Blumneconomics XII: Heckuva job, Obama

It figures that Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner would produce an entertaining column following one of the best weeks for Republicans in ages.

The former head of Florida's ACLU has little clue about economics, as abundantly illustrated by the columns she wrote corresponding to "Blumneconomics" posts I-XI.  And since it is more instructive to watch her tie herself in knots rather than hear me simply describe how mixed up she is, take it away, Robyn:

The pro-waterboarding, Tea Party-friendly Brown, a veritable unknown state senator, blew into high federal office in the bluest of blue states by harping on the deficit and promising to defeat health care reform. But the undercurrent of Brown's campaign was the dire economy.

Ah, that dreaded undercurrent.  The term itself cues the reader to the fact that Blumner will have no good evidence from the Brown campaign that he placed any particular emphasis on the state of the economy.

Brown claimed in a piece in the Boston Globe earlier this month that he was running because "more of our people are unemployed today than ever before."

Blumner's columns appear in the print edition of the St. Petersburg Times, so she simply can't provide the conntext of Brown's statement.  The Internet, fortunately, largely frees us from that problem.  Here is the full paragraph:

I’m running because more of our people are unemployed today than ever before. Public debt has reached $12 trillion and counting, and Washington politicians want to borrow trillions more. Terrorists want to strike our country again, and they will do so if we let down our guard. We have fighting forces in two theaters of war, and those men and women need our support.

In literature, any halfway decent writer uses paragraphs to collect related ideas.  And Blumner has to know that.  Yet she eliminates the set of reasons for running intially presented by Brown in favor of the one that supports her thesis.  It was out-of-context cherry-picking, in other words.  What Blumner wrote is technically true, but misleading (PolitFact will get right on it).

Blumner apparently feels she has made her case, so she moves on:

How about remembering a few things about the mess we are in. The economic meltdown happened under President George W. Bush as a direct consequence of the hands-off, free market, deregulation philosophy touted by Republicans like Brown. Cleaning up the destruction is going to take government investment in the economy. But the $787 billion stimulus package that is currently being spent to build roads and retain teachers throughout the nation passed Congress without a single Republican vote in the House.

Blumner's setting of blame is somewhat akin to blaming a broken window on the failure to keep it from breaking.  It is obviously true in a logical sense, but the logical sense is not a reasonable sense*.  For example, given the choice between blaming the person who failed to install protective shutters over his windows and blaming the lad who threw the rock at the window, it is more sensible to blame the rock thrower.  The rock-thrower, by analogy, was a federal government that implemented policies that encouraged (and even coerced) banks to make risky loans, and set up businesses (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that made it extremely profitable for banks to set up risky loans and sell them to, in effect, the taxpayers.  Government regulation, in concert with normal market forces (the latter often termed by liberals "Wall Street greed"), caused the financial crisis.

Consider for comparison the "Cash for Clunkers" program, lauded as a great success by its architects.  That program borrowed money from taxpayers and paid consumers top dollar for cars that had to be destroyed as a requirement of the program on the condition that they purchased a care with considerably higher gas mileage.  As with home prices, the government policy inflated the market price of low-mileage used cars and then ensured that the government would get nothing back by stipulating that the cars would be destroyed.  In short, the government has in part tried to cure the problem it caused by repeating, in principle, exactly the same mistakes.

It's hard to imagine Blumner would get that given a million years to ponder.  I imagine her reaching the terminus of her ruminatory millenium with "Just as I thought from the first. It was Bush's fault."

The non-imaginary Blumner:

The Council of Economic Advisers estimates that, with a third of the stimulus money out the door, between 1.7 and 2 million jobs have been created or saved. Even if these numbers are not precise, the upshot is that without the stimulus the suffering would be far magnified.

Who is the "Council of Economic Advisers," again?  Oh, yeah.  Now I remember.  Part of the White House staff, hired by the president.  Great source for objective views on the actions of the president.  The "created or saved" metric has been widely criticized as unmeasurable.  The Congressional Budget Office, less beholden than the CEA to the executive branch of government, went along with a figure of 600,000 to 1.6 million based on economic models that estimate the economic return on various types of spending.  Incidentally, I believe those same models were used by Congress to justify its stimulus spending in the first place.  The models may not be worthy of the trust accorded them by the CBO, let alone the CEA.

Blumner again:

More is needed, but that will take more spending, which is precisely what Brown and his party oppose. In Brown's words there should not be another stimulus because the current one has "failed to create one new job," a statement so demonstrably false that it raises questions about the wits of its author.

Brown's statement was very probably wrong (hyperbole?), but one should note that Blumner would go about demonstrating that Brown was wrong using economic models of dubious reliability.  Sure, one could take borrowed money and hire a new employee with that money--but the claim of creating a new job is empty unless it is somehow demonstrated that the borrowing did not eliminate a job that would have otherwise been created.  Economic models, by their nature, need to wrestle with a complicated web of relationships.

Brown also complains about the public debt. Once again he should be pointing his finger at the elephant in the room. Bush added nearly $5 trillion to the national debt during his two terms after having inherited a healthy 10-year projected budget surplus of $5.6 trillion. He did it through reckless tax cuts and the prosecution of two wars, one, a war of adventurism. Remember that two weeks before Obama was sworn into office the Congressional Budget Office projected the annual deficit to be $1.2 trillion.

This claim of Blumner's is hilarious.  Bush inherited a "healthy" (projected) budget surplus of $5 trillion as of 2010, over eight years after he took office.  I wouldn't call it coherent to talk about inheriting a projection.  There was a budget surplus, at least according to the CBO, of $86.4 billion for fiscal year 2000 (ending in October of 2000).

The 10-year projections did not take into account the bursting of the tech bubble, of course, for which we might draw a parallel to the Obama administration's oft-cited excuse that the stimulus bill did not help as it was projected to help because things were worse than they thought.  With the tech bubble, the 10-year surplus prediction was not as healthy as Blumner presents it.

Continuing the Blumner presentation:

Obama was left Bush's wars, debts and a near collapsed economy. In the past year, he's methodically tried to tackle this pile of trouble, and beyond cooperation in increasing troop levels in Afghanistan which Republicans pushed, Obama has come up against a solid wall of Republican resistance. Now with Brown's election, Republicans in the Senate have what they need to keep Obama from advancing on jobs, economic fairness, strong regulation of the financial sector and climate change. Even health care reform is in jeopardy.

This paragraph may be even funnier than the one that preceded it.

We've already reviewed a more reasonable way of placing blame for the economy than putting it entirely at Bush's feet.  And aside from supporting Obama in his promise to press the war in Afghanistan, the thin GOP contingent put up a "wall" or resistance to Obama's programs.  Some wall, when the Democrats possessed a supermajority in the House throughout Obama's term so far and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate from the time Sen. Franken took his seat (July 7, 2009) until Sen. Paul G. Kirk Jr. loses senatorial status.  The GOP has voted as a bloc because the Democrats' legislative agenda runs so far left.  The Democrats' biggest problem in passing legislation was getting their own party completely on board.  And of course Blumner knows this.

Her blather stream flows on:

Brown, the 41st Senate Republican, makes his party cloture-proof allowing him to block any future vote on a combined House-Senate health reform bill. Brown's incoherence on this is stunning. The Senate-passed plan is similar to the universal health care model in Massachusetts — a state program of mandated health insurance coverage which Brown supported. But Brown campaigned against extending that beneficial structure to the rest of America, scaring voters over new taxes and Medicare cuts.

Of course Brown can't block anything by himself.  The Democrats could try to cut a deal with any of the Republican senators, as they did with Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).  Democrats in Congress, however, have threatened to withdraw their votes if the health care legislation drifts too far toward the center.  I know, I know.  Bush's fault.

Blumner's attack on Brown makes her charge of his supposed incoherence a study in irony.  It is not incoherent to advocate state government solutions to health care legislation issues over federal solutions, and neither is it incoherent for Brown to represent his constituents by protecting them from higher taxes for which they receive nothing in return.  To suggest that it is incoherent is incoherent, as well as an insult to the many Democrats who voted for Brown.

How exactly would Brown get us to universal coverage without cost controls and new revenues? Magic wand?

Perhaps by making alternative cost controls such as tort reform part of the package, though with the Democrats in Congress safely in the pocket of the law lobby perhaps it would take a magic wand to get it done.  Funny that Obama didn't think of pushing that idea as part of his new era of bipartisanship.  Until we remember that he is a lawyer.

Mercifully, Blumner finally concludes:

The challenges facing our nation are so great that it would be a Herculean endeavor if responsible people of goodwill came together to solve them. With the election of Brown we have added an obstructionist senator who holds positions based on politics not the public interest and who fails to see that his own party's disregard for average people is what got us in our current fix. Brown will use his power to bar Obama's good-government initiatives, our problems will fester, and the Democrats will once again be blamed.

So what if the public doesn't like the bill?  Pass it anyway for their own good!  That is apparently what good government is all about--if the initiatives are of the left, anyway.

*****

*Why isn't the logical sense a reasonable sense?  I imagine that statement might cause some readers to wonder, even after the illustration of the broken window.  In looking for causes, we need to look outside the thing itself.  A broken window is not caused by the failure to keep the window from breaking; not in terms of causal explanations, anyway.  The broken window is caused by the thing that happened without which the window would not have broken.  In a deeper philosophical sense, of course, it's more complicated than that.