Deficit Reduction — Culturally Characteristic Fuzzy Thinking from Critics of the Bowles-Simpson Plan

06 December 2010

This is essay uses a specific example to illustrate the self-destructive lack of thinking that characterizes our political culture at every turn

We Americans are increasingly subject to stumbling ahead, or sleeping at the switch, because we are not analytically thoughtful. This remains so, even at a time when our national situation demands intelligent action based on thinking difficult issues through.

We are quick to argue and accuse. And slow to intelligently justify either the argument or the accusation.

That’s a bad cultural trait, if we intend to survive as a competent nation.

When throwing stones, we should not use the same rocks we criticize others for using

In illustrating my thesis, I use an example of one pundit’s representative criticism of the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan.

I have been surprised at the negative commentary the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan has received from people who agree that reductions in spending and increases in taxation are required.

Instead of seeing the plan’s confrontation of other people’s sacred sheep as a welcome political step forward, these critics seem determined to find fault with Bowles and Simpson because the pair did not overtly bite off even more of the National Spend-without-Limits/Never Tax Delusion.

Where have these critics been all these years?

Economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson, whom I thought I admired, inadvertently became one of these less than helpful people with his column today.

In fairness, the looseness of Samuelson’s argument was probably due more to limited column space, than to intellectual incapacity.

Nevertheless, I use what he said as a way to discuss the Unexplained Assumptions Problem that underlies most political and economic discourse in our time. It does not matter whether Samuelson lacked thought, or space, to make his points.

As a culture, we no longer understand the required factual and contextual bases that lead to intellectually defensible analyses. Lack of thought and lack of space are equally excused because no one seems to think that sound argument is necessary for anything.

Consequently, most of what calls itself political and economic discourse in America today is simply yapping in stale, circular wind. Fart Vortex is an apt description of the phenomenon.

Robert J. Samuelson started his criticism of Bowles-Simpson appropriately enough

Samuelson’s column criticized the Bowles-Simpson plan for failing to provide a rationale of government that (i) justifies the cuts proposed and (ii) delineates a principled paradigmatic way forward.

Modern democracies have created a new morality. Government benefits, once conferred, cannot be revoked. People expect them and consider them property rights. Just as government cannot randomly confiscate property, it cannot withdraw benefits without violating a moral code. The old-fashioned idea that government policies should serve the "national interest" has given way to inertia and squatters' rights. . . .

But what was missing [from the Bowles-Simpson plan] was a moral rationale for change, except for some familiar platitudes: "American cannot be great if we go broke"; or, "We have a patriotic duty . . . to give our children and grandchildren a better life." The trouble with these pleasing lines is that they don't address the practical question of why existing recipients of government support - farmers, the elderly, local governments, for example - should lose it.

Samuelson correctly observed that, “One task of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson - was to discredit this self-serving morality.”

His logic is that it is hard to design a budget, if everyone is morally entitled to unprioritized benefits of one kind or another.

No argument from me with that. And no need to analyze the sentiment further. Anyone who has ever planned a self or family budget knows that establishing principled priorities is a necessity, if the financial planning is to go successfully.

Samuelson’s “national interest” budget-cutting paradigm

Mr. Samuelson starts his proposed amendment to the Bowles-Simpson plan reasonably enough:

As we debate these questions, groups will inevitably promote their self-interest. But in doing so, they should have to meet exacting standards that their self-interest also serves the broader national interest.

“National interest” is difficult to define. However, just positing “national interest” as a guideline for budget-cutting, in place of the absence of any paradigm at all, is a step beyond the Bowles-Simpson document.

So Samuelson is not off the rigor rails yet.

But he immediately slides off with the same graceless aplomb he accused Bowles and Simpson of displaying

Samuelson cavalierly slides to intellectual doom, when he tries to justify the relationship of his proposed budget cuts to the national interest. He advances no intellectually rigorous arguments to support his assertions of appropriate budget-cutting.

Instead, he seems to rely on a priori ideological judgments that have little arguable basis in fact.

Defining the national interest is best done by providing examples of competing, allegedly narrower interests, followed by an explanation of why one interest should be preferred to another — when that interest is compared to what is arguably necessary to the survival or enhancement of the national whole.

Samuelson apparently agrees with this approach. After positing the national interest as an appropriate budget-making guideline, he provides examples of entitlement cuts that would be justified under it:

It's not in the national interest to subsidize farmers, because food would be produced at low cost without subsidies. It's not in the national interest to subsidize Americans, through Social Security and Medicare, for the last 20 or 25 years of their lives because healthier people live longer and the huge costs make the budget unmanageable. It's not in the national interest to subsidize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally: If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it.

That is the entirety of what he proposes in regard to these cuts under his “national interest” plan.

Do Samuelson’s conclusory statements demonstrate intellectually defensible argument?

No.

The intellectual vacuity of Samuelson’s subsidized agriculture example

Let’s look at what Mr. Samuelson wrote in regard to agriculture.

There are factual and analytical chasms he merrily and apparently thoughtlessly leaps over. For example, low cost food is not the only element of the American national agricultural interest. He ignores trade, trade balance, demographics, cyclical but sometimes unpredictable oversupplies, and the arguable need to keep American agriculture American.

Factually, he also makes an assertion without evidence. He assumes that low-cost food would be available without subsidies. That may be true for most food, but probably not all. Which food (figuratively) is the “national interest” food he leaves unexamined.

What Samuelson might more acutely have said is that agricultural subsidies today benefit huge corporate farmers at the expense of family farmers and taxpayers. This evolved misdirection of subsidies turned the historical reason for providing subsidies to family farmers on its head. That reversal of purpose, arguably, should no longer be tolerated.

I could buy that reasoning, had he taken the trouble to make it, as an argument Samuelson’s favor.

On the other hand, an agricultural corporation could just as easily argue that family farmers are bad for agriculture (because they are allegedly inefficient) and that anything that supports large corporate farming is in the nation’s food-production interest.

One would expect some economic facts and demographic philosophies of nationhood to accompany the big business stance. But the corporation-favoring argument could be made with some rigor.

In sum, Samuelson’s off-the-cuff, factless brevity is intellectually indefensible. His essay does little to demonstrate workable applicability of his “national interest” paradigm. This deficiency continues in regard to his approach to Social Security and Medicare.

Samuelson’s too-broad Social Security and Medicare fix

I’m with Samuelson on this one, but less broadly.

He ignores the fact that some people, predominantly at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, are not living longer. Those people have a justifiable claim on retaining benefits in the future because their situation is no different than that which characterized the population that Social Security and Medicare were initially intended to benefit.

(Obviously we could nevertheless decide, as an indicator of our spiritually impoverished sense of humanity, that everybody should go to economic perdition.)

My criticism of Samuelson here is the same as with agriculture. If one is going to talk “national interest,” one had better have both facts and an explained social ethos with which to order those facts. He makes no attempt to get or do either.

Mass transit is local and therefore bad to fund?

Samuelson’s ideological preconceptions about economics shows blatantly in regard to mass transit. Since when did locality of effect have an automatically exclusionary effect on federal taxpayer funding?

Were that the case, it would have been difficult to argue in favor of building railroads, when they were first constructed. Population and trade followed the rails, rather than vice versa. The only people whom some railways benefited initially were farmers along the railway.

The same argument applies to communications and a host of other government-involved expansions of the national infrastructure.

There’s more to these economic considerations than the off-the-cuff dismissal of merit that Samuelson gives them.

The true clinker in Samuelson’s box of illegitimate intellectual tricks — his “national defense is sacred” argument

Mr. Samuelson’s last illustration of the applicability of his national interest paradigm is the doozy that illustrates the absence of genuinely reflective thought that went into his essay:

The biggest blunder of their approach involved huge proposed cuts in defense, about a fifth of federal spending. National security is government's first job. Bowles and Simpson reduced it proportionately with all other discretionary spending as if there's no difference between a dollar for defense and a dollar for art subsidies. Nor was there much effort to identify programs that should be eliminated because they fail the national need test. Good programs would have been cut along with the bad.

Writing like an ideological ignoramus (a) harms the nation’s arguable interests and (b) is unfair to Bowles and Simpson.

(a) Defense first?

Defense is indeed one of government’s first responsibilities. But that certainly does not mean that Military Industrial Complex should be given any more free reign in setting priorities than other significant People’s interests should.

When Samuelson justifies his argument about defense with the Defense First proposition, he sounds like a Right Wing ideologue of the kind who regularly takes simple-minded aphorisms as truth and then gets us into counterproductive wars, whose strategic aims and success-probabilities have not been thought out. We’ve had enough Neo-Con brainlessness for this century.

Being an ex-cop and married to an Air Force flight commander, I am not at all soft on defense. But I am realistic about the selfish corporate and community interests that have made defense and homeland security taxpayer-funded milk cows.

(b) Does Samuelson know better than Bowles and Simpson about tackling the complexities of defense programs?

If one is going to armchair criticize people in the fight pit, one had better have enough imagination to picture what they are going through.

Bowles and Simpson probably made no attempt to pick out the good from the bad on defense because no one has ever successfully done that in a way that cannot be easily attacked. Both men have too much experience in politics to think that anyone is going to listen to them regarding the Defense community’s sacred cows.

Better for them, instead, to mandate an across-the-board reduction in the defense budget. That way, at least the defense budget portion of our deficit mess is addressed. Set a limit, as Bowles-Simpson does, and Congress can sort where the cuts fall. Nothing wrong with that.

Samuelson’s criticism is unfair and virtually nonsensical.

Samuelson’s parting shot — demonstration of a mindless, ideological, anti-European prejudice

Mr. Samuelson, apparently not content with the lack of rigor he displayed thus far in his opinion essay, concluded with a thoughtless slam at his cartoon-like version of a much too generalized concept of Europe:

The social contract will be rewritten either by design or, as in Europe, under outside pressures. If we keep the expedient morality of perpetual programs - so that nothing fundamental can ever be abandoned - then Europe's social unrest could be a prelude to our own.

Am I to understand that Europe is subject to “outside pressures” to an extent we mighty Americans are not?

Europe’s social contracts were not designed to the same non-degree ours has been?

Given the events of the past year, Great Britain, Germany, and France can legitimately argue that they have been doing more to design their path to the future than the United States has dreamed of doing for decades.

Furthermore, social unrest is not necessarily an indication of societal illness. We Americans might benefit from rousing ourselves enough to actually think and demonstrate about our future.

Samuelson’s statements about Europe are blanket, provably wrong, assertions made without supporting arguments of any kind. He descends into stupidity.

With this kind of low-life punditry as a guide, it’s no wonder that the United States is circling Freedom’s toilet bowl.

Conclusion — if one is going to throw brickbats at other people’s attempt at correcting America’s course, one had better do it with intellectual rigor and a knowledge of applicable facts

Robert J. Samuelson’s essay is representative of the complete loss of fair-minded intellectual rigor in American discourse.

Ignorant ideology, unexplained assumptions, lack of facts, and analytical thoughtlessness are not appropriate baggage for the Freedom Train.

As a people, we have to do better than this.

PeteFree.com

Deficit Reduction — Culturally Characteristic Fuzzy Thinking from Critics of the Bowles-Simpson Plan