possible) that the deficit actually robs the future, is actually not the common sense fallacy of composition currently articulated by republicans. It is actually that on some level our deficit spending contributes to deflation, not inflation. That it contributes to deflation is partially understood on a common sense level (once you link it to trade) by people who know that foreign goods are price competitive with domestic ones, i.e. that ford and GM have to compete with Honda and Toyota. That China made socks(and solar which was recently tarrifed) compete with american textiles and solar. So competition and the availability of different products drives down CPI. But the argument or general premise that deficit spending is inflationary needs a ceteris paribus expectation. That ceteris paribus expectation is that the amount of goods remains constant. That is you need more money chasing the same amount of goods. Of course more money chasing the same amount of goods or the expectation of this will ramp up production. We are nowhere near full production. But in addition we have our reserve currency status, and if you want to think of this in common sense terms just take my word for it that we import more than we export. So within our “closed” economy (which is what any economy is once you model/conceptualize it), we actually end up with less of that money, and more goods. So Exports are inflationary and imports are deflationary. Our trade deficit ends up signalling to us that we can afford it, because all those goods that come in not only cause competition but also drive down prices.
So you could think of the US economy as a bathtub cut in half and made into a mirror image. That is it has two faucets and two drains. One faucet is gov. spending, the other faucet is Exports. One drain is taxes, the other drain is Imports. The consumer is sitting in the bathtub and his willingness to spend(is a third faucet), or his liquidity preference or his marginal propensity to save(is a third drain) But when the consumer saving is added to the ballance between the twin faucets and twin drains it always equal zero.
Now the old school democrats and labor unions who represented industrial interests (made in america) were always deficit hawks, and enemies of Ricardo. They are deficit hawks because they are mercantilists(quite like the Germans), and the sorts of legal changes which would nudge us towards mercantilist policy would probably also bring back labor unions, if we had an economy where labor was directed towards more tangible manufacturing productivity geared to export.
In my view the only way we really pay for it is actually if the old school progressive democrats were really right, or if Germany so to speak is really the “richest”, “best” nation on earth in terms of sustainable public policy.
The problem with this of course is that not all nations can be net exporters. If one nation net exports, another nation net imports. We are that net importing nation. A nation that sort of did screw labor(of the detroit manufacturing variety), and went all in on Ricardo.
So our bathtub looks quite a bit different from the german bathtub. Both american exceptionalism and german exceptionalism, can be considered as seperate and distinct economic models.
But the only way deficits are unsustainable is if all of american exceptionalism is unsustainable, but if it is then german exceptionalism is also unsustainable! (does this sound anything like the actual loans made to germany by the U.S. pre-world war II, and Keynesian+Churchillian astonishment?) It is actually possible that american genuises designed the german constitution in the wake of world war II to become the export nation, but even if we didn’t go this far, we certainly designed the US at some point to be an importing nation. According to some progressives all the wealth attributed to Ronald Reagan was simply a result of deficit spending combined with increased imports.(funny how more money in your pocket and more goods to buy, makes you feel richer!) The more we deficit spend the richer we become in terms of goods we can consume(at this point anyways), and we can always consume more goods and produce more goods by deficit spending. The only way we pay for it, is if we become an exporting nation. (That is Exporting by definition will require us to send goods overseas and get dollars back…it will force us to produce more, and we will no longer have the surplus imports).
So anyways this is why History is a good major, but all of this is a broad common sense articulation and may run into other fallacies of composition. One could even argue that Paul Krugman is a Historian in so far as economics has an empirical component that requires good data, good accounting, good records. Dear Paul Krugman, an Occam’s razor solution: There is no such thing as Macroeconomics, there is only History. It just so happens that history itself has been robbed of its dominion over all data sets concerning the past by Adam Smith’s division of labor! But the differences between Krugman and the rest of Macro might be seen as differences in time frames.
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