I asked this on Twitter last night, then quickly backed off, deferring to smarter friends to explain their outrage over the spending freeze that the President is proposing. I mean, in general I get it: we’re liberals, we believe the government needs to expand in various ways, and we’d like to have some freedom to spend on our policy priorities while we’re in power. It seems stupid for the president to tie his hands behind his back without even extracting concessions for doing so.
But then I think about the actual agenda: I’d put HCR, addressing climate change and dismantling the terrorball apparatus at the top of my list, as, I think, would most progressives. A spending freeze doesn’t really preclude any of them*. In fact, all of them are potential deficit reducers!
Plus this, via Kevin Drum, just seems entirely wrong:
conservative Rich Lowry shows via Twitter that he understands why, even if the White House doesn’t: “spending freeze, no matter how notional, is a huge ceding of rhetorical grnd by WH. will give GOP more leverage in makng anti-hcr, stim case.”
You say “ceding”, I say “co-opting”. Reading Dave’s piece from yesterday, I was left with the impression that the alliance between establishment conservatives and the tea partiers — the only actually vibrant part of the right at the moment — is tenuous at best (“…and starring Newt Gingrich as Ahmed Chalabi!”). Maybe I’m being naive, but it seems to me like signaling a commitment to the teabaggers’ (admittedly incoherent) concerns about fiscal responsibility could do a lot to confuse that burgeoning relationship. If it can be done without seriously endangering social welfare entitlements; without affecting the party’s main policy initiatives; and hey, maybe even with it as cover for going after a few things like farm subsidies, then that all sounds okay to me.
Anyway, consider this another plea for explaining the obvious thing(s) I’m missing. At the moment I find myself convinced that this strategy could blow up quite easily. Certainly the last few weeks haven’t instilled a ton of confidence in the Democrats’ political skill. In fact, odds of this play working seem low! The idea that defusing this one last minority critique will yield dividends is a mistake that’s been made many times in the past few months. Still, this specific proposal doesn’t seem obviously crazy to me, or even that destructive. And though I’m in no position to say, it seems likely that somebody in the administration thinks it’ll help in the fall.
* Obviously another stimulus becomes untenable under this proposal. Was that really all that likely, though?
UPDATE: Yikes. Okay.
BUT ALSO: This. Which seems dumb, but okay. “It’s almost certain that Congress will pass, and the president will sign, a jobs bill”, though? Well, okay, maybe! I don’t know how to read all these sorts of tea leaves, and I’m not on any secret listservs or conference calls or anything like that. But it kind of seems to me like the Republicans have been complaining about ARRA’s (alleged — but absolute!) ineffectiveness for a while now, laying the groundwork for obstruction of any last-ditch effort to fix the economy before the election (which should be done! But c’mon, at this point it obviously won’t save anybody.). I mean, yes, clearly everyone is about to start talking about jobs. I’m unclear on why folks think that’ll turn into something, though.
The largest source of my outrage doesn’t come from the economics or politics of the situation, so much as the ethical implications raised by the Barack Obama’s choice to promote a spending freeze.
Common wisdom says the government should tighten its belt during a recession. However, all reasonable economic consensus indicates that deficit spending is an effective tool to stimulate an economy, and is one of the few available to the administration at this time. Economic consensus predicts that following common wisdom and cutting government spending carries a high risk of stalling any economic and job growth, and possibly even deepening the recession.
So faced with what is possibly the clearest possible situation of common wisdom being at odds with reality, what does Barack Obama plan to do? Will he follow the responsible course of action and try to educate the american people despite the potential for personal loss? No. Will he take the arguably cowardly course of action and try to avoid the subject or pass the buck onto another branch of government? No. Instead Obama looks to profit in the short term by giving the American people exactly what they want, even though he knows that the proposed course of action carries unreasonable risk over the long term.
It seems like the mantra of “first, do no harm” should apply equally to those operating the levers of power as those operating with scalpels, and in this case Barack Obama is proposing a plan that he must know is likely to do harm. I’m fairly certain that “I just did what the patient asked for” is not a valid defense in a medical malpractice lawsuit, and similarly should not be able to be used in justifying legislation or public policy.
In summary, the American people are demanding an unnecessary treatment with severe long-term health risks, and it is Barack Obama’s professional responsibility as the primary physician to not carry out the operation. Doing so would be a breach of his oath, ethical obligations, and the expectations of voters like myself.
Primum non nocere.
Or maybe I am just tired of leaders who seemingly share my beliefs, but simply don’t have the backbone needed to stand up for them.
I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying. If our leaders don’t start telling the public that up is up (not down, as Glenn Beck has told them!), how will we ever keep our society from falling apart?
I don’t have an answer to that. But I guess I’m too worried by the immediate problems before us to begrudge Obama’s efforts to find a clever way out of these superficial political problems. It now sounds like there will be a jobs bill before the spending freeze, and that the spending freeze will barely amount to anything anyway. If it splits the opposition and gains back some political capital, I think I’m for it. But I agree that it’s pretty frustrating.