The Winner Takes It All – Abba
Today the subject is a couple memes that are running around which irritate me. Not because there’s NO truth in them, but because they serve as overly simplistic ways of approaching situations that deserve a bit more attention.
First, that this is going to be a landslide election, a massive indication of the breakdown in public faith for the Democratic Party, a total public repudiation of Obama and company, etc. I’ve complained about this before, but it deserves saying again. In the most extreme of the blowout scenarios, the GOP gets 80-90 seats, and thus obtains…a majority of roughly the same size as the one the Democrats currently have. The much more likely scenario is a Republican majority of a modest size. As in: voters will vote roughly equally for the two parties.
That’s not nothing. It’s certainly a steep drop from 2008. And it does a lot of damage to the idea that 2006/2008 was the beginning of a strong and sustainable Democratic wave. But it is simply false to assert that there is no viable argument for Democrats to make, that the narrative is so doomed that all they can do is hang on for dear life.
It’s a tough time to be a Democrat absolutely. But a big chunk of it is simply the fact that there was a Blue wave in 2008 thanks to the economy. And since things don’t seem to have improved much since then, that support has dried up.
Second, deficits didn’t cause this economic crisis, but they certainly have been PRODUCED by it. What generates revenue for the government? Taxes. And since those taxes come from income and the movement of money around the economy, if there’s a major recession then government revenue gets a lot smaller.
There absolutely are important questions to be asked about long term fiscal stability. But the FIRST question you ought to be asking is how to facilitate a strong economy upon which all the rest of the fiscal accounting can be done. And the SECOND question you should ask is how many billions we’re going to be cutting from military spending. If you claim to care about deficits but take the military off the table before the conversation has even started, I have a hard time taking you seriously.
Third, how exactly did Ferguson ‘win big’ in this whole escapade? He maintained the status quo, by paying Rooney WAY more money. Sounds like Rooney is the winner to me.
How did we just lose both the “deficits are the worst thing that could ever happen to a country” and the “except for taxes, those are clearly even worse” arguments?