When asked on CNN about whether or not the Republicans regret taking out the pandemic money in the stimulus, Michael Steele said “we didn’t know there was going to be a flu pandemic! You can’t make that link!”
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Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
My favorite line about this comes (of course) from Paul Krugman:
Heh. Indeed.
—Myca
Well, you already have people saying Obama engineered this to push through Sebelius’ nomination. How long before people say the Democrats engineered it to justify expanding government?
Jindal’s mistake was to make fun of the very idea of volcano monitoring, which, once a volcano erupted, made him look stupid (and since one of his strengths is that he’s supposed to be smart, that’s really not good). Collins, in fairness to her, was skeptical of putting pandemic protection spending in a stimulus bill, which is more reasonable. I think it would be great to start monitoring the resources we send Pakistan properly so they don’t end up getting spent fighting India instead of the Taliban (who are now 60 miles from the Pakistani capitol), but I wouldn’t want that stuck in the stimulus bill, because its relationship to stimulating the economy is peripheral at best.
Stimulate Pakistan’s economy and yourself at the same time!
I’m going to go with negative 14 years.
Spending money to monitor things going on, on another continent, is probably not good stimulus, because it doesn’t employ many people and those people are spending their money outside of the country, limiting multiplier effects.
The same isn’t true of pandemic preparation, which (as I understand it) is essentially science spending done mostly domestically. Why would that not have a stimulative effect?
Ok you’ve found your shiny coin now wave it about and claim to be smart.
Both parties can be pinged on lack of foresight.
This is short sighted schadenfreud, feels so good but means so little.
Actually, I disagree. If politicians feel that there’s a political price to be paid for being shortsighted — and mockery, if it goes on long enough, has a price — then maybe they’ll feel pressure to find a different place to grandstand over budget-cutting.
But I certainly agree that this particular post is not substantive. :-)
steve,
You’re missing the point. The GOP consistently dislikes spending money on public goods, with the sole exception of national military defense. That’s why this isn’t a singular error, as Myca pointed out @2, and it’s not one that many Democrats will make. Democrats think paying for public health, and levees, and all that other stuff the private sector isn’t going to cover, is a good thing. It is a fundamental aspect of Republican philosophy to winnow down as much as possible the work and especially spending done by government. Your equating the two parties on this issue is simply nonsensical.
Amp @ 6,
“those people are spending their money outside of the country, limiting multiplier effects.”
I think that depends on whether you’re a protectionist or a believer in the global economy.
“The same isn’t true of pandemic preparation, which (as I understand it) is essentially science spending done mostly domestically. Why would that not have a stimulative effect?”
It’s not necessarily done domestically; for example, if vaccine production is being done primarily in another country, it’s of questionable utility-maximization to set up a factory in the U.S. just to be able to stamp the vaccine as Made in the USA.
Moreover, the most effective stimulus spending is that which puts money in the hands of people who will spend it immediately (which is why I’m grumpy that nobody took up my idea of eliminating FICA taxes for the year — more money every week in every worker’s paycheck!). I’m not sure how pandemic preparation would do that.
I think of pandemic preparations as basically intellectual infrastructure spending. Are there better ways to stimulate the economy in the short term than infrastructure spending? Probably. But it’s spending we need to do eventually, it’ll never be cheaper than during a deep recession, and it will have SOME stimulative effect. I say, if we’re gonna chuck an $870 million stone, let’s nail as many birds as we can.
Risk allocation is a huge challenge, and not just in the public sector. Our recent economic collapse has prompted ex-Fed Chairman Greenspan to acknowledged being dumbfounded at how hyper-intelligent people would make such huge bad bets with their own money (as well as other people’s).
The problem is compounded in bureaucracies, such as government, where the relationship between the people making the decisions and the people bearing the costs are attenuated. In his first presidential campaign Bush called for eliminating the US’s role in nation-building; our subsequent failures in nation-building plague us to this day. Bush disparaged concerns about the effects of global warming on weather; Katrina wipes out New Orleans. In Minnesota, the no-new-taxes governor decided to cut back on infrastructure maintenance; a bridge collapsed into the Mississippi. Now, is there evidence that the specific actions (or inactions) of any given official contributed to the specific harm? No; nor can anyone prove which specific cigarette contributed to someone’s lung cancer. Nevertheless, when you choose to start down a road, and there’s widespread agreement about where this road leads, I’m profoundly un-sympathetic to people who complain that they didn’t know we’d get there so soon. It’s all part of a larger trend: do what pays off in the short term; screw the long term.
That said….
We’ve been complaining about politicians that are willing to cancel the fire insurance policy and crow about their fiscal management skills, gambling that no fires will occur on their watch. Policies producing privatized benefits and socialized risk fall in this category. But politicians also face the opposite incentive, buying insurance at a price that is out of proportion to the risk, because the politician would bear a cost if the feared event occurs, but the cost of the insurance is borne by others.
Many criminal laws reflect this dynamic. Consider the Willie Horton incident: a criminal that had been put on parole committed a violent act, and the governor that permitted his parole suffered political damage. Governors throughout the nation now recognize their incentive NOT to grant parole; even if parole may make sense from a societal perspective, the potential costs to the governor outweigh the benefits to the governor.
I imagine that the same dynamics have influenced the choice to keep people locked up at Gitmo. There’s little up-side to the president for releasing them, whereas the consequences for the president could be catastrophic if any released prisoner eventually did commit an act of terrorism in the US. The fact that there may be an up-side to the prisoners themselves really doesn’t influence the calculus.
More generally, who wants to be seen as being soft on crime? Where’s the political constituency for moderation? Well, now there is one: states are concluding that their harsh sentencing laws – and especially capital punishment – are too damned expensive to implement.
So, what’s the right allocation of risk? Conceptually we’d leave these decisions to technocrats. They’d establish benchmarks – estimates of the value of a human life, say – then estimate the likelihood of various events and calibrate public policy accordingly. Maybe the proposed spending on public health really wasn’t worth it, given what we then knew. We should design bridges and maintenance schedules to ensure that bridges rarely collapse – but then we should also refrain from recriminations when, every now and then, they actually collapse. If the cost of averting global warming is greater than the cost of mitigating the harm, then we should expect government to focus on mitigation, not avoidance.
But I have little trust that decisions are made on that basis. Given the fundamentally subjective nature of risk perception – research suggests that conservatives are hard-wired to be more risk averse than liberals – and the volatile issue of quantifying things like the value of a human life, it’s hard to imagine political decisions could be made on that basis. And ultimately, I’d lack the capacity to determine whether the right determinations were made or not.
Absent any useful measure of government’s efficacy, I’m left simply to engage in the recriminations that fit my ideological bent. And given this fact, I’d be astonished if politicians didn’t make risk allocation decisions with an eye to placating my potential fury, rather that with an eye to achieving some optimal balance. After all, I’ll never know the difference.
One last aside regarding risk allocation and government action:
I’ve seen a lot of statistics suggesting that the manner in which the US’s (and the world’s) economy has been managed has led to disaster – increased foreclosures, bankruptcies, layoffs, debt, and a contracting GDP. But I haven’t seen estimates of where the US (and the world) would be today under some different kind of management.
Consider some index of median wealth, with 0 representing its status as of 1980. And imagine a line showing that median wealth grew to a score of 100 by 2006, and subsequently declined to 50. That’s a huge decline – but also a huge growth. Now imagine a second line representing how median wealth would have grown under “prudent” management, growing at a nice, gentle slope to a score of 40 today. Would we really say that “prudent” management was the better choice?
One concrete example: Does it make sense for me to complain about how I’ve lost wealth because the collapse of the“housing bubble” has caused the value of my house to decline – relative to the price it achieved at the height of the housing bubble? In the absence of that bubble, my house’s value wouldn’t have fallen so abruptly – but then, it also wouldn’t have risen so abruptly. Until I can estimate what would have happened to the value of my house in the absence of that bubble, I don’t know how I can complain that the bubble hurt me. All I can complain about is that my expectations were frustrated.
Lax regulation has both costs and benefits – as does stricter regulation. Most businesses fail. That is, roughly speaking, most businesses consume more than they produce, making the world poorer. Nevertheless, business as a whole makes the world richer because the few businesses that succeed produce benefits that more than offset the costs of those that fail. Stricter regulation may well succeed in reducing certain social costs related to business – but the same regulation may also result in a net increase in social cost simply by impeding business in general.
After all, Michael Milken, promoter of the junk bond, was convicted of white-collar crime. And junk bonds financed the telecommunications revolution. Would the world have been better off without Milken, without junk bonds, and without the huge expansion of telecommunications?
Bottom line: It’s hard to evaluate the net effect of any action, even with the benefit of hindsight. I sense most people (myself included) make such judgments on the basis of ideology – not because ideology is such a good guide, but because it’s what we’ve got.
I don’t know about you, but I am really happy they have Michael Steele at the helm, and I hope they don’t change him out any time soon!
What better poster child for why Republicans should become Democrats than this formerly important political player from Maryland.
Can you say “not ready for prime time?”
But please…Don’t change a thing!
nobody.really,
Which would make sense if the stimulus bill were the only spending bill that could be passed during this Congressional session. Thankfully, it’s not, and things that should get done regardless of their stimulative effect (like monitoring Pakistan’s use of U.S. resources, or preparing for pandemics) can be debated and passed on their own merits (heck, both of those items in the prior parenthetical would fit neatly into a “national safety” bill) instead of clogging up a bill that will be measured for its effectiveness based on how much stimulus it provides in the next two to four years (i.e. before the next Congressional and Presidential elections).
Horton was furloughed, not paroled (parole is basically permanent; furloughs were for weekends to allow prisoners to retain a connection with the outside world), and it really was very stupid to include people convicted of a robbery/murder and sentenced to life without possibility of parole in a furlough program. This may sound awful, but there’s not much point in having someone who will never actually rejoin the outside world spend the occasional weekend in it, especially when that person was convicted of a very violent crime (in Horton’s case, stabbing a store clerk 19 times, stuffing him in the garbage and leaving him to bleed out and die there). Especially in a state with no death penalty, there’s not a big incentive for the life-term prisoner to behave properly while on furlough; why not assault a man and rape a woman? All they can do is add a couple more life terms without parole to the one you already got.
If a governor takes the actually-on-point lesson from Horton (don’t furlough murderers on life terms), that’s a damn good thing. If he’s an ignoramus who didn’t look at the particulars of the Horton case and refuses furloughs for people in prison for 5 years on crack possession with supposed “intent to distribute” (i.e. person not found dealing but in possession of a stash), then that’s bad, but that’s really a problem with the governor’s powers of analogous reasoning (and with excessive penalties for nonviolent crimes) and not with learning lessons from others’ mistakes.
The majority of people who have been detained at Gitmo have been released, actually, although of course not into the United States and in many cases into detention in their own countries (although this often is temporary, as in Saudi Arabia’s “terrorist rehab” program). A total of 759 had been held in military custody in the detainment camps; only 241 remain at Gitmo. The Pentagon claims that 61 former detainees have engaged in terrorist activity or fought against U.S. and allied forces since their release.
Yes, that’s what the various executive agencies are supposed to do. Are you not familiar with Reagan’s Executive Order 12291? It made precisely the sort of cost-benefit analysis you’re advocating mandatory for agencies promulgating regulations.
Most Americans never saw much of that wealth. The only way in which they could believe they were wealthier was with the increase in the value of their homes. When that value sank, especially if it sank below the price they paid for the home, any potential wealth increase for those Americans was lost. Rawlsian liberalism in the Difference Principle says that a system with inequitable distribution of goods is morally justifiable only if it benefits people at the bottom at least as much as people at the top (so one can support capitalism over communism because even the poorest quintile in the U.S. was better off than the poorest quintile in the USSR).
Some i-bankers and hedge fund managers who cashed out in time have benefited from lack of financial regulation, but it did squat to fuel improvements in the lives of the majority. Subprime mortgages and CDOs have somewhere between little and nothing to do with getting venture capital to entrepreneurs; we would have Google without them.
PG already posted what I was going to say, NR. The gains you refer to — even if they exist after the economy is done retracting, compared to what we would have seen under a stronger regulatory regime, which I doubt — are strongly concentrated among the wealthiest, which doesn’t provide much comfort to laid-off workers.
PG, it should be noted that the claim that 61 prisoners released from Gitmo have returned to violence is contested.
Amp,
Yes, that’s why I modified that statistic with “the Pentagon claims” but didn’t say that about the total number ever detained or remaining number of detainees, as those stats seem to be generally accepted. I’m particularly aware of the dubious “recidivism” aspect of the claim, as some of those who definitely did commit terrorist acts after release weren’t actually picked up as terrorists/fighters in the first place, merely reported to U.S. forces by Pakistani or Northern Alliance folks who may have been looking for money, and therefore probably became radicalized by their treatment during detainment.