Senate Democrats are having trouble passing a spending bill that would, among other things, extend unemployment benefits and deliver much-needed financial aid to cash-starved states. Today the New York Times (6/18/10) explained the legislative logjam this way:
The spending and tax measure has become caught up in intensifying politics around deficit spending as members of both parties, reacting to rising public concern, have grown reluctant to vote for measures that add to federal red ink.
Reacting to public concern? As we’ve noted before, there is far more public concern that the government is not doing enough to stimulate job growth. Concern for the deficit comes much further down, when citizens are asked to rank them. (See some of those polls here.) So where reporters are getting this idea is somewhat mysterious (and let’s not forget that no one should ascribe politicians’ votes as evidence that they’re”reacting” to public sentiment).
A similar idea was expressed in yesterday’s Times (6/17/10) by Matt Bai, who argued that anti-corporate populism (“the oppressed are the poor, and the oppressors are the corporate interests who exploit them”) is out of fashion, a quaint worldview that “made sense 75 years ago.”
These days it’s Tea Party populism that has taken hold: “This new American populism is why the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters.”
Again, arguments like this would make a lot more sense if there was more evidence that the deficit is a “chief concern for voters.”
When your home is destroyed, it is a given that you will have to spend money to rebuild. Either you will get this metaphor or it will go right over your head.
I got it, and I agree. We need to rebuild, help those who were harmed, and plan so it won’t happen again.
the fact the the media didn’t note “rising concern” for deficits the republicans were creating back during the bush years is also telling…or their usual silence in pointing out that it is a mix of less tax revenues due to the collapse of the bush economy and more spending on the bush wars that is driving the current numbers…
As ‘woodward bernstein’ alludes to above, this deficit is unarguably* linked backed to W Bush and the Neo-con/’supply-side’ policies that he followed — lower revenues from tax cuts (AND the resultant recession) and hyper-military spending due to unconscionable/immoral/illegal warmongering. However, I believe that this conservative deficit-hypocrisy is indisputable evidence showing that this Neo-conservative ‘concern’ about budget deficits is merely a TACTIC and not truly a belief. This Neo-con policy is well-defined/explained by authors such as Thomas Frank in “The Wrecking Crew”, which destroys the fantasy that Neo-cons actually care about governmental fiscal health, and are actually actively involved in trying to fiscally ruin the government so that they can discredit it and operate under a libertarian state.
(* Recall that W inherited a yearly budgetary SURPLUS from Clinton. One can argue — as I would accept — that this surplus was balanced on the backs of the lower class and wasn’t structured well, but it is a FACT that there were indeed yearly surpluses when Clinton left office.)
Agreed – I think it would be really hard to successfully make the argument that the right is genuinely concerned with the deficit – just looking at their history of concern is proof enough that it is not rooted in ideology alone. On account of the fact that the right is really only concerned with the spending that would help the average American (i.e. the “liberal” agenda), I think it’s pretty straightforward to conclude that this concern about the deficit is really just a tactic to tie up the current government and make sure they don’t succeed. Everyone knows that as long as the economy stinks, the opposition party will do well in elections…