Free Lunch With John Boehner
John Boehner (R-OH) says it’s hard out there for a John Boehner:
We have a tougher job than our friends across the aisle. They’ve been offering Americans a free lunch for the last 80 years, rather successfully.
Of course as everyone knows, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ha ha. Except a big part of the point of public policy is that the policy realm isn’t an endless series of zero-sum interactions, either. It’d be very hard to get a true free lunch in which literally every single person is made much better-off. But you really can make policy shifts that improve the well-being of the vast majority of people. That’s the whole idea. It’s not exactly “something for nothing” but it’s general benefit, not just grabbing and stealing. It’s prosperity.
29 Responses to “Free Lunch With John Boehner”
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February 26th, 2009 at 10:22 am
As always, the right-wing capacity for projection amazes.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Yeah, the Reagan and the Bushes ran up nine trillion in debt. Clinton took Bush I’s deficits and turned them into record surpluses. Then Bush II took those surpluses and turned them into record deficits, while destroying this country. Way to go, Repukes!
February 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Matt, Matt. When will you learn that government is not the solution?
February 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am
The Democrats have been offering everybody a free lunch, whereas the Republicans are courageous enough to look people in the eye and tell them that cutting their taxes will raise revenue and lower the deficit.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Another rich, powerful white man talking about how hard his life is. Poor misunderstood republicans. Hey, here’s a clue: when you rob from the poor to give to the rich, the plebes tend to get grumpy about it.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Wait a minute. This guy and his party spent 8 years cutting taxes tilted to the rich and framing the debate as tax cuts for all Americans right? Now that he has destroyed the economy, he is complaining that people aren’t buying his tax cut plan for the rich? What easier argument is there to sell people than you are going to cut their taxes. Unless of course that policy is part of the reason why we have entered into a modern Gilded age.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:31 am
The Republicans are pathetic hypocrites (I can’t even believe they try to imply with a straight face that they haven’t been handing out goodies to their buddies for the last 8 years) but the point remains that the Democratic vision of what Matt calls prosperity looks a lot like resdistributing from Republican-favored constituencies to Democratic-favored ones, as opposed to the other way around. How the Democratic policy agenda is going to be enacted without massive interest group capture (which does not improve the well-being of the vast majority of people) is still a mystery to me.
February 26th, 2009 at 10:42 am
tmana,
How is it what the Democrats are doing is the same as the Republicans? I didn’t know the middle class was an interest group. So by your logic we should not be helping the middle class.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am
If you asked Boehner “Have Democrats spent the last 80 years trying to raise your taxes?” He would say “Yes.” If you asked Boehner “Have Democrats spent the last 80 years offering America a free lunch?” He would say “Yes.”
February 26th, 2009 at 11:07 am
If the Democrats have been offering a free lunch successfully for the past 80 years (that’s since the stock market crash in 1929, kids!), doesn’t that suggest that Democratic policies work and people like them?
February 26th, 2009 at 11:09 am
As a Democrat, I strongly encourage bold Republicans like Boehner to continue to publicly situate their goal as an 80 year struggle to reverse the New Deal and WWII era reforms.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I have to agree with 13 & 14. The 80-year timeframe is verrry revealing.
I think the Republicans really do want to reverse the New Deal. Look back to 2005 when they were gearing up to dismantle Social Security.
In which case, Boehner’s telling the truth. It really is hard to sell Republican policies. Because those policies really don’t advance the well-being of most voters.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Even if it’s a dead party, the Republicans might want to consider a House leader who doesn’t look like a literally dead person.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
You know, until quite recently, the Republicans at least nominally did not reject the New Deal. Reagan, for example, spoke admiringly of FDR, and pretended, however falsely, to be following in FDR’s footsteps (Reagan indeed had been a New Deal Democrat back during FDR’s presidency). Nobody dared call for limiting or abolishing social security.
Starting with the beginning of GWB’s second term, the Republicans no longer feared FDR and began to attack his legacy openly. So, here we have the Hosue Minority Leader, badmouthing FDR again.
New Deal bashing is working out real well for them, isn’t it?
February 26th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
And Bush’s tax cuts weren’t a free lunch? We’ll borrow several hundred dollars and just give money to people. Let’s put the whole country on welfare. That’s really conservative.
At least with a government job someone’s working for the money.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
There’s a fair argument that literal “free lunches” were a positive sum thing as well; that both people in bars and bar owners are better off when a drinker’s consumption of alcohol is rationed by how much he has to spend, but his consumption of food is unmetered and alcohol prices are raised to cover the expected consumption of food. The drinker no longer has an incentive to save his money for drink at the expense of not eating, and the bar owner makes it up on loyalty.
My understanding is that “free lunches” were banned many places as part of the temperance movement; they made bars too attractive. But while I read that someplace, I’ve forgotten where and can’t now find a citation for it.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
To say it would be very hard to institute a policy that would make everyone better off is more or less the same as saying Republicans still exist, no?
I mean, this might be too charitable, but Boehner’s comments do sum up the current state of discourse, crude as it is, on the conservative side. Conservatives have decided, in the face of the largest market failure in decades, to double down on the idea that an unconstrained free market is always and everywhere pareto efficient, which is to say, no government regulation can make everyone better off.
Meanwhile, everyone who is not a current elected official of the Republican Party or a New Classical Economist more or less believes that in practice, markets are constrained pareto inefficient, such that Government intervention can and should make everyone better off.
To sum up, pareto improvements are only difficult because Republicans are allowed anywhere near policymaking.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Why the f*** can’t WordPress remember name and e-mail from one post to the next? Why the hell should I have to compose comments in a separate application just in case I forgot to re-fill the name & email so that WordPress would just erase everything I had submitted?
February 26th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
My understanding is that “free lunches” were banned many places as part of the temperance movement; they made bars too attractive.
Well, they need to bring them back. Nowadays a drinking man’s lucky if there’s a bowl of peanuts on the bar. Sad times indeed.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Well, the Democrats are the utilitarian party, while the Republicans are the oligarchical party.
Democrats: “The greatest good for the greatest number of people!”
Republicans: “The greatest good for a small subset of people, who will then benevolently rule over the others!”
Unshockingly, the utilitarian argument makes it easier to win popular elections.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Why the f*** can’t WordPress remember name and e-mail from one post to the next? Why the hell should I have to compose comments in a separate application just in case I forgot to re-fill the name & email so that WordPress would just erase everything I had submitted?
Probably because some Government Bureaucrat made up a rule about it, and the Democrat Party decided to tax lost blog comments. It is literally impossible for the Free Market to devise a system that is this annoying.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
To call the burst of a giant speculative bubble in the residential housing and lending industry, a bubble deliberately inflated to gigantic size by the state, an example of “market failure”, requires a psychotic’s grasp of reality. Unfortunately, that is what too frequently passes for reason.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
duBois,
BTW, does Boehner sleep in a tanning bed? Someone close to him should tell him that he’s not only a real leather-faced freak, he’s begging for skin cancer.
In his defense, it’s not easy for a reptile to get his core body temperature high enough to be an active Minority Leader during a DC winter.
February 27th, 2009 at 6:12 am
I like the idea that the Republicans are going to go with the idea that the Dems have spent the last 80 years working to make people’s lives better and the Republicans official stance is that this is hopeless and we should just give our money to rich people. Kind of turns Reagan’s morning in American on it’s head.