Yesterday the House and Senate passed budget bills with no Republican votes whatsoever. Yet even without the GOP the bill passed the House with the biggest majority for a budget in 12 years. Carl Hulse writes for the New York Times,
Democrats said the two budgets, which will have to be reconciled after a two-week Congressional recess, cleared the way for health care, energy and education overhauls pushed by the new president. The Democrats said the budgets reversed what they portrayed as the failed economic approach of the Bush administration and Republican-led Congresses.
Of course, spending on health care, energy, education and other long-neglected matters is vital to any meaningful economic recovery. So what did the GOP offer? Tax cuts for the rich and a domestic spending freeze — during a recession, mind you –which is so breathtakingly wrongheaded one can only assume most congressional Republicans are either extremely stupid or extremely delusional. Or both.
I considered a third alternative, that they are extremely invested in protecting the wealth of the wealthy and don’t care if the rest of the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole. However, I think anyone who doesn’t understand even the wealthy eventually would suffer if the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole is either stupid or delusional.
The passage of the budget is particularly good news because all segments of the House Dems supported it, including many of the Blue Dogs. On the other hand, 38 Republicans voted against the GOP Clown Alternative.
Two Senate Dems voted against the budget — Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Evan Bayh of Indiana. Steve Benen: “Yes, Bayh is the new Lieberman.”
This CNN story has more details on the budget; see also Media Matters. Also note that in many ways passing the budget was the easy part. Crafting the health care, education, energy, etc. programs will be a fight. But maybe the Dems are learning they can, you know, do stuff without worrying about what the GOP thinks.
Which brings me to today’s David (“If I only had a brain”) Brooks column, titled “Greed and Stupidity.” Brooks writes that there are two competing explanations to the crash of the financial sector, which he calls “the greed narrative” and “the stupidity narrative.”
The greed narrative, he says, is explained in Simon Johnson’s Atlantic article “The Quiet Coup,” which many of us read this week. Brooks encapsulates Johnson’s article pretty well. “The U.S. economy got finance-heavy and finance-mad, and finally collapsed,” Brooks writes. (See also Thomas Geoghegan’s “Infinite Debt,†which you really can read online here.)
But then Brooks says, nah, that can’t be right. It’s more likely the captains of finance were just stupid.
The second and, to me, more persuasive theory revolves around ignorance and uncertainty. The primary problem is not the greed of a giant oligarchy. It’s that overconfident bankers didn’t know what they were doing. They thought they had these sophisticated tools to reduce risk. But when big events — like the rise of China — fundamentally altered the world economy, their tools were worse than useless.
Yes, Mr. Brooks, and what made them “overconfident” and “stupid”? To me, it’s obvious much of their hubris came from the fact that they had become such a force of power — a true oligarchy, as Simon Johnson says — that they felt untouchable. And much of the “stupid” was a by-product of greed. They didn’t see how fallible they really were because they didn’t want to see it.
Brooks likes the “stupid” narrative because, he thinks, the stupid problem doesn’t require a big-government regulatory solution, whereas the “greed” problem does. “Instead of rushing off to nationalize the banks, we should nurture and recapitalize what’s left of functioning markets,” he says. “To my mind, we didn’t get into this crisis because inbred oligarchs grabbed power. We got into it because arrogant traders around the world were playing a high-stakes game they didn’t understand.”
Brooks fails to explain why those causes are mutually exclusive. I say they’re both true.
Update: Reuters on unemployment:
The U.S. unemployment rate soared to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since 1983, as employers slashed 663,000 jobs and cut workers’ hours to the lowest on record, government data showed on Friday.
In a report underscoring the distress in the labor market, the Labor Department also revised its data for January to show job losses of 741,000 that month, the biggest decline since October 1949.
Yes, a domestic spending freeze is just what we need right now. And we can see how much Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy “trickled down.”
I’d say both are true as well. Brooks just wants his idea to be best.
I read the GOP Budget Proposal. Yes, I did. It was excruciatingly funny.
They contradict themselves at every turn. For instance, they blame the “government push” of property ownership on the housing crash, but then say it is imperative that government push property ownership (via their budget). “Clown Alternative” is an understatement.
With what trickled down, we should have the most fertile fields since early Mesopotamia.
And Brooks has never been known for grasping the entire issue. He can occasionally be right on one aspect, and totally miss an intersecting piece.
More often, he is totally wrong. An ass”whole,” so to speak.
“However, I think anyone who doesn’t understand even the wealthy eventually would suffer if the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole is either stupid or delusional.”
That’s only if you think in long term. The current crop of wealthy want it all to stay the same for them. By the time the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole, they’ll be dead. See? Problem solved! Won’t affect me at all!
The stupid narrative IS the greed narrative. Silly Cabbage.
The “overconfident bankers didn’t know what they were doing. They thought they had these sophisticated tools to reduce risk.” These tools were so sophisticated they didn’t really understand them, and they knew that. So, a prudent banker would have said, “You know, I don’t really trust this, it’s risky and I don’t understand exactly how these tools work to protect me, so, no deal.” That’s not smarts, that’s basic banking.
Instead, they chose to go ahead, and just hope it would all work out, or that they would get theirs and get out before the chickens came home to roost. Why?
Greed. They acted stupidly not because they were stupid, but because they were greedy and arrogant.
Kate — yes, and that proves they’re stupid.
…although I certainly don’t say this in defense of Lieberman, it probably does a disservice to the concept to frame Evan Bayh as “the new Lieberman” since the latter gent voted for the budget. Since Bayh is trying to hammer out some sort of ‘leader/broker’ slot for himself in the Senate, it’s time to give him his due and say that he’s just being the same old Bayh…
Ah yes, the good old crook-or-fool dilemma. Are they crooks or are they fools? The two conditions are interdependent; in their folly they become crooks, and in their crookedness they become fools. In the end, it doesn’t matter; whether crooks or fools, they are not to be trusted in either case.
“To my mind, we didn’t get into this crisis because inbred oligarchs grabbed power. We got into it because arrogant traders around the world were playing a high-stakes game they didn’t understand.â€
I think it’s more that they didn’t care. I think was an “I got mine” mentality where they intuitively sensed it was heading for trouble, but didn’t want to miss out on their own piece of the pie, so they just moved it along without moral implication.
An analogy,maybe a bit extreme, would be Adolf Eichman’s claims that his complicity in the holocaust was one of innocent logistics. He didn’t care what the result of his capacity as a functionary would ultimately bring…He was just doing his job as efficiently as he could.
I suspect most everybody saw the situation we’re in today coming down the tracks at least to some degree. I know I saw indications that things were amiss, or heading in the wrong direction around 1999. One example would be the concept of universal defaults on credit cards. Clearly, it could be seen by that that the financial sector was becoming aggressively predatory without concern for the damage they would ultimately cause to the consumer market.
Another obvious indication was the housing markets.. Anybody who was half alert could see that the rapid rise in home prices was unreal and unsustainable… and that at some some point the shit was going to hit the fan, and a lot of people would get hurt.
I think this Wired article from late February is a must read and does a lot to support the “stupid” position. It’s rather technical, but Salmon’s examples are good and his back-stories on how they trusted these magic tools that they didn’t understand are amazing.
I should have mentioned that if you want to skip the finance geek background and get to the “stupid” stuff in that Wired article, skip ahead to the bottom of page 3 and top of page 4. I think it’s a pretty serious indictment of the investment banking community.
I read the GOP Budget Proposal. Yes, I did. It was excruciatingly funny.
Actually, there were two versions (seriously). The second was touted as having “more specifics” than the first. wonkette.com summarized them as follows:
v.1: “Today we will kill puppies.”
v.2: “Today we will kill 47 puppies.”
Dave S.. Good article.
Let’s make this easy to understand:
Greed = Stupidity.
Also, the very wealthy have no particular concern about America being turned into a third world hellhole, as they will happily live elsewhere.
Well, this is what ya get when ya cross Thirston Howell III with Charlie Manson…………
I don’t think they are delusional…. they really ARE above the rest of us. I wish someone would give me $10,000. a month like the courts just gave the ponzi guy’s brother.
Sits thinking about the spouse that was layed off on a Wed. and our insurance ran out on the next Wed. and our child that is in the middle of having a BIG health problem that has the docs calling daily for more tests…
~sigh~
…anyone who doesn’t understand even the wealthy eventually would suffer if the nation turns into a third-world sinkhole is either stupid or delusional…
…the very wealthy have no particular concern about America being turned into a third world hellhole, as they will happily live elsewhere.
“Stupid or delusional” are your conclusions, not theirs – it’s important to grasp this.
It’s important to see that this is not a bug, it’s a feature. Republicans love cheap labor. They have no problem isolating themselves behind their walls either here in America or abroad. And if they can diminish that pesky middle class Obama continually harps about, even better. Afer all, the Democratic budget is all about rescuing the middle class and not one Republican voted for it. Their priorities are clearly on display – they’re totally for themselves and themselves alone. Could it not be any clearer?
They don’t view this as stupid at all. They simply don’t care about anyone or anything beyond themselves, and they think this is how the world is. Sometime around the election, I emailed a DailyKos article (in a fit of pique) to a GOP relative about the contrast between how the world recoiled in horror at GWB versus how well Obama is being received. My GOP cousin was amazed on one hand – as in incomprehension – but also totally apathetic. Her attitude was “I don’t care about what the world thinks”. It was as though she and I were completely from different planets, with entirely different pre-occupations.
Let’s not forget that these people want to see Obama fail. Their eyes are on winning back Congress in 2010, and the Presidency in 2012. Every move they make is toward these goals, the economy most definitely be damned. Every obstacle they can throw in Obama’s path, which translates into every bit of misery they can inflict on America, they see as helping their cause. Again, could their priorities not be any clearer? This is not stupid in their eyes, it’s how lizard people act.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21090
moonbat,
How many time have you, I, and others on maha’s site written about this?
None of these are a bug. They are ALL features.
They have wanted to kill the middle-class for generations. They don’t care if all people are homeless. Why do people think they want to put residency requirement’s into voter registration. Homeless? NO VOTE, SUCKAH!!!
Lizard brains all need lobotomies. Scalpel and pitchfork, anyone?
Sorry, I forgot I was non-violent. It becomes easier, and easier to forget…
The statement that’s being introduced to the conservative narrative is that we don’t need more regulation; the problem is that existing regulation was not enforced. One other cute evasion is that Europe does not want to increase spending to stimulate thier economies,, but righties who quote that always ignore the demand by Europe to impose tight restrictions on international banking & hedge funds.
My opinion is that Europe hopes to ride the coatails of a US-financed recovery (which looks only fair to them since they blame the US for their financial woes) AND they want to use the occasion to ‘bell the cat’, an issue which they were previously unable to raise when Bush fiercely protected the unregulated capitalist system. This issue will be a tightrope act for Obama since Conservatives will brand any concessions to regulation of the international financial system as ‘world-government’.
“Let’s not forget that these people want to see Obama fail. Their eyes are on winning back Congress in 2010, and the Presidency in 2012.”
This is exactly what makes them stupid because they cannot see that they are in the minority and will not ever win the Presidency back by continuing FAILED and selfish policies. At least the American people are smarter than they are.
http://c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=WJE-A-17112
Nice job by Glenn Greewald. Looking forward to seeing him and Amy Goodman on Bill Moyers’ Journal tonight.
Gulag…
They do not want to kill the middle class. They want to kill the poor, and they don’t give a crap how many in the middle class fall into that category. As soon as they do, they want to kill them. It’s all about the elite’s fear of the citizenry. The middle class acts as a buffer between the wealthy elite and the poor.
From Zinn’s “A People’s History of the U.S”:
The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law-all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
The Constitution became even more acceptable to the public at large after the first Congress, responding to criticism, passed a series of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments seemed to make the new government a guardian of people’s liberties: to speak, to publish, to worship, to petition, to assemble, to be tried fairly, to be secure at home against official intrusion. It was, therefore, perfectly designed to build popular backing for the new government. What was not made clear-it was a time when the language of freedom was new and its reality untested-was the shakiness of anyone’s liberty when entrusted to a government of the rich and powerful.
Seen this HuffPo article? It ties to the recent Taibbi RS article and the discussion about who is getting what out of all this financial article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/gaming-the-bailout-how-wa_b_182779.html
In another article on Huffpo/Politico today, Obama is quoted as telling the bankers that his administration is the only thing between them and the pitchforks. After reading this bit on PIMCO, I can’t say he doesn’t have his own pitchfork problem. There are evidently a huge number of people who just don’t get it when it comes to the WOYA.