Mr.Imposter also is unaware that Federal Receipts went up during the Reagan years because of the Reagan tax cuts, just as they went up during the Kennedy years because of the Kennedy tax cuts just as they went up during the George W. Bush years because of the tax cuts.
Peter Wallison, who was White House counsel to President Reagan, responded to my analysis in The New York Times on Oct. 26. He pointed to Ronald Reagan's resistance to tax increases in 1982, citing passages from Reagan's diary that were published in his autobiography, "An American Life." The gist of Wallison's article is that Ronald Reagan successfully resisted efforts by his staff and many in Congress to raise taxes, thereby ensuring the victory of Reaganomics.
The only problem with this analysis is that it is historically inaccurate. Reagan may have resisted calls for tax increases, but he ultimately supported them. In 1982 alone, he signed into law not one but two major tax increases. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act raised taxes by $37.5 billion per year, and the Highway Revenue Act of 1982 raised the gasoline tax by another $3.3 billion.
According to a recent Treasury Department study, TEFRA alone raised taxes by almost 1 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. An increase of similar magnitude today would raise more than $100 billion per year.
In 1983, Reagan signed legislation raising the Social Security tax rate. This is a tax increase that lives with us still, since it initiated automatic increases in the taxable wage base. As a consequence, those with moderately high earnings see their payroll taxes rise every single year.
The following year, Reagan signed another big tax increase in the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984. This raised taxes by $18 billion per year or 0.4 percent of GDP. A similar sized tax increase today would be about $44 billion.
The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 raised taxes yet again. Even the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was designed to be revenue-neutral, contained a net tax increase in its first two years. And the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 raised taxes still more.
The year 1988 appears to be the only year of the Reagan presidency, other than the first, in which taxes were not raised legislatively. Of course, previous tax increases remained in effect. According to a table in the 1990 budget, the net effect of all these tax increases was to raise taxes by $164 billion in 1992, or 2.6 percent of GDP. This is equivalent to almost $300 billion in today's economy.
Yes, I said we had double-digit inflation during the Reagan years. Where does it say it didn't go down?
Finn, I'm not the one digging holes. My statement is quite clear; not my problem if people don't know how to read or interpret them. Righties are good at ridiculous projections, and most people take them for who writes them; fools.
Bernie wrote:
Mr.Imposter also is unaware that Federal Receipts went up during the Reagan years because of the Reagan tax cuts, just as they went up during the Kennedy years because of the Kennedy tax cuts just as they went up during the George W. Bush years because of the tax cuts.
Another foolish projection by another DUMMY. This fool now claims I was unaware that federal receipts went up. DUH! Please show me where I wrote that? Can't fix stupid.
Don't Know Much About History
July 1, 2006
Somewhere between the firing in 2002 of President Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and the Senate confirmation this week of his third Treasury chief, Henry Paulson, the administration changed its tune on budget deficits. In the early days, the line was, essentially, that deficits don't matter. Mr. O'Neill's ouster was due in part to his gall in suggesting otherwise. Now, officials dutifully declaim that deficits matter, but that Bush-era shortfalls are "within historical norms."
Mr. Paulson apparently shares that view, having offered it repeatedly when asked about budget deficits during his confirmation hearing. That's a disappointment. It takes a narrow view of history to imply that the Bush-era deficits are "normal."
As a share of the economy, the Bush-era deficits have averaged 2.7 percent. That's the second worst record of any administration in the past 60 years, surpassed only by the deficits from the tenures of President Reagan and the first President Bush, which each averaged 4.3 percent. (Five years into the Clinton era, deficits averaged 1.2 percent of the economy, dropping to a mere 0.1 percent by the time Mr. Bush took over.) To imply that the current budget gap is comfortably within historical norms because it's not as bad as the worst deficits in modern memory is, to put it politely, a stretch.
Besides, size isn't everything when it comes to assessing the danger in budget deficits. Timing is also crucial.
The Reagan-era deficits occurred decades before the retirement of the baby boomers, when the post-World War II generation was in its peak earning ?- and taxpaying ?- years. The Bush deficits are uniquely alarming in that they're occurring on the eve of the baby boomers' retirement, leaving little time to recoup before the government has to meet large Medicare and Social Security obligations.
On top of that, and well outside the historical norm, is President Bush's insistence on continued tax cutting, despite the ongoing deficits and despite the fact that the economy has long since recovered from the last recession. From the end of World War II through the 1970's, various administrations hammered away at the nation's debt, reducing the burden from the wartime level of over 100 percent of the economy to about 25 percent. That effort was largely abandoned in the 1980's. But even Mr. Reagan backtracked on his budget-busting tax cuts of 1981 by raising taxes in 1982 and 1984. In 1990, a bipartisan deficit-reduction agreement raised taxes and cut spending, followed by another budget-tightening package passed by Democrats in 1993. In contrast, the Bush years have been marked by nonstop tax cutting, deepening debt, the abandonment of budget rules and increased spending, paid for by borrowing.
And not just any borrowing. The Bush-era deficits are also alarming in the extent to which they are foreign financed. Since 2001, 73 percent of new government borrowing has been from abroad. In total, 43 percent of the United States' publicly held debt of $4.8 trillion is in foreign hands, compared with only 14 percent at the peak of the Reagan deficits in 1983 and 30 percent in 2001. Debt owed to bankers in Beijing, Tokyo and elsewhere could destabilize the dollar and from there, drive up interest rates and prices.
If Mr. Paulson and other administration officials were to say that today's deficits were dangerous, it would logically follow to recommend scaling back the Bush tax cuts. By implying that the deficits are not so worrisome, they can continue to insist that spending cuts alone could fix the problem, even though that would mean deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare ?- something they are not willing to advocate explicitly. One can only hope that in discussions with his new boss, Mr. Paulson has more to say about the budget deficit than he let on during his confirmation hearing.
The Automaticity of Affect for Political Leaders, Groups, and Issues: An Experimental Test of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis
Milton Lodge1 and Charles S. Taber1
We report the results of three experimental tests of the "hot cognition" hypothesis, which posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively charged and that this affective charge is automatically activated within milliseconds on mere exposure to the concept, appreciably faster than conscious appraisal of the object.
We find support for the automaticity of affect toward political leaders, groups, and issues; specifically:
Most Ss show significantly faster reaction times to affectively congruent political concepts and significantly slower response times to affectively incongruent concepts;
These facilitation and inhibition effects, which hold for a cross-section of political leaders, groups, and issues, are strongest for those with the strongest prior attitudes, with sophisticates showing the strongest effect on "harder" political issues.
Even semantically unrelated affective concepts (e.g., "sunshine,""cancer") have a strong effect on the evaluation of political leaders, groups, and issues.
We conclude with a discussion of the "so what?" question?-the conceptual, substantive, and normative implications of hot cognition for political judgments, evaluations, and choice. One clear expectation, given that affect appears to be activated automatically on mere exposure to sociopolitical concepts, is that most citizens, but especially those sophisticates with strong political attitudes, will be biased information processors.
Inequality in America
The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them
Jun 15th 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The rich are the big gainers in America's new prosperity
AMERICANS do not go in for envy. The gap between rich and poor is bigger than in any other advanced country, but most people are unconcerned. Whereas Europeans fret about the way the economic pie is divided, Americans want to join the rich, not soak them. Eight out of ten, more than anywhere else, believe that though you may start poor, if you work hard, you can make pots of money. It is a central part of the American Dream.
The political consensus, therefore, has sought to pursue economic growth rather than the redistribution of income, in keeping with John Kennedy's adage that "a rising tide lifts all boats." The tide has been rising fast recently. Thanks to a jump in productivity growth after 1995, America's economy has outpaced other rich countries' for a decade. Its workers now produce over 30% more each hour they work than ten years ago. In the late 1990s everybody shared in this boom. Though incomes were rising fastest at the top, all workers' wages far outpaced inflation.
But after 2000 something changed. The pace of productivity growth has been rising again, but now it seems to be lifting fewer boats. After you adjust for inflation, the wages of the typical American worker?-the one at the very middle of the income distribution?-have risen less than 1% since 2000. In the previous five years, they rose over 6%. If you take into account the value of employee benefits, such as health care, the contrast is a little less stark. But, whatever the measure, it seems clear that only the most skilled workers have seen their pay packets swell much in the current economic expansion. The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies, whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP.
Even in a country that tolerates inequality, political consequences follow when the rising tide raises too few boats. The impact of stagnant wages has been dulled by rising house prices, but still most Americans are unhappy about the economy. According to the latest Gallup survey, fewer than four out of ten think it is in "excellent" or "good" shape, compared with almost seven out of ten when George Bush took office.
The White House professes to be untroubled. Average after-tax income per person, Mr Bush often points out, has risen by more than 8% on his watch, once inflation is taken into account. He is right, but his claim is misleading, since the median worker?-the one in the middle of the income range?-has done less well than the average, whose gains are pulled up by the big increases of those at the top.
Privately, some policymakers admit that the recent trends have them worried, and not just because of the congressional elections in November. The statistics suggest that the economic boom may fade. Americans still head to the shops with gusto, but it is falling savings rates and rising debts (made possible by high house prices), not real income growth, that keep their wallets open. A bust of some kind could lead to widespread political disaffection. Eventually, the country's social fabric could stretch. "If things carry on like this for long enough," muses one insider, "we are going to end up like Brazil"?-a country notorious for the concentration of its income and wealth.
America is nowhere near Brazil yet (see chart 1). Despite a quarter century during which incomes have drifted ever farther apart, the distribution of wealth has remained remarkably stable. The richest Americans now earn as big a share of overall income as they did a century ago (see chart 2), but their share of overall wealth is much lower. Indeed, it has barely budged in the few past decades.
The elites in the early years of the 20th century were living off the income generated by their accumulated fortunes. Today's rich, by and large, are earning their money. In 1916 the richest 1% got only a fifth of their income from paid work, whereas the figure in 2004 was over 60%.
The not-so-idle rich
The rise of the working rich reinforces America's self-image as the land of opportunity. But, by some measures, that image is an illusion. Several new studies* show parental income to be a better predictor of whether someone will be rich or poor in America than in Canada or much of Europe. In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth.
It is not clear whether this sclerosis is increasing: the evidence is mixed. Many studies suggest that mobility between generations has stayed roughly the same in recent decades, and some suggest it is decreasing. Even so, ordinary Americans seem to believe that theirs is still a land of opportunity. The proportion who think you can start poor and end up rich has risen 20 percentage points since 1980.
That helps explain why voters who grumble about the economy have nonetheless failed to respond to class politics. John Edwards, the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate in 2004, made little headway with his tale of "Two Americas", one for the rich and one for the rest. Over 70% of Americans support the abolition of the estate tax (inheritance tax), even though only one household in 100 pays it.
Americans tend to blame their woes not on rich compatriots but on poor foreigners. More than six out of ten are sceptical of free trade. A new poll in Foreign Affairs suggests that almost nine out of ten worry about their jobs going offshore. Congressmen reflect their concerns. Though the economy grows, many have become vociferous protectionists.
Other rich countries are watching America's experience closely. For many Europeans, America's brand of capitalism is already far too unequal. Such sceptics will be sure to make much of any sign that the broad middle-class reaps scant benefit from the current productivity boom, setting back the course of European reform even further.
The conventional tale is that the changes of the past few years are simply more steps along paths that began to diverge for rich and poor in the Reagan era. During the 1950s and 1960s, the halcyon days for America's middle class, productivity boomed and its benefits were broadly shared. The gap between the lowest and highest earners narrowed. After the 1973 oil shocks, productivity growth suddenly slowed. A few years later, at the start of the 1980s, the gap between rich and poor began to widen.
The exact size of that gap depends on how you measure it. Look at wages, the main source of income for most people, and you understate the importance of health care and other benefits. Look at household income and you need to take into account that the typical household has fallen in size in recent decades, thanks to the growth in single-parent families. Look at statistics on spending and you find that the gaps between top and bottom have widened less than for income. But every measure shows that, over the past quarter century, those at the top have done better than those in the middle, who in turn have outpaced those at the bottom. The gains of productivity growth have become increasingly skewed.
If all Americans were set on a ladder with ten rungs, the gap between the wages of those on the ninth rung and those on the first has risen by a third since 1980. Put another way, the typical worker earns only 10% more in real terms than his counterpart 25 years ago, even though overall productivity has risen much faster. Economists have long debated why America's income disparities suddenly widened after 1980. The consensus is that the main cause was technology, which increased the demand for skilled workers relative to their supply, with freer trade reinforcing the effect. Some evidence suggests that institutional changes, particularly the weakening of unions, made the going harder for people at the bottom.
Whether these shifts were good or bad depends on your political persuasion. Those on the left lament the gaps, often forgetting that the greater income disparities have created bigger incentives to get an education, which has led to a better trained, more productive workforce. The share of American workers with a college degree, 20% in 1980, is over 30% today.
The excluded middle
In their haste to applaud or lament this tale, both sides of the debate tend to overlook some nuances. First, America's rising inequality has not, in fact, been continuous. The gap between the bottom and the middle?-whether in terms of skills, age, job experience or income?-did widen sharply in the 1980s. High-school dropouts earned 12% less in an average week in 1990 than in 1980; those with only a high-school education earned 6% less. But during the 1990s, particularly towards the end of the decade, that gap stabilised and, by some measures, even narrowed. Real wages rose faster for the bottom quarter of workers than for those in the middle.
After 2000 most people lost ground, but, by many measures, those in the middle of the skills and education ladder have been hit relatively harder than those at the bottom. People who had some college experience, but no degree, fared worse than high-school dropouts. Some statistics suggest that the annual income of Americans with a college degree has fallen relative to that of high-school graduates for the first time in decades. So, whereas the 1980s were hardest on the lowest skilled, the 1990s and this decade have squeezed people in the middle.
The one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards greater concentration of income at the very top. The scale of this shift is not visible from most popular measures of income or wages, as they do not break the distribution down finely enough. But several recent studies have dissected tax records to investigate what goes on at the very top.
The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%?-the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder?-has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.
Put these pieces together and you do not have a picture of ever-widening inequality but of what Lawrence Katz of Harvard University, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Melissa Kearney of the Brookings Institution call a polarisation of the labour market. The bottom is no longer falling behind, the top is soaring ahead and the middle is under pressure.
Superstars and super-squeezed
Can changes in technology explain this revised picture? Up to a point. Computers and the internet have reduced the demand for routine jobs that demand only moderate skills, such as the work of bank clerks, while increasing the productivity of the highest-skilled. Studies in Britain and Germany as well as America show that the pace of job growth since the early 1990s has been slower in occupations that are easy to computerise.
For the most talented and skilled, technology has increased the potential market and thus their productivity. Top entertainers or sportsmen, for instance, now perform for a global audience. Some economists believe that technology also explains the soaring pay of chief executives. One argument is that information technology has made top managers more mobile, since it no longer takes years to master the intricacies of any one industry. As a result, the market for chief executives is bigger and their pay is bid up. Global firms plainly do compete globally for talent: Alcoa's boss is a Brazilian, Sony's chief executive is American (and Welsh).
But the scale of America's income concentration at the top, and the fact that no other country has seen such extreme shifts, has sent people searching for other causes. The typical American chief executive now earns 300 times the average wage, up tenfold from the 1970s. Continental Europe's bosses have seen nothing similar. This discrepancy has fostered the "fat cat" theory of inequality: greedy businessmen sanction huge salaries for each other at the expense of shareholders.
Whichever explanation you choose for the signs of growing inequality, none of the changes seems transitory. The middle rungs of America's labour market are likely to become ever more squeezed. And that squeeze feels worse thanks to another change that has hit the middle class most: greater fluctuations in people's incomes.
The overall economy has become more stable over the past quarter century. America has had only two recessions in the past 20 years, in 1990-91 and 2001, both of which were mild by historical standards. But life has become more turbulent for firms and people's income now fluctuates much more from one year to the next than it did a generation ago. Some evidence suggests that the trends in short-term income volatility mirror the underlying wage shifts and may now be hitting the middle class most.
What of the future? It is possible that the benign pattern of the late 1990s will return. The disappointing performance of the Bush era may simply reflect a job market that is weaker than it appears. Although unemployment is low, at 4.6%, other signals, such as the proportion of people working, seem inconsistent with a booming economy.
More likely, the structural changes in America's job market that began in the 1990s are now being reinforced by big changes in the global economy. The integration of China's low-skilled millions and the increased offshoring of services to India and other countries has expanded the global supply of workers. This has reduced the relative price of labour and raised the returns to capital. That reinforces the income concentration at the top, since most stocks and shares are held by richer people. More important, globalisation may further fracture the traditional link between skills and wages.
As Frank Levy of MIT points out, offshoring and technology work in tandem, since both dampen the demand for jobs that can be reduced to a set of rules or scripts, whether those jobs are for book-keepers or call-centre workers. Alan Blinder of Princeton, by contrast, says that the demand for skills depends on whether they must be used in person: X-rays taken in Boston may be read by Indians in Bangalore, but offices cannot be cleaned at long distance. So who will be squeezed and who will not is hard to predict.
The number of American service jobs that have shifted offshore is small, some 1m at the most. And most of those demand few skills, such as operating telephones. Mr Levy points out that only 15 radiologists in India are now reading American X-rays. But nine out of ten Americans worry about offshoring. That fear may be enough to hold down the wages of college graduates in service industries.
All in all, America's income distribution is likely to continue the trends of the recent past. While those at the top will go on drawing huge salaries, those in the broad middle of the middle class will see their incomes churned. The political consequences will depend on the pace of change and the economy's general health. With luck, the offshoring of services will happen gradually, allowing time for workers to adapt their skills while strong growth will keep employment high. But if the economy slows, Americans' scepticism of globalisation is sure to rise. And even their famous tolerance of inequality may reach a limit.
Bush's bumbling folksiness causes progressives to disregard him -- but he has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing his harmful conservative agenda.
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush's plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as incompetent. For example, Nancy Pelosi said "The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader."
Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush's disasters -- Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit -- are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.
To Bush's base, his bumbling folksiness is part of his charm -- it fosters conservative populism. Bush plays up this image by proudly stating his lack of interest in reading and current events, his fondness for naps and vacations and his self-deprecating jokes. This image causes the opposition to underestimate his capacities -- disregarding him as a complete idiot -- and deflects criticism of his conservative allies. If incompetence is the problem, it's all about Bush. But, if conservatism is the problem, it is about a set of ideas, a movement and its many adherents.
The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:
Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed
Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill and a number of massive tax cuts
Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment -- "The Healthy Forests Act" and the "Clear Skies Initiative" -- to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
Winning re-election and solidifying his party's grip on Congress
These aren't signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.
It's not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it's the conservative agenda.
The Conservative Agenda
Conservative philosophy has three fundamental tenets: individual initiative, that is, government's positive role in people's lives outside of the military and police should be minimized; the President is the moral authority; and free markets are enough to foster freedom and opportunity.
The conservative vision for government is to shrink it - to "starve the beast" in Conservative Grover Norquist's words. The conservative tagline for this rationale is that "you can spend your money better than the government can." Social programs are considered unnecessary or "discretionary" since the primary role of government is to defend the country's border and police its interior. Stewardship of the commons, such as allocation of healthcare or energy policy, is left to people's own initiative within the free market. Where profits cannot be made -- conservation, healthcare for the poor -- charity is meant to replace justice and the government should not be involved.
Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn't there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn't have failed if he bore no responsibility.
The response to Hurricane Katrina -- rather, the lack of response -- was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the government can have no positive role in its citizen's lives. This response was not about Bush's incompetence, it was a conservative, shrink-government response to a natural disaster.
Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming, not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing global warming would call for environmental regulation and governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives' golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes -- based on recognizing global warming -- were not heeded. Conservative free market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.
Our budget deficit is not the result of incompetent fiscal management. It too is an outgrowth of conservative philosophy. What better way than massive deficits to rid social programs of their funding?
In Iraq, we also see the impact of philosophy as much as a failure of execution.
The idea for the war itself was born out of deep conservative convictions about the nature and capacity of US military force. Among the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles (signed in 1997 by a who's who of the architects of the Iraq war -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby among others) are four critical points:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad
we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Implicit in these ideas is that the United States military can spread democracy through the barrel of a gun. Our military might and power can be a force for good.
It also indicates that the real motive behind the Iraq war wasn't to stop Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but was a test of neoconservative theory that the US military could reshape Middle East geo-politics. The manipulation and disregard of intelligence to sell the war was not incompetence, it was the product of a conservative agenda.
Unfortunately, this theory exalts a hubristic vision over the lessons of history. It neglects the realization that there is a limit to a foreign army's ability to shape foreign politics for the good. Our military involvement in Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, Cuba (prior to Castro) and Panama, or European imperialist endeavors around the globe should have taught us this lesson. Democracy needs to be an organic, homegrown movement, as it was in this country. If we believe so deeply in our ideals, they will speak for themselves and inspire others.
During the debate over Iraq, the conservative belief in the unquestioned authority and moral leadership of the President helped shape public support. We see this deference to the President constantly: when Conservatives call those questioning the President's military decisions "unpatriotic"; when Conservatives defend the executive branch's use of domestic spying in the war on terror; when Bush simply refers to himself as the "decider." "I support our President" was a common justification of assent to the Iraq policy.
Additionally, as the implementer of the neoconservative vision and an unquestioned moral authority, our President felt he had no burden to forge international consensus or listen to the critiques of our allies. "You're with us, or you're against us," he proclaimed after 9/11.
Much criticism continues to be launched against this administration for ineptitude in its reconstruction efforts. Tragically, it is here too that the administration's actions have been shaped less by ineptitude than by deeply held conservative convictions about the role of government.
As noted above, Conservatives believe that government's role is limited to security and maintaining a free market. Given this conviction, it's no accident that administration policies have focused almost exclusively on the training of Iraqi police, and US access to the newly free Iraqi market -- the invisible hand of the market will take care of the rest. Indeed, George Packer has recently reported that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is nearing its end ("The Lessons of Tal Affar," The New Yorker, April 10th, 2006). Iraqis must find ways to rebuild themselves, and the free market we have constructed for them is supposed to do this. This is not ineptitude. This is the result of deep convictions over the nature of freedom and the responsibilities of governments to their people.
Finally, many of the miscalculations are the result of a conservative analytic focus on narrow causes and effects, rather than mere incompetence. Evidence for this focus can be seen in conservative domestic policies: Crime policy is based on punishing the criminals, independent of any effort to remedy the larger social issues that cause crime; immigration policy focuses on border issues and the immigrants, and ignores the effects of international and domestic economic policy on population migration; environmental policy is based on what profits there are to be gained or lost today, without attention paid to what the immeasurable long-term costs will be to the shared resource of our environment; education policy, in the form of vouchers, ignores the devastating effects that dismantling the public school system will have on our whole society.
Is it any surprise that the systemic impacts of the Iraq invasion were not part of the conservative moral or strategic calculus used in pursuing the war?
The conservative war rhetoric focused narrowly on ousting Saddam -- he was an evil dictator, and evil cannot be tolerated, period. The moral implications of unleashing social chaos and collateral damage in addition to the lessons of history were not relevant concerns.
As a consequence, we expected to be greeted as liberators. The conservative plan failed to appreciate the complexities of the situation that would have called for broader contingency planning. It lacked an analysis of what else would happen in Iraq and the Middle East as a result of ousting the Hussein Government, such as an Iranian push to obtain nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden recently said, "if I had known the president was going to be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him the authority [to go to war]." Had Bush actually been incompetent, he would have never been able to lead us to war in Iraq. Had Bush been incompetent, he would not have been able to ram through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Had Bush been incompetent, he would have been blocked from stacking the courts with right-wing judges. Incompetence, on reflection, might have actually been better for the country.
Hidden Successes
Perhaps the biggest irony of the Bush-is-incompetent frame is that these "failures" -- Iraq, Katrina and the budget deficit -- have been successes in terms of advancing the conservative agenda.
One of the goals of Conservatives is to keep people from relying on the federal government. Under Bush, FEMA was reorganized to no longer be a first responder in major natural disasters, but to provide support for local agencies. This led to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Now citizens, as well as local and state governments, have become distrustful of the federal government's capacity to help ordinary citizens. Though Bush's popularity may have suffered, enhancing the perception of federal government as inept turned out to be a conservative victory.
Conservatives also strive to get rid of protective agencies and social programs. The deficit Bush created through irresponsible tax cuts and a costly war in Iraq will require drastic budget cuts to remedy. Those cuts, conservatives know, won't come from military spending, particularly when they raise the constant specter of war. Instead, the cuts will be from what Conservatives have begun to call "non-military, discretionary spending;" that is, the programs that contribute to the common good like the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEMA, OSHA and the NLRB. Yet another success for the conservative agenda.
Both Iraq and Katrina have enriched the coffers of the conservative corporate elite, thus further advancing the conservative agenda. Halliburton, Lockhead Martin and US oil companies have enjoyed huge profit margins in the last six years. Taking Iraq's oil production off-line in the face of rising international demand meant prices would rise, making the oil inventories of Exxon and other firms that much more valuable, leading to record profits. The destruction wrought by Katrina and Iraq meant billions in reconstruction contracts. The war in Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan) meant billions in military equipment contracts. Was there any doubt where those contracts would go? Chalk up another success for Bush's conservative agenda.
Bush also used Katrina as an opportunity to suspend the environmental and labor protection laws that Conservatives despise so much. In the wake of Katrina, environmental standards for oil refineries were temporarily suspended to increase production. Labor laws are being thwarted to drive down the cost of reconstruction efforts. So, amidst these "disasters," Conservatives win again.
Where most Americans see failure in Iraq - George Miller recently called Iraq a "blunder of historic proportions" - conservative militarists are seeing many successes. Conservatives stress the importance of our military -- our national pride and worth is expressed through its power and influence. Permanent bases are being constructed as planned in Iraq, and America has shown the rest of the world that we can and will preemptively strike with little provocation. They succeeded in a mobilization of our military forces based on ideological pretenses to impact foreign policy. The war has struck fear in other nations with a hostile show of American power. The conservatives have succeeded in strengthening what they perceive to be the locus of the national interest --military power.
It's Not Incompetence
When Progressives shout "Incompetence!" it obscures the many conservative successes. The incompetence frame drastically misses the point, that the conservative vision is doing great harm to this country and the world. An understanding of this and an articulate progressive response is needed. Progressives know that government can and should have a positive role in our lives beyond simple, physical security. It had a positive impact during the progressive era, busting trusts, and establishing basic labor standards. It had a positive impact during the new deal, softening the blow of the depression by creating jobs and stimulating the economy. It had a positive role in advancing the civil rights movement, extending rights to previously disenfranchised groups. And the United States can have a positive role in world affairs without the use of its military and expressions of raw power. Progressives acknowledge that we are all in this together, with "we" meaning all people, across all spectrums of race, class, religion, sex, sexual preference and age. "We" also means across party lines, state lines and international borders.
The mantra of incompetence has been an unfortunate one. The incompetence frame assumes that there was a sound plan, and that the trouble has been in the execution. It turns public debate into a referendum on Bush's management capabilities, and deflects a critique of the impact of his guiding philosophy. It also leaves open the possibility that voters will opt for another radically conservative president in 2008, so long as he or she can manage better. Bush will not be running again, so thinking, talking and joking about him being incompetent offers no lessons to draw from his presidency.
Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush's conservative philosophy is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.
Conservatism itself is the villain that is harming our people, destroying our environment, and weakening our nation. Conservatives are undermining American values through legislation almost every day. This message applies to every conservative bill proposed to Congress. The issue that arises every day is which philosophy of governing should shape our country. It is the issue of our times. Unless conservative philosophy itself is discredited, Conservatives will continue their domination of public discourse, and with it, will continue their domination of politics.
