The Economist's Presidential Election Endorsement

The Economist published their endorsement for this year's presidential election today.  The Economist, known to be a conservative news outlet, had this to say about President Obama:

"Even to a newspaper with no love for big government, the fact that over 40m people had no health coverage in a country as rich as America was a scandal."

While one particularly scathing comment about Mitt Romney was:

"...the extremism of his party is Mr Romney’s greatest handicap. The Democrats have their implacable fringe too: look at the teachers’ unions. But the Republicans have become a party of Torquemadas, forcing representatives to sign pledges never to raise taxes, to dump the chairman of the Federal Reserve and to embrace an ever more Southern-fried approach to social policy. Under President Romney, new conservative Supreme Court justices would try to overturn Roe v Wade, returning abortion policy to the states. The rights of immigrants (who have hardly had a good deal under Mr Obama) and gays (who have) would also come under threat. This newspaper yearns for the more tolerant conservatism of Ronald Reagan, where “small government” meant keeping the state out of people’s bedrooms as well as out of their businesses. Mr Romney shows no sign of wanting to revive it."

The Economist also lists its history of Presidential Endorsements.  For those keeping score, they are:

1980: Ronald Reagan
1984: No Endorsement
1988: No Endorsement
1992: Bill Clinton
1996: Bob Dole
2000: George W. Bush
2004: John Kerry
2008: Barack Obama
2012: Barack Obama

Its 1984 non-endorsement had this very prescient point that haunts us today:

"Although Mr Reagan's ultra-Keynesian America is barrelling along towards full employment, all its trading and budget accounts are frighteningly out of balance. A sound international economic order cannot be built on the assumption that the rumbustiously richest country will go on borrowing unprecedented amounts at enormous interest rates from everybody else for ever."

All-in-all, it hasn't been a good few days for Mitt Romney.  First, his keynote speaker from the Republican National Convention, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, effusively praised President Obama for his handling of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.  Then, he attempted to do the right thing by having a can drive at what was originally scheduled to be a campaign rally.  Just one problem though:

"The campaign asked for nonperishable donations despite the fact that the Red Cross does not typically accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items because of the extra labor involved with sorting, cleaning, repackaging and transporting such items."

After that, New York City's Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a surprise endorsement of President Obama based on his views on climate change, in spite of the fact that it hasn't come up much in this year's election cycle.

What does all this mean?  Nothing, except that this will all be over in four more days, when Barack Obama has an 81% chance of winning 303 electoral votes.  Then, like the Hurricane Sandy recovery, we can all get on with the rest of our lives.

Reagan Called For An End To ‘Crazy’ Tax Loopholes That Let Millionaires Pay Less Than Bus Drivers

Great video showing Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan essentially saying the same thing:



Sshh! Don't tell any conservatives Reagan was a pragmatist. For them it's like a kid finding out there's no Santa Claus.

Whose Lie Is It Anyway?

Whose lies were more outrageous than the others? Go to FactCheck.org's recap and PolitiFact's recap of the MSNBC/Politico Republican Debate to find out.

The Best Defense 'worst president' of the 20th century contest - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

So it came down to a guy named 'Wilson' and a guy with 'Wilson' in his name. Interesting.

Happy Belated 100th Birthday Hubert H. Humphrey!

Excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times on Thursday on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hubert Humphrey:

"His Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act, introduced in May 1975, when unemployment was at a post-Depression high of 9 percent, proposed a sort of domestic World Bank to route capital to job creators. (It spoke to his conviction, in a knee-jerk, anti-corporate age, that pro-labor and pro-business policies were complementary.)

And at a time when other liberals were besotted with affirmative action as a strategy to undo the cruel injustices of American history, Humphrey pointed out that race-based remedies could only prove divisive when good jobs were disappearing for everyone. Liberal policy, he said, must stress "common denominators - mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears."

In 1976 he joined Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from the Watts section of Los Angeles, to introduce a bill requiring the government, especially the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment below 3 percent - and if that failed, to provide emergency government jobs to the unemployed.

It sounds heretical now. But this newspaper endorsed it then, while 70 percent of Americans believed the government should offer jobs to everyone who wanted one."

The op-ed piece also talks about how we revered Ronald Reagan on the anniversary of his 100th birthday but forgot about Humphrey for his. Of course, Reagan being a former president had a lot to do with it. It also got me thinking though: many of today's conservatives hold up Reagan as an icon even though he provided amnesty to illegal immigrants and raised taxes during his presidency.

If Humphrey was held by progressives in the same regard, would his positions that are contrary to modern progressive views also be overlooked? The skeptic in me thinks that is likely so.

That's kinda the point Joe

From Joe Scarborough's weekly column in Politico:

"White House watchers believe the president will not touch Social Security until he is safely ensconced in his second term."

This is seemingly passing comment in the column is unfortunately the problem for as long as politics has existed in the human community. When unpopular decisions need to be made, political leaders don't make them because it reduces their chances of getting re-elected. It's not necessarily a sign of cowardice. That political leader believes he or she is doing the right thing for his or her town, city, state, and country and can only continue doing so while in office and not out of it.

That's part of the reason presidents don't attempt any real reform until their second term, such as Reagan's 1986 Tax Hike. Obama addressing Social Security now would be akin to George H.W. Bush breaking his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. Presidents make controversial decisions in their second term because they don't have a re-election to worry about. As a two-term president, your place in history will be determined by how much you accomplish, not just if you're a two-termer. Unfortunately the fickle voting public will never re-elect you to a second term if you do something unpopular in your first term no matter how beneficial it is to the greater good.

Why is that a problem? Because the loss is usually due to the unpopular decision and, more often than not, the challenger will have run on a platform to get rid of whatever good yet unpopular thing the incumbent did, setting the whole country back.

So isn't the issue equally divided between the politicians in charge as well as the naivete of the voting public?

Wouldn't starving the beast just make it angry enough to consume disproportionately more than it should?

The Economist's Democracy in America blog has an interesting post about a column in The Fiscal Times by Bruce Bartlett, a former Jack Kemp staffer, advisor in the Reagan Administration, and Treasury official under Bush 41.

In talking about Reagan and Bush 43, the The Economist's blog writes:

"...both administrations revved up spending at the same time they were cutting taxes, in the political equivalent of an overweight person who rewards himself with an extra helping of ice cream because he has just purchased a membership in a gym."

The Bartlett column also provides empirical evidence contradicting its counterpoint, that raising taxes results in uncharacteristic increases in government spending:

"By this logic, the tax increase enacted in 1993, which raised the top federal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 31 percent, should have caused a massive increase in the federal budget deficit. In fact, it did not. Spending was 22.1 percent of GDP in 1992 and it fell every year of the Clinton administration, to 21.4 percent of GDP in 1993, 21 percent in 1994, 20.6 percent in 1995, 20.2 percent in 1996, 19.5 percent in 1997, 19.1 percent in 1998, 18.5 percent in 1999, and 18.2 percent in 2000."

When a staunch Reaganite involved in its fiscal policy is jumping the ship on the economic theory they so dearly espoused, why are today's Republicans still hanging on dearly hoping against hope that they might be proven right this time against all evidence otherwise?