Of Presidents and Economies

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 30, 2017

There was a scrap of good economic news this week: The GDP-growth figure for the last quarter has been revised upward to an annualized rate of 3.3 percent. That is the most robust GDP growth we’ve had since the third quarter of 2014.

Hurrah.

There was other good news: Corporate earnings were up 5.4 percent year-over-year, and while consumer spending slowed down substantially, investment in business equipment rose considerably, to an annualized rate of 10.4 percent.

You’ll notice the word “annualized” in there more than once. That’s because we are looking at the data from only one quarter, i.e., from a three-month period. That’s a pretty narrow view: No one remembers 2014 as a smashingly successful year for the U.S. economy, but it featured two quarters of growth far stronger than the one currently being touted by the Trump administration: 4.6 percent in the second quarter and 5.2 percent in the third quarter. Unfortunately, growth was negative 0.9 percent in the first quarter and 2 percent in the fourth quarter. This quarter giveth, and the next quarter taketh away. Or maybe it doesn’t.

But this isn’t about data. It’s about bug-eyed, bone-in-the-nose, bark-at-the-moon primitivism.

We like to think that we have left behind such ancient notions as divinely sanctioned kingship and rule by chieftains who propitiate the gods and therefore make the fields fertile and the livestock fecund — or else displease the gods and bring upon us drought and plague. But we haven’t.

One of the great enduring stupidities of the American presidential cult is the belief, rooted in invincible ignorance, that the state of the U.S. economy at any given moment is a reflection of the intelligence and wisdom of the chief executive of the federal government and a result of the excellence or insufficiency of his administration. “Sure, Bill Clinton may have been an intern-diddling hillbilly and maybe even a violent rapist, but, man, my IRA kicked ass in the 1990s!”

It’s dumb, but it rules politics.

There’s an upscale version of this stupidity, one you will hear repeated ad nauseam on outlets like MSNBC and in the virtual pages of Forbes, which really ought to know better. Here’s Jere Glover praising candidate Donald Trump for asserting

the same thing I’ve been compiling cold, hard government data on since 1980: By crucial metrics like GDP, job creation, business investment and avoiding recessions, the economy does a lot better with Democrats in the White House than with Republicans. Just one eye-opening example: Nine of the last 10 recessions have been under Republicans.

If you have a little basic mathematical literacy, you’ll see some problems. A little political literacy will lead to your detecting several more. But let’s consider it.

Ten recessions back gets us to 1953. Since then, we have had 30 years of Democratic presidents and 35 years of Republican presidents; if recessions were randomly distributed, we’d still expect to see more of them coinciding with Republican presidencies simply because there have been more of them. In fact, most presidencies have coincided with one or more recessions.

On the specifics, the argument is weak. But how much should we make of that coincidence in general? Democrats plead on behalf of Barack Obama that he came into office during a terrible economic crisis, and that he and his policies should not be blamed for the weak growth and disappointing labor-market performance that marked his time in office. That’s not unfair. But the same could be said of, e.g., Gerald Ford, who had to deal with an OPEC-inflicted quadrupling of oil prices in 1973. Does anybody think Gerald Ford’s policies caused that? John Kennedy came into office at the tail end of a recession, which officially ended in February of his first year in office. Does any serious person believe that in the course of less than a month President Kennedy implemented policies that ended the recession? That would be a deeply silly contention. Even more juvenile is assuming that business cycles are inextricably linked to election cycles — without offering a lick of evidence or even a plausible mechanism for that being the case.

Recession-counting also ignores the fact that some recessions are the result of excellent public policy. The Reagan administration came into office with the country suffering from a serious inflation problem, and the tight monetary policy that the administration undertook to rein in that inflation produced a recession, as it was expected to. The recession was the price we paid for getting inflation under control. Inflation rose again toward the end of the Reagan-era boom, and once again, monetary tightening was used to control inflation at the cost of inflicting the mild recession that Bill Clinton rode to power. Oddly, Jere Glover ignores inflation. I wonder why.

Besides the most obvious economic stupidity, there is some pretty deep political stupidity at work here, too. For one thing, presidents have to deal with Congress, which actually does things like set tax rates and appropriate money. People talk about “Reagan deficits” and the “Clinton surplus,” but it would be much more sensible to talk about the Tip O’Neill deficits and the Gingrich surplus: Reagan wanted substantial spending cuts that were never implemented, and Clinton resisted even modest fiscal reform until he couldn’t. These things get a little more complicated than the R-vs.-D, black-hats/white-hats mode of analysis would suggest.

And, of course, there’s the hard-to-quantify fact that Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump (“One of these things is not like the others / one of these things does not belong!”) pursued radically different economic policies. As, indeed, did Democratic presidents: There’s a great deal of daylight between Jack Kennedy’s economic thinking and Barack Obama’s. On the GOP side, Ike was a Republican throwback who pursued a policy agenda that he himself described as “progressive” while keeping an eye on the nickels and dimes, and he presided over a federal government that, in 1957, saw slightly lower taxes than we have today, three times the military spending, and a modest budget surplus. (Modern conservatives could live with a progressive like that, I think.) Nixon was a Wilsonian statist who imposed price controls on the economy. Reagan was a libertarian optimist who put growth over balanced budgets. Trump is an economic illiterate with no substantive policy agenda at all.

But he will crow about that 3.3 percent GDP growth last quarter, and will insist that it is the result of his policies. Which of those policies, I wonder? He may get his tax cut, but, for the moment, Trump has done almost nothing of substance on the economy, and what his administration has done — a bit of excellent regulatory reform — is unlikely to affect growth dramatically in the short term. Regulatory reform is a good investment, but one with a long timeline for payoff. When you hear someone crediting a president with an economic boom or strong wage growth, ask them in some detail about the actual mechanism they believe to be at work, some plausible chain of causality. You’ll rarely get a satisfying answer.

Presidents are one small piece of the public-policy picture — and public policy as a whole is only a small part of what shapes and moves a complex modern economy. We tend toward a destructively immature and ahistorical view: The regulatory reforms that made the Internet boom of the Clinton years began decades before; the confluence of terrible policies that created the subprime meltdown and financial crisis of 2008–09 began in the 1930s, with housing and banking reforms and regulatory development occurring under presidents and Congresses of both parties in ways that would frustrate any intellectually rigorous attempt at laying blame on a partisan basis. The Asian currency crisis of the Clinton years, Communist aggression and Mideast conflict in Eisenhower’s time, the terrorist attacks during George W. Bush’s first year in office: None of these was the result of some decision taken in the White House. George W. Bush wanted to be a school reformer and economic booster, not a president overseeing a long and thankless campaign against distant desert savages. But history doesn’t wait for anybody to vote on it. That affects everything, including the economy.

The belief that GDP growth or this month’s jobs report provides a meaningful judgment on the performance of the president isn’t economics — it’s superstition. It is the modern version of the ancient belief that a crop failure means that the king has displeased the rain god or the wheat goddess. It is a primitive disposition from which we should liberate ourselves — and could, if we were willing to do the hard work of citizenship rather than take our ease in lazy partisanship.

Matt Lauer, Fox News, and How Tribalism Affects the Press

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The ongoing cascade of sexual-harassment violations is fascinating for all sorts of reasons. But one thing has been nagging at me for a while and Patrick Ruffini put his finger on it this morning:

Why did this cascade start with Weinstein and not Roger Ailes? Was it because the Fox scandals were mostly about discrediting Fox?

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) November 29, 2017

When the allegations about Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes came out, the mainstream media had a field day. But there was no larger feeding frenzy. Last year it was a “Fox News” story, not a “societal problem” story. It took the Harvey Weinstein allegations to get the mainstream press to start asking uncomfortable questions about its own institutions. I can think of several reasons for this, but one that stands out is the tribalism of media itself.

The Fox stories confirmed, to one extent or another, what a lot of mainstream liberals think about Fox or about conservatives generally: They’re retrograde. They’re bad. That’s the kind of thing that goes on over there.

It’s related to what some reporters I know at Fox call the “Fox News effect” (not to be confused with some blather from David Brock using the same term). If Fox goes hard at an important story, a lot of other outlets will reflexively go soft on it. I’m sure the folks at the Media Research Center can produce the total minutes Fox dedicated to Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Lois Lerner’s IRS, the VA, etc., compared with the other cable news networks or the broadcast newscasts. This isn’t to say that Fox doesn’t occasionally over-cover or under-cover some stories too. There’s no scientific formula for how much airtime or resources any particular story should get, and from the outset Fox has prided itself on not reflexively following the lead of the New York Times on every news event.

But it just seems obvious to me — and many other people in and out of Fox World — that there’s a kind of seesaw dynamic. If Fox puts a lot of weight on a story, other outlets go the opposite direction. That’s why so many conservative pundits played the “If this was Bush” game during the Obama presidency.

But back to the sexual-harassment thing. One of my longstanding gripes is how when conservatives do something bad, it’s proof of the inherent badness of conservatives and conservatism. But when liberals do something bad, it is immediately turned into an indictment of America itself. Joe McCarthy’s excesses were a window into the nature of conservatism, according to historians, intellectuals, and journalists. But when liberals — Attorney General Palmer, Woodrow Wilson, et al. — did far worse, the villain was America itself. When conservatives are racist, it is because they are conservatives. When liberals are racist it is because racism is an “American sin.” In other words, liberalism is never wrong. I could go on at length about this.

Similarly, the sexual-harassment story is now being covered — largely correctly by my lights — as an American story, not a story about liberals. Again, that’s fine. But three points come to mind.

First, is it crazy to think that there’s a problem specific to liberalism at work here? I mean this all started with Harvey Weinstein, and he first thought he could survive the scandal by promising to go after the NRA. Where did he get that idea? Maybe because he had good reason to think it would work?

Perhaps there are a lot of liberal men who think they can buy indulgences by toeing the party line on equal pay and Title IX, and emptying their bladders over things like Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women.” To be fair, in recent weeks, quite a few liberals have been coming to grips with the fact that Bill Clinton survived the exposure of his predations precisely because he bought such indulgences. It’s worth remembering that he even admitted that sexual misbehavior should take a backseat to winning when he chastised Donna Shalala, his HHS secretary, for criticizing his behavior — at a cabinet meeting set up to let Clinton apologize for his behavior:

The participants said Shalala rejected what she took as Clinton’s implication that policies and programs were more important than whether he provided moral leadership.

“And then she said something like, ‘I can’t believe that is what you’re telling us, that is what you believe, that you don’t have an obligation to provide moral leadership,’” one participant recalled.

“She said something like ‘I don’t care about the lying, but I’m appalled at the behavior.’ And frankly, he [Clinton] whacked her, let her have it,” this source said. The president told Shalala that if her logic had prevailed in 1960, Richard M. Nixon would have been elected president instead of John F. Kennedy, the source said. After that, no other Cabinet member had anything critical to say, the participant added.

The second point is the reverse. The stories of sexual harassment at Fox were entirely newsworthy and legitimate on the merits. But not because Fox is “right wing.” Yet it seems fairly obvious to me that the press enjoyed the Ailes and O’Reilly stories precisely because they involved toppling someone else’s icons. Where there was barely constrained glee in the voices of many pundits and reporters when it came to exposing the sins of Ailes and O’Reilly, there’s equally obvious remorse when it comes to Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin, NPR’s David Sweeney, and, obviously, Bill Clinton. It speaks well of the media that it’s reporting these things anyway. But it would be a good thing for the press to meditate on what that remorse (and glee) says about its own tribalism.

Last, it’s simply worth pointing out that many conservatives have now embraced the Clinton position. Substitute John F. Kennedy for Donald Trump and you have precisely the argument that Clinton made to Donna Shalala, only now many conservatives are making it. Likewise, with Roy Moore. Winning is more important than literally anything Roy Moore has said or has allegedly done. It seems that, just like sexual harassment, no party has a monopoly on cynical expediency. The problem lies not in ideology but in human nature.

Trump’s Strange Beliefs

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Does President Trump believe everything he says?

If not, we can shrug off some recent tales reportedly told by the president of the United States. If so . . . there’s good reason to wonder if the stress of the office is starting to weigh on Trump’s judgment.

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman is one of Trump’s favorite reporters — he grants her interviews frequently. She recently reported that Trump is making an assertion that is uncomfortably close to insisting two plus two equals five:

But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.

It’s really odd for Trump to claim that the exchange never happened nearly a year after he apologized for making the remarks, declaring, “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.”

In a similar reversal, Trump apparently no longer believes this statement he himself made last summer: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” Haberman and Jonathan Martin report that the president “has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.”

Trump logged on to Twitter Wednesday morning and dredged up a long-debunked, long-forgotten false claim against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough:

So now that Matt Lauer is gone when will the Fake News practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin? And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the “unsolved mystery” that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!

The so-called unsolved mystery was indeed thoroughly investigated. Lori Klausutis passed away in 2001 while working as an intern in one of the district offices of then–Florida congressman Joe Scarborough. The medical examiner determined that she had lost consciousness because of an abnormal heart rhythm and had fallen, hitting her head on a desk, and the head injury caused the death. No one has ever presented any plausible evidence to suggest that Scarborough had anything to do with Klausutis’s death or that there was any foul play.

Does Trump really believe that Scarborough killed that young woman? If so, it did not prevent him from appearing on Scarborough’s show several times.

There a plausible argument that these recent comments are just par for the course with Trump, never a disciplined speaker and always eager to use any claim available against those he perceives as enemies. How many times in the past three years have you heard some variation of, “Oh, you won’t believe the crazy thing Trump just said?” After a while, the unbelievable gets pretty believable — maybe even boring. For decades, Trump’s public persona was built on over-the-top boasts, insults, and not-quite-plausible claims. He didn’t change much as a person when he became a presidential candidate and then a president.

But sometimes Trump has effectively insisted two plus two equals five. In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were accused of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park. Considerable public outrage surrounded the trial of the “Central Park Five,” and juries convicted the young men. But then, in 2002, a serial rapist in prison confessed to raping the jogger, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. The convictions of the five teens were vacated in 2002, and the district attorney withdrew the charges.

In October 2016 interview with CNN, Trump insisted that the DNA evidence was irrelevant and that guilty perpetrators had been set free:

They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.

The man responsible for selecting federal judges apparently believes that allegedly-coerced confessions are more compelling and persuasive evidence than biological evidence studied at the genetic level.

A nutty belief or theory expressed in private is pretty harmless. Putting it out on Twitter is more troubling, and what’s most concerning — what the president’s staffers and the American people must guard against — is the possibility that these implausible beliefs are influencing the president’s decision-making.

Strange or unverified beliefs are pretty common among Americans. Roughly half of Americans believe in ghosts or that the earth has been visited by aliens, about 60 percent of Americans believe that the lost civilization of Atlantis existed, and about 20 percent believe that Bigfoot is a real creature. One could argue that presidents are entitled to a few strange beliefs of their own. John Quincy Adams believed that the earth was hollow, and he approved an expedition to its center; Nancy Reagan famously put great faith in astrology; both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter believed they saw UFOs; and Theodore Roosevelt claimed he saw Abraham Lincoln’s ghost in the White House.

A little while back, Ben Domenech asked his Twitter followers, “What’s the conspiracy theory you deep down think might be true?” The answers were a mix of familiar — JFK’s assassination, TWA Flight 800, referees fixing ballgames — and then some hilarious, bizarre, and occasionally strangely plausible offerings: Alex Jones is secretly a project to discredit conspiracy theorists, Stevie Wonder isn’t really blind, and NBA superstar Michael Jordan accepted a deal to suddenly retire and briefly pursued a baseball career to avoid a suspension for gambling.

Chances are, your belief in conspiracy theories, ghosts, or Atlantis doesn’t really interfere with your ability to do your job well. If you’re an auto mechanic, the carburetor is still fixed the same way whether you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or not. But a conspiracy theorist in the role of, say, a federal prosecutor or doctor could unleash some dire consequences.

The key question is, When does a belief in an unsupported theory begin to affect one’s duties and responsibilities?

Americans have to hope that Trump is just shooting his mouth off and doesn’t actually believe that his predecessor was a secret infiltrator from Kenya, that his voice was mimicked on the Access Hollywood tape, and that MSNBC’s morning show is hosted by a modern-day Jack the Ripper. If the president really thinks those things, then invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment doesn’t seem so unthinkable.