Left In Lowell

Why I forget some weeks to read Digby and her cohorts is beyond me. Read all of this.

There was a lot of talk during the transition about how economists and elites of all political ideologies knew something major had to be done, and they must have thought they would just coast to a quick victory on this plan. But that’s not what’s happening, as the conservative noise machine forced an argument about small particulars rather than the need to have a massive job creation program as soon as possible to stave off disaster. The bill was pre-compromised and nothing like a Roosevelt-era New Deal but it would be enough to spur job creation, save a lot more jobs that would be eliminated, and face down the abyss of massive job loss and a deflationary spiral. And while ultimately, Republicans may “lose” in that something will be enacted, they will have won because they will preserve the fundamental argument that government spending is negative and suspicious while tax cuts are always positive and righteous. Their goal is to muck up the bill enough to discredit it and make it functionally inoperable, purely for reasons of party and not country.

There are some damn good finds in there, including this little piece of history, where Rick Perlstein explores the role of the shift in public opinion on economics to a precurser of Clintonism, Wisconsin Democratic senator William Proxmire.

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it’s what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the “Golden Fleece Award,” bestowed upon what he would claim was the month’s most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion’s good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her “mountain climbing hobby.” Actually, she’s one of the nation’s most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes “went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs.”

We don’t just need a change in Washington, we need a change in general perception of what is useful in government spending. The plague of Reaganism has created the least economically equal society in the post-WWII era, contributing to the decline of the middle class and increasing the levels of poverty, while enriching a few and making our system incredibly precarious and prone to abuses (S&L, Enron, Lehman Brothers). Anyway, you are commanded to go read dday over at Digby’s place, in full.