All this talk about Democrats worrying over deficits in the midst of a recession (forget the GDP, FDR got the GDP going up by the end of 1933, and nobody claims the Great Depression ended the year he took office) is so crazy one scarcely knows where to begin. (The 1937/38 recession, perhaps?) And targeting Social Security and Medicare? So almost at random...
On Friday, I stumbled across an early October blog post by Stephen Levy--one of the leading experts on California's economy, particularly in terms of the role of government spending and investment. In it, he wrote:
Most current public pension and health care benefits were negotiated at a time when private sector pay and benefits were growing. In recent years many private sector employees have seen their pension and health benefits decline as companies went out of business or changed benefit arrangements. As a result, public employee retirement benefits now seem high in comparison to what is happening in the private sector.
In fact, it's not just public employee retirement benefits. Perhaps the main reason we have an "Entitlement Problem" is because private wages and benefits stopped growing for the bottom 90% of income earners about 30 years ago. (And even the next 9% hasn't done well by historic standards.) The lack of broadly-shared economic progress in the era of conservative Voodoo Economics is the great unspeakable truth of our times. And this great stagnation makes taxes, public employee benefits and social insurance--such as Social Security and Medicare--seem like much bigger factors than they would be if we still had the sort of broad economic prosperity that "socialists" like FDR and Harry Truman gave us, and which persisted until around 1973--as could readily be seen from the following pair of charts from my earlier diary, "The One Percent Economy--Part One: The What"
First, the "socialist" economy of the New Deal Party System Era (plus a few extra years of spillover):
Note how the slowest growth rates were from the top 1%.
Then, the economy we've had since Democratic dominance gave way to divided government:
Levy was trying to make a relatively modest point in trying to achieve a relatively modest goal of rationality and civility in dealing with the economy we've got. Me, I want to change that economy. But first, let's hear Levy out:
Throughout the month of August, I responded to several Salon columns by Michael Lind--published on Tuesdays--the following weekend. This week, I responded to Lind's column the same day, in "[I Should Be] Looking For The Next FDR With Michael Lind". Out of that came a very clarifying comment by John Emerson that inspired me to write a followup diary this weekend. But as I started work on it, I realized that I first needed to finally correct a long-standing oversight, and discuss the importance of social science situationism, not to be confused with the revolutionary Situationist Internationale. The Situationist blog associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School explains:
There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else.Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception.Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong."The situation" refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. "Situationism" is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation.
An important part of my core differences with Lind spring from a situationist perspective. I don't think that many people's basic attitudes have changed as much as he does, nor do I think that some of the actors he identifies are responsible for the changes he associates them with. Rather, I think that the political/economic situation has changed dramatically, and that we need to adopt political practices that take account of that changed situation, and seek to modify its impact.
One of the clearest ways to get a handle on that change is from the various presentations of changes in income and wealth concentration from the work of US Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Here's an example:
It's my primary contention that people living in a highly income-polarized society--as we do today--will act in ways quite different from those living in a more income-equalized society, such as predominated during the Post WWII New Deal Era, and even into the 70s and early 80s. It's my second contention that while changes in attitudes and actions have taken place, and vast ideological structures have been erected, these are more reflections of a changing economic situation, and have substantially less to do with changes in core attitudes. It's my third contention that the neoliberal trap Obama is caught in--which Lind wrote about in the column I agreed with most--is itself a manifestation of old-style non-situationist thinking, which systematically misapprehends the foundations of human action. In short, the problem goes much deeper than the Team of Rubins.
In my first entry, I made a brief case for the value of norms and traditions in reforming formal institutions. In the case of the run-away Presidency, this is perhaps the most vital weapon.
I'm going to add something to that, in terms of the power of norms. One of the biggest checks on a runaway executive is the two-term limit. What's interesting is that for almost 200 years, the limit of two terms was purely normative, and only the extraordinarily popular FDR had the temerity to successfully broach it, and even then, after he died, the violation of this norm was problematic enough to pass a constitutional amendment preventing anyone else from doing as Roosevelt did (Unsurprisingly but still ironically it was a Republican congress that first passed the 22nd Amendment). So in terms of limiting the executive, my proposal is to change the norms, then once some President overreaches, that will trigger a backlash sufficient to end the practice in law or even the constitution. One nice thing the founders did get right is that the President has no formal say over constitutional amendments. That's between Congress and the States.
So the case I'm trying to make here is that the very institution of the Presidency is one which is anti-democratic and anti-progressive. The inexorable growth in the powers and prestige of the Executive branch is naturally of great concern, but I'm going to take issue with even some of the explicitly constitutional powers of the office, because I think they are a large part of why and how this branch has succeeded in beating down the legislative one.
