While Mining the Mighty Slopes of The Internet

In search of flecks of gold, some I came across this remarkable quote.


I am going to cheat just a little bit and change two words, but other than that the entire thing is  verbatim from the lips of a famous American public intellectual.  


See if you can guess who.

"But we face a tradeoff. On the one hand this government stimulus package is going to hurt the deficit over the long-term, especially over the long-term.


On the other hand, we've got a global stagnant economy. Japan is stagnant, Europe is going to stay stagnant because of their monetary union situation; they can't be stimulative, and, meanwhile, we have a situation with recently high unemployment, kids coming out of college have got no job opportunities, low pay raises. So there is real stagnation that the whole world is suffering from. The only country that can do anything about that it is the government... is the U.S. government.


So to me, it is worth taking a risk to get some stimulus into this world economy. A government stimulus package, maybe not this government stimulus package, but a government stimulus package is the only way to do that, to get the whole economy moving, the whole world."

Krugman, right?  Or Alan Grayson maybe?  


Bernie Sanders?


Karl Marx?


Nope.


It was...David Brooks on "The News Hour" and the two words I changed were "tax cuts" for which I substituted "government stimulus package".


The quote is from back in 2003 when Mr. Brooks was still a Neocon hod-carrier for Bloody Bill Kristol at the "Weekly Standard", still aggressively pro-Iraq War and still fucking wrong about everything.   


Here Mr. Brooks is arguing in favor of the Bush Tax cuts.  Mind you, not the first round of Bush tax cuts; the ones that eradicated the Clinton Surplus.  No, this was the second round of Bush tax cuts; he ones that blew a gargantuan hole in the deficit with tax cuts that overwhelmingly favored people like Mr. Brooks.  


The ones that passed in the Senate 51-50 with Emperor Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote.


(Yes, Virginia, there really was a golden age before January 20, 2009 when a 60-vote super-majority was not required to pass every damn thing in the United States Senate.  Our Mr. Brooks spent much of that time passed out face-first in Dubya's codpiece, so perhaps he did not notice it.)


Mark Shields was on the program, arguing in vain that running up massive deficits by cutting taxes during wartime was a "fraud, sham, hoax".  

Mr. Brooks dismissed any talk of deficits thus:

DAVID BROOKS: We've got a $10 trillion dollar economy.

Yeah!  We got plenty of dough to fight a war and cut my taxes, so STFU loser!

And as we watch the David Fucking Brooks of 2003 ride crackpot Republican economic voodoo and Neoconservative foreign policy into the glorious twin sunset of global American-led prosperity and a peaceful, democratic and self-funding victory in Iraq, if you're like me,  just for kicks, I wonder what whiny, Liberal naysayers were saying at exactly the same time, about exactly the same issue?


Whiny, Liberal naysayers like, for instance, Paul Krugman?

Funny you should ask.

Here is Ray Suarez introducing Paul Krugman and Allan Meltzer on the "The News Hour", May 14, 2003:

RAY SUAREZ: And for that, I'm joined by: Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times and professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. He served on President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors. Professor Meltzer, the president said a tax cut would put our fellow citizens to work, in his words. Would a tax cut help create jobs, and if so, how?

Here is the official 2003 Republican line on all of the various ways that the Bush tax cuts will magically transform the economy, improve corporate ethics, cure your acne and halitosis and pass the savings along to you!

ALLAN MELTZER: Well, there are several ways in which a tax cut is going to help create jobs. You know, it's interesting that we have this debate, because President Kennedy had a big, the cut with a large corporate tax cut, he cut marginal tax rates, it was very successful. President Reagan cut tax rates. That was very successful.

And now we're having a debate again, except the people who are on one side in the Kennedy debate are now on the other side, the Democrats of course were favorite when it was President Kennedy, they oppose it now. And the Republicans talked about big deficits back in the 60s, and they of course are in favor of the tax cut now. So we know that there's a lot of political rhetoric that we want to put to one side and look at what the issue is about.

What this issue is about is two things: One is there's a temporary stimulus to the economy of about $25 billion this year, and perhaps $25 billion next year, and the $550 billion number is a throw away number to make the thing look big. But we're going to have two presidential elections and five congressional elections before we have to worry about whether we're going to continue these for ten years. And the second thing so, the first effect is going to be to give us $25 billion, approximately, of stimulus this year.

But the big effect comes from a dividend tax cut because that's going to have supply side effects, it's going to try to increase the capital stock to make shareholders, make corporate officers more accountable to their shareholders, to reduce risk by reducing the amount of debt in the corporation and substituting equity.

It's all gold, and dropping in the long-debunked lie about the real nature and purpose of the Kennedy tax cuts is a lovely, Rovian touch, but I must admit I especially like the part about how throwing bales of money at rich people will "make corporate officers more accountable to their shareholders".

Here is how shrill, American-hating Socialist, Paul Krugman replied:

PAUL KRUGMAN: The difference between running a responsible budget now, which gives us some ability to be prepared for the deluge when the baby boomers start retiring and running what are in fact rather large deficits by historical standards over this crucial decade between now and the time when the baby boomers become a huge burden, you know, we're almost at our last chance to do something sensible in preparing for the baby boomers. And instead we're proposing to run, to have irresponsible tax cuts, run bigger deficits.

We are not, the point is we are not in good shape. The fact is that we are in a very, very serious budget prospect. And to say relax the debt to GDP ratio is not historically high. ...

Please remember this bit when we leap boldly forward to the Year of Out Lord, 2012 to find Mr. Brooks excoriating "cyclicalists" on the Left for...

...wait for it...

....wait...for..it...

...being all reckless n' shit about deficits and refusing to even talk about doing anything about those darn entitlements.

Until then, let us linger a few moments longer in 2003 and listen very attentively to the official 2003 Republican party line on those pesky entitlement programs.   (The very same entitlement programs which, six years later -- approximately 20 seconds after Barack Obama was sworn in as President -- every fucking Conservative and Centrist in America would suddenly and simultaneously announce must be massively and immediately slashed lest we will all die horribly leaving nothing of this country behind but lazy Negroes, uppity women, undeserving Mexicans, mountains of aborted fetuses and a giant smoking, atheist hole the Chinese will use as their national bidet!  Also, Wolverines!):

ALLAN MELTZER: First, I don't see anybody on the political scene and I haven't seen anybody on the political scene in a serious position for 20 years that has suggested that we do something about the social security other than talk about it. I agree that we all agree there's a long term problem. But it's not a crisis, it's the kind of problem where by extending the working age by a couple of years we would be able to solve a great big part of that problem. 

But in any case, nobody is talking about using this money for that. What the Democrats are talking about is spending it for other things. Increasing health care, they're not talking about reducing the deficit. They're talking about other ways that they would like to create deficits. So I think we ought to be honest about that and not politicize the issue. 

There just isn't much to that argument. 

Well-known shrill, American-hating Socialist, Paul Krugman:

PAUL KRUGMAN: It's just not true. But ok.

So why bring this all up today?


Because just like he did with his own record on "Mission Accomplished" and just like he did with his own, execrable record on Iraq, today the Our Mr. Brooks of 2012 has once again buried the David Fucking Brooks of 2003 somewhere in the high desert, stolen his horses and has come riding shamelessly back into town to scold his betters on the same subject that he himself got horribly, horribly wrong from the beginning.


First we get the hurried construction of Mr. Brooks' trademark left/right straw man which Mr. Brooks will spend the rest of his 800 words immolating (if you can't quite follow Mr. Brooks' eely convolutions, it helps to remember that when he is lying about "people on the left" on matters of economics, he is generally talking about Dr. Paul Krugman, who routinely humiliates Our Mr. Brooks by unfairly taking a fact-based death ray to Mr. Brooks' mushy, free-verse Conservative dereliction):

The country is divided when different people take different sides in a debate. The country is really divided when different people are having entirely different debates. That’s what’s happening on economic policy.

Many people on the left are having a one-sided debate about how to deal with a cyclical downturn. The main argument you hear from these cyclicalists is that the economy is operating well below capacity. To get it moving at full speed, the government should borrow and spend more. The federal government is now running deficits of about $1 trillion a year. Some of these cyclicalists believe the deficit should be about $1.4 trillion.

The cyclicalists rail against what they see as American austerity-mongers who resist new borrowing. They really rail against the European ones. They see François Hollande’s victory in France as a sign that, in Europe at least, the pendulum might finally be swinging from austerity to growth.

Other people — some on the left but mostly in the center and on the right — look at the cyclicalists and shrug. It’s not that they are necessarily wrong to bash excessive austerity. They’re simply failing to address the core issues.

The diverse people in this camp — and I’m one of them — believe the core problems are structural, not cyclical. The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.

None of which is actually true. 

Outside of Mr. Brook's  flaccid  prose and feverish imagination I do not know any Liberals who would seriously deny the existence of structural problems with the economy, or who believe that the only thing the the government should do is "paper over" the problems with "more debt". 

None. Nada. Zero. 

Quite the contrary, it is painfully clear that we have two, distinct problems.  We have the economic equivalent of a massive chest wound in the form of on ongoing, debilitating Great Recession caused by a giant hole being blown in the demand side of the economy.  This can be fixed using the relatively straightforward method of increasing targeted government spending.

On the one hand, yes, this will increase the debt and, yes, Conservatives like Our Mr. Brooks will keen like banshees about it...whenever there is a Democrat is in the White House. 

On the other hand, I really don't give a shit what frauds like Our Mr. Brooks have to say about anything. 

We also have the economic equivalent of heart disease, mostly in the form of runaway health care costs and a failure to invest in infrastructure and education.  These are real problems, which Mr. Brooks insists on "solving" by dragging the patient out of the operating room in the middle of emergency surgery and throwing him on the treadmill. 

"Unlike the cyclicalists, we structuralists do not believe that the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows."

... 

"Running up huge deficits without fixing the underlying structure will not restore growth."

Back when the prevailing wind was from Vichy, Our Mr. Brooks was only too happy to serve Vichy.  He never rubbed his worry stone until it burst into flames over Dubya pissing away irreplaceable American blood and treasure into the sands of Iraq and never set his hair on fire over Dubya making the Clinton surpluses vanish in a flurry of deficit-busting tax cuts that overwhelmingly favored people like Our Mr. Brooks.

But now that the wind has shifted and his fellow Conservatives have settled on Austerity as the shiny, new sledgehammer with which to beat the smelly masses to their knees, Mr. Brooks can't get enough of it.  Of course he is willing to be reasonable about the amount of agony he inflicts on the poor, the weak and the dispossessed in the name of his new plutocrat chew-toy --

"Structuralists face a tension: How much should you reduce the pain the unemployed are feeling now, and how much should you devote your resources to long-term reform? There has to be balance."

-- but in the end, like Iraq, it's all just a game to him.

A game rigged to de-legitimize Mr. Brooks' opponents by constantly lying about their actual positions and constantly shifting the terms of the debate away from the real pain of real people and towards the oligarchic interests which Mr. Brooks so loyally and profitably serves.

A game in which Mr. Brooks is free to be as grotesquely wrong as he likes as often as he likes because he knows his lies will never be hung out for public scrutiny and ridicule.

All just an interesting abstraction being played out by little people far beyond the grounds of Stately Whine Manor.

Meanwhile, Dr. Krugman continues standing outside of Mr. Brooks' New York Times masturbation booth, rudely blasting facts and history through the door here and here:

So why are these people so sure that it’s structural? I know that it sounds wise and Serious to say that it is, but there is this matter of actual evidence; that evidence is strongly inconsistent with a structural story, and quite consistent with a demand story. That doesn’t settle the case entirely, but in a better world it would go a long way toward resolving the argument.


Too bad we don’t live in that better world.

I now patiently await all the usual suspects to send their readers over to Charlie Pierce's house because thank God someone out there has finally, finally had the huevos to screw that weasel to the sticking place :-)