Vol. 2 No. 8 (December 2003)
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
"The deadliest
enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders ."
-- William James
Get
Involved: Leave a present in our stocking!
Talking Points: The monster under the bed
Wit and Wisdom: "Iraqis Fail to Love Raymond"
Check It Out: Assessing
Featured Article: Neil Gabler
on conservative PR
Quoted! Rick
Santorum on American destiny
Happenings: Good steps forward on key issues
Endorsements: Ted Lempert
GET INVOLVED
All political moments are crucial in their own way,
but some are more crucial than others, and at the end of 2003, we find
ourselves in a particularly precarious time. Environmental protections face
continued attack; the educational system is more hamstrung than ever; the
Christian Right presses its campaign against the separation of church and
state; the gap between rich and poor grows and grows; the international
prestige of the United States keeps sliding (despite the capture of Saddam
Hussein).
If you care about these issues, please consider joining our network of
donors building the Commonweal Institute! Whether it's
$10, $100, or $1,000, your tax-deductible contribution will make an important
difference in helping to advance progressive ideas in the political arena. Click here to
contribute online. Or call 650-854-9796. Your support is essential.
Over the past year, the Commonweal Institute has seen successes in:
Helping to defeat a bill in California that would have
caused thousands of teacher layoffs by increasing the maximum class size in
public schools, and would have wasted billions of dollars the state has
invested in teacher recruitment and retention;
Raising awareness of how the Right has used the "tort reform"
movement, and attacks on trial lawyers generally, as a way of defunding their political opposition;
Contributing to an increasingly effective effort to ensure that new electronic
voting technologies do not undermine the integrity of the democratic process;
Alerting the academic community to the ways in which the Right is seeking to
undermine academic freedom by attacking supposedly "liberal"
professors;
Forging alliances with organizations and individuals on the
moderate-to-progressive end of the spectrum -- alliances that will be necessary
to combat the Right's message machine.
Our approach in these efforts
and in future projects is to develop a communications strategy that gives
progressive ideas the force and profile they deserve, and that will help move
public attitudes back toward the center. In the words of Nancy Pelosi,
minority leader in the House: "In these challenging times, we need an
advocacy think tank like the Commonweal Institute to communicate our principles
and programs in ways that will resonate with the broad public and empower
citizens to take a more active role in our democracy." Robert Reich,
former Secretary of Labor and co-founder of The American Prospect,
concurs: "
If you make a donation now, you can deduct it from your taxes for 2003. You can
also know that your money will support the only advocacy think tank designed to
take on the Right with a marketing-based, long-term strategic plan, across a
range of important issues.
Click here to
contribute online. Or call 650-854-9796. Your support is essential.
TALKING POINTS
Imagine the following political cartoon. A young boy, in
bed in his cozy bedroom, a Dixie Chicks poster on the wall, clutches the top of
his American flag quilt and looks fearfully toward the door, where his father
(in cowboy boots) has just entered. "Daddy," the boy says, "I
think there's a monster under the bed." Indeed, there it is: a huge
snarling reptilian thing, all claws and teeth and scales, with the word
"Deficit" scrawled across its loathsome length. "Aww, that's nothin' to fret
about," drawls the father, "That's just the
puppy I brung home for Christmas."
Too blunt, probably, and perhaps unfair -- but this whimsical scene does convey
something of the dynamic that has emerged in American political discourse
regarding the federal budget deficit. That dynamic consists, on the one hand,
of a disingenuous, faintly paternalistic campaign to convince the public that a
$500 billion dollar deficit doesn't really matter, and on the other hand, of
the willingness of Americans, in their eternal optimism, to believe so.
So why should we view the deficit as more monster than puppy? Why
does it matter? How will ordinary Americans experience its tangible effects?
These are important questions to address because, on any given day, the deficit
probably seems so abstract and imponderable to most people. The public might intuitively
feel that large deficits are bad, but one rarely hears clearly articulated
explanations of why.
At the outset, we need to look at the argument that deficits are good because
they stimulate growth. This may be true, but only if we're talking about
relatively small deficits and/or relatively short-term growth. Currently, we're
facing massive deficits that threaten to undermine the long-term economic
health of the country, even though they appear for now to have purchased (as
promised) a sharp upturn in GDP growth. What Americans need to remember is that
the approximately 8% growth figure for the last quarter, and the robust numbers
that will likely show up next year, are -- in a very real sense --
unaffordable. Not only would it take as much as decade or more of implausibly
fast growth to pay off the debt we're incurring, but in the meantime the venom
of heavy deficit spending will be eating away at the tissues of the country's
economy. Here's how:
Huge deficits are bad because they crowd out private investment.
As the deficit rises, so do interest rates, because the government has to
compete with other borrowers for money, and therefore has to raise rates in
order to attract lenders (a.k.a. investors). So as interest rates rise, more
investors will put their money in government bonds, which have a specified rate
of return, as opposed to risking that money in the stock market. That means
that less money overall will be invested in the private sector -- and
particularly in those smaller companies that tend to represent the leading edge
of innovation. This is just a thumbnail sketch of a complicated economic
dynamic, but it does capture the prevailing wisdom of the last 15 years, among
both conservative and progressive thinkers.
Huge deficits are bad because they limit spending on useful programs.
This, of course, is precisely what many conservatives now intend; the days when
conservatives called for a balanced budget amendment seem like eons ago. The
Right's goal, as has been argued here before, is to undermine the federal
entitlement system and to make it politically difficult for progressives to
propose new programs and services, or to improve existing ones. There is
something terribly cynical about overspending in order to prevent spending, and
Americans might respond more negatively to if they had a better sense of where
their money is actually going, of what the relative dollar figures are.
To take a current example, the administration has requested $87 billion for one
year in
$75
billion. All agriculture programs
$71 billion. The Department of Labor
$55 billion. Education
$15.4 billion. The space program
$11.7 billion. Section 8 vouchers for low-income families that need help with
housing
$6.5 billion. Head Start (which reaches only 60 percent of low-income
preschoolers)
$5-7 billion. The "war on drugs"
$0 billion. The "No Child Left Behind" act (an unfunded
educational mandate)
One
in seven Americans lacks health insurance. One in 10 American children lacks
coverage for basic vaccines. One wonders whether the American people would
continue to tolerate the deficit spending caused by tax cuts and war if they
really understood the good that that money might accomplish for themselves,
their families, and their communities. The progressive position must be to
emphasize fiscal responsibility and the importance of spending money wisely, in
the areas that will make life better for the greatest number of Americans.
Massive deficits that make life better for the wealthy and for the Iraqis, but
not for the people of
Huge deficits are bad because future generations will have to pay for
them. It's like inheritable credit-card debt. The bill always comes
due, and even if today's boomers don't have to pay for it, their children and
grandchildren will. It would be nice if we could grow our way out of debt
through a robust economy generating more tax revenues, but there are limits,
particularly when you consider the strain that an aging boomer generation will
place on Social Security and Medicare. Sending every American a $300 tax-cut
check might seem like a nice gesture, and will certainly help with buying some
new clothes or fixing the car, but it should be seen as a sop, a bribe, and an
insult. (The $30,000 tax break that the conservative political donor got -- now
that's a nice gesture.) The projected $500 billion deficit for 2004,
along with the hundreds of billions in the coming years, will not simply
disappear after a few years of economic growth. They threat! en
to saddle the country for a long time.
The monster may be under the bed right now, but you can hear it stirring.
WIT AND WISDOM
Iraqis Fail to Love Raymond
Setback for Pentagon Planners
"The Pentagon today
acknowledged that their attempt to introduce an American-style sitcom to
post-Saddam Iraq had been a dismal failure, as Iraqis expressed their
overwhelming disapproval of the CBS hit 'Everybody Loves Raymond.'
'We were operating under the assumption that everybody, indeed, loves Raymond,'
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told
reporters. 'Apparently, plenty of people hate Raymond, especially in the Shiite
south.'
Sources inside the Pentagon blamed the decision to broadcast 'Raymond' on the
advice of Iraqi exiles who had enjoyed the sitcom on American Airlines while
jetting back and forth between
-- From the Borowitz Report. Read more.
CHECK IT OUT
Many of us living in the
A survey of major new books investigating the role of the
Michael Hirsh, At War with Ourselves: Why
Robert Jewett and John
Ivo H. Daalder and James M.
Lindsay,
G. John Ikenberry, ed.,
Seyom Brown, The
Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century
(Brookings, 2003). Another resolutely centrist offering from the Brookings
Institution, Brown's work analyzes the increasing willingness of U.S. leaders
to use military force in a "polyarchic"
(i.e., complicated) geopolitical environment, assesses the dangers and supposed
benefits of this trend, and offers guidelines for helping to ensure that
"wherever and whatever military options are chosen, they are indeed the
lesser evil and truly advance the country's interests."
FEATURED ARTICLE
The following is an excerpt from "Conservative Revolution? No -- Just Dazzingly Effective PR," by Neil Gabler, a senior fellow at the
"Nearly 40 years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term 'pseudo-events' to describe things like premieres, photo ops and publicity stunts: They have no inherent value and exist only to be covered by the media. The right wing has now devised a pseudo-politics, of which the 'conservative revolution' is a primary feature. It may look like the real thing, sound like the real thing and, most important, be covered by the media as if it were the real thing, but it is essentially just a way to gain media attention, which is usually enough to convince people that it is the real thing. If the objective of cultural politics is to win adherents, the objective of this postmodernist pseudo-politics is to convey the idea that you have already won adherents -- that the revolution has already occurred and power has been transferred."
Click here to
read the whole article.
QUOTED!
"I've read the Bible. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that
HAPPENINGS
Increased profile for CI report on tort law -- "The Attack on Trial
Lawyers and Tort Law," by CI Fellow David Johnson, has been featured on
the websites of both the New York State
Trial Lawyers Association (www.nystla.org) and the Texas Trial Lawyers Association (www.ttla.com).
The Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association,
meanwhile, has sent electronic copies to hundreds of its members, urging them
to spread the word.
New York Times calls for VVATs --
Amidst a growing public outcry over the potential for error, tampering, and
abuse in new touch-screen voting technologies, the country's most influential
newspaper has endorsed the idea of requiring electronic voting machines to
provide a paper record, or "Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail" (VVPAT).
The Secretary of State of California has declared in favor of VVPAT, allowing
until 2006 for implementation; Commonweal Institute communicated several times
with the SoS during his
deliberations, explaining the importance of VVPAT for election security. Most
recently,
ENDORSEMENTS
"Commonweal will play three critical roles in helping all of us and our
organizations in making the world a better place. They will frame the debate,
provide research for existing organizations and expand the base." -- Ted
Lempert, former California State Assembly member and
current CEO of EdVoice
© 2003 The Commonweal Institute
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