The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

In the
past 100 years, there have been eight Democratic and nine Republican
Presidents. 6 of the 8 Democrats (except FDR and Wilson), delivered to their successors
smaller deficits than they
inherited. 7 of the 9 Republican Presidents (except Eisenhower and Harding), delivered
to their successors larger deficits
than they inherited.

You read
that correctly, every Republican
President since Eisenhower has left office with a larger deficit than he
inherited, so says a study by Stephen Bloch,
a PhD mathematician at Adelphi University.

Despite
the last minute reprieve by Congress’s voting to extend the date(s) of our
budgetary and debt ceiling crisis, we will most certainly see the Republicans in general and the Tea Party in specific, charge up
Austerity Hill again in a few weeks.

The Center
for American Progress (CAP) says
we are paying a steep price for Tea Party demands for fiscal austerity. Their analysis (see
chart below) shows it has cost us 2.5 million jobs:

The CAP report
says the gap in economic growth between our present and their imagined
anti-austerity worlds could have made a big impact on the US jobs situation:

Moreover, the widely-cited Macroeconomic
Advisors (MA) report estimates
that our crisis-driven fiscal policy has cost us 1 percentage point off of the
growth rate of GDP for the past three years, or roughly 3% in total. More than
half of this estimated cost comes from the “fiscal drag” of falling
discretionary spending, with the rest
coming from MA’s estimate of the negative impact on GDP of fiscal uncertainty.

“Uncertainty”
used to be the Republican mantra when discussing the Obama fiscal policy. Now, it
is hung around the necks of the Republicans like Flavor Flav’s Clock.  

So, it is clear that we have paid a steep price for Tea Party and right
wing Republican intransigence on the debt. What explains the Teapols’ ability
to remain fact-free? How can they look past the facts to whichever totem stands
for their beliefs about economics?

Cognitive
neuroscience says we are not
fundamentally rational beings. Whenever decision-making involves
judgment or personal values, our default mode of thinking is driven by
subconscious forces. We reach decisions almost instantly, and just as quickly,
we create rationalizations to justify those conclusions, consciously thinking
we worked through the decision logically.

The
psychologist, Daniel Kahneman has studied this for decades. He won the Nobel Prize
in economics, without any formal economics training, (! What’s up with the
Nobel Committee?) for demonstrating that economic decisions are not made
rationally. His book, “Thinking
Fast and Slow” made most Top-10 non-fiction lists. An example:

The
Dunning-Krueger Effect shows that the
least-qualified are most likely to be certain of their (incorrect) conclusions.
Tea Party, meet economics; media, meet Paul Ryan. Of course there is also
the example of Mr. Romney’s polling gurus – who were certain of his victory
deep into election night.

Deliberately
setting out as the Tea Party did, to create doubt about the full faith and
credit of the US, and grand-standing with the Confederate flag in front of the
White House by the very same Teahadists who worked to shut the government
down, all the while bemoaning that it is shut down, is not just delusional
in the face of logic, it is shameful behavior to most Americans.

We shouldn’t
dignify their totemic beliefs as a “negotiating position”. The position “give
us concessions or we will destroy the Government of the United States, an
institution we all took an oath to uphold,” is not a logical, or a fact-based
position.

Maybe Ted
Cruz, et. al really wish to destroy the government of the United States.
There is a different word for that. That word would
be “treason” and there seems to be a faction of the Republican Party
that embraces and endorses that strategy. These people normally would be prosecuted;
here, they build their email lists, raise money and get re-elected.

In
December, Republicans will again raise the flag of Austerity. They will strap
on their Tea Party armor and work to weaken Medicare and Medicaid, just like
they did in 2011, just as they did to the Food Stamp (SNAP) program in the
House last month. Paul Ryan will be back on the Sunday media catwalk, hawking
the same old tax cuts and cuts to social programs, wrapped up in “tax reform”
and deficit reduction.

Paul
Ryan, who this week, along with 143 other Republican members of House, voted
for a US debt default, will be the chief Republican negotiator.  

Marx said:”History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as
farce.”

America isn’t laughing.