David Atkins and Digby have a well-done tag-team take-down of the ‘austerity mavens’ up at Hullabaloo. A couple of teasers to whet your taste-buds…Here’s Atkins, riffing on Justin Lahart’s Wall St. Journal post “Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%“:
…People who know the first thing about public policy laugh at the bipartisanship fetishists and the people who insist that “both parties have gotten too extreme.” The facts are pretty one-sided here. They suggest that if anything, the President and the mainstream Democratic Party in the United States are too far to the right and too beholden to the austerity mavens, and the Republicans are living on a extremist conservative moon base with Newt Gingrich…
Then Digby, persuasively concluding after presenting several compelling charts demonstrating that state austerity policies (esp. CA) have been a disastrous drag on the economy :
If the federal government continues to refuse to help out the states financially — especially a state as large as California, whose economy is actually bigger than Spain’s, it’s hard to see how it doesn’t drag down the entire country….I realize that Europe and the US face different problems. But one of the problems they have in common is a daft belief among policy makers in austerity during a depression As California goes even further into hardcore austerity mode, I’d expect some unpleasant side effects to the US economy as a whole.
Not a good week for the austerity crowd, what with France, Germany, England and now this Digby-Atkins take-down.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
