CR Reading List: Shun the Non-Believer!

Stephen posted the article mentioned herein to our facebook page over the weekend, which prompted my confusion. Why would a committed economic conservative like Steve post an article that fails to make a compelling case for any of the basic assumptions underlying the intense Republican opposition to President Obama? Read the original article here. My thoughts below:

Republicans have never done a particularly good job of concealing their efforts to paint Barack Obama as a radical left-wing socialist who doesn't believe in American greatness and wants to fundamentally transform the very nature of our country. I used to think this was to manipulate the Tea Party and other elements of the GOP grassroots. Increasingly, however, I'm not so sure.

It seems that even the party elites and other conservative thought-makers really, actually believe this stuff. Honestly I'm not sure how else to explain Fred Barnes (of The Weekly Standard)'s weird, post-factual account of the recently-released Obama Budget for Fiscal Year 2013.

Read Barnes' take here (The Real Obama - 2/27/12 issue)

More radical socialism after the jump...


First things first - Barnes is pretty conservative, but he's hardly outside the mainstream. Before joining the columnist team at TWS, Barnes reported on the White House and Supreme Court in the 1980s and 90s for both The New Republic and the Baltimore Sun. He is often held up as a voice of reason in conservative media, and in addition to his other current role at Fox News, he has made several appearances on C-SPAN.

Barnes' core argument against the Obama budget, then?

"He turns out to be a left-wing progressive who rejects many of the mainstream political and economic ideas of post-World War II America."

Yikes. That doesn't sound like someone I would want to be my president.

In his article, Barnes lays out an 8-point argument for why Barack Obama isn't like you and me - in order to keep things succinct, however, let's examine four of his most egregious assertions about the president's underlying political and economic philosophy:

1) America is a deeply unjust and unfair country
Classic GOP talking point - expect to hear a lot more of this as we move into the general election this year. For evidence in this instance, Barnes quotes Obama's widely-circulated December speech on economic fairness in Osawatomie, Kansas:

“The basic bargain that made this country great has eroded,” Obama said at Osawatomie. “Hard work [has] stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success.”

First of all, in what world is this not true? We're now in decade four of stagnant middle class wages, which led to more people working more for less, which led to increasing personal and household debt burdens, which are only beginning to lessen as the country digs out of the recession. Barnes basically took Obama's acknowledgement of a widely-accepted economic trend and attached a meaning that is not at all evident.

But hey, if you don't believe me, maybe this graph will convince you:

Contributing in productivity while not benefiting in wages

2) Government spending is better at spurring the economy than private investment
This one is particularly amusing, because Barnes quotes Obama as arguing that the private sector should be the primary engineer for job growth, only to then make an evidence-free claim that this isn't actually what the president believes. Here it is:

“Yes, business and not government will always be the prime generator of good jobs,” he said at Osawatomie. That was lip service. He took it away in the next sentence. “As a nation, we’ve always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed.” The key phrase was “through our government,” which for Obama means Washington-directed programs, not incentives for private investment.

Once again, Barnes takes Obama's words and projects onto them a meaning for which there is no compelling argument. "Through our government" could mean any number of things - since the last time I checked, tax breaks don't appear out of thin air. Either way, public investment takes many forms, from direct government research and development (if you like the internet, you should support government R&D spending) to Barnes' favored "incentives for private investment," which are at the heart of Obama's renewable energy policy.

3) When the rich get richer, the middle class and poor get worse off
Initially, this claim about Obama's ideology almost passes muster... until Barnes makes another leap of faith:

Obama often mentions the middle class and the poor one after the other. He doesn’t claim a cause and effect. But the implication is there’s at least a correlation. You don’t get prosperity for the few without declining prospects for the many. Obama doesn’t believe in a growing economic pie.

I'm not sure where any substance at all for that last sentence comes from. Why wouldn't the president believe in a growing economic pie? For one, the bigger that pie grows this year, in 2012, the more likely it is that he gets re-elected. The distinction is in where the new slices of that pie go. Overwhelmingly to the already-rich, as they have for the last 30 years? Or are they more evenly distributed throughout the population? You can have a growing pie that doesn't leave the middle class behind - the problem is that the opposite has happened since the start of Reaganomics.

4) Medicare and Medicaid are not big problems.
This is just funny. I can't claim to know how Barack Obama views the future solvency of Medicare in the silence of his heart, but the current administration has at least acknowledged the need for sustainable management of the program by finding modest cost savings, all of which were opposed - yes, opposed - by the GOP. I'm not sure how this point about entitlement spending passed the logic test at The Weekly Standard, but it sure is mildly amusing to hear conservative politicians rail against government on the one hand while promising senior citizens to never, ever, cut Medicare on the other.

Fred Barnes is clearly a smart guy. He graduated from the University of Virginia and has an impressive media resume that includes a prestigious fellowship honor from Harvard. With that being said, I'm not sure how he writes an article such as this with a straight face. As I said at the outset, to me it's an indication that Republicans are so blinded by their staunch belief in Obama-as-left-wing-radical that things like logical and factual due diligence fly out the window.

If you'd like to read the rest of an article that might have earned Fred Barnes a B- if he turned it in at his esteemed college alma mater, feel free - but I'm going to stop there and leave Stephen with the unenviable task of defending his ideological compatriot.


Stephen's Response:
Well, first I'd like to point out that my ideological convictions are pretty out there, and while closer to Fred Barnes than Matt, they are certainly not spot on. As such, I'll only focus on the points that are relevant to me.

1 - Matt, productivity only makes sense to use as a measure of  "hard work" if you believe that computers and technology have not had an impact on out lives. If so, use the traditional measure of labor, "average hours worked", which I have so kindly prepared for you here. As you can see, the problem is not wages rising, its hours working. In fact, the rise in incomes is due entirely to rising wages. This, in my opinion, pokes a pretty big hole in the liberal argument that the poor are working really hard and just getting fucked.

The other real issues for me with Obama's budget is point 2- it does nothing to address our debt problem, which is the real harm to the middle class. Point 8- it attacks the investor class, which provides the capital for the entrepreneur (that Obama loves so much), which in turns creates jobs. However, without that capital the whole system has a problem. This is why Barnes can argue in point 3 that Obama does not believe in the private sector. If the private sector cannot provide capital, then the only other option is government. And I hope Obama is wise enough to understand that if he further taxes private capital, he further limits private capital and the only way to make it up is with (inefficient) government money. Which, I'm quite scared, is actually his goal.

Other than that, the points made by both you and Barnes are really nothing more than assertions into the inner workings of another person. Nothing substantial for me to argue. You can say Obama is concerned with medicare and Barnes can say he's not. I'd rather just debate the actual budget.