I haven’t read everything that Ezra Klein has ever written but I still feel comfortable saying that this is the best thing he has ever written. It’s long. It’s really, really long. But it’s long because the subject matter demands it. It also confirms for me what I concluded about six months ago. The Bush administration screwed up our economy so badly that it wasn’t possible to fix it. The hole that they created was so big that it was not politically possible to fill it. The Obama administration should have asked for a substantially bigger stimulus bill, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if they’d succeeded in getting one, which they wouldn’t have. The hole in the economy was so large that even if the administration had known how big it was, they couldn’t have devised a way to spend enough money to fix it. Klein is right. With better information, things could have been done better and our current situation would be modestly improved, but the damage was really so severe that there was no escaping a prolonged period of pain.
The sad thing is that we could fix our problems and Europe could fix theirs. We could all fix this if the solutions weren’t so easy to demagogue. But they are.
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Yep, and with the expenses of the Afghan and Iraq adventures, military spending and Bush tax cuts, the past administration knew how deep they would dig the hole for the American people and generations to come! Great Obama is such a gentle person, FDR made clear from the start by whom the blame lies.
I’ll buy into the analysis below …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."That’s not FDR from the start. It’s from 1936. I can’t tell how Obama is gonna be in 2012. Don’t have a time machine. FDR promised to balance the budget in 1932. He was an enigma at that point.
more myth of FDR indeed. also, re: how Obama speaks to the nation, ppl forget that Obama is black, a man who made it with the support of his [white] mother and grandparents and his own gifts and perseverance in a country that pretty much assumed all of these couldn’t exist. FDR was white, from the 1%, as it were.
I see no evidence that Obama speaks to the country in any servile, “Yaz, Boz!” type of way. Indeed, I’ve heard many complaints that Obama talks down to people, like they were ignorant children and he is the wise parent. In this regard, demagogues like Perry, Palin, Bachmann, etc etc, are succeeding because they do the opposite, pandering to the great prejudiced unwashed, not only supporting their lunacy, but asserting things like that they no better than “pointed headed librul perfessors(sic).”
FDR was always evidently upper class, but he had the knack of talking to people like an equal, while never pandering. Clinton had that knack too. Of all the Presidents that I personally remember (I was a boy under Truman, but I don’t remember him) from Eisenhower to Obama, Clinton stands out as having that magic knack. Don’t reply complaining of Clinton’s policies. I’m not saying he had the best policies, but he had the best technique.
Reagan has technique, too.
Yes, conceeded. But not like Clinton IMHO.
appreciate Clinton’s technique. just pointing out, Obama is dealing with constraints, kind of the old saw about Ginger Rogers – she did everything Fred Astair did but backwards wearing high heels.
sorry for brevity. very very limited internet access here
Sorry for your limited access, Errol. But Clinton also had a Republican House. Do you remember Newt Gingrich? Can you ever forget Newt Gingrich, no matter how much you want to?
I don’t understand the point about Obama being Black to mean he speaks in a servile way. Rather, it’s that he needs to be really circumspect. No sudden moves, reassuring tone, lest he be seen by large percentages of white voters as aggressive or angry. He doesn’t have as many rhetorical options as any white President.
That’s being servile! My point.
Well, do you think that butting heads with US racism might have something to do with it? That maybe it’s not a personal quality of the President but a social quality of the country?
I don’t think “talks down to people, like they’re children” quite hits the target. Just the opposite, Obama demonstrates a respect for his audience, assumes they’ll be able to handle complicated and nuanced statements, more than any other prominent politician I can think of. Think about the Philadelphia “A More Better Union” speech.
I think the problem that charge gets at is that Obama is cerebral, not visceral. This makes him come across as aloof, even elitist, to people who want President Feel-Your-Pain.
It’s perception. Electoral politics is all perception.
Absolutely. What Obama has NEVER understood is that if he will not blame the repukeliscum, he will get the blame. It’s a simple math thing:
0 – Obama’s bipartisanshit
-10 = Repukeliscum statement that Obama and Dems are to blame
0 + (-10) / 2 = -5
The public are sheep. They hear two statements, and they average them.
Obama needs to WAKE THE FUCK UP, and CALL OUT THE REPUKELISCUM. He has started, and kudos for that. He needs to do it more. We need a FULL-THROATED BLAME OF BANKERS and BANK WHORE REPUKELISCUM.
Honestly, the hole was starting to yawn open at the end of the Clinton administration. Jobs were flying out of the country but there were so many jobs that it wasn’t noticed.
When the dot com crash came it was evident, but Bush was in power because “Al Gore is wooden” and “People would like to have a beer with Bush”. That beer was hemlock.
Al Gore would have taken action, not because he was so liberal. He wasn’t, except in contrast with Bush. But because his political fortunes and support were intimately tied to the telecom and internet industries.
Still, eleven years later, no one except some crazed hippies, advocates closing the door by erecting barriers to off-shoring and out-sourcing like every single one of the other industrial nations does.
who is he? what does he know? how old is he now?
i couldn’t even bother to log in. just lost my will, even after your great endorsement, because i was reminded, “who the fuck is ezra klein?”
there are just so many more insightful people on the planet.
and that’s what’s wrong with the world. people reading ezra klein.
and plug your ears then.
just oozing with political dishonesty: well, it’s complicated, Maude; ins and outs and whatnots. what a mess.
Here’s how honest people talk about the economy:
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/10/october-6-2011-occupy-this-mark-banks.html
Thus, here we are, once again, at another Lehman moment, Europe on the brink (and we with it), all due to gob-smacking (criminal) dishonesty.
do a word search in Klein’s article for “mark-to-market,” FASB 157, “criminal,” or “accounting.”
“We didn’t keep our foot on the [stimulus] accelerator,” my ass. It’s the Bush crime wave with the pedal to the metal.
that anyone on large amounts of drugs sounds like an idiot.
Which you do.
What is your drug of choice?
taking bong hits off Obama’s criminal ass?
Couldn’t see article. Removed adblock. Still no article. Signed in (with FB), still can’t see article. What’s the trick?
Which article? Mine? Or Klein’s?
Klein’s.
The solution is to click the print button (to anyone who can’t see the article).
I disagree. I don’t think better information would have done jack.
I think what will be the most underlooked narrative in the article is Democratic intellectual bankruptcy. It was only broached in terms of Republican response, but it was telling how the stimulus was described as “pulling every old Democratic idea off the shelf.” Look at the party’s agenda. It’s all old shit that people pouted over not getting to implement during the Clinton or Bush years.
Has any democratic policymaker invented a single new economic idea in the response to this recession? To the last ten years of labor imbalances in the face of a globalized economy? In the face of thirty years of rising inequality?
Nope. They’re a stolidly twentieth century party. With twentieth century models and theories and ideas. And the GOP, well, they’re living in the nineteenth century, so that’s even worse. Yay.
I think we could return to full employment if they had the political will to spend the money.
But on another note, I think you’re correct. Maher and Trumka had a little spat about this on Friday. I’m more on the side of Maher with this. People can talk about trade agreements being to fault all they want, but globalization is inevitable regardless of those agreements; they need to stop whining about them, and figure out a way to make the country employable in spite of this reality. Maher seemed to hint that he doesn’t believe there are enough jobs. Maybe there aren’t, I don’t know.
Another point is, “Do we even WANT to return to where we were before?” I can’t speak for everyone else here, but I sure as shit don’t.
Freddie deBoer: solidarity first, then fear for this movement’s future
I’d replace Democratic with leftist and globalization with automation (globalization is only a stop gap in the process of eliminating unskilled labor from production) but otherwise spot on.
It also confirms for me what I concluded about six months ago. The Bush administration screwed up our economy so badly that it wasn’t possible to fix it. The hole that they created was so big that it was not politically possible to fill it. The Obama administration should have asked for a substantially bigger stimulus bill, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if they’d succeeded in getting one, which they wouldn’t have.
The old Confirmation Bias at work, n’est pas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
I wonder what would have happened if the incoming President had listened to a different set of advisors, ones who would have told him/her: 1) How bad things really were, 2) What was really needed to fix them, and 3) Failure to fix them would result in a horrible economy and subsequent major electoral losses.
We can never know, of course. But that advice was available at the time, from the usual suspects. Krugman has done a good job in the past couple months linking to his posts and columns from November, 2008 – March 2009 showing what he was forecasting even then, and he wasn’t the only one who foresaw the consequences of a stimulus that was both too small and too focused on tax cuts.
Ah, but the usual suspects will pipe up with: it wasn’t politically possible to get more of a stimulus. Perhaps true. But, if the President at that time recognized the reality of what he/she faced, what other options did he/she have that weren’t taken? Could the stimulus have contained fewer tax cuts (with their known weak stimuli effects) and more raw stimuli? Could it have included a direct jobs program, a la CCC and WPA (an option that apparently was taken off the table from the beginning), which would have maximum stimulus-per-dollar benefit? Could he/she have decided to manage the HAMP program and TARP program closely to assure maximum effectiveness, instead of allowing them to become basically free money for the bankers through administrative neglect?
Beyond that, could administrative prerogatives have been used to redirect existing, approved spending to maximize economic benefit? Reduce investment in low-job-generating projects, especially in the DoD, and focus more on real employment?
Again, we can’t know the answer. But we do know that the advice at the time was ignored.
By September, 2009, it was clear that the unemployment rate WITH the stimulus was worse than had been predicted by Summers/Geithner for the non-stimulus scenario. Furthermore, the models that had predicted that outcome predicted that high unemployment was going to continue for a long time. Yet the administration chose to avoid action and talk about “green shoots”. Only in December, 2009, when the dismal Christmas retail season confirmed what the numbers were already telling them did the administration host a public “jobs summit” – which turned out to be nothing but an opportunity for photos and speeches but no action.
Would another President have taken different actions in those situations? Certainly. Would those actions have been more effective, or would political constraints have defeated them? We can never know for sure – but we do know that they weren’t tried.
I’m not sure if you read Klein’s piece or not. It seems not.
He didn’t need to. Ezra’s only focused on being the next David Broder, if Chait and Cohn don’t get there first. He is a stenographer for the administration. Did you read Krugman today? He takes Klein to task for the drivel that column is.
I read the article. Before you linked to it.
Yes, I know what the people Ezra linked to said about previous crashes and recoveries. And I know what Ezra concluded. But I do NOT buy the idea that “it was going to be bad no matter what” implies “so therefore the fact that the Obama administration dramatically underperformed didn’t make a difference.” And the way Ezra dismisses the possibilities that HAMP provided with one line – sorry, I like Ezra’s writing but for someone who does this as his full-time employment that was just lazy. HAMP offered all kinds of opportunity.
There WAS a ton of opportunity for Obama and company to do better. They didn’t. They screwed up.
But don’t take my word for it …
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/was-failure-inevitable/
Both Krugman and Klein are partly right. Klein is right when he talks about how difficult the situation was and how hard it was to fix. Krugman is right when he says that there were things that the Obama Administration could have done that it didn’t.
Klein is wrong when he states that we couldn’t have done better – we could have. Krugman is wrong when he underestimates the political difficulties that we faced in trying to fix the economy.
I say this because I think that it’s clear that Obama couldn’t have passed more than a $1T stimulus no matter what they did, and more likely the most they could have passed was slightly more than what was actually passed.
With hindsight 20/20, what I think Obama should have done was take the Rogoff estimates of what was needed (maybe $2.5T) and ask for that as a stimulus. He would have gotten less than $1T, but then Obama would have been in a good position to get more in the budget later that year. Obama might have been able to get as much as $500B-$750B more in the budget – it’s hard to say.
Obama then should have nationalized (most of) the banks and paid the $1T to get them healthy again. That would have been extra stimulus spending right there, and the fact that we’d have to spend the money up-front would be a feature, rather than the problem it seemed to be at the time. We also would have been able to pass better financial reform because the banks would have been neutered.
Obama then should have turned to financial reform and dropped the rest of his domestic agenda, including health care. He could have provided some health care spending through stimulus spending, but the other parts of the bill would have to be dropped. He simply wouldn’t have been able to beat a GOP filibuster on health care after nationalizing the banks and getting over $1T in stimulus spending passed. Too much effort and focus would have been needed to beat the GOP on jobs and economics issues to be able to pivot to health care reform.
I think that if the Obama Administration had chosen this route, his base would have been extremely frustrated and angry. Health care reform has been a goal of the Democratic Party for so long that dropping it as an agenda item would have made so many people so angry.
Also, I don’t think that Obama knows enough about economics to make that type of call. Obama listened to a LOT of great economists before making decisions on what to do, including Krugman. Obama ended up taking the consensus route, which excluded the non-consensus (but correct!) views of Krugman and Rogoff. Obama was prepared to make difficult decisions on foreign policy issues (hence the Nobel Peace Price, the killing of Bin Laden, and the removal of Moammar Gadhafi), but he wasn’t prepared to make the difficult decisions on economic issues. And I’m not sure if any president would have known enough about economics to know what needed to be done in the face of so many bright people who thought otherwise.
Geithner/Summers didn’t make those predictions. Romer/Bernstein did.
When I want economic honesty I go to Krugman.