Straw Men

I’m listening to the president, and on the verge of throwing something at the flat screen. I’m very tired of hearing him make the vague “argument” that we can’t get out of this situation with the “same failed policies of the past eight years.” This is apparently an argument against tax cuts in the “stimulus” bill, though it’s hard to know, because it’s vague. Why won’t some reporter ask him what in the hell he’s talking about? To actually put forth his supposed theory of how we got here, and what “failed policies” caused it? Because if he’s arguing that we’re in trouble because of tax rate cuts, that’s a ludicrous proposition. He seems desperate, and has fallen back on the only thing he seems to know how to do — campaign with vague and misleading rhetoric.

Charles Johnson has further commentary on these Obama strawmen.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some questions that the president should, but probably won’t be asked tonight.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:

…things are upside down: The conservatives are mad that Bush over-spent, and suddenly when out of power want to restore fiscal sanity, while Obama says that the Bush borrowing brought on this mess and must be addressed by more borrowing. What is what? Conservatives suddenly are once again fiscal purists when out of power? Liberals blame Bush for reckless Keynesian spending and want to cure it by more of the same?

Few tell the truth: The conservatives should say ‘Mea culpa—our deficit spending and borrowing helped to get us into this mess, so we’ve seen the error of our ways, and want you liberals not to repeat our mistakes.’ And the liberals should say, ‘Bush on the budget was one of us in borrowing and spending and priming, so we can’t really trash the last eight years since we’re now advocating more of the same.’

Yes, few tell the truth. Including, foremost, the president.

[Update late morning]

“The worst bill since the 1930s.” An interview with economist Robert Barro.

[Evening update]

He’s doing the press conference now, and repeating the stupid, false history that we’ve done nothing in the past eight years except tax cuts. I want to throw a shoe at him.

[Bumped from this morning]

[Update a few minutes later]

He claims that he’s been “civil” and “respectable.” I don’t think that it’s either civil or respectable to set up strawman arguments based on a false history, and kick them down. And now he’s claiming that there are no earmarks in this package? Please.

61 thoughts on “Straw Men”

  1. Leland – the park needs government money because a private firm couldn’t charge sufficent admission to make a profit.

    That’s called devaluation. If I give a million dollars to you, and you spend it on something that won’t retain the value or better yet increase the value, then that million dollars is now worth less. That is exactly what most of us are concerned about regarding what some idiots call a stimulus package.

    We want to grow the economy, not shrink it.

  2. No, Leland, I am not suggesting war as an economic stimulus, although I was and still am in favor of our actions in Iraq.

    Well, I glad to hear it. I didn’t think you were, which I’m sure was obvious to you based on my comment of strawmen questioning.

    As for the value of WWII to the US economy, I think you and Godzilla get it slightly wrong. It wasn’t just spending on tanks and planes that pulled the US out of a depression. It was the fact that each tank and plane built was more valuable than the materials and labor that went into it. Many of those weapons of war were then sold to other countries. After the way, many countries had decimated manufacturing and production capability, while the US had was strong in both. The US was able to continue producing goods and selling them to other nations. In addition, I’ll give credit that innovation from WWII allowed for this growth to be prolonged.

    In Iraq, the US gave away much of the cost of fighting the war and post reconstruction. Yes, some US firms gained from the endeavor, but for the whole, the US economy didn’t grow because of Iraq in any manner that will be prolonged, beyond having another ally that might share in growth.

  3. I don’t like to see “greed is good” being said unironically, because the people saying it are using the word “greed” as shorthand for “enlightened self-interest,” which is not the same thing.

    It’s like using the word “racist” to mean “someone who thinks the present stimulus bill favored by President Obama may not be the best thing for America right now.”

  4. Leland – I think you’re missing my point. WWII stimulated the economy because we spend tons of money building stuff. Much of the stuff we built (for example, hundreds of B-17 bombers) was promptly scrapped at the end of the war.

    In other words, we built stuff that didn’t retain its value.

  5. Chris, I recognize that was your point. I just think it is stupid. You don’t grow the economy by spending something and then just scrapping it. It’s Rand analogy that economic progress doesn’t come from paying one person to dig a hole and another person to fill it.

    My point was that the economy improved because we sold many products to other countries during the war and during reconstruction of those countries. The income from those endeavors outweighed the losses. That’s called a profit, and profits is economic growth.

  6. It’s Rand analogy that economic progress doesn’t come from paying one person to dig a hole and another person to fill it.

    Well, at least it’s a shovel-ready project. Perhaps the ultimate one…

  7. > Economically, WWII for the US looked like the New Deal on steroids.

    Actually, it didn’t, and it takes a mind-boggling amount of ignorance to assert otherwise.

    The “New Deal” was basically a war on production because FDR and his advisors believed that the problem with the economy is that there was too much stuff.

    WWII made that impossible to sustain – you can’t have an “Arsenal of Democracy” that doesn’t produce like crazy.

    The Great Depression didn’t end until the limits on production eased, when the “New Deal” was taken off the table.

    Note that Obama’s “stimulus” package is mostly production killing measures of one form or another.

  8. I lived in Austin for a bit and I can tell you that the last thing they need is yet another Frisbee park.

    And the majory economic spin-off from Frisbee golf players is more likely to be with one-hitter manufacturers and rolling paper companies.

  9. Saying that the spending of the New Deal or WW2 lifted the US out of the Great Depression is a pretty big oversimplification. Yes, there was a lot of spending in both, but that doesn’t mean that scattershot spending now will solve anything.

    In WW2, as a requisite for the huge increase in production while a large portion of the workforce was overseas, for the first time large numbers of women entered the workforce and acquired marketable skills. The men sent to war developed skills in a huge variety of areas, and returned to the G.I. Bill. So on the whole you had more people with marketable skills at the end of WW2 than at the beginning. At the same time, the US had to rapidly industrialize and at the end of the war was left with an industrial capacity that had been destroyed in Europe. The “stuff we built” to which Chris Gerrib referred was not merely the instruments of war, but the industrial capacity and the skilled workforce that resulted – and that most certainly was not scrapped.

    Is the economic stimulus going to provide that kind of massive increase in economic productivity and in the skillset of the workforce? If not, then it is meaningless to compare the spending of WW2 with the spending of today.

  10. I agree with Andy Freeman here. The US didn’t turn around economically because of a vast application of the Broken Window Fallacy. It turned around because the FDR administration had to reverse a considerable portion of the labor and production oligopolies that it had created since 1933. Well, FDR died too. He was much more useful to the US as a dead legend than as a living president.

  11. You know, I always found it a little weird that people looking to explain the end of the Great Depression assume that some action by government put an end to it. They may locate it in FDR’s policies or in the war, but there’s a strange underlying assumption that, had government not done something, it would have gone on presumably forever.

    That’s a weird point of view, given that recessions have plagued every market economy since Christ roamed the hills of Judea talking to himself. They’ve certainly been ubiquitous in US history, all the way back to the time when central government had nearly zero influence on the economy because it was too puny to matter.

    And they always end, usually within a year or two. Except in the case of the Great Depression, which dragged on for a decade or more. Given the fact that that depression was unusually long, compared to how quickly they’re over when you do pretty much nothing at all, it seems like the default assumption should naturally be that something government did was preventing recovery, and the search should be for what terrible mistake that might have been.

    I mean, suppose I get a cold. Well, I get colds all the time, and they’re usually gone in a week, say. But this time I try all kinds of folk remedies and herbs and stuff, and the cold lasts for two years. Would we all sit around wondering which remedy finally cured the cold? Or would we be wondering what the hell I did to turn a one-week malady into a two-year problem?

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