By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
May 15, 2023
Do you
know what Joe Biden has in common with Kevin McCarthy?
They
both were elected.
That
means what it means—nothing more, to be sure, but nothing less, either.
President
Biden says he will not negotiate with congressional Republicans over a bill to
increase the debt ceiling. This is preposterous and indefensible, for several
reasons: For one thing, taxing, spending, and borrowing are inherently
congressional powers, not presidential powers. For another thing, Joe Biden is
president—not king. The idea that a president would refuse to negotiate with
Congress over congressional action is nonsensical from a constitutional point
of view and autocratic from a political point of view. Congress is not there to
do the president’s bidding—if anything, it is the other way around: The
president is charged with the faithful execution of the laws Congress passes,
not with barking orders at the branch of government that is actually charged by
the Constitution with responsibility for this issue.
President
Biden’s argument is, in essence, “I won’t negotiate with these guys, because
they are schmucks.” And they are schmucks. Kevin McCarthy is an old-school
schmuck from Schmuck Street with a Ph.D. in schmuckery from Schmuck U. His
familiar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is a schmuck. They are the leading figures in
a schmuck caucus.
And they
are the schmucks that the American people elected to the positions they
hold.
There is
no getting around that. The voters gave Republicans a majority in the House of
Representatives, which has the first and foremost constitutional role in
purse-string management. President Biden doesn’t like that. He doesn’t have to.
He just has to do his job.
No one
is above negotiation, Biden’s inappropriately haughty posturing
notwithstanding. And nobody elected to federal office is beneath negotiating
with, either: Not Kevin McCarthy, not Marjorie Taylor Greene, not Chuck
Schumer, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not Ilhan Omar. We live under a system
of government that gives people choices about whom they send to Washington to
represent them. The freedom to choose means the freedom to make dumb
choices—President Biden should understand that, because he was, after all, one
of those dumb choices. (Oh, settle down: There are 334 million Americans—the
fact that the 2020 election ended up being a choice between Joe Biden and
Donald Trump was the result of a whole lot of dumb choices.) Nobody has to love
the outcome. We all have to live with it. There is more than one way to refuse
to accept the outcome of a legitimate democratic election.
What
Biden ought to do is to call McCarthy’s bluff and give him the big thing he is
asking for: a cap of 1 percent in discretionary-spending growth. Why not sign
that and, in doing so, send the ball back into McCarthy’s court and enjoy the
spectacle of watching Republicans try to enforce some spending discipline
without making any cuts to anything anybody cares about? Why not give
Republicans the politically impossible task they are demanding for themselves?
It would be good politics—and, if Republicans actually managed to contain
growth in discretionary spending to 1 percent, it would be good policy,
too.
What we
call “discretionary spending” means spending on programs other than
entitlements, and it is a small part of the budget: $1.7 trillion in 2022,
versus $4.1 trillion in so-called mandatory spending. (When it hits the fan,
all spending is discretionary. But that’s a different column.) Republicans
being Republicans, they also say they won’t cut defense or veterans’ programs,
which takes about half of discretionary spending off the table. Non-defense
discretionary spending in 2022 added up to less than $1 trillion of $6.3
trillion in outlays ($4.1 trillion mandatory, $1.7 trillion discretionary, $475
billion interest on the debt), so, focusing on that leaves most spending on the
table. But, even so, capping discretionary spending growth at 1 percent will not
be politically easy, especially if you aren’t willing to touch the biggest
piece of discretionary spending, which is defense.
As with
any system of government based on formal procedure, there are choke points in
our system, one of which is the need to periodically raise the debt ceiling.
Bills to fund government operations are another. So are defense bills, to which
all sorts of special-interest issues end up being attached so that anybody who
votes against them can be accused of being an unpatriotic scoundrel who won’t
pay the troops. President Biden knows this. So does Chuck Schumer: Both of them
voted against debt-ceiling increases in the past and made unbearably sanctimonious speeches about why they were doing so.
They can’t act like they don’t know how this game is played—it is their
game.
It is a
stupid game.
But
playtime is over. I have no interest in carrying any political water for a hack
like Kevin McCarthy or the collection of miscreants he leads in Congress, but
it is President Biden here who is being the irresponsible obstructionist.
Knock it
off, Joe.
Remember
who you work for—and that you are the head of one branch of a
democratic-republican government, not Grand Poobah God-King Emperor Malarkey I.
Economics
for English Majors
Writing in the Los Angeles
Times, Jackie
Calmes repeats, in woeful hackish fashion, the predictable Democratic talking
points about the debt ceiling:
Remember, first, that all the struggling underway is simply to get
enough Republicans to help avert an economic catastrophe—by raising the debt
limit so the nation can keep paying for past spending that
presidents and Congresses of both parties racked up for years. In other words,
to get Republicans to take an action that should be bipartisan. And
nonnegotiable, as Biden says. When Trump was president, Republicans joined
Democrats three times to hike the debt limit without drama.
(Words
About Words has addressed that underway before: Better to
write under way. But this is E4EM, not WAW.)
Calmes’
characterization is not quite right. This is not about paying for “past
spending that presidents and Congresses of both parties racked up for
years.” As I have argued before, there is no fiscal reason that
failing to raise the debt ceiling should result in defaulting on the debt: We
will have about $4.8 trillion in tax revenue this year and less than $650
billion in interest to pay on the debt, or $7.50 in tax revenue for every $1 in
interest we have to pay to creditors. The spending that already has been racked
up can be met without increasing the debt ceiling now or for a very long time,
if ever. (To repeat an earlier point: When you actually have to take on new
debt to keep good on your existing debt obligations, that is when you are
positively hosed, as the economists say.) What is at issue is
spending that has been authorized without the money’s having
yet gone out the door. One of the fundamentals of democratic practice is that
no parliament or legislature can forever tie the hands of subsequent
parliaments and legislatures, that laws and programs put into place by one
Congress can be undone by a future Congress. Yes, prior Congresses have made
many promises; this Congress, and future Congresses, will be breaking some of
those promises in the future as it becomes necessary to impose some fiscal
sanity on the federal government.
Of
course, it would be foolish and counterproductive to use the debt ceiling to
suddenly impose a radical cut in federal spending—and without Congress having
passed new appropriations bills to enact those cuts rather than simply acting
as agents of chaos. But there is nothing wrong, in principle, with Congress
saying: “The Congress before us made a lot of big, expensive promises, but we
think that was unwise, and we have been elected to represent our constituents
by doing what we believe to be prudent and expedient. So, we’re not actually
going to spend that money.” There is a procedure for doing that, and it is
entirely fair to criticize House Republicans for being grandstanding buffoons
who don’t give a fig about procedure or legislative process—or basic
responsibility.
But that
isn’t an argument against rescinding previously authorized spending—that is an
argument against chaos and misgovernance.
Not to
mention …
Economic
inequality is habitually listed alongside climate change and China as the big
challenges facing the United States, at least if you are talking with, say,
a Council on Foreign Relations type
such as Robert Rubin.
But is
it?
The
United States has high (and rising, since the 1990s) income inequality as
measured by the Gini coefficient, a metric about which there is much to
criticize but which will do for our purposes here. But as income inequality has
grown, absolute standards of living have increased and absolute measures of
poverty have decreased. So what we have seen is modestly higher inequality in a
well-off society in which living standards at the lower end of the income
distribution have risen significantly—i.e., a country in which the population
as a whole is making steady economic progress while there has been
disproportionate growth at the very high end of the income distribution. (Similar
though not identical findings hold true for wealth, as distinct from income.)
You can read that as a story of economic oligarchy, the way Bernie Sanders does
(he calls it “allah-garky”), or you can read that as a story of successful
entrepreneurship, because a huge driver of tippy-top incomes and shockingly
large personal fortunes from the 1990s until now has been the fact that a
relatively small number of Americans founded companies of global importance in
those years. If Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., all had been launched in
Iceland, then Iceland would probably be the most unequal country in the world,
albeit a very rich and happy one.
A lot of
that wealth gets spread around in obvious and non-obvious ways: Big pension
funds such as CALPERS, for example, are venture-capital investors, and thereby
capture returns on successful startups for government employees of relatively
modest wealth and income. But in a globalized economy, the returns to
successful entrepreneurship (or successful investment) can be very, very large,
and it is natural (and good!) that these returns accrue disproportionately to
the people who take the risks and make the investments. Money moves around.
Jeff Bezos is not the only person Jeff Bezos has helped to make richer over the
years.
If the
choice is between a dynamic economy with rising standards of living and
relatively high inequality or egalitarian stagnation, then you should choose
the former—if human flourishing is what you really care about.
Words
About Words
Writing
in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd offers this monstrosity:
It seems so quaint now, the idea of respecting the president. Gallant
has vanished; gladiatorial is in. Patriotism is no longer a premier American
virtue. … When I flip on Fox News at night, I cringe at the way they make fun
of President Biden, the sick delight they take in sniping at any perceived
infirmity.
Patriotism
is love of country, not admiration for the president, who
is one elected official in the federal government. Until we liberate ourselves
from the idolatry of the presidency, we will never have a healthy, normal civic
culture.
The
president isn’t the country, the pope isn’t the church, the CEO isn’t the firm,
etc.
In other
wordiness …
Lamenting
that a small number of elite economists went to a small number of elite schools
(gotta find something!) Pete McKenzie writes in Slate:
A budding economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, he had
been accepted into Ph.D. programs at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Oxford. He
chose the latter.
Denunciations
of elite universities should be written in good English, or better English, if
not the best English.
English
has three degrees of comparison for adjectives: the positive, which asserts
only a quality; the comparative, which asserts a quality in superior or greater
degree; the superlative, which asserts a quality in the highest degree.
Think: good, better, best; big, bigger, biggest; beautiful, more
beautiful, most beautiful, etc.
Latter is comparative in character,
being a variation of later: late, later, last, or late,
latter, lattermost. The comparison-between-two-things nature of latter is
embedded in its habitual pairing with former: “A house and a car are both big
investments, but if you end up living in the latter rather than the former, you
have done something wrong along the way. On the other hand, you can live in
your car, but you can’t drive your house, unless it’s a Winnebago.”)
So, if
the sentence had been: “He had been accepted at Stanford and Oxford, and he
chose the latter,” that would work just fine. But with more than two items on
the list, you want last or lattermost.
What you
want to keep in mind is meaning rather than some abstract formality—because the
same guidance applies even when you are not working with a list of discrete
items. (Incidentally: I write discreet when I mean discrete about
half the time, and always have to check myself.) For example, you might write
that something happened in the “late 19th century” if that is
all you want to indicate, or in “the latter half of the 19th century”
if it is important to note the halfway mark, or in “the last years of the 19th century”
if you want to emphasize the sense of finality or terminality.
And
furthermore …
Yes, I
know the literal meaning of schmuck. And it is the word I meant. We
don’t use schmuck literally in English.
Elsewhere
Do you
know what would help Republicans win mayors’ races in big cities? Running
candidates. But they don’t, even in conservative states such as Texas. They
should contest those races. A radical idea, I know. More in the New York Post.
In Closing
Donald
Trump really, really likes the Village
People. Also the music from Cats. I get the feeling there is a missing chapter of
his biography waiting to be written.
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