J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2156
November 15, 2010
Hoisted from Comments: How Much Did Bush Talk to His Ghostwriter?
Hoisted from comments: ogmb:
Let No One Else's Work Evade Your Eyes!: Speaking of...
Already having been branded a liar by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, ex-US President George W. Bush's intelligence has now been questioned by Schröder's former spokesman. (...)
"We noticed that the intellectual level of the (US president) was exceedingly limited," Uwe-Karsten Heye, Schröder's former government spokesman, told the television news station N24 on Wednesday in reference to Bush. "As such, it was difficult for us to communicate with him." Heye continued: "He had no idea about what was going on in the world. He was so fixated on being a Texan. I think he knew every longhorn in Texas."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,728482,00.html
Uncertainty and Aggregate Demand
The future is always uncertain--and how uncertain it is fluctuates. When the future is more than unusually certain, economic players want the security of financial asset holdings before they are willing to spend to put people to work. It is, then, the business of the government to make sure that they have the amount and the kinds of financial assets they need to sleep easily. That was one of the insights of John Maynard Keynes. That was one of the insights of Milton Friedman.
Uncertainty about the future cannot be eliminated. But its harmful macroeconomic consequences can be neutralized.
Matthew Yglesias preacheth the lesson:
Uncertainty and Aggregate Demand: [T]he notion that the economy is being held back by a mysterious increase in “uncertainty”... is no different from the standard Keynesian diagnosis. Indeed, Keynes himself put uncertainty front and center in his diagnosis of the business cycle....
Policymakers can’t make it cease to be the case that the future is uncertain. Policymakers can observe, however, that if economic actors’ level of uncertainty about the future increases that would manifest itself as an increased demand for money. Increased demand for money is a funny beast. Normally if demand for one kind of good or service falls, demand for other goods or services has to rise. But if what people demand is money itself then we find ourselves mired in a general glut, a shortfall of aggregate demand. Which is to say you’d be in just the normal Keynesian situation and you’d want to get out of it in just the normal Keynesian way—looser monetary and fiscal policy to bolster aggregate demand, soak up the excess capacity, and return us to a low-idleness equilibrium.
So if for whatever reason businessmen or politicians or media figures or anyone else feels more comfortable expressing the situation as one caused by “uncertainty” that’s fine. But the name of the game is still fiscal and monetary expansion. But instead the proposed cure typically seems to be “shift public policy in a more rightwing direction.” That wouldn’t do anything about uncertainty or a shortfall in aggregate demand. It’s just a faux-sophisticated way of saying “I’m a rich businessman who wants politicians to cater to my interests more.”
Department of "Huh?!" (Clive Crook Edition)
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Clive Crook:
Clive Crook - How Obama should curb the deficit: As for the [Simpson-Bowles] plan, it is good.... One can quarrel with many items... and not just over details. The overall fiscal adjustment may be too mild. It takes decades to balance the budget (though public debt starts to decline more promptly). Also, the chairmen adopt the goal of holding revenues at no more than 21 per cent of gross domestic product indefinitely, without saying why. That number is questionable; so is the intention to hold it constant. Ageing of the population, by itself, will tend to push the revenue requirement higher...
One does wonder how Clive Crook thinks public debt can decline before the budget is balanced. If the budget is balanced, the public debt is constant. That is what it means to balance the budget: you don't have to sell extra bonds to raise the public debt.
Either he is using the wrong concept of "public debt," or he is using the wrong concept of "budget balance"--or both.
More important, perhaps, is that Crook says that the plan is both not bold enough and too draconian: the "fiscal adjustment may be too mild" but also "holding revenues at no more than 21 per cent o gross domestic product... is questionable.... Ageing... by itself... push[es] the revenue requirement higher..."
It's really not good when you find yourself saying that the meal is both too spicy and too bland.
Intellectual Garbage Cleanup: Walter Williams Edition
Ta-Nehisi Coates does the honors:
Confederate Hair Tonic: In this instance, it must be said that Williams is practicing history in the manner of a phrenologist practicing brain surgery--with similarly ghastly results. In raising primary sources to the level of indisputable fact, Williams employs a methodology which does not merely argue for the existence of black Confederate legions, but for UFOs, orcs, the Dover Demon, elves and magic. The sable Confederate arm is too modest. Surely, Nessie awaits. I would not demand that history remain solely the property of professionals. But I would simply see a basic commitment to honesty from academics plying a borrowed trade.
What makes Williams spiritualism so appalling is that like his forebears, he is preying on a deep pain. It is utterly agonizing for Americans--regardless of color--to face the Civil War as it was. No honest broker of history can fail to admire the military exploits of Stonewall Jackson or Nathan Forrest. It is utterly discomfiting that the same honest broker must admit that these men charged backwards into history. What Walter Williams offers here is a credentialed con--a way of avoiding the agony of American history, of ducking the mixed inheritance that is our responsibility. It is American citizenship on the cheap. It is lard packaged as a salve. It is charlatanism. And it should always be known as such.
November 14, 2010
Let No One Else's Work Evade Your Eyes!
The scary thing is that apparently George W. Bush doesn't remember enough about his presidency for his ghostwriter to write Decision Points simply from listening to him talk.
Chris McGreal of the Grauniad:
George Bush accused of borrowing from other books in his memoirs: George Bush's memoirs were billed as offering "gripping, never before heard detail" of his time in the White House. Now it appears that Decision Points is not so much the former president's memoirs as other people's cut and pasted memories. Bush's account is littered with anecdotes seemingly ripped off from other books and articles, even borrowing without attribution – some might say plagiarising – from critical accounts the White House had previously denounced as inaccurate.
The Huffington Post['s Ryan Grim] noted a remarkable similarity between previously published writings and Bush's colourful anecdotes from events at which he had not been present. Bush borrows heavily from Bob Woodward's account Bush at War, which the White House criticised as inaccurate when it was published in 2002. He also appears to take chunks from a book written by his former press secretary Ari Fleischer.
Bush recounts a meeting between Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on the Afghan president's inauguration day, which he used as an example of hope for the future of the country. The former president writes: "When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on 22 December – 102 days after 9/11 – several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport. As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai responded: 'Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.'" The Huffington Post notes that the account and the quote are lifted almost verbatim and without attribution from a New York Review of Books article by Ahmed Rashid.
Bush also lifts a quote from an interview John McCain gave to the Washington Post on Iraq and then presents it as though McCain had said it to him.
Even where Bush is present and is quoting himself, he appears to have had his memory jogged by the accounts of others without finding much to add. Many of the borrowed lines are taken from Woodward's Bush at War, with the former president's accounts of meetings bearing a striking similarity to Woodward's. Bush's publisher has suggested that only confirms the accuracy of Decision Points. Others have suggested it is a reflection of two traits the former president was often criticised for – lack of original thought and laziness.
Bush also quotes Woodward's writings almost word for word in places. Where Woodward writes: "The second option combined cruise missiles with manned bomber attacks," Bush says: "The second option was to combine cruise missile strikes with manned bomber attacks." And where Woodward's book says: "The third and most robust option was cruise missiles, bombers and what the planners had taken to calling 'boots on the ground'," Bush says: "The third and most aggressive option was to employ cruise missiles, bombers and boots on the ground." Bush manages to remember exactly the same shouts as Woodward from the crowd at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks – "Do not let me down!" and "Whatever it takes" – even though there must have been a slew of them. He appears to have borrowed from the memoirs of Fleischer in relating an anecdote about a hospital visit to meet injured survivors of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon...
Dahlia Lithwick: We Are All the Bag Man
William the Bastard asserted the right to kill and torture--but he admitted that he had to justify what he had done to his tenants-in-chief afterwards. George W. Bush and Barack Obama say that what they do doesn't have to be explained and doesn't get to be reviewed by anybody.
Dahlia Lithwick:
The baby steps that have taken the United States from decrying torture to celebrating it: [N]o criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man.
President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would "turn the page" on prisoner abuse and other illegality.... What he didn't seem to understand... is that what was on that page would bleed through.... There's no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons... it's feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it's not illegal after all.
In his new memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush boasts that he not only granted his permission to water-board detainees but did so cowboy-fashion—with the words "Damn right." This admission has elicited barely a ripple of self-doubt among an American public that reconciled itself long ago to the twin propositions that torture can sometimes be legal and that every terror suspect is always a ticking time bomb. Bush's contention that American torture "helped break up plots to attack American military and diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States," has been largely rejected by British officials. (You may recall that earlier claims that Bush-era torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed led to the interruption of a plot to crash planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, were roundly debunked by my colleague Timothy Noah, who has shown that the Library Tower plot was disrupted in 2002, before the United States had even captured KSM, much less begun to torture him.)...
[A]s Ronald Reagan's former Solicitor General Charles Fried has argued in Because It Is Wrong... for all that torture hurts our enemies, it invariably hurts us even more.... "In the past we have prosecuted American soldiers who engaged in the equivalent of waterboarding. We have also prosecuted German and Japanese commandants who ordered it. Some were even executed."... [T]he Bush spin on the old Nixonian formulation... it's legal if my lawyer tells me it's legal—has become the law of the land.... As Nan Aron explains, the "my lawyer ate it" defense has been deemed illegal since Nuremburg. Now it's a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that water-boarding is illegal torture. So what? That's just their opinion. President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. It has taken this issue from a legal question to a matter of personal taste. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer. This is precisely the kind of sliding-scale ethical guesswork the rule of law should preclude.
Those of us who have been hollering about America's descent into torture for the past nine years didn't do so because we like terrorists or secretly hope for more terror attacks. We did it because if a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right.... It demands the shielding of torture photos and the exoneration of those who destroyed torture tapes just a day after the statute of limitations had run out.... All this was done in the name of moving us forward, turning down the temperature, painting over the rot that had overtaken the rule of law. Yet having denied any kind of reckoning for every actor up and down the chain of command, we are now farther along the road toward normalizing and accepting torture than we were back in November 2005, when President Bush could announce unequivocally (if falsely) that "The United States of America does not torture. And that's important for people around the world to understand." If people around the world didn't understand what we were doing then, they surely do now...
Liveblogging World War II: November 15, 1940
The 400,000 Jews in Warsaw are sealed off in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Henry Aaron Really Does not Like SImpson-Bowles
From the Fiscal Times:
All responsible budget analysts agree that the United States faces a
daunting deficit problem. It should be addressed soon. But how soon is
not clear. After the recovery is well under way, most would agree, and
certainly before the debt/GDP ratio gets too large. What is not clear
is what “well under way” means and whether it will happen soon enough
to prevent to debt/Gross Domestic Product ratio from getting too
large. The Bowles-Simpson plan would start deficit reduction in fiscal
2012, which starts on October 1, 2011, not even eleven months from
now. Since unemployment is likely then to still be in the vicinity of
9 percent or higher, that is too soon, as premature deficit reduction
could intensify and lengthen the recession. This is not a minor issue,
as nothing more effectively depresses revenues and generates deficits
than a weak economy.
Even more troubling... is the program... 70 percent of the deficit reduction under the Bowles-
Simpson “mark” would come from spending cuts.... The steady-state spending level... would be
20.5 percent of GDP. That is lower than spending averaged from 1980 to
2008 when none of the baby boomers had yet retired and claimed Social
Security and Medicare and when spending on health care per person was
a minor fraction of what it will be in 2020.
Other problems:
The plan calls for a reduction from baseline in federal health care
spending of about one-third by 2040, but doesn’t say how that target
will be achieved.
The plan would block grant Medicaid.... The result
would be powerful incentives to cut benefits.
The plan presents four options for modifying the tax system, but
doesn’t endorse any. All would tax capital gains as ordinary income,
which means doubling the rate on them.
All tax plans would end or curb deductions for charitable
contributions... at the same time that the
principal programs supporting these very [vulnerable] populations – Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security -- would be slashed....
Social Security benefits would eventually be cut by 25 percent for
people earning $43,000 today and by 40 percent for those earning
$100,000. Note the double whammy—less Social Security and no tax-
sheltered savings plans. The plan actually contains some modest
increases in Social Security benefits, so that it actually increases
the deficit until well after 2020
The plan says it would fix the Medicare fee cuts for doctors
scheduled for next month, but it doesn’t say how – other than to
establish a new payment system to reduce costs and improve quality.
The plan would freeze salaries of federal employees for three years,
cut the federal work force by 10 percent, and dump 250,000 contract
employees. To offset these cut backs, the plan calls for an increase
in productivity of federal workers, but it doesn’t say how....
[T]he shortcomings in their proposals are profound. It is vague in key
elements, sets targets and then calls on some committee or group to do
something unspecified if the targets are not being met.... [T]he draft plan is replete with magic asterisks.... It sets targets for overall spending
and taxation so low that it will be impossible to sustain even basic
promises to provide pension and health benefits....
There is a better way. The first element should be a large new... value-added tax.... Second... long-term budget reduction... hinges on the control of health care spending. Such control is
not possible without vigorous implementation of health care reform.... [T]he Affordable Care Act... is a start. More to the point, it is the
only game in town.
Third... Bowles-Simpson... will have to rely on spending curbs. But relying on
spending cuts to achieve 70 percent of the deficit reduction requires
setting spending targets so low that it calls to mind the quip
attributed to the man enjoying a drink in the bar on the Titanic: “I
asked for ice,” he said, “but this is ridiculous.” Or, as the British
say: “Less would be more.”
As I say, Simpson-Bowles is a significant unforced error by the Obama administration.
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