Michael Maiello's picture

    The Obama Era

    Late in the week, The Daily called with the kind of assignment that no opinion writer could turn down.  Obama has a chance to be the Reagan of the left, they said.  If he gets a reasonable amount of what he wants in his second term, what will America look like?  Writing this longer essay was an exercise in optimism and, though I tried to be realistic, I also found it kind of a tonic for cynicism.  Things can get better, with just the ideas that Obama has expressed and hinted at.

    What I realized is that a few Obama ideas, if implemented, could semi-permanently stave off the threat of a Japan-like inflationary spiral in the U.S.  Some of these are not things I particularly like.  But, I'll summarize a kind of virtuous cycle:

    Implementation of the health care exchanges (and subsidies to help people by coverage if they can't afford it) means that people can leave jobs with larger, insurance providing employers and strike out on their own.  It's not perfect, but it will help people start job creating smaller enterprises.

    Manufacturing isn't coming back in a big way but hydraulic fracturing has caused a natural gas boom.  Couple that with the Keystone Pipeline (which I opppose, but set that aside) and a likely world where oil prices will remain high enough that fracking is economic and you can see some of our extraction industries actually replace manufacturing in the economy.

    New businesses and a gas boom translate into higher private sector employment and higher aggregate demand and, of course, higher tax receipts, which sparks more public sector employment too.  Voila, labor market tightens and you get some wage inflation.

    And, you get some real, healthy inflation throughout the economy.  Increased tax receipts plus inflation makes the debt a smaller part of GDP.  Problem doesn't "solve" itself, but it heals itself.

    The Fed, meanwhile starts all of this at zero rates, so it has a full inflation fighting clip.  No need to worry that things will get out of hand.

    Finally, if Obama gets Cap and Trade he creates a whole new, high paying industry in, of all places, the financial sector.  It's the trading houses of Chicago and Wall Street that will most benefit from a new pollution credit trading system.  This is one of the reasons why banks like Deutsche Bank have long been Cap and Trade supporters.  Huge new market in the making.

    I don't know if the Obama administration thinks of it this way, but when you link up these disparate bits of policy, they add plausibly into a rosy scenario.

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    Comments

    Initially I thought I would have to argue with you, but well done.

    I will add this, with the continued tax credit policy for individuals who invest in alternate forms of energy either for the homes or cars presumably those manufacturers will continue to experience growth. Production is already up for local manufacturers. It took almost 3 months to receive the 17 panels we now have on our roof because the Bellingham company had so many orders. One day I imagine solar electric or wind systems will be included on every newly constructed house.


    From what I've been reading lately, Cap and Trade seems likely to happen. The EPA has been getting its ducks in a row and all that is needed now is an EO or two.


    I read your article (thanks very much for the link) and Michael, it is terrific.  Well played and very well done.  Ah, if only most of what you envisioned would be so.....

    (Not sure about the Keystone, without more info on the environmental impact, but hey, sure he'll take good care with that too.)

    It, IMO, is always a good thing to accentuate the positive and ponder the moments (with great glee) when our dreams and goals are fulfilled. 

    I am saving your article and I'll meet ya back here in four years to review. (Would be stunned if Ryan is the Repub candidate, but..............) 


    The kicker is that this will happen under the leadership of someone who the right wing has been trying since for five years to paint as a socialist implementing the most leftist agenda in the history of the United States.  So....maybe socialists with leftist agendas arren't such a bad thing.


    Great article, Other Mike, and I'll pleased if he pulls this much off, but does this fantasy really constitute a "golden age for liberal politics?" It seems like Clinton Era + health care--a sad shadow of the real golden era of liberal politics from Wilson through LBJ.

    Wilson, for example, did more in one year than Obama will do in eight--even in fantasy land. It's not that he was such a great president. I would much prefer Obama. But Wilson governed during a period of incredible fertility. Progressives were bursting with grand plans. We don't have those ambitions anymore--or those fantasies.


    Well, I tempered my own ambitions, in order to present what I thought was a reasonable progressive future to a largely conservative audience,  And, as you will not be surprised, over at The Daily, they mostly responded as if I were some sort of communist Utoptian fantasist.

    But, here's the upshot  -- I think that self censorship in order to be heard kept me from stretching into the improbable and that. though the right will react to any taxation or social leadership as socialism, that I have a better chance of being mostly right, four years from now, than I would had I indulged my true Utopianism.


    Interesting. I think it makes sense to self-moderate for a conservative audience, but I wonder if you've mixed your apples and oranges. It would have been fine to make yourself out as a center-left guy, the liberal equivalent of Brooks and Douthat at the NYT say, and give them a center-left fantasy. But with all the talk of Reagan and the golden liberal age, you basically presented yourself as a Paul Krugman, yet you gave them Tom Friedman's dream president.

    The trouble is that this feeds the myth that Obama is a liberal extremist because he wants to insure all Americans [gasp] and that anything to the left of Mitt Romney is radical socialism. I say, if you're going to promise them a liberal fantasy, give 'em a real one so that they can see what it really means to be liberal.


    Ah, but the thing is that they asked me about Obama's America in 2016, given that he gets mostly what he asked for, not mine.  When I had a regular column for them, they got a lot of "lefty Mike," where I'd be a lot more critical of Obama, but from our side.  Heck, I'd now say that the wrongest thing I'd written was my column against Obama's intervention in Libya, which was a well founded argument that put me on the side of tyranny rather than justice.

    I agree that I gave them Tom Friedman's dream president, but... isn't that who Obama is, absent his opposition?  To me, one of the reasons that Friedman's been so frustrating over the last few years is that he keeps calling for a third party candidate to run on Obama's platform.

    I tried to give them a reasonable fantasy.  In the end, it didn't work (you should see the comments!)  I might post my unedited text here to see what folks think.


    I don't remember your column, but our intervention in Libya comes across highly arbitrary in light of related events in Sierra Leone, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen. 

    Kazantzakis notes, "the fisherman prays he'll catch a fish today; the fish prays he'll get away. Sometimes God listens to the fisherman, sometimes to the fish."

    We didn't take a stand for justice - we took our most convenient play, and mapped it up to a liberty and justice framework*. Laura Bush did the same thing with women wearing burqas in Afghanistan as part of our need to invade. Well, we haven't invaded any other countries over the burqa, and women's rights haven't held up under 10 years of occupation in Afghanistan. But ostensibly that was a cause de guerre, among the more obvious.

    (*from what I've read of the recently offed ambassador, he did seem to put a lot of effort over a long time in doing the right stuff - my critique is over our overall intervention angle and lack of transparent policy, not necessarily on-the-ground efforts)

    It turns out that Libya like Iraq is one of the few countries in the world we could go to war against based on human rights abuses, not that Qaddafi committed the atrocities they did in the Congo or North Korea or likely in Chechnya, or that Libya was much more restrictive than Saudi Arabia (especially for women?). Bahrain quickly smacked down its protesters, but we didn't put sanctions on them for blocking the internet or beating up and torturing protesters to death like we just did with Iran (looks like Bahrain has called out its National Guard now, so another round of violence against civilians on its way. The farce of a trial against Bahraini medics with a military occupation of the hospital? Not as fearsome as that ol' boogieman of censorship).

    The reason Friedman's frustrating is he believes his own hype and he's so banal it'd hardly be worth discussing if he weren't somehow revered, even though he's usually wrong if he says anything relevant, and writes for the equally (these days) banal NY Times. Anyone who inspires automated column generators has some serious issues:

    http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/create-your-own-thomas-friedman-op-ed...

    https://correctnicity.com/blog/2012/04/18/the-tom-friedman-column-genera...

    http://gawker.com/5921030/thomas-friedman-writes-his-only-column-again

    http://entre_nous.typepad.com/entre_nous/2004/05/thomas_friedman.html

    http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/07/13/thomas-friedmans-less...


    I'm having trouble articulating my concern. It's that you gave them Obama's fantasy (or Friedman's fantasy) but called it a "liberal" fantasy--which feeds their misconception that Obama is a left-winger's dream president.

    It's just a quibble in any case, but it rubbed me wrong because of a larger concern--which has nothing to do with you--that the Democratic establishment has a groundhog complex. Liberals who run for public office are so afraid of their own shadow that they won't say what they really want. While that strategy may be effective in achieving short-term political goals, it has not led the country to view Democrats as moderates. Centrists and conservatives still present most Democrats extreme, which has had the adverse effect of reframing pragmatic Democratic initiatives like HCR as radical ideological positions.


    I think the reason politicians aren't telling us what they plan to do beyond adjustments around the edges is neither party knows what to do about the central issue of our times. The global labor market and automation. Its a world wide problem, too many people who just aren't needed to produce the products people want. For us its a problem that began with Reagan and has been accelerating ever since. Government can't afford to pay for big ideas without a robust middle class paying taxes and sufficient jobs to lessen the amount paid out for the safety net.

    Its less a groundhog problem than a "Groundhog Day" problem. Republicans just keep repeating the same solution, tax cuts for the rich and less regulation, and the new business investment will create a robust economy with tons of good paying jobs. Democrats call for more revenue to hold down the debt, which is just a holding action not a solution. There's some talk of a large infrastructure rebuilding bill but that's a hard sell since it will have to be deficit financed. How do you get that through the House? Also that's really just a temporary solution too. The basic problem still remains after that massive infrastructure rebuilding period ends.

    Honestly I don't know the solution and no one I've read seems to have a credible plan to solve it. The party the figures it out or by chance is in the oval office when the invisible hand of capitalism comes up with a solution will gain a distinct advantage with the electorate.


    This structural/automation-killed-the-worker story is without evidence.  Middle class balance sheets were devastated.  Our economy is 70% consumer demand.  When consumers don't have money, they can't spend money.

    Furthermore, modern technology has not made the worker obsolete.  People have been making such claims since Sam Slater.  The truth is that technology is the driving factor behind modern economic growth precisely because it makes workers more productive.  For some reason, some people conclude this must mean the worker is doomed, as if eventually there will simply be one machine with one operator doing one job - the rest of us miserably unemployed.  In reality, technologically driven increases in production are what make the pie bigger.  Go ahead and look for modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution.  It didn't really exist because of fairly static limits on population and capital.

    Moving along, all governments have debt.  The issue is not the presence of debt.  The markets want as much of our debt as they can buy presently.  The issue is that people don't understand that the issue is not the debt.  The only thing that matters vis a vis our current debt situation is that the economy grows while debt shrinks.  The nation is not a household.  It does not need a short-term strategy to retire all national debt.

    Government can't afford to pay for big ideas without a robust middle class paying taxes and sufficient jobs to lessen the amount paid out for the safety net.

    This is only true in the long run.  In the short run, we have essentially zero borrowing costs right now.  The government can afford it presently.

    There are solutions out there, but maybe the problem is that left-liberals still can't diagnose the disease.  Obamaism's embrace of debt hysteria certainly doesn't help.


    Your Krugman link doesn't address anything I posted. It addresses the notion the unemployment is caused by geography or skill deficits, neither of which I claimed. Unemployment is high almost everywhere so workers can't simply move to where the jobs are. And there is no evidence that there are large numbers of high skill jobs waiting to be filled if only people would get the proper training. I agree with Krugman. Again I never claimed that was the problem.

    I also never claimed the the deficit was a problem. I'm not worried about the debt. I only stated that it would be extremely difficult to get the house to pass a large jobs bill that would have to rely on deficit financing. Short term programs like a jobs bill aren't a debt problem, just a political problem, but long term programs, like true HCR or the ACA act, can't be deficit financed forever and won't work without a robust middle class.

    If you haven't read anything about the long term decline of well paying middle class employment, mainly in manufacturing, and those jobs being replaced with lower paying service jobs than, frankly, you're missing a large part of this discussion. And I really have no desire to do your research for you.

    This problem has been masked by a tech bubble, which collapsed, and then a housing bubble, which collapsed. While I agree with 98% of Krugman's analysis, I don't think Keynesian spending will solve this problem. At best that will put us back onto the slow decline we were on, the gradual hollowing out of the middle class.


    Well, all you really said was automation and global labor markets and how that's the issue.  Usually when people are claiming those things are having an effect on domestic labor markets, they telling a story about structural unemployment.

    As for debt, you said holding the debt down isn't a solution.  It is a solution to the debt inasmuch as the debt is actually a problem.

    There are fewer manufacturing jobs.  There's also still plenty of manufacturing.  Sam Slater did not kill the worker.

    Why is it that other OECD nations that don't have huge manufacturing output can maintain a high standard of living?  Maybe it's because they have a policy mix that includes healthcare, education and a social safety net.  Maybe it's because they have a truly progressive tax structure.  Nations like Denmark, Sweden and Finland don't offer a high standard of living because their bursting with manufacturing jobs.  Changing the policy mix is a credible plan, but you claim no one has proposed it.

    The American worker is not poorer because of workers on foreign shores.  The American worker is poorer because she has been systematically made so over the last 40 years as a matter of policy.


    I do agree that many Democrats don't really know what they o do next and that some of that is a lack of ideas, but I also think that timidity is a factor. There are still some big policies out there that Democrats don't mention since they can't get them through this Congress, e.g. single payer health care, free advanced education, gun control, cap-n-trade, etc. I seldom see Republicans hold back on promoting ideas that they lack the votes for, sometimes to their detriment re:Medicare vouchers.


    Some ideas, like free advanced education can't be tackled until the problems with the economy are tackled. But you're right, some of it is timidity. Gun control is a prime example. Fear of the NRA fanatics is stupid, most democrats will never get those votes no matter how much they pander. And many if not most gun owners as well as non gun owners would support rational gun control.


    I'm having some trouble with part of your assessment here.  Democrats (I have no idea why people are still talking about liberals as political candidates.. no one self-identifies that way anymore, save Paul Krugman, and I don't see him running for anything) talk about what they want all the time: safety net, healthcare, immigration reform, voting rights, etc.  I definitely hear plenty of them saying what they want.  Is it that they're not saying what you want?


    I think they talk about safe topics. Health care (but not single payer) is safe. So are immigration reform and voting rights. "Safety net" is vague and inoffensive minus the details.

    Is that all they want? I doubt it. I think that most Democrats want gun control, but you hardly hear a squeak about it in Washington. Not a winning issue. Cap-and-trade? Another policy-non-grata. These are not radical ideas. They are liberal ideas that have been hushed up and pushed to the margins because they're unpopular. There are exceptions of course, and I'm sure you can find Democrats who espouse these policies, but they don't represent the party mainstream. In the party platform, you'll only find namby-pamby references that express concern about global warming and gun violence without substantive proposals to address them.


    I think we'll get immigration reform. I think we could get gun control if democrats had a spine. We might be able to get other things like cap and trade if they tried. Perhaps one problem is democrats don't want to be seen dealing with other issues when the overwhelming concern of Americans is jobs, jobs, jobs. I'm still amazed that Obama won in this economy. Luckily Thurston Howell III was running against him


    Gun control is a non-starter.  Americans don't want it and they don't seem to care who shoots up what.  End of story.

    Cap and trade is a liberal idea?  Since when?  The liberal idea was "command and control."  Cap and trade isn't even remotely commensurate with climate science.  That's liberal?

    I guess at this point I'm just baffled by what you're calling for.  Politicians spout platitudes.  They don't lead; they follow.  Americans like their guns and cars.  Gun control would be easy enough to propose, but no one wants it except some Dems.  Cap and trade isn't a substantive proposal, period.

    Personally, I don't think it has to do with lack of leadership or anything that pat.  More broadly, American politics reflects American culture.

    I wanted my fellow Californians to end the death penalty.  They didn't.  They did end three strikes.  That's still a net positive.  I'd like to end the Drug War yesterday.  That's not here yet, but it's on the horizon.  I think that perhaps by focusing on a lack of leadership that was never really there, we might be missing the real, yet glacially paced changes that are occurring.

    Most of what we need is not about a lack of big, bold, undefined ideas or even leadership.  Most of what we need is about not doing ourselves unnecessary harm.  To the extent that we continue to do these things, it's largely because they're culturally ingrained, not because there aren't enough bold, charismatic, action-packed leaders telling people how it ought to be.  Half the nation denies climate change - hell, they deny evolution - but not because Barack Obama isn't telling to believe hard enough..  To the extent that we're wanting what we're not getting, that's usually about plutocracy.

    Serious question: If there was a margin in championing either of the ideas you mentioned, do you really think there's a lack of type A self-aggrandizing egomaniacs who would do so?


    Politicians spout platitudes.  They don't lead; they follow...American politics reflects American culture.

    I disagree with you. Politics and culture has historically been a two-way relationship, each one driving the other. But in recent years, Democratic politicians have taken an increasingly passive role, always following, never leading.

    They don't do that nearly so much on the right, not anymore. From Goldwater to Reagan to Ryan, conservatives have advocated aggressive positions that they know they can't win, but they have nonetheless succeeded in driving the agenda to the right.

    Most of what we need is about not doing ourselves unnecessary harm.

    This is an entirely new phenomenon. For almost the entire 20th century, an aggressive left had little concern about the passive right undoing what it had achieved. The only question was how fast we went forward.

    But now we have an aggressive right and a passive left. There remain few serious discussions about moving forward in substantive way; it's all about how to keep from slipping backward.

    A defense of my position requires evidence of course, which I have not offered here, but I've argued it consistently across many blogs with many examples for the past couple of years.


    I agree with you Michael, a good leader could sell progressive ideas to some degree to the people. Especially during a crisis situation like we're in now. But I don't see that happening with this president. With Obama the idea of some big progressive idea being put forward and sold to the public just isn't part of my world view. I'm just not  looking for a big idea like you are.

    What I'm worried about is a big idea being put forward by this president. The so called Grand Bargain. I think Obama is ready to sell out SS, medicare, and medicaid for some picayune tax hike on the rich.

    I'll be happy if all Obama does is raise the taxes on the rich and appoint two or more Supreme Court justices. I hope Breyer and Ginsburg have the good sense to resign in the next four years. I'm not looking for a big idea because I think any big idea from Obama is sure to be crap in form and execution.


    Well, they presented it as a "liberal fantasy."  I think you're right that it confuses the issue.  It's really a best case scenario for an Obama second term, I think -- something that resets the economy and leaves the world a better place without fundamentally fixing what I really think is wrong.  Because, heck... I'm not even sure that Obama agrees with me about what the problems are.


    Brilliantly done, Michael.  Makes this liberal pretty darned happy.  Now if it'll only happen--especially Donald Trump's well-deserved baldness.

    No new wars or terrorist attacks would be grand, too.  Now if the rest of the world only cooperates.

    I don't expect the Republicans to lie down and die, much less take up any form of cooperation.  I think the home-grown terrorists aren't done with us yet.  The Tea Party, the anti-gays and anti-poor, the NRA, the right wing organizers and their billionaire sugar-daddies probably aren't going anywhere but underground where they can regroup.

    When I see the decline of Fox News and the disappearance of Limbaugh, Coulter and Malkin, I'll believe we're inching toward social sanity.

    Still, I like your vision of 2016 much more than mine.


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