Party Of No Clue

I briefly alluded to Mark Sanford rejecting stimulus funds that will result in up to 7,500 teachers being laid off. South Carolina legislators are trying to outflank him on that. But he's not the only one. Governor Goodhair of Texas is denying his citizens stimulus funds, too:

Gov. Rick Perry will announce today that he is blocking the state from accepting $550 million for expanded unemployment benefits as part of the federal stimulus package.

With an upscale Houston hardware store as his backdrop, he will paint the expansion as a burden on small business.

The Legislature still could move to change state law to draw down the money, but those changes would be subject to a Perry veto.

To be eligible for all the money, Texas must enact legislation that would change how the state’s calculates a worker’s eligibility and extend benefits to more workers, including those looking for part-time work.

Arnold Schwarznegger is trying the same thing in California, with the same argument that the changes in eligibility would impose an "unnecessary burden" on state businesses. Actually, what would impose a burden on them is them having to file for bankruptcy because nobody's buying goods because their unemployment ran out.

There's no real argument for this obstinacy from a policy perspective, just shopworn and outdated ideology. Sanford compared the stimulus to the policies of Zimbabwe, saying all this federal spending will lead to hyper-inflation. I wish! Right now we're in a deflationary spiral, and the only thing the Fed has the monetary tools to combat is inflation at this point. If we were experiencing any inflation at all, it would mean that the economy is at least sort of working again.

Then there's the argument that all this fiscal policy is like what FDR did during the Depression. Yes, they use that as a negative. The Bible for this revisionist history is a book by Amity Shlaes, and Jon Chait fairly well demolishes it.

Now here is the extremely strange thing about The Forgotten Man: it does not really argue that the New Deal failed. In fact, Shlaes does not make any actual argument at all, though she does venture some bold claims, which she both fails to substantiate and contradicts elsewhere. Reviewing her book in The New York Times, David Leonhardt noted that Shlaes makes her arguments "mostly by implication." This is putting it kindly. Shlaes introduces the book by asserting her thesis, but she barely even tries to demonstrate it. Instead she chooses to fill nearly four hundred pages with stories that mostly go nowhere. The experience of reading The Forgotten Man is more like talking to an old person who lived through the Depression than it is like reading an actual history of the Depression. Major events get cursory treatment while minor characters, such as an idiosyncratic black preacher or the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, receive lengthy portraits. Having been prepared for a revisionist argument against the New Deal, I kept wondering if I had picked up the wrong book [...]

Shlaes begins every chapter with a date (say, December 1936), an unemployment percentage (15.3) and a Dow Jones Industrial Average. The tick-tick-tick of statistics is meant to show that conditions did not improve throughout the course of Roosevelt's presidency. Yet her statistics are highly selective. As those of us who get our economic information from sources other than the CNBC ticker know, the stock market is not a broad representative of living standards. Meanwhile, as the historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, her unemployment figures exclude those employed by the Works Progress Administration and other workrelief agencies. Shlaes has explained in an op-ed piece that she did this because "to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects." So, if you worked twelve hours per day in a coal mine hoping not to contract black lung or suffer an injury that would render you useless, you were employed. But if you constructed the Lincoln Tunnel, you had an anxiety-inducing make-work job.

In response to this criticism, Shlaes has retreated to the defense that unemployment was still high anyway. "Even if you add in all the work relief jobs, as some economists do," she has contended, "Roosevelt-era unemployment averages well above 10 percent. That's a level Obama has referred to once or twice--as a nightmare." But Roosevelt inherited unemployment that was over 20 percent! Sure, the level to which it fell was high by absolute standards, but it is certainly pertinent that he cut that level by more than half. By Shlaes's method of reckoning, Thomas Jefferson rates poorly on the scale of territorial acquisition, because on his watch the United States had less than half the square mileage it has today.

This is the intellectual heft on the right. And it manifests itself into policy with things like the "no-cost stimulus" - really - which would create two million jobs by, um, drill baby drilling, I guess. Never mind that oil prices are down, auto mileage is down and it takes ten years to get a drop of oil out of a new platform. That's going to be the "timely, targeted" stimulus to save our souls.

I'm beginning to think that, by trying to talk himself out of the RNC Chairmanship, Michael Steele is the SMART one.