Andrew Ross Sorkin, seemingly the product of intellectual spontaneous generation--he began writing for the New York Times when he was still in high school and is now an editor and columnist for the paper and a commentator for MSNBC as well as an author of best selling books on the financial industry despite nothing in his history to commend him other than a father who is a mergers and acquisitions lawyer for a major world-wide law firm and a Cornell University degree in some unspecified major--wrote an article on the "Obama economy" that appeared in the Sunday magazine of The Times this week. Despite my dubiety regarding his credentials, the article was pretty good in a sketchy kind of way (most of what he writes and says is a little sketchy), but he left out a few politically significant details. I say politically significant for two reasons: first the Republicans keep harping on The President's performance in addressing the financial crisis as if they had nothing to do with it, and second because come November, that will be the mantra of Donald Trump and every other Republican candidate for national office. And with regard to Sorkin's somewhat fluffy piece, both the devil and the saint are in the details, some of which he missed.
Sorkin likes to quote people and rely on their credentials as if they can substitute for his own, and that practice...like relying on an extensive bibliography and copious footnotes when you wrote a paper in college...is acceptable in my mind as long as you understand what it is, but his piece is a little short on facts that are quite significant. For example, President Obama had to do a lot of arm twisting to get the few Republican votes he got for his stimulus package, just enough I might add to compensate for the Democratic defectors in congress, and in doing so, he had to give some things that he and those Democrats weren't too keen on. For example, about $325 billion of the $800+ billion package, a full 40% of it, was in the form of tax considerations, both cuts and what they call "tax expenditures," that favored business. Yet, while the Republicans held his feet to the fire in order to get those corporate sops, they complained all the while about the size of the package that they bloated with their supply-side rationale (that's their modus operandi: cause a problem and then blame the other guy). That fact is significant because when they now complain that the stimulus package was a relative failure because Keynesean economic principles don't work but supply-side principles do, they always decline to comment on the fact that the stimulus had plenty of supply-side money in it in the form of those tax cuts and expenditures. And all of that relates to the fundamental principle that "fiscal conservatives" always cleave to: lower taxes create jobs and stimulate the economy.
That tax package along with the fact that American business is sitting on cash totaling more than $1 trillion by some estimates puts the lie to the proposition that we can do anything on the macro-economic level to coax business to invest when it doesn't want to. The idea that Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand are on to something is based on the premise that the taxes paid by big business are an impediment to investment, as if business would spend more if we left it more of its ever rising profits by taxing it less. In other words, money saved in taxes translates directly into capital investment. The fact that some corporations already pay as little as nothing on their profits--nothing is what GE infamously paid on tens of billions of profit a few years ago, and they admitted it very publicly--while they sit on huge capital reserves doesn't seem to deter people like Ryan from making claims based on the conservative postulate that tax reduction is a remedy for economic malaise. That is why the tax element of the stimulus package is important. It is evidence to the contrary, and Hillary Clinton and other progressive candidates will need all the help they can get when the Republican propaganda machine begins cranking out self-serving tripe in a couple of months. The campaign is going to be about whether Clinton's affinity for Obama policies will work, with creation of good jobs at the core of it all. And Ryan, along with the rest of the Republican conservative establishment, will be spewing their claims to anyone who will listen. The only hope of their progressive adversaries will be in rebuttal and refutation, which requires facts, like the fact that tax cuts abounded in the stimulus, so they can't have their cake and eat it too. Either their policies failed right alongside Keynesean government spending, or both succeeded, and thus, the Obama economy is a success story, not a source of hand-wringing woe.
So, while I first noticed Sorkin when he initially came out as an apologist for the financial industry in 2009, redeeming himself with criticism of the industry only later on, he seems to be on the right side now, though his technique leaves something to be desired. So I hope that Hillary Clinton reads what he writes and uses Sorkin's broad-stroke technique against the Republicans' preferred shibboleths regarding taxes and spending. They are a chimera, and little more than a euphemism for institutional greed, but there is a way to combat it, and the facts are its core. So a little Sorkin and a lot of Robert Reich ought to do it.
Your friend,
Mike
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