Matt Yglesias

Don’t Cry for Mark Sanford, Argentina

The truth is Mark Sanford went to Buenos Aires.

The Mark Sanford quasi-disappearance story gets weirder:

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media. [...] Sanford, in an exclusive interview with The State, said he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over how to spend federal stimulus money. [...] When asked why his staff said he was on the Appalachian Trail, Sanford replied, “I don’t know.”

In fairness to Sanford, I took a flaky last-minute poorly-planned solo trip to Iceland (photos here) in the summer of 2005 so I don’t find it inconceivable that this is all on the level. That said, it’s obviously strange behavior for a governor. The larger issue with Sanford, however, continues be that “difficult legislative session” in which he decided to jeopardize the well-being of South Carolina’s students and unemployed workers in order to bolster his national cred with the hard right.

SC Governor Fiddling While State Burns

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has emerged as the current economic crisis’s greatest sadist, not just refusing to help victims of economic distress in his state, but going the extra mile to ensure that the federal government can’t help people either. Some say this is just a cynical play for Republican presidential primary votes, but it seems to me to reflect a very authentic strain of Dixie conservatism that simply takes a vindictive attitude toward the poor. You saw a lot of this in the Depression, when the locus of resistance to New Deal programs that transferred wealth from the prosperous northeast to the poor south was actually in the South.

Here’s John O’Connor’s account in The State of anti-Sanford protests and Sanford’s reaction:

“Tent city is obviously people trying to make a political point,” Sanford said. “I get it. But it doesn’t make it true.”

Sanford should know, said Sheheen, adding Sanford has a history of publicity stunts.

“Things like this pale in comparison to bringing pigs to the State House,” as Sanford once did to decry pork-barrel spending, Sheheen said.

According to the latest Center for American Progress analysis of state-by-state unemployment numbers by Heather Boushey and Nayla Kazzi, South Carolina has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation (behind Michigan) at 11 percent. Take a look at the state’s rapidly deteriorating labor market conditions:

Back in 2007, before this spike in the unemployment rate, 15.1 percent of South Carolinians—and 21 percent of South Carolina’s children—were living below the poverty line. That was above a national average of around 13 percent. But, again, the unemployment rate has almost doubled since then so that’s sure to be a serious undercount of how many people in Sanford’s state are facing a dire situation.

Mark Sanford’s War on South Carolina Teachers

Ali Frick runs some numbers and does a little reporting and concludes that Mark Sanford’s anti-stimulus posturing could imperial the job status of as many as 7,500 South Carolina teachers:

John Cooley, deputy superintendent for finance and operations at the South Carolina Department of Education, explained that the stimulus funds would help fill a 15 percent budget cut already inflicted on the school system. Without those funds, Cooley estimated that up 7,500 teachers (15 percent of the state’s 50,000 teachers) could be negatively impacted. But he cautioned, “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve reduced 7,500 teachers” or that all 7,500 will lose their jobs.

These kind of education cutbacks directly deepen the recession, by further contracting individual spending power. The teachers who see job losses or salary cuts suffer, but so do all the businesses they patronize and all those business’ suppliers. Meanwhile, in the long run the state gets a less-educated workforce, which means more inequality and lower average wages.

SC Governor Mark Sanford Compares Obama to Mugabe, Doesn’t Realize There’s No Inflation

I was talking a couple of days ago with a guy I generally think of as sensible, if misguidedly right-wing on economic issues, and was surprised to learn that he has a positive attitude toward South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who’s a moron. Here’s Glenn Thrush reporting on Governor Sanford being ridiculous:

“What you’re doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more money that we don’t have, send it to different states – we’ll create jobs… If that’s the case why isn’t Zimbabwe a rich place?”…”why isn’t Zimbabwe just an incredibly prosperous place. Cause they’re printing money they don’t have and sending it around to their different – I don’t know the towns in Zimbabwe but that same logic is being applied there with little effect.”

Not only is this comparison really offensive to people living in Zimbabwe and struggling with a horrible situation, far worse than the misery Sanford is trying to inflict on the population of South Carolina by refusing to extend unemployment benefits, but the ignorance on display here is really appalling. Sanford’s like a guy standing next to a burning building worrying that it might rain tomorrow. There’s no inflation right now in the United States. None whatsoever. It’s actually a big problem, because it means that our standard macroeconomic stabilization tool—federal reserve open market operations—doesn’t work. Serious inflation would be bad, of course, and Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation would be ruinous, but some increase in inflation would be helpful. It would serve as a real cut in interest rates and help to spur growth. And long before inflation reached problem levels, the Fed could increase nominal rates to head the problem off. Sanford’s just out to sea on this.