Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I don't even get it. In 2000 the Naderites at least had the excuse that they were in it for the money....the magic 5% so they could get matching funds for the green party.

Now that Nader isn't even part of the Green party, what's his excuse? I mean aside from sheer ego?

Did you have to rule out ego?

I think Nader's run represents a level of arrogance, as does the support of his die-hard backers who make outlandish claims that Bush and his opponent are one and the same. The only way one could think that is if one considers oneself a paragon of ideological purity. Hence, everyone who's not pure can be grouped together.

Fortunately, support for Nader's run in 2000 stemmed at least in part from a complacency regarding the probable outcome of the election. It was also the result of eight years of relatively good times under Clinton. Some people had forgotten how bad things could get, so they bought Nader's claims. I think that's eminently understandable, but there's really no excuse this time around.

Nader's in serious danger of making people forget the good he's done as a consumer advocate (some would say he's already done so). If he runs again, it will be painfully obvious that he really doesn't care about the American people.

My Dad, who in his last few years seemed to be channeling Rush Limbaugh, hated "Saint Ralph" Nader with a passion. I think he sees himself as the saviour of American politics.

I agree with Marshal--he isn't going to be a factor this time.

Well, I did my part. I saw an announcement of the URL of Nader's exploratory committee a while ago and went to take a look. There was a survey exploring support for the guy in 2004. I provided uniformly polite but extremely negative responses. I think I said that I would not vote for him even if he were the only person running. I would write in somebody, anybody else. My cousin, uncle, aunt, McCain, Harold Stassen if he's still alive, pretty much anybody, first. I guess I didn't have much impact!
They guy blew off or slighted whole issues in the last campaign, and was kind of arrogant about it, too. I can't believe he is going to waste people's time and endanger getting a good person elected again!

Nader is toast. Not a SINGLE of a dozen of Nader-voting friends will vote Nader again.

NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

Criminey! This will stir up the Nader loons I know and they'll flood my inbox for the next nine months.

They're lovely people and they've been to our house numerous time but they have this.. well .. Kevlar like shielding from newspaper and magazine URLs. They prefer forwarded emails that come from your uncle's podiarist's cousin's mother's gypsy woman's milkman's cat.

God forbid that Fluffykins would exaggerate or rearrange the facts to make Fluffykins look good.

God forbid.

Mark is off base in his criticism of Clinton. "The result of the search for programs that reach "a huge cross-class constituency" in times of fiscal scarcity and hostility to government is thin programs, like Clinton's "micro-initiatives" of the Dick Morris era, that offer a little something for everyone and not much to anyone." The key to economic success in the US is a JOB. All benefits are tied to the JOB. Clinton programs provided the poor with the thing they wanted most: JOBS and making those jobs pay more.

Brownstein also would disagree with the Mark's assessment of the impact of Clinton programs on poor Americans.

http://pearly0000.tripod.com/htmls/bill-debate.html

The deep instinct of liberals to believe that Clinton's success at expanding the party's electoral coalition was won solely at the price of sacrificing its neediest constituents can be sustained only by ignoring the actual record of the 1990s. Under Clinton, low-income and working-class families made their biggest gains since the 1960s--largely because of the booming economy, but also because of the policies Didion derides as "silly" : a set of initiatives that encouraged and rewarded work. It turned out that "making work pay" was not only a good political slogan but an effective strategy.

The 1990s were unquestionably a good time for Americans in the penthouses. Yet the boom of the Clinton years was defined not only by its length but also by its breadth and depth; it reached even workers on the margins of the economy, minorities, single mothers, and people with limited education. Census Bureau statistics paint a portrait of the decade recognizable in none of these books.

Consider the median income. Overall, in real terms, the median income--the income level achieved by half of American families -- increased by almost 15 percent from 1993 to 2000. But it rose much faster for blacks (33 percent) and Hispanics (24 percent) than it did for whites (14 percent). It rose faster in central cities (18.5 percent) than it did in suburbs (12 percent). Despite all the warnings about welfare reform impoverishing single mothers, the median income for female householders jumped nearly 29 percent from 1993 to 2001, significantly more than the 17 percent increase for married couples.

In percentage terms, families on the lowest rung of the income ladder scored the biggest income gains from 1993 through 1999. According to Economic Policy Institute calculations, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their average income increase nearly 19 percent from 1993 through 1999 -- while families in the top 5 percent enjoyed an average increase of about 15 percent. By comparison, in the expansion of the 1980s, the average income of the top 5 percent grew more than five times faster than the incomes of the bottom 20 percent.

Those broadly shared income gains refute another common liberal complaint about the Clinton years: that the expansion of the 1990s widened the gap between rich and poor. Actually, according to Census Bureau figures, the gap between rich and poor remained virtually unchanged through the decade. In 1993, the top fifth of households received 48.9 percent of all income; in 2000, the number had increased only slightly, to 49.6 percent. (The top fifth increased their share of total income much more rapidly in the 1980s.) The share of total income received by the bottom three-fifths of families declined during Clinton's tenure, but only slightly (from 27.7 percent to 27.3 percent). It's perhaps a legitimate complaint that the Clinton years didn't see more progress at narrowing income inequality. But given the enormous gains of families at the top during the 1990s, even holding inequality essentially stable has to be seen as a kind of triumph, for it required significant advances for workers on the economy's lower rungs as well.

And those gains generated dramatic and almost entirely overlooked advances in reducing poverty. From 1993 through 2000, the poverty rate in America fell from 15.1 percent to 11.3 percent--a reduction of 25 percent, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. As with income, the most vulnerable groups recorded the biggest gains. The poverty rate among blacks dropped by fully a third under Clinton; among Hispanics, the drop was just over 30 percent. For both groups, the poverty rate is now the lowest ever recorded. Poverty dropped faster for female-headed households than it did for married couples and is now, by far, at the lowest level ever recorded. Children registered the greatest gains of all. Under Clinton, poverty among children fell by nearly 30 percent, to the lowest level since 1978. During Clinton's tenure, the number of children in poverty fell by 4.1 million--compared with just 50,000 during the expansion under Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, home ownership among African-Americans and Latinos rose to the highest levels ever recorded.

Obviously, the long boom itself (in particular , the low unemployment rates) deserves the most credit for these advances. But even leaving aside the question of how much Clinton's success in deficit reduction contributed to the expansion, his administration pursued a coherent series of initiatives that reinforced these trends by demanding and honoring work. The stick was welfare reform, which pushed welfare recipients into the job market, where they could benefit from the rising tide. The carrot was a steady stream of policies to reward work, beginning with a major increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and then continuing with a hike in the minimum wage, the creation of the children's health-insurance program (to provide coverage for the children of working poor families ), extended access to Medicaid for former welfare recipients, an increase in day-care subsidies and funding for after-school programs (which provide another source of child care for working families) and a children's tax credit that significantly reduced the tax burden on many working-class families. On a separate track, much tougher enforcement of fair-lending laws and federal subsidies for community lending institutions contributed to a staggering 97 percent increase in home mortgage loans to low-income borrowers from 1993 to 1999. The four authors contemplating Clinton give, at most, short shrift to all of these accomplishments.

But taken together, these efforts tangibly improved millions of lives and took a significant further bite out of poverty. Under Clinton, the federal tax burden on families at the median income and below fell markedly. (At the same time, the 47 percent share of total federal taxes paid by families earning $100,000 or more jumped to 57 percent--a statistic that doesn't exactly confirm Didion's portrayal of the Clinton administration as a DLC-inspired surrender to the wealthy.) Harvard professor David T. Ellwood , a former Clinton welfare official, recently calculated that a single mother who left welfare for full-time minimum-wage work would have come out ahead by only $2,005 in 1986; by 1997, largely because of the expansion of the EITC, work was some $7,100 more valuable than welfare. That support for work lifted millions of additional families out of poverty under Clinton. Once the EITC and other government income supports (such as food stamps) are added in and state and federal taxes paid are subtracted, the poverty rate in 2000 stood at just 8.7 percent overall and only 11.1 percent among children, the Census Bureau found.

bakho -- I like Clinton, and I think that he's a good guy who did the best he could for the nation with his position during the 1990s, but... measuring from 1993 to 2000? That's measuring from near a business-cycle nadir to a business cycle peak. It may not, strictly speaking, be as manipulative as Bartley's "Seven Fat Years," which excluded 1981-82, which was part of the Reagan administration, it is still a bit, if not disingenious, at least naïve to measure the success of Clinton's policies from near-nadir to peak.

That said, I broadly agree that Clinton was a Good Thing (and C of E) for the working poor. However, from what I can tell, extreme poverty, among those out of the labor force, increased fairly dramatically during the 1990s.

'course, I'd take a 3rd Clinton (or Gore, or Kerry, or Edwards, or Dean, or Clark) administration any day, and I find many of the critics of the 1990s booms are simply incoherent. ("Alan Greenspan should have tightened monetary policy to prevent the bubble! No, wait, Alan Greenspan should have loosened monetary policy to facilitate a broader expansion, and worried about inflation too much! The expansion was built on feet of clay, because there wasn't enough saving an the U.S. only could finance it through massive foreign borrowing! No wait, we worried too much about budgets, and ought to have run deficits a bit and worried about saving less so that we could fund other critical priorities!") Still, it's important to remember that no, the 1990s boom DIDN'T lift all boats, even if it generally did lift most of them, including many of poor, and even if Clinton was one of the better presidents we've had in the past few decades.

I don't think there's any evidence that "extreme poverty" (whatever that means) increased in the 1990s. It's certainly decidedly unlikely that when unemployment falls to 4% and inflation is nonexistent things are going to be getting worse for the poor (even those who are out of the labor force).

1993-2000 has a logic to it as a category because that's when Clinton was in office (you can hardly hold him responsible for what happened before 1993). And 1993 was not the nadir of a business cycle. It was two years into a recovery. But it doesn't matter. If you measure from the fall of 1990 (end of previous business cycle) to end of 2000 (end of last business cycle) the numbers and statistics look very much the same -- perhaps even better. Bakho's analysis has nothing in common with Bartlett's. It's right on the money, unlike Mark Schmitt's bogus critique of the 1990s. The idea that things got worse or stayed the same for 40% of Americans in the 1990s is preposterous on the face of it and, as bakho shows, completely unjustified by the numbers. And I like Edwards, but he needs to stop talking about the little girl and her coat. As John Tierney has pointed out, the percentage of Americans who can't afford a warm winter coat has to be in the single digits at worst -- and without Edwards' textile protectionism that number would be even lower.

Back on Brad's post: Can GWB be a Jack (Knave)? Isn't exactly of humble birth, but still.

"any of the other three would surely make good presidents, but there is every reason to think that John Kerry will make the best president."

I can't agree that "any of the other three" would be good presidents (Howard Dean in the white house? Heavens, no! And John Edwards' protectionist shtick really gets on my nerves) I do agree that John Kerry would likely do a good job in the office. What certain people have against him I just don't know.

All four of the kings would make good Presidents. Alas Dean and Clark folded. But King Edwards is getting too trade protectionist for my taste. Guess when it comes to the Cal. vote, I'll cast for Kerry by default.

The "Joker" bit is silly and insulting.

If Nader wishes to run he should do so! The Dems make a great mistake assuming that Nader takes votes from "their" candidates. The simple fact is that most of the Greens I know simply will not vote for a plastic candidate such as Kerry. If Nader doesn't run they won't have a person to vote for -

When it gets right down to it Kerry is the perfect example of a "plastic candidate". He believes in nothing and decides which side of an issue to come down on based on what the consultants say.

This is more of the old "blame the voter" game. The Greens really have simple requests - its sad that the Dems refuse to satisfy them.

One final point - Nader's support may seem small now but just wait till the ad war begins this summer/fall and Kerry does what the consultans tells him to do and moves to the center. Lots of folks will look at Nader again.

One thing that truly impresses me about Kerry so far is his evident refusal to talk about religion.
I suppose someone will notice this, and force him to say something. And if he does I would hope he will tell us that religion is relevant here only as it is manifested in one's acts. That if social justice is the main message of Jesus, Mohammed, and Jewry, then politicians can only be judged on the good works to which they have applied the power they have. And where does this leave George W. Bush?

Brilliant post by bakho on the EITC and welfare reform. I would add that Clinton's (perhaps not entirely conscious, but) approach to income inequality (raise marginal taxes on the high end - use those incomes to balance the budget) was pretty sharp also.

It's sad to realize that we now have a choice between two parties that seem to both be edging (if not running, or in the R case, stumbling) away from the Clinton approach. The R's are appealing to their upper middle class constituents, via tax cuts, while the D's are appealing to theirs, via welfarization. It almost makes you think there's something to the idea that somehow Government, as an entity, makes itself worse off when it makes people better off....

Kevin Drum: "Clark demonstrated that serious talk about national security was something Democrats both could and should do."

Yes, the guy who thought we needed a ground war in the Balkans to address human-rights concerns campaigns on the theme that a ground war in Iraq was just a bad, bad idea. There's nothing like a campaign based on deep-seated, easily understood principles. And the Republicans would have been hard pressed to find angles of attack against a candidate of such high personal dignity.

I suspect Clark's reaction to the "four kings" idea would be that Kerry could be a jack, but Dean and Edwards, no way they should be face cards.

Sorry, the idea of a WC presidency sends Pat Buchanan-like shivers down my spine....

It's certainly true that the best way to move people out of poverty is to grow the economy, as Clinton did, but given that the latter part of the Clinton boom stemmed from a bubble that we're still working off, I don't think the Clinton era can be pointed to as a good example in this regard.

OK. In the latter 90s there was a stock market bubble. There was a dotboom and a dot bust. However, you cannot say that the economy itself was in a bubble in the later years of the Clinton administration. The stock market is not the economy.

During recession, unemployment increases. This has negative effects on the states that are suddenly hit with greater costs and fewer revenues. Many states have "rainy day funds" that can absorb some of the shock, but with the GOP on the tax cutting warpath for the past decade, many of the rainy day funds were drawn down. Faced with costs greater than revenues, the states were forced to cut back. States cut back by cutting jobs. They use some combination of hiring freeze, salary freeze, overtime freeze, cancellation of projects that employ construction workers etc.

A key to fighting job loss in a recession is to prop up the states so they don't contribute to the job loss. Mr. Bush and the GOP Congress decided to let the states suffer, thus guaranteed that jobs and employment would suffer. It is not just the loss of state jobs but the loss of jobs of people that provide services to those workers that is involved. Of course, the joblessness futher exacerbates the revenue shortfall of the states and they must retrench further.

No additional funds were made available for retraining of displaced workers, funding infrastructure projects using displaced workers etc. Penny wise pound foolish decisions have been made. For instance, putting county records on a GPS system would save money in the long run, but the short term costs are cut during revenue shortfall. An opportunity for trained people to use their skills to build infrastructure that saves taxpayers money in the long run has been lost. This is the tragedy of the Bush administration response to the economy he inherited. Lost opportunity.

Was there excess hiring of computer people in the late 90s. Yes. Was there an economic bubble. No. Look at the GDP numbers. The GDP has gone up every year, yes at a slower rate in the 2000s than the late 90s, but it is expanding, certainly not in recession. We are not "still working off" some mythical Clinton bubble. We are suffering from fiscal mismanagement of governmnet monies.

1- Clinton or not, I understand there is still hunger in America:

http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html

In a country where only one percent of the population can produce more foodstuff than the nation needs, I find it hard to understand how any one could be allowed to go hungry for any reason at all for even one day.

2- If it is going to be Kerry to run against Bush, I don't mind Nader running too (as I said before, for some reason I don't know, I can't trust Kerry to really avoid favoring narrow special interest). If it is Edwards, however, running against Bush, Nader won't matter any way -- he can't steal votes from Edwards, methinks.

"there is every reason to think that John Kerry will make the best president."

I keep reading this, and not understanding it. The man has sponsored no major legislation and refuses to take stands on most major issues (see Project Vote Smart). He has, so far as I can tell, very limited executive experience--four years as a Navy Lieutenant, however decorated, has little to do with managing the huge federal bureaucracy. There seems no way to know what kind of President he will be at all, or even to know his politics with any certainty.

What am I missing here?

One does not spend over a decade as a senator without learning how things are done in Washington. Candidates can say just about anything, as Mr. Bush did, but if elected, they still have to govern. Much of the government runs itself. The president sets policy. He does not micromanage the career employees. Bad things happen with micromanagement such as Cheney / Rumsfeld micromanaging intelligence.

I think the politics of Kerry, Edwards, Dean and Bush are very clear. If you have questions, go to their websites. Kerry has been a deficit hawk and is a supporter of NAFTA and trade. He has a top score on environmental concerns and proposes to address the jobs issue by money to the states and support for alternative energy projects. His health proposal is aimed at some cost containment. Edwards has lately come down as a protectionist, although his record on trade is more moderate. Edwards will spend more to address health care. Both Edwards and Kerry would move back to multilaterlist policies of Clinton and Bush41 and away from the attack whenever we want policy of Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush talks free trade, but is an over the top protectionist if he can score political points. Mr. Bush is in favor of a unilateralist, militaristic foreign policy that uses force and threat of force and little diplomacy. Mr. Bush is a borrow and spender. He has shown little restraint on spending and prefers to push off taxes to those who will follow him. Mr. Bush is in favor of huge increases in military spending while minimizing increases in domestic spending. Mr. Bush is not in favor of giving money to the states or government programs to invest in domestic infrastructure. Mr. Bush prefers to give large tax breaks to dinosaur big industry and wealthy people and continually touts this as the way to stimulate the economy, create jobs, etc. So far he his economic policy has not met with much success.

Ah, but every deck comes with 2 jokers!

So who's the other joker then?

I could summarise the lines of Bakho above concerning Mr. Bush in three words: Prescription for disaster.

The problem I see coming up for democrats in the general election (assuming the Bush Presidency does not implode in the interim) is that the Kerry campaign is a traditional 'top down' operation. The Dean campaign was bottom up. He didn't find his supporters, they found him, and it turned out that his political footwork wasn't as deft as it has to be to succeed at a national level. But let's remember that he came close.

The problem with the Kerry campaign is that his managers will be tempted to 'go for the middle', rather than make the effort to get the 'middle' to come to them. This effort inevitably generates an impression of waffling, which the Republicans will have no trouble exploiting, given their success doing the same thing against Gore. The problem with the poll-driven advertising model of campaigning is that it takes the 'consumers' tastes as largely given, and movable within very narrow limits. This vision allowed the Republicans to set the agenda and the terms of the debate. I fear Kerry will end up in the same trap.

Though he has less experience, Edwards seems to be better protected from that trap. He's a natural-born salesman. And I think he can attract the Dean constituency in an active way that Kerry probably can't. Kerry is a good candidate and would make a good President. But it's hard to see how he can actually mobilize the kind of people who have given their money and a part of their lives to what the Dean campaign stood for.

"The simple fact is that most of the Greens I know simply will not vote for a plastic candidate such as Kerry. If Nader doesn't run they won't have a person to vote for"

Aside from the person who is nominated by the Green Party of the United States at the presidential nomination convention that will take place from June 23 to 28 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of course. But why would Greens vote for a Green candidate chosen by Greens to run as a Green on the ballot? So much easier to just remember to vote for the same guy you did in 2000, because that turned out so excellently for progressives and environmentalists alike.

bakho wrote, "However, you cannot say that the economy itself was in a bubble in the later years of the Clinton administration. The stock market is not the economy."

Of course the stock market isn't the economy. That doesn't mean we *weren't* in an economic bubble, however.

I agree that the recession was made worse/longer by the fact that Bush's fiscal stimulus had very little bang for the buck, by the position of the states, and so forth---and have posted comments in this forum to that effect. But that doesn't logically contradict the claim that the economy was otherwise in an unsustainable bubble.

Nader will be a problem because he'll have quite a bit of money.

He'll have quite a bit of money because Rove will get it to him -- one way or another.

The only question is whether the donation will be overt or covert.

"...He'll have quite a bit of money because Rove will get it to him -- one way or another...."

Nader sank that low!?

J F
Really? -the Rovian donation could be overt? No question that Repugs would thrill to see Nader in, hence the 'ready'funding, should that be an issue for the Nader campaign. In what sense could this be made overtly and still be acceptable? My failure of imagination or am I missing something?

I don't think Nader's an issue. The issue is whether it is Kerry or Edwards. If it is Kerry, it doesn't really matter who wins the election -- methinks. If it is Edwards, I think he will win despite Nader.

You cannot learn without already knowing.

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Believing in God does not require believing in religion.

Study without thinking, and you are blind; think without studying, and you are in danger.

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit - Everything changes, nothing perishes. (Ovid)

Fallaces sunt rerum species - The appearances of things are deceptive. (Seneca)

Fallaces sunt rerum species - The appearances of things are deceptive. (Seneca)

Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probat - A wise man states as true nothing he does not prove (don't swear to anything you don't know firsthand)

Bene legere saecla vincere - To read well is to master the ages. (Professor Isaac Flagg)