Of the many transgressions against logic and civility committed by Glenn Beck, perhaps the most heinous are his spurious rants about the national economy. By delivering his deceptions in a ready-to-swallow gelcap of panic and hostility, Beck perpetuates the economic illiteracy of a great many Americans who will subsequently vote against their own (and my own) economic self-interests. And this country takes another bold step towards global irrelevance.
Beck has lately devoted enormous energy to the national deficit, for which, of course, he blames Obama. This ignores quite a number of facts. In times of significant economic stress, with unemployment at a quarter-century high, it is more important to focus on job creation and the health of the financial sector, which lubricates markets and, in turn, stimulates occupational growth. Has the Obama administration made mistakes here? Surely. But by simultaneously castigating the president for stimulus and dismissing environmental initiatives, Beck is deliberately thwarting recovery and foreclosing America’s best shot at future growth through the research and development towards, and patenting and licensing of, green technologies.
Let’s get back to the deficit — the convenient boogeyman of freedom-loving patriots everywhere. Though the current president has committed to spending that will increase the deficit, it by no means matches the previous guy’s policies, which were not enacted for the benefit of getting through a massive recession, but rather to expand American capital markets and provide crony corporations with cushy contracts while stripping away anything resembling a tax obligation. All that money, straight out of the Treasury and into the hands of shareholders, never to be paid back in any way shape or form.
George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus of $230 billion, which folks like Beck always fail to mention. This is money that could have been used to reduce our national debt. But instead of, ahem, capitalizing on this windfall, Dubya proceeded with policies that would erase the surplus almost overnight, while ballooning the deficit to previously unknown proportions. Here’s how he did it:
- Tax Cuts: Bush’s aggressive tax cuts were subsidized by the national debt to the tune of $1.35 trillion in 2001 and $1.5 trillion in 2003. Of course, these tax cuts favored the wealthiest 1 percent of the country, leaving the rest of the us stuck with an IOU. In total, that’s almost $3 trillion that Bush and his corporatist cronies “stole” from freedom-loving Americans. But you won’t hear that from Glenn Beck.
- The War in Iraq: Conservative estimates indicate that this unnecessary adventure has increased the deficit by $3 trillion. These figures were arrived at by several respected economists, and reported on by most news outlets not named Fox. I’m not gonna mention American casualties, as we all share that in that loss. But I will bring up the Iraqi civilian deaths — over 100,000 to date, far more than under Saddam Hussein — as well as the millions of citizens who have fled the country since the start of US occupation.
- Other policies: Dubya didn’t stop at irresponsible tax cuts and wars of convenience. There were numerous fun ways to encumber the nation with debt, and he took every opportunity to do so. In the course of his presidency, Bush increased our debt burden by $4.9 trillion — a whopping 86 percent. If I were a Democratic leader — say, the fella at the head of the party — I’d be clobbering the GOP with this figure at every available opportunity.
Bush also presided over the Wall Street derivatives and credit-default-swap binge that brought on the global economic downturn and likely permanently damaged a key sector of US growth — the housing market. Certainly, Dubya didn’t instigate these trends, and there are plenty of Democrats to blame for the lax regulatory policies that hastened the collapse. Yet the cancer in the home ownership market, with its foreclosures and unsalable properties, has now spread to the commercial sector, which means we’re hardly done feeling the effects. Rather than assigning blame for this situation, I’m merely using it as an example of the tremendous handicaps facing Obama on almost every front.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that some of Obama’s contribution to the debt comes from putting straight the untold number of “creative accounting” arrangements authorized by Dubya. Bush had a lot of really neat ways to obscure the true costs of things, from the “emergency supplemental spending” for Iraq and Afghanistan to the inflation-indexing of the Alternative Minimum Tax, to playing fast and loose with Medicare, to ignoring or improperly accounting for the actual cost of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Then there’s the evisceration of the public sphere, which only continues due to the shedding of jobs at nearly all levels of the economy.
Yes, the stimulus package has increased our national deficit, and there are likely going to be associated costs in reforming health care. But the former is now largely viewed as having staved off total system collapse, and the latter will (hopefully) drive down long-term health care costs for Americans and their employers, which should have positive economic (and quality-of-life) multipliers.
Glenn Beck is offensive for countless reasons, but by using his powerful megaphone to deliberately obscure factual reality, he is committing a kind of treason, albeit not one that comes with conviction in a court of law. And there’s nothing we can do about it but tell the truth and hope that enough voters get the message. That, and work to reform media to allow for more voices in American broadcasting with a realistic and forthright read on contemporary American civics.
End Transmission.
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Thank you for this, Casey. Beck is scary.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Beck is a TV character and an idealogue, just like Michael Moore, Al Gore, etc… They all exagerrate to attempt to convince you of their argument, and it does not matter if you are a liberal or conservative, you should still easily be able to see the “lawyer like” presentations these types of people make. It’s just like in a courtroom, it’s not the lawyers job to prevent the facts, it’s the lawyers job to convince you that his argument is valid, and by any means necessary. The way these types of debaters see it is as long as they can get the most percentage of people to believe the argument, then the actual facts are irrelevant except to where they act to benefit the argument itself. They are not going to present any facts that go against their argument.
The problem I take with this argument on this page is it does the same thing. I am neither a fan of Obama nor Bush, but ALL politicians are going to waste exuberrant amounts of money and improperly allocate funds, repub or democrat. It’s the nature of getting elected, pleasing lobbyists, and even more than that it is human nature.
What bothers me is that people seem to take one side (Democrat or Republican), and then just act like one or the other side is actually doing MOST things correctly. This is almost never the case, their is corruption everywhere in both government and private corporations, because there are so many people in this world driven purely by power and money, and that is human nature, and you can’t vote human nature out of the equation.
The second issue I take with people on the Internet making specific arguments about budget and monetary issues, is they are just spewing what they’ve heard under the grapevine. None of us here are experts on govt. budgeting (the budget is hugely complex and completely innacurate even by the supposed “experts” with their PHD’s in economics, and masters in accounting and finance.) To go off and start summing up some govt. budget that actually contains millions of items by presenting X and X spending facts, is like me taking Exxon’s accounting records and presenting it to you in a 20-line item page, and then telling you this is why X and X happened. That is ridiculous, it is so much more complicated then that unfortunately.
The only way to really view the spending and waste is to look at it from a macro-perspective, not from a specific issue and not by what people claim the deficit is or is not (the claims are 10 trillion all the way up to 50 trillion, or the idealogues like Beck claim it is 100+ trillion).
Certainly health care needs fixed, but having the govt. uproot the entire system at once is like walking into Microsoft and re-designing their entire procedures of how they’ve done everything in the past 25 years, and then expect to get an increase in productivity. The opposite will occur.
There needs to be performance driven analysis after specific changes are implemented in a tactical type sense. This is better than uprooting the whole system at once and then trying to figure out if it worked or not. This entire healthcare thing is a giant experiment with all the facts being too complex for any one person or even one group to understand. It would be like taking a giant piece of software (Windows for instance), and then completely re-designing it, and then expecting it to work without a major bug that will actually prevent the entire system from booting. Problem is there will be major bugs and it won’t boot when you do that until you first test it
You sound like a socialist idealogue (no offense), but you should just look at things on an individual basis from a purely “cold and calculating” perspective. Money and resources are not based on emotion and life is not fair. The socialist dream of everyone having something cannot come true, because there will always be people trying to step on the other guy. That is my biggest problem with the entire socialist concept, it assumes that almost ALL humans are at heart a good and willing to share and live without so the next guy can have more. Even if there were a way to forumulate such a world, it cannot happen because centralizing power will always result in a bad apple ruining it for everyone else (just like what has happened with the banks and wall street). Socialism is in itself a contradictory argument, because it wants to centralize power so the govt. can decide who to give the money to, but then you just complained the article about how the govt. did not give money to the right people or right causes. That will ALWAYS happen, no-one can agree to what the right causes are and never will, that is why it is better to just keep the govt. smaller in the first place, otherwise it’s like having 5000 people on one board of directors at a company, and trying to get them all to agree to the same thing. It won’t happen, instead some over-powering force will have to just on someone in order to get anything done, hence the way it works
… The only other choice would be perhaps a dictatorship, but then there is the bad apple problem again.
November 27th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
I agree with much of your statement, but it’s a bit intellectually dishonest of you to dismiss attempts at reform due to the complexity of a system. Of course these are complex systems — which is all the more reason to adjust the balance to arrive at a more functional form of capitalism.
We need to arrive at a formula in which a country’s wealth is not strictly measured by GDP, which is a wholly inaccurate indicator of a nation’s true economic and civil well-being. Then there’s the capitalist gravedigger phenomenon. The shareholder profit model ALWAYS leads to the same result: marketplace consolidation and a non-diversity in stock, from agra to media to the financial apparatus. Therefore, when one part of the system fails, the whole thing goes kaplooey. This is bad when we’re talking about media, worse when we’re talking about finance, and potentially devastating when we’re talking about food production. A lack of cross-system heterogeneity will be our downfall, of this I am certain.
I’m not talking about growing government — I’m talking about creating structures by which government can fulfill its basic duties to the populace: a guarantee of expression and the right to pursue happiness. Corporatism affects my personal safety and well-being, and limits my choices in a marketplace. That’s not freedom.
Agency capture is a huge problem in government, and the only way to solve it is to put some serious fucking brakes on the private sector’s influence on the regulatory apparatus, and impose some strict ethics rules on policymakers. You should not be able to go straight into the private sector from a regulatory agency and vice-versa. Campaigns should not be allowed to take ANY kind of corporate donation. And yes, there should be tort reform.
I am not a socialist, I’m a neo-libertarian.
November 28th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
OK, well my bad for calling you a socialist when your a neo-libertarian.
I guess agency capture would be similar to regulatory capture, as one example where governments start handing out tax credits to big corporations to move into their state or city. This happens all the time and is another big problem, it is another example of Fortune 500 elitism and favoritism by the govt.
There is a definite problem with companies getting too big, and the govt. re-enforcing this dynamic. This is a hard problem to solve, because it’s so industry specific and then we have to rely on the faulty government to regulate the breakup. This did work well on MA-BELL in the 80’s. Although there aren’t that many monopolies anymore (a few tech companies which might be impossible to split up), there are way too many oligopolies which are all tied into the govt, especially in the financial industry (Visa, Amex, MC, Fannie Mae, and on and on…)…
I agree that a sort of corporate elitism has developed where the government (federal, state, & local), and is catering and favoring to specific large corporations thereby ruining the free market.
We could start by burning the tax code and writing a new one…
November 29th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Other than a social safety net (to encourage production; beneficient nationalism) and a law-enshrined pursuit of liberty and equality (respect for others’ liberty), I think we’re in general agreement.
Which is why we need a better-than trad Libertarian third party.
And fuck Objectivism in Ayn Rand’s corpse-holes.