Biden is popular, but the filibuster rule is still in place and the clock is ticking

I'm not on the team that says Biden is doing just fine as long as he is Not As Bad As Donald Trump.

That standard is not a low bar. It's a bar buried in the ground.

But I'm not ready to jump on the Biden-is-FDR bandwagon, either. Paul Krugman makes a case for being a bit more giddy about this (What’s the Secret of Biden’s Success? New York Times 04/19/2021):

Public support for the Obama stimulus [of 2009], never very strong, plunged in the face of a sluggish economic recovery. Voters might sour on Bidenomics, too, if the economy disappoints.

But all indications are that we’re heading for an economic boom, with G.D.P. growing at its fastest rate since 1984. If that happens, Biden’s policies might get even more popular than they are now.

How all of this will translate into votes remains to be seen. But early indications are that Biden has achieved what Obama never did: finding a way to make progressive policies truly popular. [my emphasis]

Krugman's point in the column is basically that Biden is doing well in the polls at the moment because he's doing substantial things that much of the public perceives as being good things. The vaccine rollout quickly picked up once Biden took office, and that was not a random coincidence. Trump's administration was an irresponsible disaster on the vaccine distribution.

Rick Perlstein has observed that Biden has an advantage that probably would have been there even if the previous administration's vaccination program had been half competent, which is that Biden gets to be the guy who made it possible for people to hug their grandchildren again. Because Biden's first year in office is coinciding with what looks like is going to be the turning point against the COVID pandemic in the US.

And as Krugman was predicting last year, once the pandemic situation improved enough to resume some like normal economic activity, the economy would see a notable upsurge just from that alone. Now we can add to that the COVID relief bill which is certainly a boost to that goal, even though economists like him were insistent on calling that a "relief" bill rather than a "stimulus."

This kind of comma-dancing is an emerging trend here in what is still Biden's first 100 days as President. For economists, the COVID bill was "relief" because it addressed immediate losses that people experienced because of the virus and the lockdowns, like providing extended unemployment coverage. Not a "stimulus" bill aimed at producing longer-term growth. But of course the financial provisions of the "relief" bill helped the economy. There was some attempt by the Republicans to label it "stimulus" which they tried to make a stigma along the lines of "welfare".

Now with the infrastructure bill, Republicans and ConservaDems are haggling over what counts as "infrastructure" with the same Republican goal, to stigmatize some parts of it as "welfare".

In any case, Krugman in this column is right, at least for the current moment. Biden is not only getting some substantial things done, but voters understand them as such. Including a notable number of Republican voters.

But the Republicans also have reason to believe that a strategy of fundamental opposition, i.e., obstruction across the board, at least on domestic issues, will be effective. Conventional political wisdom has it that the President's party is presumed to have a disadvantage in the midterm elections. And with the Senate split 50-50 and the House majority relatively slim, the Democrats not only need to get as much of their program passed as possible. They also need to make a strong positive impression on voters. And the party structures in the states tend to be stronger for Republicans. And, most ominously, is the new raft of Jim Crow over voter suppression laws like the one Georgia just passed.

Foreign policy is not on the front burner of political attention at the moment. But, of course, that can change quickly. Still, peace is popular, despite the militarized rhetoric of our political culture. Still, Biden's early announced that he's staying in the nuclear-arms agreement with Russia that Trump had decided to leave and his intention to re-enter the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran are both things that Biden could and should use to bolster his political support.

On the other hand, there are worrisome signs that Biden is still sorely tempted to revert to the Clintonian strategy of "triangulating" between (center-)left and right. Which in practice means caving to the conservatives. Not by coincidence, that is also the kind of thing that wealthy donors tend to prefer.

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss this concern in the first part of the 04/19/2021 edition of TYT, talking about some of Biden's backsliding on his own announced policies. The $15/hr. minimum wage is going nowhere. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, who often acts as a Biden surrogate, is talking about reducing the infrastructure bill (The American Jobs Plan in White House marketing) from over $2 trillion to $800 billion or so. This is the Democrats negotiating with themselves.

The filibuster rule is still in place. If it's not modified, a lot of Biden's program, including the most popular parts, have little or no hope of passing. Especially not the critical voter protection act (For the People Act) to counter Republican voter suppression. And the clock is already ticking on that. The longer the bill is delayed, the less time the Federal government will have to take the necessary legal and administrative action necessary to undo the voter suppression laws before the 2022 elections.

TYT also reports on Biden' record on immigration. Which, yes, Not As Bad As Trump. But, actually, not that good. And so far, really not much better than Trump's:

Krugman is also right in arguing that Biden coming off so far to the public as a Democrat who is actually serious about Democratic policies that visibly help people is a major contributor to his popularity to date. The fanaticism of the Republican Party has also helped. "And at this point Republicans seem so deep in the cult that they’ve forgotten how to talk to outsiders." But that was also true during Obama's first term. Yet their obstruction and their ground game in the 2010 elections was still very effective against the Democrats. The Republicans were able to take a majority in the House.

Krugman trashes the EU over the COVID vaccinations

Paul Krugman ruffled some feathers among European politicians with his high-profile criticism of the European Union's performance on COVID vaccination in his New York Times column, A very European disaster 03/20/2021 (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette link).

Krugman concludes his column melodramatically, "The European project is in deep trouble."

But saying "the European project is in deep trouble" about the EU is similar to describing the United States as "the American experiment." Any historic "experiment" can fail, e.g., the Soviet Union. The EU has a long and complicated history. I think it's tempting for Americans to think of the EU as some kind of parallel to the US. And that's not entirely wrong. Luuk van Middelaar in his history of the EU, Vom Kontinent zur Union: Gegenwart und Geschichte des vereinten Europa (2016), discusses the formation of the American Constitution as a reference point for the development of the EU.

But it's a reference point that presents both parallels and contrasts. The EU is an international organization, not a nation-state. It's more than a free-trade area, it's a political union, but it's a supranational institution, not a federal state. This Carleton University website takes a Mugwump position on the nature of the EU, but one that's probably as close as political theory can get right now, as something more closely tied together than a confederation but not so closely united as a federation. (Is the EU a federation or a confederation? n/d)

Krugman is an economist - a Nobel Prize-winning one at that - and he gave intense attention to the euro crisis including the  the Greek crisis of 2015. I think Krugman's basic criticisms of the euro's problems are right. The eurozone was not constructed as an "optimum currency area (OCA)." Having a common currency in a real sense makes the eurozone a single economy in the way that the EU as a whole is not. So, as Krugman and others have described, parts of the eurozone where productivity grows more slowly are forced into destructive austerity policies in the absence of compensating macroeconomic policy at the eurozone level.

Krugman's criticism of the EU's pandemic response includes the following.

Europe's vaccination debacle will almost surely end up causing thousands of unnecessary deaths. And the continent's policy bungles don't look like isolated instances, a few bad decisions made by a few bad leaders.

Instead, the failures seem to reflect fundamental flaws in the continent's institutions and attitudes--including the same bureaucratic and intellectual rigidity that made the euro crisis a decade ago far worse than it should have been.

This strikes me as a criticism founded in an assumption the EU has constructed what was supposed to be a unified health care system. And that's just not the case. In the case of the euro, a subset of the EU nations constructed a common institution with the single currency that did have some "fundamental flaws." But it doesn't seem so reasonable to criticize the absence of institutions (like an EU-wide health system) that the EU has never pretended to have or tried to construct.

Here, I think the analogy of the EU to a nation-state like the US is really problematic. But Krugman has more specific criticisms of the vaccine purchasing process

They seemed deeply worried about the possibility that they might end up paying drug companies too much, or discover that they had laid out money for vaccines that either proved ineffective or turned out to have dangerous side effects.

So they minimized these risks by delaying the procurement process, haggling over prices and refusing to grant liability waivers. They seemed far less worried about the risk that many Europeans might get sick or die because the vaccine rollout was too slow.

I'm inclined to think the purchasing process in the EU, which has been mainly handled at the EU level, was deficient in some way. I haven't followed that process so closely that I could offer a much more detailed analysis at this point. Krugman does allude to the fairly spastic policy of several countries including Germany and France on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which I do think diminished some of the confidence in the vaccine itself. He does seem to be so fixed on the idea that austerity thinking distorts European policy that he may be too inclined to blame stinginess for the problem.

And I found this point to be a real head-scratcher:

Finally, Europe turns out to have a problem with widespread hostility to science. So do we--but theirs is different, in ways that are doing a lot of harm.

In America, most--although by no means all--hostility to science comes from the right, especially the religious right. We're a nation full of anti-evolutionists, climate change deniers and, more recently, covid deniers--forms of science denial that are much less common in Europe. But other anti-scientific attitudes, less easily placed on a left-right spectrum, are distressingly widespread.

Reluctance to take a covid-19 vaccine, even if available, is hardly unknown here, but anti-vaccine sentiment appears to be alarmingly broad in Europe, especially in France.

I don't really know what he's talking about here. Far-right parties and sects have promoted anti-vaxxer notions and bizarre conspiracy theories around COVID. The more specific influence of the QAnon conspiracy has been notable in Europe, too, notably in Austria and Germany. So far as I'm aware, the COVID conspiracy mongers seem overwhelmingly "brown" rather than "green" in the EU.

There will hopefully be a lot of studies - and policy changes based on them - as the COVID pandemic comes under better control for what worked well and what didn't. There does seem to be something to the idea that countries with a stronger collective sense of social responsibility like China including Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. But aside from the fact that such broad "cultural" factors are extremely difficult to quantity and not exactly easy to export.

I haven't noticed any clear inclination that the particular types of health insurance or public-vs.-private organization of the delivery systems has made a dramatic difference in the response, although systems of universal insurance that produce generally better public health outcomes almost surely have had some influence on survival rates.

It does seem that countries that for whatever reason had structures in place to rapidly disseminate vaccines as such did better. Israel has been on a relatively high level of military alert basically since its founding, part of which means that they were prepared to rapidly distribute medical supplies like gas masks and vaccines. Israel has 9.1 million people, the same population size of Austria, which has been much less efficient in getting people vaccinating.

Chile with 19 million people has a much bigger geographic area than Israel and achieved a faster vaccination rate than Israel. In an analysis of Chile's experience (Impfweltmeister Chile Makroskop 23.03.2021), Jens Holst focuses on Chile's relatively recent experience in vaccination campaigns against epidemics, a general emphasis on primary health care in their system, and a high rate of acceptance of vaccination among the public. Somehow, anti-vaxxer sentiment doesn't seem to have gained much of a following there. Chile has relied on the Chinese vaccines Sinovac und CanSino along with AstroZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

If Krugman is upset about the EU not being more loosey-goosey about their vaccine bidding, I wonder what he thinks about the Chilean approach. As Holst describes it (my translation from German):

However, the terms of the contracts are not known in Chile … Prices remain secret in the South American country, and no one knows the clauses, and in particular the limitations of liability imposed by manufacturers, who usually travel with dozens of lawyers and, if possible, exclude all financial risks. However, President [Sebastian] Piñera, who knows the other side all too well, could not take this into account. He seized the unique opportunity to present himself as a do-er after his government had created a very bad image for itself, and not only in dealing with the pandemic. For years, his liberal-conservative government has been under massive political pressure, and protests against social inequality, the expensive education system, and the lack of participation of large groups of the population in economic growth have continued despite corona restrictions. Then comes a successful vaccination campaign eight months before the next scheduled presidential election.

COVID relief bill and the state of Democratic reform prospects

The COVID relief bill really is an important, beneficial piece of legislation. It's been passed by the House and the Senate and blessed by President Joe Manchin, so now it goes to reconciliation and presumably will soon become law.

Paul Krugman talks about the very good economics of the relief bill: "while the American Rescue Plan is mainly disaster relief rather than conventional stimulus, it’s a big proposal that will, in fact, provide a lot of economic stimulus." (The macro equivalent of war? Substack 02/27/2021) Obviously, we won' know the final form of the bill until it actually passes.

But the COVID relief plan is a very good contrast to Obama's initial stimulus package in 2009, which economists like Krugman were frantically warning was only about half the size it needed to be. Then Obama negotiated with Republicans and agreed to put more of it into less-stimulative tax cuts. Then the Republicans voted against it anyway. Biden at least seems to have really learned from that experience about how to deal with bad-faith Republican negotiators.

And Biden didn't spend the transition period promoting a Grand Bargain where the Republicans would agree to raise taxes and the Democrats would agree to cut Social Security and Medicare like Obama did in 2008-9. And so far, we haven't heard any talk from this administration about a new Boles-Simpson Let Grandma-Eat-Catfood Commission, which was nothing but a huge political gift to the Republicans going into the 2010 midterms.

By the way, Biden campaigned in 2020 on lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, the opposite of what Obama's fortunately stillborn Grand Bargain would have done.

Krugman also wants to see a good Keynesian pedal-to-the-metal approach on the infrastructure/climate crisis program. (How (not) to pay for building back better 03/07/2021)

The Republicans are currently so full-in on culture themes, like defending the nobility of, uh, Neanderthals (?!?), that they mostly haven't been using their normal "Debt! Deficit! Aaaaa--iiieeee! economic arguments very much so far. But Krugman is offering preemptive refutations, anyway.

Will Bunch points out that the Republicans in solidly opposing a minimum wage increase handed the Democrats what should be a potent issue to use against them. (How the GOP blew its chance at a 2022 working-class coalition in just 10 hours, 43 minutes Philadelphia Inquirer 03/08/2021)

But he also warns about the weakness of the Democratic performance on the issue:

Yes, there were moments when the Democrats — still no more of an “organized political party” than when Will Rogers told that joke a century ago — looked determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, confronted with a bill that, with the arguable exception of Obamacare in 2010, does more for the U.S. middle class than any legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society since the mid-1960s. The macho posturing of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — for whom getting on the Sunday talk shows matters more than his state’s high rate of poverty — nearly toppled the bill, and the Democrats’ blind spot on the $15 minimum wage is deeply disappointing to leftists who voted for Biden last November.

Still, he's optimistic about the implications of the trend of the Democrats' current performance, including the narrow Senate victory on the COVID relief bill:

But in the end, the Democrats’ resolve and unity among its one-vote Senate majority was a stunning victory for a new American political reality in the 2020s. It involves forging an all-new definition of “bipartisanship” around hardball politics for measures that are supported by majorities of citizens, rather than negotiating with a Republican Party that continues to rally behind a Big Lie around nonexistent voter fraud and the 2020 election that threatens our democracy.

Bunch also points out that without Democrats in the Senate being willing to at least partially set aside the filibuster rule, an urgently needed voting rights bill to counter the current nationwide Republican drive to restrict minority voting. "If Republicans win in the 2022 midterms not by the power of their ideas but by picking who gets to cast a vote, the rest of the Biden/Democratic agenda will be dead, and that won’t be the worst of it for the American Experiment." (Why Biden needs a prime-time, Oval Office speech to declare war on voter suppression Philadelphia Inquirer 03/08/2021)

Getting this passed means that Harris and all 50 Senate Dems have to somehow set aside the filibuster for the new voting rights bill. Every vote in the Senate to keep the filibuster in force on this bill is a vote for Republican white-supremacist voter suppression. And all the Senators, even the most dimwitted ones like Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, are very clear about that.

If President Joe Manchin or other ConsevervaDems succeed in killing the voting rights bill by voting to keep the filibuster applying to that bill, they will be doing enormous damage not only to the Democratic Party but to the democratic system itself.

The press loves to focus on who is in which high school clique ...

My terrible, trolly opinion that I'm only sharing because I want to piss off Twitter is that, if a senator from a state that Trump won by 40 points votes yes on a bill that does 90 percent of what you hoped it would do, that senator is not your enemy and is, in fact, your friend.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) March 7, 2021

But getting that voting rights bill passed is critical, no matter how much it gives the pundits a Big Sad to see ConservaDems like President Manchin be called on the carpet over it.

The significance of progressive narratives and organization in US politics

Joe Biden has been President for just over a month now. And for the most part, even those impatient for constructive changes are relieved at the "normalcy" of having a President who actually respects the basic institutions of the government and knows that the federal government does have responsibilities to its citizens, e.g., in responding to a deadly pandemic.

Progressives are very aware that we have to press Biden to actually enact even the program he put forward in his primary candidacy, and even more so to enact the unity program agreed on with the Sanders campaign.

Naomi Klein has been pointing out that a significant difference between 2021 and 2009 is that the progressive left has a more clear organized presence in politics, in contrast to the relative weakness of the left at the beginning of the Obama-Biden Administration. In a recent editorial (Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal New York Times 02/21/2021), she analyzes the bizarre position the Republicans and their media networks have taken on the disastrous failure of radical free-market energy policies in Texas right now, that the Green New Deal that hasn't even been enacted yet is responsible for the disaster!

She goes back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to illustrate her point:

When Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s long-neglected levees in 2005, there was, briefly, some hope that the catastrophe might serve as a kind of wake-up call. Witnessing the abandonment of thousands of residents on their rooftops and in the Superdome, small-government fetishists suddenly lost their religion. “When a city is sinking into the sea and rioting runs rampant, government probably should saddle-up,” Jonah Goldberg, a prominent right-wing commentator, wrote at the time. In environmental circles, there was also discussion that the disaster could spur climate action. Some dared to predict that the collapsed levees would be for the small-government, free-market legacy of Reaganism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.

None of it happened. Instead, New Orleans became a laboratory for the shock doctrine. Public schools were shut down en masse, replaced by charter schools. Public housing was demolished, and costly townhouses sprang up, preventing thousands of the city’s poorest residents, the majority of them Black, from ever returning. The reconstruction of the city became a feeding ground for private contractors. Republicans used the cover of crisis to call for expanded oil and gas exploration and new refinery capacity, much as Mr. Perry is doing right now in Texas with his calls for doubling down on gas. [my emphasis]

There were efforts to block that approach and implement more constructive responses.

But there were no readily available, alternate ideas lying around for how New Orleans could be rebuilt to make it both greener and fairer for all of its residents.

Even if there had been, there was no political muscle to turn such ideas into reality. Though the environmental justice movement has deep roots in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” the climate justice movement was only just emerging at the time Katrina struck. There was no Sunrise Movement, the youth-led organization that occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office after the 2018 midterms to demand “good jobs, and a livable planet.” There was no “squad,” the ad hoc alliance of congressional progressives whose most visible member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent shock waves through Washington by joining the Sunrisers in their occupation. There had not yet been two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns to show Americans how popular these ideas really are. And there was certainly no national movement for a Green New Deal.

The difference between then and now goes a very long way toward explaining why Mr. Abbott is railing against a policy plan that, as of now, exists primarily on paper. In a crisis, ideas matter — he knows this. He also knows that the Green New Deal, which promises to create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit and affordable housing, is extremely appealing. This is especially true now, as so many Texans suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services and extreme weather. [my emphasis]

She appeared on Sam Seder's Majority Report Monday to discuss her perspective, beginning just after 17:30 in the video, Why Texas GOP Fears the Green New Deal w/ Naomi Klein 02/22/21:

But the President is career centrist Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders. The best scenario for the next four years is that he will bicker and complain about progressives pushing him and progressives will complain about how much he falls short, and in January 2025, the left will praise him for being surprisingly more progressive than anyone really expected.

Looking at it from the perspective of the start of the second month of the Biden-Harris Presidency, two factors are likely to weigh very heavily in the public reception of this government. If the vaccination and other public health are successfully rolled out and we see a resumption of more normal economic activity in the fall, that in itself will be perceived as a huge relief. The Democrats are surprisingly inept at messaging their own successes, of course. But even with klutzy messaging, results do matter.

As Paul Krugman has been actively pointing out, the lifting of most lockdown restriction in itself will produce a notable surge in economic activity, which he compares to the "morning in America" effect from which benefitted the first Reagan-Bush Administration so much. (He doesn't suggest that Reagan's voodooo economics was the magic it was claimed to be.) If Biden actually does enact his own proposed version of the "New Green Deal," as he prefers to call it, that will also provide a much-needed economic stimulus. (Krugman explains the distinction he makes between economic relief and economic stimulus, which has relevance for the wonkier discussions among economists about economic policy, in Cooling it on overheating Substack 02/21/2021.)

I don't think the filibuster issue is going away. Things that actually need legislation will be blocked by the Republicans in the Senate using the filibuster if they are anything actually significant and important that could befit Democrats at the polls in 2022 or 2024. Comprehensive immigration reform is one. Anything like the $15 minimum wage that isn't included in a bill that can be passed with a Senate majority through the "reconciliation" procedure will also be shot down with the filibuster.

Biden is an experienced legislator and an institutionalist, so he of course knows all this as well as anybody. If the Democrats offer up something like comprehensive immigration reform in a bill that can be filibuster, they will doing so fully knowing it will be defeated. There's no need for anyone to kid themselves about that. It's not a bad thing to fight for something like loses, depending on how important it is and the kind of message the fight itself sends about what Democrats stand for.

But a bill that wins a majority in the Senate but is defeated because the Democrats would not set aside the filibuster, it's safe to assume that it's a bill that the Biden-Harris Administration wasn't serious about getting passed.

The American Prospect is a good source to keep track of Biden's progress, or lack thereof, in his Presidency, particularly on domestic affairs. This piece by executive editor David Dayen, for example: First 100: The Biden Vaccine Rollout Is Working 02/22/2021. The "first 100" refers to the decades-old convention of putting special emphasis on a Presidential administration's accomplishments during its first 100 days in office.

Paul Krugman and the coming fight with Republicans over austerity economics

Ron Wyden, the incoming chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the only Democrat quoted on the record by Greg Sargent in this column, A hidden reason that Joe Biden is trying to go big Washington Post 01/15/2021. But I hope they all recognize the lesson from 2009 and the following years:

[M]any Democrats have lived through what happened when former president Barack Obama inherited another major economic crisis from another Republican president.

As has been endlessly hashed out, Obama opted for a stimulus that fell short of what was needed. Putting aside why that happened, what everyone now knows is that it was a serious mistake. Democrats lost the House in 2010 and spent the remainder of Obama’s presidency locked in brutal fiscal trench warfare with a GOP determined to starve the recovery with austerity to cripple his presidency under the guise of fake concerns about spending and deficits.

The actual position of Republicans in the Senate and House is the one Dick Cheney articulated back during his (and Bush II's) Presidency: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

That's their position. When they say something different, they are just trying to sucker Democrats into deals they then won't honor. As this article recounts, that was a successful *partisan* strategy for the Republicans during the Obama-Biden Administration because the economic results were so damaging.

Paul Krugman was warning about exactly that in real time during the Obama-Biden Administration. His current analyses are certainly worth following.

Neither defunct ideology, nor bogus economic concerns, nor the vain hope of comity should be allowed to stand in the way of delivering the policies America needs 1/ https://t.co/tWt0uHEq6r

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 15, 2021

His four rules are:

1. Don’t doubt the power of government to help.
2. Don’t obsess about debt.
3. Don’t worry about inflation.
4. Don’t count on Republicans to help govern.

That last point is especially important, and something even the most left-leaning Members of Congress would say in that form: The Republican Party has no interest in bipartisanship as any kind of governing principle. Democrats may be able to pick off some Republican votes in Congress on particular issues. But the notion that make the hearts of TV pundits go pitty-pat that we will see some kind of Bipartisanship consensus on major issues is just wrong. The only exception would be issues on which a large number of Democrats are willing to capitulate to a Republican position.

Krugman caught some deserved criticism from the left for his seeming to pooh-pooh the importance of the $2,000 check issue last month. To his credit, he recognized that he was being tone-deaf on the politics of it. His larger economic argument wasn't wrong: extended unemployment insurance is more important to economic recovery than immediate $2,000 payments. But, as he recognized, that debate was taking place in a very particular political context.

Krugman has actually generally been good on the political side of economic issues. He even uses the term "political economy," which was what economics was called in the 19th century.

The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites 1/ https://t.co/R9CO8GK2kz

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 1, 2018

In current economic trends, Krugman is a "neo-Keynesian," not a post-Keynesian or an adherent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Although Keynesian is generally identified as a left-leaning economic theory, it's not inherent left or progressive. Keynesianism is a way of understanding how economies work. It can be employed for conservative as well as liberal/progressive ones. Andrés Velasco, who was Michelle Bachelet's Finance Minister in Chile 2006-2010, explains in Are We All Keynesians Again? (Project Syndicate 08/25/2020), "we must remember what Keynes taught: fiscal policy should be tightened during good times, precisely so that it can be expansionary during bad times."

That concept is known as balancing the budget across the business cycle with deficits during recessions and surpluses during expansions. But the idea of running surpluses during expansions is particularly inappropriate to the United States today. Jamie Galbraith provides an accessible description of why in his book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). Short version: as long as the US is a net importer and the dollar is still the de facto world reserve currency, the collective federal, state, and local government spending will be in surplus only in years in which the private sector is in deficit, i.e., investing more than earning.

That is an accounting definition that is based on real-world phenomenon. But it means that assuming that government surpluses are automatically needed in expansionary periods would make for really bad policy. But Jamie Galbraith's father John Kenneth Galbraith had explained in The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical political reason that balancing the budget across the business cycle is near-impossible. That is because lowering taxes or increasing spending during recessions is much easier politically than raising taxes or cutting spending during an expansion.

After the $2,000 flap, I saw some progressive/social-democratic dismissals of Krugman as being just another neoliberal. At least on Twiiter ...

If you look at some of his columns from the 1990s, that might seem plausible, because he is an authority on international trade and he was generally friendly to the neoliberal deregulation trade treaties. But politically, he was one of the most visible critics of the Iraq War and the dishonest claims around it in his New York Times column. And on one of the most spectacular neoliberal fiascos, the imposition of brutal austerity policies on Greece in the 2015 euro crisis, he was severely critical of it. And more generally, he was intensely critical of austerity economics and its adherents' false claims after the 2007-8 crisis. He was also very specific in real time during the Obama-Biden Administration of warning about exactly what Greg Sargent write about in that recent column.

He also popularized the concept of the Very Serious People (VSPs), his mocking term for people like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles of Simpson-Bowles Commission fame, officially the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, aka, the Catfood Commission, as in let-Grandma-eat-cat-food, because of their focus on cutting Social Security and Medicare. In Krugman's use of the term VSPs, he saw them as people who were accepted by political and media elites because the VSPs repeated familiar ideas they found comfortable, even when there was little real-world basis for them. (See: Joe Wiesenthal, PAUL KRUGMAN: Alan Simpson Is 'All Wrong' And Conventional Wisdom On Economic Policy Is 'Stark Raving Mad' Business Insider 07/14/2012)

Krugman was particularly scornful of the media reverence for Paul Ryan, a once-prominent radical Republican Congressman who pimped austerity policies for years and was treated as a VSP by the media. "Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted." He called Ryan "an obvious con artist" who nevertheless managed to "get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity." (The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism New York Times 04/12/2018)

Krugman has also been notable in stressing for years that the asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics was overwhelmingly due to the still-ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party. He was no friend of the lazy mainstream media convention of Both Sides Do It. (Joe Wiesenthal, KRUGMAN: It's Entirely One-Sided: Republicans Are To Blame For Today's 'Nightmarishly Dysfunctional Political Situation' Business Insider 07/12/2012)

In the column on Paul Ryan quoted above, he also addressed one of the key points in Sargent's 2021 column:

Some commentators seem surprised at the way men who talked nonstop about fiscal probity under Barack Obama cheerfully supported tax cuts that will explode the deficit under Trump. They also seem shocked at the apparent indifference of Ryan and his colleagues to Trump’s corruption and contempt for the rule of law. What happened to their principles?

The answer, of course, is that the principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

As Sargent puts it:

Many Democrats who lived through that, a lot of whom are still in Congress and some of whom are advising Biden — who himself experienced it as vice president — must be wary of a repeat.

Making them even more wary, one hopes, is the fact that Republican deficit concerns evaporated once a Republican (Donald Trump) became president. Indeed, the Trump economy was good (at least until the coronavirus shattered it) precisely because it was fueled by stimulus. [my emphasis]

So, yes, there are areas, especially on neoliberal deregulation "trade" treaties, where progressives will disagree with Krugman. But on some of the biggest and most urgent issues - the radicalization of the Republican Party and the damage of austerity economics - he has a solid record.

Krugman cautious about the seriousness of the current recession

Noah Smith interviewed Paul Krugman for Bloomberg Opinion on the state of the economy and how severe the recession is likely to be. Krugman is somewhat surprisingly upbeat, though the title of the piece overstates his comments in the interview, Paul Krugman Is Pretty Upbeat About the Economy 05/27/2020.

Krugman is a serious academic economist as well as a public intellectual. And I assume he is giving us his actual views as a professional economist here.

The optimism part comes at the end: "right now I don’t see the case for a multiyear depression. People expecting this slump to look like the last one seem to me to be fighting the last war."

But he actually describes some major risks whose actual seriousness depends to a very large degree on whether or not there are sensible public policies to deal with them:

I’ve been trying to get a handle on this by looking at recessions over the past 40 years. Until now we’ve had two kinds: 1979-82-type slumps basically caused by tight money and the 2007-09 type caused by private-sector overreach. The first kind was followed by V-shaped “morning in America” recoveries; the second by sluggish recoveries that took a long time to restore full employment.

My take is that the Covid slump is more like 1979-82 than 2007-09: it wasn’t caused by imbalances that will take years to correct. So that would suggest fast recovery once the virus is contained. But some big caveats.

One is that we don’t know how long the pandemic will last. Right now, we’re probably opening too soon, which will actually extend the period of economic weakness.

Another is that even if we didn’t have big imbalances before, the slump may be creating them now. Think of business closures, which will require time to reverse.

And I also wonder how much long-term change we’ll experience as a result of the virus. If we have a permanent shift to more telecommuting and less in-person retail, then we’ll have to shift workers to new sectors, which will take time. That was an argument lots of people made, wrongly, in 2009, but it could be true now. [my emphasis]

When Krugman talks about "1979-82-type" slumps, that phrase actually refers to two different recessions, officially designated by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as January-July 1980 and July 1981-November 1982. The hard-money policy was intiated by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed to the position by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979, reappointed by St. Reagan in 1983.

As a glance at the NBER table shows, the previous recession ended in June 2009, which means the expansion lasted almost eleven years, making it one of the longest expansions on record. Based on the average duration of previous expansions, we might say that the economy was "overdue" for a recession. So that makes me wonder how far the induced-recession comparison of today with 1979-82 applies. Krugman uses the term "Covid slump" here for the current recession. (The NBER hasn't yet officially a new recession as having begun in the US. Normally that doesn't come until after two successive quarters of falling GDP is experienced, although that is not itself the NBER's formal definition of recession.)

I am also highly confident that the Trump Administration will not do a good job of promoting policies that will stimulate the real economy. They will continue to concentrate on ways to juice the stock market - which does not directly stimulate the economy - and to give great attention on schemes to enrich the Trump family's business income and spreading around crony-capitalist deals and grift.

And, sadly, the Democratic Party is showing itself unable to do much effective during this election year to force Republicans to adopt more genuinely stimulative measures.

Krugman on Sanders

Krugman isn't thrilled to have Bernie Sanders as the Democratic frontrunner. But he's also pushing back against anti-Sanders nonsense. His characterizing Meidcare for All as simply "abolishing private health insurance", though, is just silly. It's a purely polemical formulation.

But I think Sanders will listen to a lot of Krugman's economic policy advice.

"Socialism" and US politics in 2019 (and also 190 years before that)

Neil Buchanan back in February made a prediction that is holding up so far, Republicans Will Run an Entire Campaign Based on an Incorrectly Defined Word (Socialism) Because They Have Nothing Else Verdict/Justia 02/19/2019;

The 2020 strategy for Republicans is the mirror image of using happy words to hide ugly reality. They are misusing a word with actual meaning—socialism (more accurately, the term democratic socialism)—to stand in for everything that they cannot attack on the merits and for which they offer no alternative that they are willing to defend.

Paul Krugman takes time to look at the emptiness of the Republican accusation, also agreeing that it will be a standard Republican practice (The S Word, the F Word and the Election New York Times 06/27/2019):

Nobody in these [Democratic Presidential] debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call "social democrats": advocates of a privatesector - driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.

Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are that denunciations of Democrats' "socialist" agenda will be front and center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.

Krugman takes the chance to situate the extent of Republican far-rright extremism by comparing it with the EU's most notorious case of an authoritarian "iiliberal democracy" in Hungary under President Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party. "One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West's white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy."

I want to agree and disagree with Krugman on what socialism is. The agreement is his diagnosis of the Republians' rhetorical strategy. They are trying to make perfectly sensible policies like national health insurance sound equivalent to governments and policies that the public understands to be dictatorial, undemocratic, and otherwise disastrous. And it is dishonest and demagogic. It's also silly for Democrats like John Hickenlooper to try the same tack, because the Republicans are going to call any Democratic Presidential nominee socialist.

If you're determined not to vote for any candidate the Republicans will call "socialist," well, you're probably a Trump supporter. I would add to Buchanan's description that Republicans use "socialism" for "everything that they cannot attack on the merits and for which they offer no alternative that they are willing to defend", that they also use it for things they just don't like.

My disagreement with Krugman is actually more a different perspective when he says, "government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean." The "means of prodution" in that classical forumlation being all major industries, banks, and natural resources. That's mostly accurate. But I think it's also important to see socialism as the classical critical left perspective on capitalism.

The term socialist came into usage in broadly its current sense in Europe around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

I wrote about the development of the term ten years ago in Who you callin' a socialist? 11/22/2009 in the previous iteration of this blog.

In the wake of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, socialist parties formed advocating for unions, the rights of the industrial workers, and for democratic governance. The history of the socialist movement is also a history of ideological arguments over what socialism should really mean as well as over strategy, tactics, peronalities, positions, fame, money and all the other things political parties fight over.

The same can be said for the intellectual trends associated with socialism, of which Marxism is the best known. And, of course, there have been multiple competing versions of Marxism to this day.

The European Social Democratic parties were the main political vehicles for socialist ideas in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early 20th. The most famous and influential of them was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) whose prominent leaders included August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels identified with that party and with others in the international party associations known as the First International (International Workingmen's Association 1864–1876) and the Second International (from 1889 to today's Socialist International).

The SPD and the other social-democratic parties emphasized establishing parliamentary democracies, a goal which they shared with bourgeois pro-capitalist liberal parties. They did advocate government ownership of the means of production and they did regard themselves as revolutionary parties, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Revolutions of 1848 being their general model of the process. The American Revolution and the freeing of the slaves in the US Civil War were important but more indirect influences. The First International was enthusiastic for the Union cause in the Civil War.

But they were not focused on taking power by organizing citizens' militias and staging armed uprisings on the model of say, the Peasant Wars of the 16th century. They weren't pacifists. And the aftermaths of the French Revolution and the suppression of the 1848 revolutions, as well as the constant presence of Czarist Russia as a conservative force ready to intervene against democratic movements that would take power, made them very mindful of the danger of counter-revolutionary violence. But the SPD, even during the period of the German Sozialistengesetz of 1878-1890 when the SPD was officially outlawed, continued to organize and succesfully focused on peaceful (if not always legal) political activity. Successful enough that the SPD became the largest German political party - and the largest party advocating for parliamentary democracy - and regarded the period of illegality as their "heroic period."

An example of the diversity of opinion within the official socialist movement can be seen in Karl Marx' Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), his comments on the official program of the German party adopted in 1875. A quick scan of the text will show that he didn't endorse 100% of the formulations in the program. But he did approve of the assumption in the Gotha Program that the social-democratic goal was a "co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production." That is the idea to which Krugman refers when he writes that "government ownership of the means of production ... is what socialism used to mean."

In the 1890s, a major new trend gained popularity in the SPD that was known as Revisionism. Associated with Eduard Bernstein, it advocated a reformist goal for the party and rejected the Gotha Program idea of social revolution in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class and abolish it by doing away with the capitalist system. Karl Kautsky was the leading politician and theoretician of the more traditional "Marxist" approach that was still the official position of the SPD. This revolutionary/reformist dispute was reflected in other European social democratic parties, as well.

So, by the 1890s, there was already a major trend within the socialist movement that did not focus on establishing government ownership of the means of production but instead regarded their socialist perspective as a radical, pro-democracy criticism of the capitalist order. That's what I mean in the historical sense that socialism was the classical critical left perspective of capitalism, without being exclusively defined as state ownership of the means of production.

The Social Democrats had a huge and formal split over the outbreak of the First World War between those who supported their own country's side in the war and those who regarded it as an imperialist war in the interest of capital which the workers' movement should oppose by rejecting their own governments' participation in the war. But this split was not the same as the Revisionist-Marxist split. The "arch-Revisionist" Bernstein supported the antiwar position, while Kautsky initially supported the war but came over to the antiwar position by 1915. This difference resulted in a major, formal organizational split within the SPD.

The various brands of socialism emerging from the war was a far greater proliferation of positions. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 produced new formal splits between supporters of the Bolshevik government and its political strategy (Communists) and those who criticized it for being dictatorial and rejecting the necessity of violent revolution on the Russian model (Social Democrats). There was a Leninist Communist International umbrella group (Third International) with the Second International defining itself in contrast. There was also an alliance of ten smaller national parties who rejected the terms of the Social Democratic/Communist split, including the "Austromarxist" Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), which didn't suffer a significant split over Bolshevism, known as the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (IWUSP) which formally existed from 1921-23. Lenin mocked it as the "2 1/2 International".

Since 1917, there have been many varieties of groups identifying themselves and their goals as "socialist." Communism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Guevarism are some of the better known. Many of these disagreements were involved with international disputes among socialist states. The single most important was the Sino-Soviet dispute, whose start is conventionally dated to around 1956. It produced years of extensive polemics between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties over Marxist doctrine, argued in terms of socialist history.

During the Cold War, "socialism" in general became a smear word in American politics, especially because of the post World War II Red Scare often identified with Joe McCarthy, who represented its more paranoid and authoritarian form, but was actually a bipartisan project. See, e.g.: Michael Steven Smith, About the Smith Act Trials Encyclopedia of the American Left (1998).

Conservative parties in Europe made the same effort, but with less effect. France and Italy had substantial Communist Parties, and Social Democratic Parties defended their version of the socialist vision in contrast to Communist models. The German SPD kept the ownership of the means of production as an official party concept until their Godesberg Program of 1958, though in practice they had abandoned it after the First World War. While the Europen Social Democrats were officially reformist, they still supported public ownership in various areas. And because there were large, distinct parties arguing their varying perspectives, voters and commentators generally were able to distinguish clearly between the "socialism" of the Social Democrats and the "socialism" represented by the East Bloc and Chinese models of ownership and governance.

This theme of socialism as The Enemy evolved in a significant way after the conservative turn in Chinese politics in the mid-1970s marked by the ascendency of Deng Xiaoping in the leadership and later by the increasing de facto alliance of the US and China balancing off against the USSR. John Kenneth Galbraith quipped that China had been informally designated as an honorary capitalist country in Amreican politics. And after the fall of the Eastern bloc Communist governments in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, much of the American foreign policy establishment assumed the End of History had arrived, and Western-style capitalism and political liberalism had permanently triumphed. It was an overly hasty declaration of victory, to put it mildly.

With the end of history, the increasing prevelance of "neoliberal" thinking and policy in Western politics, the Republicans' continued dismissing of everthing they disliked as socialism, and the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of "socialism" didn't sound so threatening any more. If even public schools and fire departments are "socialist", that sounds pretty good to a lot of people. These are all reasons why such large numbers of younger American voters in particular express their approval for socialism in opinion polls.

Bernie Sanders, of course, had never been afraid of the label, even during the Cold War. And he was able to make his "socialist" critique of the failures of capitalism effective in building a political movement during his 2015-6 Presidential campaign and afterwards.

As the nearly two-century history of socialism suggests, disputes over the meaning of socialism and the best priorities and methods of achieving it are unlikely to end in any foreseeable future.

But I think it's reasonable to say that in the real existing political climate of the US in 2019, "socialism" as a framework of criticism of capitalism and its problems and failures now has a resonance and legitimacy that it hasn't had in a long time, maybe ever.

A final comment on "means of production." There is now a substantial historical record on state-owned enterprises, from the Soviet model to the present-day Chinese model to publicly-owned companies in social-democratic systems like France's and even publicly-run enterprises of various kinds in the US, including the Social Security system. Having a company that is publicly owned doesn't in itself mean it will act in the public interest or operate free from many of the same problems as a private business or corporations. And establishing democratic control over a company or segment of the economy doesn't have to mean government ownership.

And even though it's heresy to the neoliberal gospel, even very establishment economists recognize the existence of "natural monopolies", of which the OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms describes as:

... exist[ing] because of economies of scale and economies of scope which are significant relative to market demand. Natural monopolies are thought to exist in some portions of industries such as electricity, railroads, natural gas, and telecommunications. Because productive efficiency requires that only one firm exist, natural monopolies are typically subject to government regulation. Regulations may include price, quality, and/or entry conditions. [my emphasis]

Goverment ownership is also an option in those cases. A country may also nationalize oil or other natural resources as a matter of national security or because it is considered fundamental to national economic development. Those are not distinctly socialist ideas. But presumably socialists would agree that those are valid options. (See, now I'm splitting hairs about what a True Socialist is!)