Grow the economy by growing the debate about it

By Arianna Huffington, Tribune Media Services
Arianna Huffington

Hey, have you heard about this thing called “the fiscal cliff”? Actually, the better question is: Have you heard about anything except the fiscal cliff? Nine months ago, the term had not even entered the media lexicon. And now it’s suddenly everywhere.

It was Fed Chairman and Neologist-in-ChiefBen Bernanke who, while testifying in front of Congress back in February, first used the term to describe the combined effect of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, along with the beginning of across-the-board spending cuts (the so-called “sequestration”) that were part of the debt ceiling deal (technically the Budget Control Act) of 2011.

Whether or not we go over the fiscal cliff, around the fiscal curve, or down the fiscal slope remains to be seen — and no doubt heard about nonstop every day through the end of the year — but one thing is already certain: Our political debate has already gone over the cliff. In fact, it was sequestered long ago, when the acceptable parameters of this so-called debate were initially set.

Just look at the current state of the negotiations. President Obama’s proposal — delivered to John Boehner and Eric Cantor last week by Obama’s lead negotiator Tim Geithner — calls for $1.6 trillion in tax revenue over the next 10 years, the majority of which comes from letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those making more than$250,000, along with $600 billion in savings from entitlement and farm subsidy programs, and $800 billion from reduced combat spending. There would also be $200 billion in new spending for unemployment benefits, homeowner mortgage relief and infrastructure.

Republicans immediately took to their fainting couches. “Right now I would say we’re nowhere, period,” Boehner told Chris Wallace. But, in fact, these were the same terms the supposedly shocked — shocked! — Republican leaders had already heard from the president himself earlier in the year.

President Obama has mounted a campaign-style effort to go over the heads of congressional leaders and get the American people involved. On Friday he appeared at a toy manufacturing company inPennsylvania, proclaiming that the Republicans refusing to budge — and thus raising taxes for everybody — would amount to “the lump of coal” for a “Scrooge Christmas.”

The president ended his speech by saying, “So I want you to call, I want you to send an email, post on their Facebook wall. If you tweet, then use a hashtag we’re calling ‘My2K.’ Not Y2K, ‘My2K,’ all right? Because it’s about your ‘2K’ in your pocket.”

It’s really great that the president is appealing directly to the people. But why assume that the people will only respond to a direct appeal to their pocketbooks? Why not also appeal to the need to grow the economy, create jobs, rebuild our infrastructure and, yes, even take care of America’s unemployed? Where is the moral imperative — that can help connect us all — to rebuild the country?

The debate the country should be locked in right now isn’t about the fiscal cliff and the deficit, but about the growth cliff and the 20 million unemployed or underemployed Americans. Economic growth for the fourth quarter is expected to be under 2 percent — well below what it needs to be if we’re going to substantially reduce unemployment.

Of course, if we actually did worry about growth and did something about it, that would go much further toward reducing the deficit than cuts to social programs. “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity,” John Maynard Keynes said, and it is as true now as when he said it in the 1930s.

But instead of trusting the country to understand that, the president has instead largely acquiesced to the Republican mantra that when American families have to tighten their belts, so does the government, and has chosen as his distinction-drawing principle the disagreement over tax cuts for the wealthy.

The president has the wind in his sails. He’s just won an election — convincingly. And he’s facing an opposition whose exhausted vision for the country has curdled into, simply, tax cuts for the wealthy and forever-unspecified loophole closing. The moment is ripe, and people are ready, for something more than an appeal to use the hashtag “My2K.”

Republicans have termed Obama’s proposal “fantasyland,” but it’s a measure of how far we’ve gone into fantasyland that this is the debate we’re having at a time of near-recession, and of dismal prospects for 20 million unemployed or underemployed Americans. It’s important to remember that this debate didn’t go off the cliff by itself. This was no act of God — it was entirely manmade.

It would be great if we could channel some of the ingenuity we clearly possess for producing manufactured crises (debt ceiling, fiscal cliff, etc.) — and giving them catchy names — into solving our real problems. One start would be for the president to use his new, hard-fought political capital not just to beat the Republicans at this particular game, but to expand the playing field of the next one. The only way we’re going to grow the economy is if we grow the debate about the economy.

(Arianna Huffington is president and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post Media Group. Her email address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.)
(c) 2012 Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Never ever, ever, ever…

By Leonard Pitts Jr., Tribune Media Services
Leonard Pitts

A few words to ponder as we sail toward the fiscal cliff. Those words would be: “That was then, this is now.”

Strip away the false piety and legalistic hair splitting offered by Republican lawmakers rationalizing their decision to abandon a pledge that they will never ever, ever, ever vote to raise taxes, and that’s pretty much what the explanation boils down to.

Rep. Peter King says he understood the pledge, propounded by the almighty Grover Norquist and his group Americans for Tax Reform, to obligate him for only one term. Apparently, he thought it had to be renewed, like a driver’s license.

Sen. Lindsey Graham says that if Democrats agree to entitlement reform, “I will violate the pledge … for the good of the country” — a stirring statement of patriotism and sacrifice that warms your heart like a midnight snack of jalapeno chili fries.

In other words: bull twinkies. If you want the truth of why a trickle ofGOP lawmakers is suddenly willing to blaspheme the holy scripture of their faith, it’s simple. The pledge used to be politically expedient. Now it is not.

This is not, by the way, a column in defense of the Norquist pledge. The only thing dumber than his offering such a pledge was scores of politicians signing it, an opinion that has nothing to do with the wisdom or lack thereof of raising taxes and everything to do with the fact that one ought not, as a matter of simple common sense, make hard, inflexible promises on changeable matters of national import. It is all well and good to stand on whatever one’s principles are, but as a politician — a job that, by definition, requires the ability to compromise — you don’t needlessly box yourself in. Never say never.

Much less, never ever, ever, ever.

So this revolution against “he who must be obeyed,” however modest, is nonetheless welcome. It suggests reason seeping like sunlight into places too long cloistered in the damp and dark of ideological rigidity.

But it leaves an observer in the oddly weightless position of applauding a thing and being, simultaneously, disgusted by it. Has politics ever seemed more ignoble than in these clumsy, self-serving attempts to justify a deviation from orthodoxy? They have to do this, of course, because the truth — “I signed the pledge because I knew it would help me get elected, but with economic ruin looming and Obama re-elected on a promise to raise taxes on the rich and most voters supporting him on that, it’s not doing me as much good as it once did” — is unpretty and unflattering.

In this awkward about-face, these lawmakers leave us wondering once again whether the vast majority of them — right and left, red and blue, Republican and Democrat — really believe in anything, beyond being re-elected.

There is a reason Congress’ approval ratings flirted with single digits this year. There is a reason a new Gallup poll finds only 10 percent of Americans ranking Congress “high or very high” in honesty and ethics.

Lawyers rank higher. Advertisers rank higher. Even journalists rank higher.

This is the sad pass to which years of congressional grandstanding, fact spinning, cookie jar pilfering and assorted harrumphing and pontificating have brought us. And while a certain cynicism toward its leaders functions as a healthy antigen in the body politic, it cannot be good for either the nation or its leaders that so many of them are held in plain contempt.

The moral malleability exemplified by the likes of King and Graham will not help. Perhaps we should ask them to sign a new pledge: “I will always tell you what I think and what I plan to do in plain English, regardless of whether you like it or it benefits me politically.”

But no lawmaker would make that pledge. And who would believe them if they did?

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza,Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail atlpitts@miamiherald.com.)
(c) 2012 The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The GOP — not a club for Christians

By Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Media Services

In the scramble to make the GOP more diverse, a lot of people are looking at Asian Americans, whom many believe are a natural constituency for the party. I would love it if Asian Americans converted en masse to the Republican Party, but the challenge for Republicans is harder than many appreciate.

President Obama did spectacularly well with Asian Americans, garnering nearly three-quarters of their vote. This runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. On average, Asian American family income is higher and poverty is lower than it is for non-Latino whites. Entrepreneurship, family cohesion and traditional values all run strong among Asian Americans, and reliance on government runs weak.

And yet, Asian Americans — now the fastest-growing minority in America — are rapidly becoming a core constituency of theDemocratic Party.

I’ve joked for years with my Indian American relatives and friends that they are the new Jews because their parents bury them in guilt and overeducate them. It turns out it doesn’t end there. SociologistMilton Himmelfarb observed that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Well, Indian Americans earn like Jews and … vote like Jews.

And maybe for similar reasons. The comparison to Jews is instructive. Perhaps the most common explanation for the GOP’s problem with Asian Americans is the party’s pronounced embrace of Christianity, which turns off many Jews as well.

According to Pew studies, barely a third of Chinese Americans are Christian and less than a fifth of Indian Americans are.

“Whenever a Gujarati or Sikh businessman comes to a Republican event, it begins with an appeal to Jesus Christ,” conservative writerDinesh D’Souza recently told the New York Times magazine. “While the Democrats are really good at making the outsider feel at home, the Republicans make little or no effort.”

My friend and colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, an Indian American and devout Catholic, says the GOP has a problem with seeming like a “club for Christians.”

That rings true to me. I’ve attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor, and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn’t a Christian. I’ve never taken offense, but I can imagine how it might seem to someone who felt like he was even less part of the club.

A few years ago, Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist, reported this finding: As racial and ethnic diversity increases, social trust and cohesion plummets. “Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer,” Putnam found. “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

The villain isn’t racism or bigotry or anything so simple. The phenomenon is much more complex. Indeed, it’s not clear why this happens, but it’s clear that it does. Economic inequality and cultural attitudes do not matter much. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” Putnam writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.”

Part of the explanation stems from the fact that people with shared experiences and cultures draw strength from working together, whereas with strangers, language often becomes guarded, intentions questioned.

The GOP is not a Christian club, but there’s no disputing that Christianity is a major source of strength and inspiration for many Republican activists. This is nothing new and, generally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with this. The abolitionist, progressive and civil rights movements were all significantly powered by Christian faith.

As someone who’s long argued for theological pluralism and moral consensus on the right, it strikes me as nuts for the GOP not to do better with Asian Americans, particularly given how little religion has to do with the policy priorities of the day.

Twenty years ago, conservatives started referring to Judeo-Christian values in an effort to be more inclusive. The challenge now is to figure out how to talk in a way that doesn’t cause decent and dedicated Christians to pull in like a turtle, while also appealing to non-Judeo-Christians and the nonreligious. That’ll be hard, requiring more than name-dropping Confucius or Krishna.

(Jonah Goldberg is the author of the new book “The Tyranny of Clichés.” You can write to him in care of this newspaper or by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.)
(C) 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.