Liberal Media, My Ass

NYT Tax Talk: What Does ‘Politically Sensitive’ Mean?

Posted on 06/07/2012 by Peter Hart

Most people think rich people should pay more in taxes. And they think the government should spend more to help revive the economy. The New York Times knows this—but still calls this discussion “politically sensitive.”

Today Jonathan Weisman has a piece (6/7/12) about recent comments by Bill Clinton and former Clinton/Obama economic adviser Larry Summers. The piece primarily channels Republican claims that these Democrats want to keep tax rates low for the wealthy. But that does not appear to be what either of them actually said, and both have released statements denying the Republican spin.

Nonetheless, the article treats the Republican interpretation as the most important fact, which produces this somewhat confusing lead:

Congressional Republicans pounced Wednesday on disputed comments from Bill Clinton and a former senior Obama economic adviser, claiming that the Republican push to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts beyond the 2012 expiration date has support at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.

The next sentence, to make things even murkier, says that Democrats responded by saying that’s not what either man said. But it’s not hard to see where Weisman comes down: Republicans “are on the offensive,” and Democrats are “on the defensive.”

But perhaps the real problem comes here:

The heated exchange illustrated how politically sensitive the tax cut expiration has become amid fresh data showing the economy slowing. A majority of voters say the federal budget deficit should be tackled with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases on the rich. In an April New York Times/CBS News poll, 56 percent favored boosting the economy by spending on education and infrastructure while raising taxes on the wealthy, against 37 percent who favored cutting taxes and spending.

What? The poll Weisman’s citing shows a 20 point advantage for raising taxes on the wealthy and spending more money—which seems roughly similar to other polling.  He introduces this by saying a majority favors a “mix of spending cuts and tax increases on the rich.” That doesn’t seem to make any sense.

And more broadly: What is “politically sensitive” supposed to mean? These are issues where public opinion is pretty consistently on one side of the discussion—the conventional wisdom in elite media seems often to be on the other side (spending cuts, debt panic and so on).

And this isn’t the first time the Times doesn’t seem to trust its own polling on these questions. Maybe that’s what “politically sensitive” is supposed to mean: The public is dangerously out of step with elite opinionmakers and politicians.

Speech from “Network”

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?! You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians.

There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, Yen, Rubles, Pounds, and Shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx?

They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”

Young: Economic twist: blaming president for GOP barriers

John Young, Regular Contributor

‘The race may be a referendum on Mr. Obama, as Republicans want, or, as Democrats prefer, a choice between a president nursing the economy back to health and a challenger who represents the failed policies that caused the crisis in the first place.”

Bingo.

The New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman and Mark Landler couldn’t have framed it better. That’s how President Barack Obama has to frame it, but not as either/or.

Absolutely, make it a referendum on what Obama has done, as well as on what an obstructionist opposition party has wrought.

If the “failed (GOP) policies” the Times cites in its prescient description of the choice ahead are seen as more of the “blame Bush” narrative — more living in the past — they’re not.

This is about the tea party now, not former President George W. Bush. It’s about how Mitt Romney would serve as its marionette.

Bush had a founder’s hand in the Great Recession, sure, but it was the tea party that prevented Obama from doing what he ought to make things what they ought to be.

“Slashing spending while the economy is deeply depressed is self-defeating strategy,” writes Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.

Ah, when the strategy is to drag down the “Obama economy,” as Romney frames it, it is just what the tea party and Republicans in Congress have ordained: disabling it.

Considering what Obama has had to face in Congress — a perpetual filibuster in the Senate and a tea party-directed House — to accomplish what he has is no small feat.

It is amazing to hear the frothy right talk about Obama’s out-of-control spending, when Politifact.com acknowledges he has “presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars” — second-slowest when adjusted for inflation.

At the same time, taxes as a percentage of GDP are the lowest since the 1950s, a trend that began with President Ronald Reagan and one that has dragged the nation into a deep well of red ink.

Meanwhile we waged multiple wars of choice, spent blindly on military needs, and failed to address problems with Social Security and Medicare. Can you say “intractable federal debt”?

An untidy truth is that war is good for an economy, particularly America’s economy, since America makes the world’s arms.

And yet the “Bush economy” went into the toilet despite all that war-making, with its job creation and munitions-making. And don’t forget what it’s done for American contractors.

Conversely, Obama has drawn down both wars, which means fewer jobs, less spent on munitions — which is not good for the economy, particularly this economy.

It has been odd since Obama took office to hear the same people rail against his domestic spending — much driven by the state of the economy he inherited. These people said almost nothing about the spending devoted to warfare under Bush.

How dare Obama spend on America’s roads, its bridges, its schools, its water systems? Shouldn’t we be spending that in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Indeed, we should be spending money here and now.

Recent job figures say as much. But the obstructionist wing of government will have nothing of it, of course. For one thing, if the economy gets better too quickly, Obama’s re-election chances improve similarly.

Hence, for sure no Republican was going to support the American Jobs Act, the $450 billion stimulus package Obama proposed in September.

The proposal would have paired a cut in the payroll tax with a boost in spending for infrastructure, state aid for schools and first responders, and additional unemployment relief.

Nein. Nicht. No. Nyet. How many ways can the GOP say no?

So, sure, make it a referendum — on Obama and what he has tried to do, and on what the GOP has tried to do to bring him down along with America’s economy. What a patriotic act.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.