When reports broke that President Donald Trump had picked Stephen Moore to serve at the Federal Reserve, the backlash was swift and severe.
Moore is best known for being an economic analyst who is terrible at his job. Jonathan Chait called him a “famous idiot.” Economist Greg Mankiw, one of the most venerated conservative economists, said he “does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job.” Catherine Rampell humiliated him in a debate about deflation.
But one point in Moore’s unimpressive history is a piece he wrote in early January of 2009, in the depths of the financial crisis that began in 2008.
In this perilous time, with the United States facing financial disaster and the world economy staring over the edge of a cliff, Moore advised policymakers to turn to a book at the center of his worldview: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
It’s not a historical analysis of past recessions or a methodical examination on various economic theories of boom and bust cycles. Instead, it’s a far-right melodramatic novel, a favorite of libertarian extremists, that paints the government as incompetent and a few select entrepreneurs as all-knowing titans.
It provides no actual insights about how the government might mitigate a recession, and Moore is unable to extract any real guidance from its pages in his op-ed, aside from perhaps abolishing all income taxes (!?). But nevertheless, he writes, “If only Atlas were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.”[sic]
This isn’t meaningful analysis or actionable policy guidance — it’s ideological mouth noise designed to impress the uninformed.
In one bizarre passage, he analogizes Rand’s story of an innovative metal inventor having his discovery co-opted by the government to the Treasury secretary pressuring banks to accept bailouts at the cost of giving the United States a financial stake. These instances couldn’t be more different — the government seizing rights to an invention versus taking partial control of banks while providing bailouts to prevent financial catastrophe. A catastrophe driven, in part, by wildly reckless banking practices. And despite Moore’s implications, the actions taken during the recession, whatever their wisdom, didn’t lead the government to keep seizing control of banks — it backed off once the crisis was averted.
The Fed, under the leadership of Chair Ben Bernanke, played a key role in the efforts to respond to the 2008 recession. There are good arguments that it could and should have done more, but those counterfactuals will always be difficult to prove.
But Moore’s view at the time appears to have been that the government should have just stood back and watched as the world burned. And he based this view, of all things, on an absurd novel written by a non-economist.
Now, Trump thinks he should have a say in U.S. monetary policy.
If Paul Ryan had written A Christmas Carol, Scrooge would have gotten a massive tax break, paid for by taking away Tiny Tim’s health insurance. The obvious lesson of the tale would be that a small businessman had been rewarded for creating a job for Bob Crachit — who could enjoy working overtime on Christmas without the fear of additional compensation, as well as the freedom of knowing that he won’t be able to retire until he’s at least 70, if ever.
Ryan’s glorious vision of Christmas yet to come may sound like a nightmare to you — but if the Speaker of the House gets his way, that nightmare will become America’s reality by the end of 2017.
Let’s go through Scrooge’s wish list, step-by-step, like we’re a concierge Santa service for rich people’s most destructive urges — or as if we were Paul Ryan.
Ebenezer Scrooge may be Charles Dickens’ personification of everything that is wrong with unfettered greed. But to Paul Ryan, Scrooge — with his estimated net worth of $1.6 billion — is a proud example of those job creators known as small businessmen, which by Ryan’s definition includes all Americans who “file their business as individuals, as people.”
This class of taxpayer, New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait notes, allegedly includes Donald Trump, a man who seats himself in a gold throne and identifies as a billionaire. Though Trump evidently is not much of a taxpayer.
But who would? That kind of talk would only make rich people sad, which to Paul Ryan is a crisis almost as severe as America’s recent epidemic of poor people getting health insurance.
Sure, offering tax breaks that mostly benefit the rich blasts a $3.1 trillion hole in the deficit over the next ten years. But, as tattoo artists often lie to their drunkest customers, the Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity.”
So 2017 will be an excellent opportunity to insure poor kids, like — say — Tiny Tim.
Under President Obama, America has hit a remarkable milestone with 95 percent of children covered by health insurance. Ryan has a plan to fix that with a repeal of Obamacare that will increase the number of uninsured kids by 4 million, nearly doubling the uninsured rate from 4 percent to 9 percent, according to a study by the Urban Institute. Ho ho ho!
In exchange for all those uninsured kids, we get a lot of happy Scrooges! We’ll be trading the insurance of about 4 million kids and some 16 million adults for $197,000 a year in sweet tax breaks for the richest .01 percent of people a.k.a. “small businesses” in RyanSpeak.
But, you say, Tiny Tim uses a crutch and an iron frame to support his sickly frame. He has a pre-existing condition! Surely Republicans will make sure he’s still insured.
Well, Scrooge doesn’t have to offer his employees insurance, meaning the Crachits have to get their own coverage. And since the GOP replacement bills all require people to maintain coverage, a few bad months for Bob and his family could leave poor Tim at the mercy of grossly underfunded high risk pools.
Or perhaps Scrooge will offer some of that great new non-Obamacare low-cost insurance that could cover as much as $2,000 a year, which would insure him for a whole day if he ends up in the hospital.
To make up for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Crachit could end up owing for Tiny Tim’s care — given since Republicans will almost certainly aim to repeal Obamacare’s ban on insurance companies placing yearly or lifetime limits on care — Bob has got to work, all the time. So he does.
But Mr. Scrooge carefully makes sure his star employee earns just over the threshold where no compensation for overtime work is required. President Obama’s Labor Department wanted to raise that threshold from $455 a week to $913, meaning employers like Scrooge would either have to offer a raise or pay overtime. But Paul Ryan’s GOP will make sure that people earning more than $455 but less than $913 can be made to work all the overtime Scrooge wants for no extra compensation — even on Christmas. Just like the wise men!
And the best news of all is Bob Crachit and his son can look forward to working overtime every week of their lives until they’re in their 70s, when they can finally cut back to just working a 40-hour week so they can afford some Fancy Feast to go with the doctors’ bill.
Paul Ryan’s desires to privatize Social Security and Medicare — and pass the losses and costs on to you! — are about as well hidden as his passion for Ayn Rand. It’s what defines his career in public service — but it’s also what makes him repulsive to most Americans. So he tries to hide his passions or cloak them under code words.
Ryan’s plan to privatize most of Medicare and demand future retirees pay more is a part of his “Better Way” plan, which should be named “Better Way for Scrooge” plan. Donald Trump campaigned on preserving both of America’s retirement guarantees, but he has been quickly moving toward Paul and the two now seem to be fully aligned with the president-elect’s choice of Rep. Mick Mulvaney to be his budget director. The GOP congressman from South Carolina is one of the few politicians in America who eagerly declares his desire to cut Social Security.
How else can we afford to make Scrooge’s life easier?
Ryan and Dickens may have had different ideas of happy endings. The author of Great Expectations saw a Scrooge overwhelmed by the plenty with which he had been blessed and the need to which he had become blind. Ryan sees a Scrooge who is overburdened by tax and spend politics and exploited by greedy employees who want Christmas off every single year.
No wonder he prefers the works of Ayn Rand.
Both stories end with Scrooge being able to proudly say, “Merry Christmas!” But in Ryan’s tale, Scrooge is rushing home to inhale a whole turkey by himself. Just like a “small businessman” should.
IMAGE: Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) holds a copy of his party’s “A Better Way” reform agenda at a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, September 29, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
In a sensible world, you wouldn’t be able to run on failed policies.
Economic gambits that led to massive inequality in the good days and a financial crisis that cost 8 million jobs in the bad days would be cast aside forever. Proposing a rehash of the foreign policy that destabilized the Middle East at the cost of thousands of American lives and trillions in treasure would exclude you from polite society. You wouldn’t, for instance, even consider backing the brother of the president who championed all these polices, especially a brother whose only major disagreement with that president would have left America with a net job loss, instead of just the worst job creation since the Great Depression.
In a sensible world, the guys who led us into Iraq to be “greeted as liberators” would be tarred and thumbtacked for suggesting that the poor should think about their life choices.
But we have to stop pretending this is a sensible world.
Fortunately, Republicans’ fiercest opponents are themselves. Actual reality has proven to be a powerful countervailing force, when enough Americans vote. This is why you should expect an election filled with Bushian attempts to blur the differences between the two parties in order to encourage independents and discourage liberals. Despite that, there will be plenty of moments to call out the true differences between the two parties, besides one wanting you to have health insurance, voting rights, reproductive rights, and the freedom to organize, while protecting the sanctity of traditional… climate.
The truth behind the conservative mission to have America governed by big corporations is often exposed in the party’s most risible policies. Here are five ways Republicans reveal their cruel intentions and dare people not to vote for them.
1. Thinking opposition to “big government” equals opposing government programs. Conservatives have effectively trained Americans to hate the idea of “big government.” President Bill Clinton recognized this as he said, “The era of big government is over,” even as he was engaged in a battle to defend Medicare from withering cuts. Since the 1990s we’ve learned that smaller government leads to bigger banks, bigger corporations, and bigger inequality. People still hate big government, but they love Medicare and Social Security. And when made aware of how many of us will end up being dependent on Medicaid as seniors, they love that too. Heck, they’re even learning to love Obamacare, despite about a billion dollars in ads designed to make them hate it.
Mike Huckabee recognizes the affection for these programs and seems to be spouting conservative heresy when he says that he wants to preserve them for older Americans. But that’s even Paul Ryan’s line. He continually points out that his Medicare reforms — which reveal the lie in all Republican health care policies by turning Medicare into a version of Obamacare with a public option — would only affect people 55 and older. And the fact is that breaking two systems that work as well as Medicare and Social Security threatens anyone who depends on them.
Weakening the safety net in order to cut taxes for the richest is the GOP’s Prime Directive. But denying the reality of these cuts to the seniors whose votes keep them in power is their only means of survival.
2. Hazing the poor. If you have any passing familiarity with the Gospels or any trace of a conscience, you’ve probably wondered, “How did a movement based on the teachings of an abstinent socialist, 1 percent-bashing rabbi join forces with the ‘Greed is the greatest good’ followers of an abortion-loving atheist romance novelist like Ayn Rand?”
Well, Christian Libertarianism includes a reverence for money as an infallible means of God/free market deciding your worth. Winners reap tract homes, timeshares, and tax breaks. Losers suck on pain, poverty, and piss tests.
In Kansas, this is happening on another level.
The rich and their richresentative failure of a governor, Sam Brownback, have broken the state — literally — with tax breaks for the wealthy that were supposed to pay for themselves and instead bored massive holes in the budget. Someone has to be punished for this, and the obvious answer is the poor.
“The legislature placed a daily cap of $25 on cash withdrawals beginning July 1, which will force beneficiaries to make more frequent trips to the ATM to withdraw money from the debit cards used to pay public assistance benefits,” The Washington Post‘s Max Ehrenfreund wrote. “Since there’s a fee for every withdrawal, the limit means that some families will get substantially less money.”
But guess who will end up with more money? The big banks. That’ll learn ’em.
3. Playing games with women’s health. When Scott Walker was facing a tightening re-election campaign, he made this ad which starts by saying he’s “pro-life” and then ends with him seeming to argue that the decision of when to have a child is ultimately a woman’s choice, which would suggest the opposite.
He, of course, wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother. This is the official position of the Republican Party, one that only about 1 out of 5 Americans shares. So you see why he’d want to hide it. And now, of course, he’s pursuing a new limitation on reproductive rights as he faces a tough presidential primary election.
This strategy is also at play for Republicans who want to hide the fact that they want to reverse the historic expansions of contraceptive access in Obamacare by pushing over-the-counter birth control pills. This argument — which worked for Cory Gardner in Colorado — sells voters on what feels like a new right. But it’s actually a right to pay for something that’s now free for all women.
4. Running on war without consequences. The Iraq War wasn’t just one of the worst strategic mistakes in American history. It was one of the most expensive. And was made even more expensive by financing it with debt. Not only was it the first war that didn’t see some element of new taxes to cover its expense, but it also followed two of the largest tax breaks for the rich in American history.
Separating war from its cost is a necessity. When Republicans ache for a return of ground troops to Iraq or a possible escalation to war with Iran, they’re never asked about the costs of such policies. We can’t afford to feed the hungry but we can always afford to feed the hunger for war.
Democrats did a decent job of pointing out the first “credit card” war in 2008. But since then Republicans have edged back to the same aggressiveness that marketed our post-9/11 failures. It’s time to corner the right on this again by proposing a law that requires any new wars include a progressive tax increase. Even if such a law is politically impossible or technically unworkable, it makes it clear that when Republicans are demanding new wars for questionable motives, we can’t just ask the 1 percent of Americans who serve in the armed forces to sacrifice for it. Since we’re all going to pay for it eventually.
5. Saying the only problem is that we’re not conservative enough. Conservatism is magic. It can’t fail. It can only be failed.
Congressional Republicans are seeing lows in the polls that are usually reserved for Congress itself. Part of the problem is that the party’s base is unhappy with its leaders, imagining that taking over the Senate should have resulted in the repeal of Obamacare, an end to anything they want to call “amnesty,” and the president’s deportation.
In a new study, Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins find that “the rise of the Tea Party movement among Republicans in recent years has not been accompanied by an equivalent ideological insurgency among Democrats.” Democrats in disarray is a constant narrative, but the fact is that liberals are far happier with their party and their presidential frontrunner than Republicans could ever imagine.
Republicans depend on a fundamentalist base that regards all compromise as sin and a business community that recognizes that indulging its base too much wouldn’t just lead to economic catastrophe, it would lead to something worse — electoral defeat.
The right likes to pretend that conservatism only wins when it’s pure. But this ignores that its greatest victory in 1984 had more to do with economic growth of 6.8 percent than an embrace of conservative policies, as Democrats kept their majorities in the House and Senate.
Leaning to the center is an inevitability of a presidential campaign. But there’s evidence that suggests that if the GOP’s nominee leans too far in 2016, the party may crack.
This past week, Rand Paul made his announcement that he was throwing his hat into the GOP presidential primary ring, and he made it at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Huh. Well, the senator’s lifelong affinity for the books of Ayn Rand is well known. Was the name of the hotel a coincidence? Did Paul see the enigmatic hero ofAtlas Shrugged beckoning to him out of the list of possible venues and hear the call of destiny? Will “rational selfishness” inform his domestic agenda? Why ask useless questions? Who is John Galt?
You can purchase the book here. (But of course it’s also available for free at a public library.)
