“Andrew Sullivan”

Obama’s Budget Philosophy: Life Is Short, Eat Dessert First

by Hans Bader on February 18, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Energy, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

If a motto summed up the Obama administration, it might be, “Life is short. Eat dessert first.” President Obama’s policies are all about self-indulgence in the present, to be paid for with either long-run economic decline, or painful sacrifices by future generations.

His recent budget proposal, which contains a mix of real spending increases and mostly imaginary “cuts,” is a case in point. It pretends to cut spending and the deficit, but its “cuts” are slated to occur largely in the distant future (and thus may never happen), while its increases kick in almost immediately. It is so dishonest that it has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum.

As former congressional economist Chris Edwards notes, although Obama claims it cuts spending:

His new budget proposes slightly more discretionary and entitlement spending for next year than did his last budget!

  • Last year, Obama planned to spend $1.301 trillion on discretionary programs in FY2012, but now he plans to spend $1.340 trillion.
  • Last year, Obama planned to spend $2,107” billion “on entitlement programs in FY2012, but now he plans to spend $2,140” billion.

Similarly, The Wall Street Journal calls the “White House Budget” proposal “cynical and unrealistic,” since it pretends to cut spending over the long run, but openly “increases deficits above the spending baseline for the next two years.”

(Obama made the same kind of deceptive sales pitch for his $800 billion stimulus package, focusing on immediate gratification and ignoring future costs. In pushing the stimulus, he cited Congressional Budget Office claims that it would save jobs in the short run, while ignoring the CBO’s own finding that the stimulus will actually shrink the economy over the long run, by exploding the national debt and crowding out private investment. Obama also made the apocalyptic claim that the stimulus package was necessary to avert “irreversible decline,” but this claim was so incredible that it was not even peddled by his supporters in the media. The stimulus ended up destroying jobs even in the short run by wiping out jobs in the export sector, and subsidizing foreign green jobs .)

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama in 2008, calls Obama’s budget proposal “disastrous.” She notes that his proposed budget includes phony, “sketchily outlined cuts,” and short-term patches that are “stacked to expire just after Obama (in theory) gets reelected.” Moreover, she points out that the supposedly “‘fiscally responsible’ Democrats have given us the largest peacetime deficit in history, one that keeps growing beyond all expectations.”

Her colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was Obama’s chief cheerleader in the blogosphere until now, finally admits the truth about his idol:

this president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal [male bovine excrement; we like to keep this a family blog if we can--ed.] it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

AOL News notes that  for all the talk of cuts, “President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposes to spend $3.48 trillion on everything except interest on the national debt. That’s a 7 percent increase over what the government spent in 2010. And keep in mind that in 2010, there was a lot of stimulus money flying out the door.”

Even The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama in 2008 and has not supported a Republican for president since 1952, said Obama’s budget was full of “gimmickry,” and called Obama the “Punter-in-Chief” for failing to address America’s looming budget problems.

Obama would increase wasteful education and transportation spending by billions more. The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson gave a thumbs down to the Obama administration’s anachronistic focus on rail boondoggles that few people will use. The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey debunked the bogus offsets Obama is using to pretend to pay for his budget-busting and wasteful education proposals. We earlier explained why Obama should have cut rather than increased education spending at this link.

Andrew Sullivan Blames Tea Party for Budget-Busting Deal That He, Not It, Supported

by Hans Bader on January 21, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The deficit is largely the result of “feel-good” bipartisan policies supported by the political establishment. But rather than taking credit for the deficit it helped to create, the liberal establishment blames it on political outsiders like the Tea Party who have little influence over public policy. Sometimes, the Tea Party is accused of supporting policies it had nothing to do with.

Writing at his blog at The Atlantic, liberal journalist Andrew Sullivan recently faulted the “Tea Party” for the recent budget-busting deal between Obama and congressional leaders that exploded the deficit by extending tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and government handouts: “immediately after the election, moreover, they did a deal borrowing a huge amount more and adding $700 billion to the debt.”

The irony is that Sullivan, one of Obama’s biggest cheerleaders, had earlier endorsed that very deal, a deal also endorsed by other liberal media like the Washington Post because of the government handouts it contained. In an explanation that was hard to follow, Sullivan said that this new “stimulus package financed by borrowing” would somehow create “the best context for serious reform” of the nation’s finances, providing a “big new stimulus” that would help Obama “as he moves toward re-election.”

By contrast, some Tea Partiers publicly opposed the deal. A Wall Street Journal article quotes a Tea Party activist and Senate candidate saying that “she decided to run after watching Congress pass legislation during this month’s lame duck session, including a package of tax cuts, that added to the national debt.”

Most Tea Party bloggers took no position on the deal. The few that did either opposed it or reluctantly supported it as the best one could expect from a government that would still be dominated by liberals in the next Congress (with Democrats controlling both the White House and the Senate).

I criticized the deal in a blog post that was reproduced at a blog called “Freedom Action“” that includes many Tea Party members. It drew no objections from any blogger or reader at that site (which has more than 300 members). I noted that the billions it will spend on extending unemployment benefits won’t stimulate the economy, but will financially burden states. 30-40 state unemployment funds are already insolvent or teetering on the edge, thanks to past federal extensions of unemployment benefits. Giving people unemployment benefits for years on end discourages people from taking lower-paying jobs, and results in some recipients gaming the system. It encourages people not to relocate in search of work, and not to take productive jobs that they think are beneath them, even if those jobs are the only jobs that they will realistically find once their jobless benefits come to an end, because of the disappearance of the type of job they once performed.

As the Heritage Foundation notes, “The consequences of extended unemployment benefits are some of the most conclusively established results in labor economic research. Extending either the amount or the duration of UI benefits increases the length of time that workers remain unemployed. UI benefits subsidize unemployment. They reduce the incentive unemployed workers have to search for new work and to make difficult choices–such as moving or switching industries–to begin a new job.” (The deal also contains other disincentives to work.)

Admittedly, the deal is not as economically-destructive as some of the measures that Obama previously pushed through Congress on party-line votes, such as the $800 billion stimulus package, which actually shrank the economy in several ways. (The stimulus used “green-jobs” subsidies to send American jobs overseas. 79 percent of those subsidies went to foreign firms, such as an Australian firm that imported Japanese wind turbines, effectively outsourcing American jobs. It also wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)

Torture Prosecutions for Thee, But Not for Me

by Hans Bader on April 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Economy, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants Bush Administration officials prosecuted for facilitating torture. Fair enough. But if they get prosecuted, she should get prosecuted, too. She knew of the torture and knowingly funded the very programs that engaged in it. She only objected to it after Bush’s poll ratings went down.

Andrew Sullivan, who detests the Bush Administration, observes that “The Speaker was briefed on waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the White House. She was part of the select group of congressmen and women told of the program. She did nothing to stop it.” Indeed, said the CIA’s Porter Goss, “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough” to extract confessions.

Similarly, lawyer John Hinderaker notes that Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.), who wants to investigate the Bush Administration, “enthusiastically endorsed waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques back in the days” following 9/11.

Liberals like Pelosi can’t logically object to being held responsible for “aiding and abetting” torture by knowingly funding it, without engaging in hypocrisy. After all, they support punishment based on very broad theories of “aiding and abetting.” For example, liberals support the massive, and worthless, $400 billion Alien Tort Claims Act lawsuits against American companies that did business in South Africa, under the theory that merely by selling products in South Africa, the companies thereby “aided and abetted” South Africa’s apartheid regime — never mind that South Africa’s current, democratically-elected, black-majority government is utterly opposed to these lawsuits, and that the companies now being sued complied with a set of human-rights principles known as the “Sullivan Principles” while operating in South Africa.

Torture produced lots of false information that wasted the CIA’s time and money, and produced bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced travelers. But the creepy Dick Cheney is still defending torture, making claims that are as illogical as his ridiculous claim (now echoed by the Obama Administration, which is running up record deficits in violation of Obama’s disingenuous “net spending cut” pledge) that “deficits don’t matter.”

Obama has been vague about the possibility of torture prosecutions. He seemed open to them on Tuesday, but not on Thursday “when it became apparent that any investigation would . . . include Congressional Democrats who signed off on the interrogations.”

While Andrew Sullivan is to be commended for not deliberately overlooking liberal complicity in the Bush Administration’s torture (the way most bloggers advocating torture prosecutions have), he has been less consistent in his attempts to defend the policies of the Obama Administration, such as his attacks on the tea-party anti-tax protesters.

Sullivan erroneously attacked the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s” — even though the protests focused on the bailouts as well as the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in the long run.

But after it became clear that many of the protesters had opposed the costly bailouts over the past year, including the Wall Street and auto bailouts during the Bush Administration, Sullivan switched gears to defend that wasteful spending, which even many original supporters of the bailouts now regret (and which even Treasury Secretary Geithner, an architect of the bailouts, admits have had “mixed” results). Sullivan now attacks the tea party protesters because they OPPOSED the bank bailout last year pushed through by the Bush Administration.

To Sullivan, criticism of Obama’s wasteful spending seems suspect regardless of whether the critic supported or opposed Bush’s fiscal policies.

Sullivan, the self-described “fiscal conservative” and believer in “limited government,” now supports Obama’s massive $800 billion stimulus package, sneering at people who “think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus” — seemingly oblivious to the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that Obama’s pork-filled stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run by exploding the national debt.

Andrew Sullivan, not the tea party protests, was once a cheerleader for one of the most costly items on George Bush’s agenda: the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, Sullivan bashes Bush for invading Iraq. But Sullivan long advocated invading Iraq before Bush did so, at times even chiding Bush for his perceived slowness to act against Saddam Hussein. Ironically, he now trumpets the idea of prosecuting Bush Administration officials. He cites the Administration’s use of torture, which I have also repeatedly criticized; but one of those Sullivan wants prosecuted, Doug Feith, staunchly opposed the use of torture. Feith’s real sin was to espouse the same cause Sullivan once did with such zest: the perfectly lawful, although extremely costly, invasion of Iraq.

Sullivan may variously claim to be conservative or libertarian in an effort to lend weight to his endorsement of big-spending liberal politicians like John Kerry and Barack Obama, but it would be more accurate to describe him, as Forbes magazine did, as a liberal journalist.

Tea Party Protesters Are Right

by Hans Bader on April 17, 2009 · 4 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

Tea party protests questioned the constitutionality of some of the massive bailouts over the past year, which amount to trillions of dollars. That drew bizarre attacks from leftists, who argue that these peaceful protests will somehow lead to another terrorist incident like the Oklahoma City bombing, and that the tea party protesters, like the Founding Fathers, are just a reactionary “bunch of white males who didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

Not all of the bailouts are illegal or unconstitutional, but some of them are. Some bailouts were sweeping, standardless grants of authority to spend money that violate the non-delegation doctrine, a Constitutional separation-of-powers safeguard enforced by the Supreme Court in the 1935 Schechter Poultry case. Others were never authorized by Congress.

For example, the auto bailout was either illegal or unconstitutional. Even Andrew Sullivan, a critic of the tea parties, reached that conclusion. So have liberal commentators like Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich and conservative commentators like the Heritage Foundation and George Will. I earlier explained why the bailout is illegal or unconstitutional: either the bank bailout bill didn’t confer such vast discretion to spend money that it could be diverted to an auto bailout (in which case the auto bailout was illegal), or it did (in which case the bank bailout bill was itself an unconstitutional violation of separation of powers).

A similar auto bailout in Britain failed miserably, wasting billions in the process.

There was a bomb threat recently, but it wasn’t from conservatives or libertarians, but rather an advocate for illegal aliens. So much for the Obama Administration’s baseless suggestion that the next terrorist attack may come from opponents of illegal immigration or supporters of federalism.

Other criticisms of the tea party protests also were baseless. They have been criticized for supposedly offering no solutions or constructive suggestions about how to cut spending. But they have specifically identified two massive spending programs that need to be cut. The first is Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which was falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly pointed out would actually shrink the economy “in the long run.” The second is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (scroll down to this protester’s “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign).

For having the temerity to protest Administration lies and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been attacked elsewhere in the most vicious terms as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist n****r out of the White House and stop the fags from stealing their children.” As a Harvard-educated urban dweller with a multiracial family, whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling.

Andrew Sullivan dismisses the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”

I certainly made “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.

Slandering the Tea Parties

by Hans Bader on April 16, 2009 · 5 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

The “tea party” protests against out-of-control government spending have been very clear in identifying what wasteful spending they object to. One example is Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which was falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly pointed out would actually cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” Another example is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign).

But the protesters are frequently criticized by journalists like Andrew Sullivan for supposedly offering no solutions or constructive suggestions.

For having the temerity to protest Administration lies and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been called “despicable” by a liberal Congresswoman, and attacked in the left-wing blogosphere in the most vicious language as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist n****r out of the White House and stop the fags from stealing their children.”

As a Harvard-educated, arugula-eating, urban dweller whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling. I am certainly not afraid of my Asian, black, and Hispanic relatives, my French-born wife, or the gay neighbor whose children play with my daughter.

Andrew Sullivan derides the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”

I did too make “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I publicly called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.

And contrary to Sullivan’s claims, I do indeed have a “constructive and specific argument about how . . . to reduce spending and debt and borrowing” — cancel the wasteful $800 billion stimulus package, most of which has not been spent yet, and may cause inflation when it finally is.

Sullivan: Blogs Are “More Alive”

by Richard Morrison on October 22, 2008 · 5 comments

in Culture

Veteran journalist and editor Andrew Sullivan pens a love letter to the his favorite literary format, the blog:

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Sullivan acknowledges many of the pitfalls of writing without the kind of prior editorial review that accompanies more traditional outlets, but emphasizes that, for him, the advantages of spontaneity outweigh such hazards. As he puts it, his first experience with unrestricted self-publishing was “intoxicatingly free…like taking a narcotic.” I can’t say I’ve ever felt quite the same while blogging, but perhaps that just reflects my lack of narcotic-taking experiences to compare it to.

Thanks to Megan for the link.