Matt Yglesias

Chuck Grassley Embraces “Insane” Spending Freeze Proposal

To the best of my knowledge, Chuck Grassley is among the best-informed, most-reasonable Republican Senators. He also seems to have gone completely around the bend of late. Now, he’s getting on board the bandwagon calling for a three-year “spending freeze”, the sort of proposal I’m used to hearing from know-nothings like Jim DeMint or John McCain, folks with no understanding of or interest in, policy questions. Pat Garofalo reminds us that “A freeze would have the ‘dramatic effect’ of providing dangerous anti-stimulus at the precise moment when stimulus is needed most.” David Brooks has rightly termed this effort “insane”.

On the merits, it makes no sense whatsoever to worry about short-term deficits, so a short-term spending freeze is ridiculous. Since interest rates are low at the moment and economic projections uncertain, I also wouldn’t put a high priority on worrying about the CBO’s long-term projections regarding the Obama administration’s budget. But if Republicans want to freak out about this in an honest way, they could recognize the need for more revenue. Alternatively, they could propose making Social Security less generous or propose some kind of arbitrary cap on Medicaid spending. Also alternatively, you can propose a boring-sounding technical fix like starting to use the C-CPI-U index both for the indexing of tax rates and for the indexing of Social Security benefits—that would have the result of both raising income taxes and cutting Social Security benefits, but doing so in a very confusing way that might elude public scrutiny.

I don’t think any of that stuff is really necessary at the moment, but any of it would actually address the concern about long-term deficits. A short-term spending freeze, by contrast, would just help drive the economy into the ditch and make long-term problems worse.

Chuck Grassley Advocates Lying About Comparative Effectiveness Research

Conservatives have spent a lot of time spreading misinformation about the Obama administration’s plans to conduct more so-called “comparative effectiveness research.” This is particularly interesting because it’s not really a hot-button ideological topic, and a fair number of conservative support it. The main idea, after all, is to save the government money. Senator Chuck Grassley, for example, is in favor of comparative effectiveness research. So what does he think about his fellow-travelers going around scaring people about it? Well, it seems he thinks the liars are doing the lord’s work because misleading the public about the issue is “the only way you’re going to get [the public's] attention.”

Very strange.

Grassley Calls for Contrition, Not Suicide

I thought Senator Chuck Grassley’s initial impulse to suggest that AIG-folk ought to kill themselves, samurai-style, was a bit over the top. But there was a ray of truth in what he was saying. And I think he found the way, saying that there’s a need for some personal responsibility and contrition among the masters of the universe who destroyed the global economy:

In the case of the Japanese, you know, they do one of two things. They either go commit suicide or they take a deep bow and say apologies and then sometimes resign. But they take full responsibility. And we’re not hearing that.

And obviously, I don’t want anyone to kill themselves because I don’t believe in that sort of thing. But I do believe that when you have done bad for your company, for your stockholders, and eventually for the taxpayer…you ought to say I’m sorry.

Right. We’ve somehow managed to construct something of a post-shame society, in which elites have convinced themselves that the rational agent model of human behavior is not just a useful modeling tool, but an ethical guidebook. There’s something to be said for the idea of a sense of honor and personal responsibility. You’d like to see a story in a newspaper somewhere about some Wall Streeter whose lost a lot of money over the past 18 months and is saying “you know what, I lost a lot of money over the past 18 months but I’m still a lot better off than most people are, and unlike a lot of those people I never really did much of anything to earn this wealth — that’s why I’m giving what I have left to the local soup kitchen.” Do I expect everyone to act like that? No, that’s not realistic. But I think that in a healthy society, you see some consideration of issues of honor and duty and moral responsibility and certainly Americans of more humble means don’t strike me as being nearly as taken with the “greed is good” personal ethic.

That said, turning attention back to Grassley, the man’s a United States Senator. He’s in a position to not only offer commentary on passing events, but to change the structure of American public policy. He could, for example, show his outrage at greedy elites by supporting a budget that undoes the pro-rich-people Bush tax code to finance tax cuts for working people and expansion of health care coverage. Thus far, though, he seems content to stick with his pro-rich policy agenda.

Organizing for America Kicks into Action

Chris Cillizza reports that Organizing for America, the successor-organization to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is going to kick into gear for the first time to try to mobilize support for the president’s budget. That seems like a good idea to me. Ordinarily, you think of a brand-new president’s main initiatives as being able to attract a fair amount of support from opposition party legislators whose constituencies he carried in the election. After all, an Obama platform of letting the Bush tax cuts expiring and auctioning carbon permits in order to pay for health care and a tax cut for working people carried the day in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and Iowa so you might think that Richard Burr, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, George Voinovich, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, and Chuck Grassley would be a bit leery of opposing a budget framework that just lays out those campaign promises. But instead Obama’s seemed to have trouble getting Democrats on his side—including Democrats in whose states he’s popular.

Organizing, roughly speaking, is the difference. The top two percent and the pollution lobby don’t really care who won the election, aren’t impressed by slogans about how elections have consequences, and don’t care if people have health care or if the working class gets a tax cut. They just go to work every day to press for their agenda, and they’ll get their way unless people are pressing back.

Scandal!

So it seems that when Tim Geithner worked at the IMF, his FICA taxes weren’t automatically withheld in the customary way, and consequently he underpaid taxes by tens of thousands of dollars and when the error was pointed out to him he . . . paid back taxes and penalties. What’s more, Chuck Grassley is “raising questions about a housekeeper who worked briefly for Treasury Secretary-nominee Timothy Geithner without proper immigration papers.” I, for one, know that whether or not Geithner once had a housekeeper whose work visa was valid at the time of hiring but expired during the time she was employed by him ought to be the primary focus of our attention as we think about filling key economic jobs amidst a huge crisis.