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I’ve switched the comments from the old system to Disqus to cut down on maintenance. Yes, all of your old comments are gone. I have a backup, but I will probably do nothing with them. That is all.
Gay marriage as an externality
It occurs to me after writing my previous post that a reason Obama might prefer to keep his accomplishments on glbt rights on the downlow (sorry) is not that he wants to avoid confrontation with the right on the marriage issue. Of course it isn’t – he agrees with them on it. He wants to avoid confrontation with the left on gay marriage.
I’ll have to meditate on whether or not I think that is smart politically, but what is immediately clear is that Obama’s opposition to gay marriage might have helped him with suburban Christian swing voters, but it is not without costs. Now, he has to spend political capital on gay-friendly initiatives to avoid being derided as a repeat of Clinton’s famous hanging out to dry of gays, but because of his stance on marriage, his returns on this investment are minimal. Conservative Christians get to paint him as a gay lover, and left-liberals get to paint him as a gay-hater.
Let this be a lesson to Democratic politicians. Supporting “equal rights” for gays while opposing marriage rights is no longer the path of least resistance.
The “quiet” president
This article is a good demonstration of Obama’s equivalent of Clinton’s “small-bore” initiatives.
In the past year and a half, President Obama has quietly used his powers to expand federal rights and benefits for gays and lesbians, targeting one government restriction after another in an attempt to change public policy while avoiding a confrontation with Republicans and opponents of gay rights.
The result is that scores of federal rules blocking gay rights have been swept aside or reinterpreted by Obama officials eager to advance the agenda of a constituency that strongly backed the president’s 2008 campaign.
It’s well known that after failing at health care, Clinton narrowed his focus and started working toward smaller, targeted achievements like the FMLA. The reason this is well known is that, strategically, Clinton wanted these initiatives to be talked about on the front pages.
Obama seems to operate very quietly. I think he’s been far more effective than his critics on the left will admit, but many of his accomplishments just don’t get much coverage. As outlined in the Wapo article above, his accomplishments on glbt equality have been under the radar. The same is true of what I think is one of the greatest things about his first year in office – the quiet dismantling of the federal War™ on Drugs.
It appears that team Obama does not want to risk confrontation on these issues, but I am not entirely sure why, at least where the gay rights issues are concerned. Public opinion is now solidly in favor of nearly every gay rights plank with the exception of marriage. If Obama comes out strongly in favor of equal treatment for gays in employment, housing, health care, etc. he forces Republicans into the uncomfortable position of having to cater to their base on an issue about which swing-voters disagree with their base. It marginalizes conservatives, strengthens their identity in the public consciousness as narrow-minded, overly-religious busybodies. It also plays to Obama’s strengths of the soaring rhetoric, high-minded visionary.
Making these accomplishments “quiet” has been a strategic mistake for Obama. I have no doubt that once I start doing more political focus groups with swing voters as the election nears that my opinion on this strategy will be confirmed.
Fantastic misreading of history of the day
Proof that in the world of libertarian lasseiz-faire economists, you pretty much just have to memorize the talking points to be considered an “economist.”
In their embrace of Keynesianism, many economists have concluded that even though the New Deal’s hodgepodge of policies never brought about full recovery, World War II did, as the economy expanded to produce munitions and enlarge the armed forces. Huge, deficit-financed government spending, they argue, finally wiped out the lingering mass unemployment.
The truth, however, is really quite simple. In 1940, after eight years of New Deal pump priming, the unemployment rate remained about 10 percent even if, unlike the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we count people enrolled in federal emergency work-relief programs as employed. The gigantic buildup of the armed forces, primarily by conscription, then pulled the equivalent of 22 percent of the prewar labor force into the military. Voilà, unemployment disappeared, as it was bound to do regardless of any wartime Keynesian fiscal policies.
Mr. Higgs says all the jobs created by the war don’t count as real jobs because the government created them, and that the Great Depression was only masked by WWII. I don’t see anything in the article that explains how all these guys who fought in the war came home to get jobs, make money, and take part in an economic boom, all during a Great Depression that hadn’t ended.
To put it more simply, Higgs says that we had tons of unemployed people because there was a Depression, and that the government undertaking mass hiring for the war effort didn’t fundamentally change that. If that were the case, at the conclusion of the war unemployment would have again skyrocketed as our soldiers returned home and factories de-tooled from making munitions. But that didn’t happen.
Higgs thinks it’s because just at the moment the labor market would have been flooded with supply, investors stepped in and, with new confidence inspired by the war’s end, invested tons of money into making things. However, this makes no sense. If I’m an investor and I see a country suddenly about to be flooded with unemployed people who won’t be able to buy things, why would I invest in production?
Fact is, the investment was spurred by demand. And the demand was spurred by all of the money people had to spend after being employed by the government for years. People had money saved up and needed things they’d waited for a decade to buy. The demand caused the investment. Good old Keynesian stimulus.
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