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The Daily Debate
edited by Robert Tracinski
Brought to you by RealClearPolitics.
June 12, 2012
3. Blowback
4. Around the RealClear Universe
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1. Public or Private?
The debate continues over President Obama's comment about how "the private sector is doing fine." Contrary to the views of cynics (and White House press secretaries), the debate is not over that one quote taken out of context. It is about the context. The basic question is: what is really holding back the economy, a weak private sector or a contraction of the public sector?
Paul Krugman tells CBS, "The real story about this economy is that the cutbacks at the public sector are what's hurting the recovery."
"By this point in Obama's presidency, if we had normal public sector job growth, we would have around 800,000 more people. Firefighters, schoolteachers, police officers. Instead, we've got 600,000 fewer. So right there, it's like 1.4 million jobs that we should have had in the public sector. And, of course, those would have translated into more private sector jobs too. So that's what [Obama] was trying to get at, and of course, he screwed up the line."Yet this presumes that the pre-recession rate of growth was "normal" and could be continued indefinitely. At Bloomberg, however, Josh Barro asks whether Obama actually knows the reason why local governments aren't hiring. He writes that "a major barrier to job growth in the public sector" is "unsustainable compensation structures." Cities and states can't hire or retain workers because they are using all of their money to make contributions to generous pension funds. For example:
"San Jose spends $142,000 per [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising."San Jose, of course, recently passed a referendum reducing benefits for public employees—on the same day that Scott Walker won his recall vote in Wisconsin. Which seems to imply that our leaders should be more like Walker, a conclusion that Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine embrace.
Back on the left, The Nation's Bryce Covert also points to public sector job losses.
"Since the recovery officially began, the number of local government jobs has fallen by 3 percent, while the private sector has actually been able to add jobs—4.3 million, to be exact. And it's worth comparing those numbers to recent recessions to get the full effect of just how bad, and abnormal, this trend is. Romney is at least partly right in that the private sector isn't doing as well as it could be. At this point in the recessions experienced in 1992 and 2003, it had added 5 million and 4.5 million jobs, respectively."But the public sector looks far, far worse now than it did then. As Ben Polak and Peter K. Schott write in the New York Times today, 'In the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it's not.' Local government employment actually grew in the past two recessions by 7.7 percent and 5.2 percent for each respective period. This time around, it's hemorrhaging jobs....
"The huge fall in public sector employment really is dragging down the economy."
PJ Media's Tom Blumer comes back with a graph comparing private and public employment, not just during the recovery, but during the whole recession. He points out that public-sector employment never really went down during the recession and only recently has the "fat" public sector begun to show losses which are minor compared to the millions of jobs in the private sector that were lost and have not yet been regained.
The Nation's Covert concluded that the public-sector job losses were driven, not by economic necessity, but by the ideology of newly elected "Tea-Party-esque" Republicans on the state level.
"[T]he massive job loss we've been experiencing in the public sector is no random coincidence or unfortunate side effect. It is part of an ideological battle waged by ultra conservatives who were swept into power in the 2010 elections. Republicans seized control of eleven states, and of those, five were at the top of the list for public sector job loss. Only seven states lost more than 2.5 percent of their government workforce from December 2010 to December 2011, and those five newly Republican states were among them."This is one issue that everyone seems to agree on: the real issue is ideological. Echoing Jennifer Rubin, who argues that Obama's "private sector" line was not a gaffe but a statement of his philosophy, Peter Wehner names that philosophy: "By his own logic, President Obama believes the path to prosperity is for the federal government to spend more, and more, and more."
Charles Krauthammer adds the obvious rejoinder to the assumption that the economy could be boosted by more government hiring: "We can see in Europe the meltdown of the council members from Greece to Portugal, Spain, and Italy, which hugely expanded the public sector as a way to provide employment and they are in collapse."
This may end up being the defining moment of the election, not just because it was a gaffe, but because of the big, fundamental issues it raises. Expect that debate to continue.
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2. Who Lost the Economy?
The debate over public versus private employment is just part of a larger debate: who lost the economy? That debate takes on greater urgency with another giant piece of bad news: the average net worth of American families is down 40% since the beginning of the recession, partly because of decreased housing prices and partly because of decreased income. So who is responsible? How did the economic recovery fail to take off?
Byron York gives an overview of the Republicans' case for blaming Obama. The idea is that Obama was so insistent on passing his health-care law that he deliberately put the economy on the back burner. That claim is based on reports like this one:
"There's no doubt Obama and his party pushed other issues aside to focus on health care. In a March 2010 profile of then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the Washington Post reported: 'As health-care negotiations inched along at the end of [2009], Emanuel grew impatient about addressing national joblessness concerns. One Democratic senator who wanted to pivot to unemployment said Emanuel shared his thinking. "I understand, I understand. We have to get to jobs," the senator...recalled Emanuel commiserating. In a meeting with the president and chief of staff, the senator stated his case, but Obama decided the priority was seeing health-care reform through.'"Time's Michael Crowley reports that Democrats are preparing, once again, to blame George W. Bush, increasing their references to the former president and their attempts to tie him to Romney.
"Democrats often cite polling showing that voters blame Bush at least as much as Obama for the state of the economy, a dynamic that political scientist John Sides argues has propped up Obama's approval numbers."But I'm not sure we have to choose between blaming Bush and blaming Obama. Can't we blame both?
That's what Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore do in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. They are scrupulously bipartisan, crediting President Clinton and the Republican Congress for reducing government's share of GDP in the 1990s, while blaming a recent spending binge on a Democratic Congress, President Bush, and President Obama.
"From the second quarter of 2007, i.e., the first full quarter of a Pelosi-Reid dominated Congress and a politically weakened President Bush, to the second quarter of 2009 when President Obama assumed office, government spending skyrocketed to 27.3% of GDP from 21.4%. It was the largest peacetime expansion of government spending in U.S. history."After taking office in 2009, with spending and debt already at record high levels and the deficit headed to $1 trillion, President Obama proceeded to pass his own $830 billion stimulus, auto bailouts, mortgage relief plans, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the $1.7 trillion ObamaCare entitlement (which isn't even accounted for in the chart). While spending did come down in 2010, it wasn't the result of spending cuts but rather because TARP loans began to be repaid, and that cash was counted against spending."
So Democrats should be careful. Blame is not a zero-sum game. There's plenty of it to go around.
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3. Blowback
So far, the Obama administration has been fairly scandal-free. But no administration escapes scandals (real or trumped-up) for long. Thus, it looks like House Republicans are preparing to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for giving unresponsive or misleading answers on the "Fast and Furious" investigation.
The other scandal brewing is about who leaked to the press about President Obama's drone and cyberwar programs. But while the right thinks the scandal is about revealing sensitive national security information—the reporters cited top administration officials, and the leaked information clearly makes Obama look tough on al-Qaeda and Iran—the left is beginning to criticize Obama over the substance of the reports.
Katrina vanden Heuvel writes:
"The problem isn't the leaks, it's the policy. It's the assertion of a presidential prerogative that the administration can target for death people it decides are terrorists—even American citizens—anywhere in the world, at any time, on secret evidence with no review."Richard Cohen complains that it makes the president actually look weaker.
"The leak that troubles me concerns the killing of suspected or actual terrorists. The triumphalist tone of the leaks—the Tarzan-like chest-beating of various leakers—not only is in poor taste but shreds a long-standing convention that, in these matters, the president has deniability. The president of the United States is not The Godfather...."Killing is a serious matter. The death of an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) is deeply troubling (the government asked the government if it was legal, and the government said it was). For this as well as other assassinations, there could be blowback.
"Assassination by drone has its charms—it has severely degraded al-Qaeda—and war, after all, is war. But I wonder if those presidents who knew war—a Truman, an Eisenhower, a Kennedy—would themselves boast about killing or let others do it for them. The leakers set out to blow a mighty trumpet for Obama. It came out, however, like a shrill pennywhistle."
I don't know if these leaks will have military "blowback," but they are definitely having political blowback.
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4. Around the RealClear Universe
There's much more on the main page at RealClearPolitics, and here are some highlights and sidelights from around the RealClear universe.
RealClearMarkets links to the latest on the European crisis, including a Spanish bank bailout that may not work and the possibility that Italy will be next to collapse. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera advocates a TARP-style bailout for Europe.
RealClearWorld links to a warning from Kevin Rafferty that India's boom is fading because it has abandoned its pro-free-market reform agenda. Shashi Tharoor argues, however, that the hand-wringing is exaggerated and that India's economic prospects are fundamentally sound.
RealClearHistory marks the 25th anniversary of President Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech by linking to a recollection from speechwriter Peter Robinson, which is unfortunately behind the Wall Street Journal's paywall. They also link to a New York Times piece describing as a "myth" the idea that this was an example of Reagan confronting the Soviets. Instead, this piece argues, the speech was intended to provide cover for a conciliatory policy toward Soviets and to "set the terms for the end of the Cold War."
RealClearTechnology reports that Microsoft and Yahoo! are selling customers' names and data for political ads. I suppose it was inevitable.
RealClearScience links to an article about a study that uses data about Google searches for racial epithets, in an attempt to quantify the "Bradley Effect"—the tendency of voters in opinion polls to overstate their support for black candidates out of fear of being labeled as racists. The study is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that some of these racially charged epithets have been adopted by blacks themselves, a complicated little linguistic loophole Gwyneth Paltrow recently discovered when she tweeted a reference to a rap song about her, um, African-American acquaintances in Paris.
RealClearReligion continues to link to interesting discussions about Mitt Romney and Mormonism—though the most interesting thing is that these are largely attempts to explain why discussions of Mormonism have not been featured in the mainstream political debate. One article explains:
"What's surprising in 2012 is the relative lack of anxiety on the other side, among evangelicals who for years considered Mormonism a 'cult' that was to be feared, not embraced."In fact, the relative ambivalence among prominent evangelicals about this new 'Mormon moment'—and the fact that Romney's campaign could mainstream Mormonism right into the Oval Office—could radically shift the dynamics on America's political and religious landscape."
Meanwhile, Mormon blogger Ryan Bell informs us that "No, Jesus Was Not an American." Thanks for clearing that up.
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—Robert Tracinski
Send comments or suggestions to tracinski@realclearpolitics.com.
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