GELFAND’S WORLD--I don't know who won this latest Republican debate, but Donald Trump lost it by not winning. When your appeal involves getting in the better insults, you have to keep escalating the attack or the audience will get bored. There is only so far you can push the nasty-boy persona, and Trump seems to be getting near the end of that particular rope. Perhaps it's because CNBC, not being Fox, didn't feel the need to take Donald down a peg. By mostly ignoring him, they actually did more damage.
In watching this debate, I noticed something that was kind of a subliminal irritation. Actually, there were several, which we will get into, but there is one that really requires a reminder.
Those of us of a certain age will remember that the George W. Bush presidency spent money like it was water -- water before the drought, that is. The Iraq invasion and occupation was financed on the national credit card, to the tune of a trillion or two. When you count the rest of the increase in military spending and a few other big ticket items, all combined with a hefty tax cut, the George W. Bush presidency was a financial mess. The national debt ran up predictably.
Note that the Republican argument at the time was that tax cuts lead to substantial economic growth, enough to finance the otherwise-predictable fall in tax revenues. It was a bad, factually incorrect idea even then, and it is the same now.
The Bush policies also led to a massive recession that still plagues us.
But in those days, Republicans didn't seem to care much about deficit spending. Deficits don't matter was the insiders' mantra. Deficits didn't matter if the president was a Republican.
What we should also remember is that when Obama got elected, all of a sudden the Republican Party stood for budget cutting and deficit reduction. It was a massive one-eighty that went largely unremarked by the media. What was horribly, horribly wrong about the new Republican approach was that Obama took office in the face of a massive recession.
The proper economic tool in the face of recession is government spending. In fact, deficit spending is the prescribed process, as described by Keynes more than half a century ago, and validated by economic studies and the history of the twentieth century.
So we have a political party that opposed deficit spending when it was most needed, and continues to push the same kind of economic austerity philosophy that has been so damaging in Europe. Read Paul Krugman for the details.
What was missing in the debate was any question from the moderators along these lines: Economic history and our modern experience show that the supply side economics that all of you are pushing is a failed experiment, leading to recessions and massive deficit spending. We experienced serious recessions under George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, recessions which mostly receded under presidents Clinton and Obama. Your response?
The moderators didn't ask that question. The candidates should have secretly breathed sighs of relief, and informally thanked the questioners, at least under their breaths, for being allowed to get away with their massive tax cut proposals.
Instead, the candidates attacked the panel and the media in general. Marco Rubio led the charge, but Trump, Cruz, and Christie got in their own digs.
As a lot of pundits have pointed out, the criticism was not entirely off base. Asking about fantasy football, or asking Donald Trump whether he was promoting a comic book presidency, were questions which lacked gravitas. The opening question, inviting candidates to explain their biggest weakness (as in some job interviews) fell flat, with the candidates predictably ignoring the question and reciting their personal canned speeches.
On the candidates' side, there were some seriously bad ideas floated. Several candidates proposed replacing the current income tax structure with a flat tax. If you listened closely, it turned out that they weren't proposing a flat tax at all, but something more like the current progressive income tax structure, except that it would be limited to two brackets. When the proposal is that the first forty-thousand dollars is untaxed, and the remainder is taxed at ten or fifteen percent, that is still a progressive income tax. The main difference with the current system is that those with large incomes would save a lot of money, because there would no longer be tax brackets in the twenty and thirty percent range. As usual, these candidates were tossing bones to the multimillionaires and billionaires.
The panel allowed the candidates to get away with these proposals.
John Kasich put himself forward as the reasonable and responsible candidate, and then pushed for a federal balanced budget amendment. Such a rule, if enacted, would go against the economic experience of the past century, not to mention standard theories of macroeconomics.
Marco Rubio supported the H-1B visa, which allows American companies to replace American workers with cheap labor from overseas, particularly in the computer technology sector. Rubio worked both sides of the street by reciting a list of proposed reforms such as requiring market level salaries to the visa holders, and requiring that jobs be posted for 180 days so that American workers could apply. If you listened carefully, the whole thing went against the free market dogma being espoused by all the other candidates. But I think everybody knew that these so-called reforms were window dressing, because an H-1B system with Rubio's proposed changes wouldn't be acceptable to the American companies that have made use of it so effectively.
For some reason, the Republican candidates spoke sympathetically about the plight of single moms. I suspect that the field was responding to poll numbers which show that the Republican Party isn't doing well with this demographic. Fiorina tried to invert the conventional view that Republican dogma is anti-woman, going so far as to claim that all of Hillary Clinton's and Obama's actions have been to the detriment of women. I suspect that we will be hearing a lot of arguments on both sides about the war on women.
If there was one issue in these Republican debates that Democrats will pound on, it was the twin topics of Social Security and Medicare. There seemed to be universal sentiment that Social Security needs to be reformed. Candidates supported raising the retirement age, and some supported allowing workers to opt out of Social Security at least in part. As Kevin Drum has pointed out repeatedly, Social Security is doing fine, and will do fine for the next half-century, with perhaps a few tweaks to keep it on target. As for Medicare, candidate John Kasich tossed a barb at Carson about abolishing the program.
Mike Huckabee pointed out that a lot of Medicare spending goes to four major chronic diseases (Alzheimer's, heart disease, diabetes, cancer) and proposed that we find cures for them in order to fix Medicare. I found this argument strange. For one thing, finding better treatments (or preventions) for any or all of these is desirable in and of itself. Secondly, the way to move towards cures is to fund basic research, not to mention clinical research. I didn't hear Huckabee say anything about doubling the funding of the National Institutes of Health.
Overall, this was a bubble debate in the sense of the candidates being in a dogmatic bubble of supply side economics, tax cut frenzy, and anti-big-government hysteria. Fiorina flogged the anti-government position best, but it was the unquestioned assumption that was never challenged. Liberals will recall that anti-government frenzy was the choice of segregationists during the civil rights era. I wonder how many young Republicans understand that this was the origin of current party dogma.
There was one topic that some of the candidates made that seems to make sense. They spoke of vocational education as something we need to do better. This is one area where I have to agree with those few candidates, and disagree with the ostensibly liberal idea that every student should be offered a college-track education. The Republican candidates failed to point out that European countries are way ahead of us in offering vocational training at the high school level that leads to well paying jobs in the manufacturing sector. Still, they get credit for bringing up vocational education at all.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 88
Pub: Oct 29, 2015
