Replies: 7 Comments

Posted by: Publicus On Sunday, April 10th

And taking Christopher Hitchens as the final word on anything is dubious, but doing so on WMD is ridiculous. Bush shut down the inspections himself this winter. The "infrastructure" and the "pontential" and "weapons-related programs" were not what Bush said were there. He said Saddan had WMD. Saddam did not, and Bush has stopped looking, meaning that even Bush himelf, notwithstanding his desperation to prove the point, knows that the weapons aren't there.

Posted by: Publicus On Sunday, April 10th

Nathan, it is possible right now for the government to be considerably more fiscally conservative. It is not a matter of private or personal accounts. It is a matter of the basic will to do so. Bush promised he would. He hasn't.

Kindly restore my posts to their original condition. No real debate is possible with someone who capriciously exercises a unilateral right to excise his own record or that of another party in the discussion.

Posted by: Nathan Smith On Sunday, April 10th

Publicus,

All your points about the deficit are well-taken. It's a big problem.

Just for the record, Saddam did have WMDs, as Christopher Hitchens points out here.

Private accounts do help with the long-term fiscal problem. For one thing, they make it POSSIBLE, even if it's not likely to happen in the immediate future, for the government to be considerably more fiscally conservative. The reason for this is that the Social Security Administration is required to use present payroll taxes to buy T-bills; this means that the government has to borrow in order to create T-bills for the Treasury to buy. Private accounts open up the possibility for the government to reduce its dissaving beyond what it can do at present.

Related to this, private accounts would increase the nominal deficit without increasing the government's liabilities. This might help to discipline spending. But, in general, I'm a little bit unsure about what would help to discipline spending.

As for whether to blame Republicans and Democrats for the spending binge of the past few years, there's plenty of blame to go around. Republicans are in the leadership, and they've done a pretty bad job of living up to their own claims to advocate smaller government. But Democrats are pulling them in only one direction: towards more spending. In our political system, politicians have a huge incentive to drift towards the center, where the swing voters are. The Democrats do much to define where that center is.

Anyway, the main reason that private accounts may be said to embody Republicans' political philosophy is that Republicans believe people should stand on their own two feet and not rely on government handouts. Social Security is the ultimate government handout. To replace this with a system rooted in individual responsibility would be about the biggest step forward for the conservative political philosophy that there could be.

Posted by: Publicus On Sunday, April 10th

And perhaps you ought to leave it to the reader to judge whether my remarks were ad hominem or merely inconvenient for you. You're welcome to respond. And as you know, I cannot edit your remarks.

That is censorship, Nathan, plain and simple.

Posted by: Publicus On Sunday, April 10th

You do indeed answer your own questions, Nathan, and you raise some more. The predictable veneer of politesse doesn't make them go away.

First, what "governing philosophy"? The GOP touted itself for years as the party of pay-as-you-go fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. Now, according to the vice president, "deficits don't matter." Many of the GOPs own best and brightest take direct issue with this flagrant reversal. Couple that attitude with five years of breakneck spending and not a single veto of such a bill by Bush himself, and the answer, thank you, is obvious. There is no governing philosophy in the GOP right now but one: get while the getting is good. Deficits? Not our problem.

That is very imperious behavior. The payers here are the ones the GOP insists it wants to protect: children and the unborn, who'll enter American life saddled with the debt we leave them. They have no choice in the matter except to pay.

Blaming the Democrats for policies they haven't implemented is like...let's think of the most absurd example we can here...like blaming Saddam for having WMD.

The Republicans represent over half the votes. That's different from representing half the population.

Bush by his own admission has proposed nothing at all that would address the long-term fiscal problems for Social Security, and he and the GOP created an even bigger one with the Medicare entitlement they rammed through Congress. For Bush to go around calling this a crisis is like an arsonist calling in his own fires.

Rein this in: the GOP is becoming a party of insubstantial spin and rationalizations. Bush sold himself as a "reformer with results," and he's acting like a salesman with excuses. The governing philosophers here aren't Locke or any of the other names you bandy around. They're Karl Rove and Frank Luntz, tent-show salesmen pitching patent medicine to fools.

I have to doubt your sincerity on raising the level of debate here. I think it's more like this: you like scoring points on the blogs, the still warm pond of political opinion, where it's an asset to be blindly loyal to the point of willful ignorance, and where no dissenting opinions are welcome. The Little League.

Posted by: Nathan Smith On Sunday, April 10th

For the reader's information, the [Ad hominem] is a stand-in for a paragraph in which Publicus talked about how "my loyalty blinds me" and something starting with "thinking like this," basically the same ending he usually puts on his comments. I'll try not to edit people's comments this way often, but I am dead serious about raising the level of debate here. You contribute some good arguments, Publicus. But if these discussions are to be worth reading, we've got to rein in the ad hominem.

In response to the substance:

First, the Democrats may represent "almost half the population." Not half, as the 2004 election clearly showed.

Second, the Republicans did not create a crisis deliberately. The long-term fiscal crisis of Social Security (or "major problem," if you prefer-- I hope we can avoid the stupid semantic debate) was certainly not created by Republicans; it is an inevitable consequence of a pay-as-you-go retirement system in a time of demographic changes.

Third, to blame Republicans alone for the growth of spending in recent years is myopic and unfair. Certainly they bear some of the blame. But the Democrats did not create pressure for less spending. They created pressure for more spending. Kerry ran for office, not promising to cut back any Bush programs, but promising to spend more. And Bush's prescription drug benefit was initially (it seems) a response to Gore for political purposes. (Gore offered a bigger one.)

Is it imperious behavior for a party that the people have chosen to control every branch of government to design solutions to the nation's long-run problems consistent with its governing philosophy? The question answers itself.

Posted by: Publicus On Saturday, April 9th

Nathan, the Democrats "get off" by representing half the population of the United States. If the Republicans "use" a crisis--meaning, if the Republicans create one deliberately, as they have by spending like Democrats used to--then they are abrogating their duty. If it's "imperious behavior" on the part of a minority, what is it when it's exercised by a majoriity with a razor-thin margin?

[Ad hominem]