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| Rembrandt, "The Resurrection", Courtesy of Bible-Art.Info |
Scenes from Mel Gibson's brilliant "The Passion of the Christ", available via iTunes
Scenes from Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth", available via Amazon
Embedded video available for download here
Quote of the Day
April 8, 2012
The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency.
All men have wandering impulses,
fits and starts of generosity.
But when you have resolved to be great,
abide by yourself,
and do not try to reconcile yourself with the world.
The heroic cannot be common,
nor the common heroic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Obama Campaign Goes Into Reruns
(Even Before Prime Time TV Does...)
No Scarecrow Named [Insert-Republican-Here] Safe
From Obama's Fear Mongering Rhetoric
I have not shown in this blog the nature and extent of withering criticism I am capable of delivering to a politician or others. I have not been nearly as hard on Barack Obama as I should be. I think in part it's because I still hear Father Lonergan gently admonishing me, saying, "Don't make Donceel [a Jesuit theologian/philosopher] look like an idiot." I also remember Sr. Morkovsky cautioning me over the use of secondary sources vs. primary. (That plays a little into this discussion and the above embedded video, as I'll soon discuss.)
I'm getting tired of Obama's general pattern of plagiarizing himself and others, establishing straw men, and deliberate distortion and misleading rhetoric. I regard this as open contempt by the President for the general intelligence of American citizens; he has no shame, no intellectual integrity whatsoever. Let me start with just a minor point he made in comments at the AP luncheon last week:
Some of these cuts were about getting rid of waste; others were about programs that we support but just can’t afford given our deficits and our debt. And part of the agreement was a guarantee of another trillion in savings, for a total of about $2 trillion in deficit reduction. This new House Republican budget, however, breaks our bipartisan agreement and proposes massive new cuts in annual domestic spending –- exactly the area where we’ve already cut the most.
Okay, please bear with me in case you already know all about this. Our federal budget is something in the neighborhood of $3.7T, revenues maybe near $2.2T. Now the first thing you need to realize is when Obama is talking about "$2 trillion in deficit reduction", he's not talking about the next fiscal year; he's talking about the next fiscal decade (and there are some nuances as to the nature of that reduction, which requires separate discussion of what we're talking about, namely baseline budgeting). On a very simple basis, he's talking about reducing of maybe reducing a $1.5T deficit to $1.3T.
But here's another relevant point he's purposefully skimming over: reduction of a deficit doesn't necessarily point to any decrease in program spending. A deficit can be reduced by any combination of revenue increases or spending decreases.
Let's talk a little more about Barack Obama's talking points which have not changed at all since last summer. We have this claim from the same speech:
As President, I’ve eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working, and announced over 500 regulatory reforms that will save businesses and taxpayers billions, and put annual domestic spending on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower held this office.Politifact has rated similarly rated statements last year as "half-truths"--but to be honest, they were grading Obama on a curve. We wouldn't expect a lawyer to be precise, would we? "Don't tell me that words don't matter", right, Mr. President? Let me explain the point differently than Politifact: under the most generous appraisal, the President misspeaks when he references "annual domestic spending". The federal budget can be seen as defense/security/foreign policy spending, roughly 20% and domestic spending, 80%. Domestic spending can be broadly categories as mandatory (i.e., social security, Medicare, Medicaid), which accounts for roughly 60% of the federal budget and discretionary (the rest, roughly 20%). Another clue: Medicare didn't even exist under the Eisenhower (or JFK, for that matter) administrations. [Let me point out another minor point Politifact referenced: it couldn't obtain relevant data before 1962. JFK was President at the beginning of FY1962, not Eisenhower. Eisenhower was President for the first four months of FY1961.]
So it's clear from Obama's context, he must be really talking about domestic discretionary spending--because we know that given accelerating Baby Boomer enrollments, not to mention ObamaCare's intent to expand Medicaid enrollment--that mandatory spending is going to grow, not shrink, as a share of GDP. Now Politifact noted in the earlier citation that Obama went from discussing "domestic discretionary spending" to "domestic spending" in sound bites after the debt limit budget deal. There are a few issues Politifact discussed. First, the numbers Politifact had didn't show a breakdown between domestic mandatory and discretionary spending. Second, it had two different sets of numbers to work with: OMB and the nonpartisan CBO. Both sources had differing estimates of economic growth (with the President's more optimistic). It is true that Boehner and the House GOP accelerated getting domestic discretionary spending down to roughly 3.2%, the low point during the JFK Administration, about 5 years earlier than earlier budget projection (2014 from 2019), but note that future GDP estimates, especially beyond a year out, are notoriously unreliable, and we are talking less than 20% of the federal budget--a problem when we're currently borrowing something near 40 cents on the federal dollar.
And notice that Obama is shifting attention away from program year-over-year to GDP percentage. Domestic discretionary spending can shrink relative to GDP if discretionary spending is held to a lower growth rate than the rest of the economy. It's more meaningful to talk in terms of year-over-year.
This brings us to what most Americans don't understand about the federal budget, but Obama does--and is deliberately exploiting: ordinary voter confusion over baseline budgeting--which bears little relationship to what most households consider a budget. Let me quote a good practical introduction from the Rush Limbaugh show on the point:
When you put together your budget, if you do one, you take last year's spending and income and you take a look at it and you figure out if you spent more than you had, or if you didn't spend more than you had, what did you do with what you had left over, where did it get spent.If the next budget you prepare has to be smaller because your income's dropped, you start going through items, figuring out where you're going to cut. Your baseline is the amount of money you have to start with. That is not how it works in Washington. Baseline budgeting is based on the presumption that every item in the budget will automatically increase between three and 10% depending on what the item is, every year, regardless what happened in the previous year. But that three to 10% increase every year becomes the starting point for every budget negotiation [even if this year's program budget was in surplus]. If Speaker Boehner were to propose that we simply freeze all government spending immediately, including mandatory and discretionary, the Congressional Budget Office would score that as a nine and a half trillion-dollar cut.
I want my readers to focus on that last statement. Obama is trying to tell you that he's been Mr. Greenshades. But his deficit reduction doesn't even get to the point of a simple budget freeze. Obama is engaged in sophistic game-playing, just like when he announced an expansion of offshore areas available for lease--and it turned out to be something like 5% of desired acreage. Obama engages in window-dressing and sells the lipstick on the government pig. He hopes that voters will buy that he's engaged in substantive reform, when in reality he's throwing just enough token bread crumbs to co-opt the opposition. The $5T Man thinks all he has to do is inject a weak inoculation of token deficit reduction against opposition attacks, and he's good to go for another 4-year term from the voter saps whom buy into his snake oil sales pitch and lip service on fiscal responsibility.
A simple freeze doesn't even touch the phenomenal amount of waste that we know exists (redundancy, obsolescence, etc.), and these amounts get automatically increased just like legitimate core functional budget items
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But now here's where President Obama completely loses touch with reality and engages in a pure smear campaign, shameless, partisan, disgraceful and unworthy of any legitimate President; it's one thing to have a civil disagreement with the loyal opposition. Unlike Obama and Senate Democrats, the House GOP (and Paul Ryan in particular) have put forth now multiple budgets (not phantom/missing budgets); the GOP is assuming the leadership missing in action from the Democrats and instead of coming up with their own responsible budget, including one which puts mandatory spending like Medicare on the table, Obama's idea of leadership is to engage in deliberate distortion and ad hominem attacks. Tell me: every state in the country has had to rollback state spending to balance budgets. When has Obama come out for year-over-year reductions of a statistically significant amount from a $3.7T budget? Not only has he refused to show any such initiative, he hasn't even endorsed the reforms from his own bipartisan debt reduction committee:
This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it is a prescription for decline.Methinks some demagogue read his copy of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought. (Unfortunately, I had to read this when I was in college, too.) For the reader whom is unaware, Herbert Spencer, a libertarian philosopher, had coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" before Darwin, and (this is where my opening Morkovsky reference comes into play) Hofstadter deliberately lifted a quote from Spencer's Social Statics out of context, as did GE Moore before him. Damon Root notes:
As philosophy professor Roderick Long has remarked, "The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial." This is a far cry from Hofstadter's summary of the text, which has Spencer advocating that the "unfit...should be eliminated."It's not surprising that Obama would resort to referencing the writings of another committed leftist in the form of Hofstadter, whom also opposed the free market. TC Leonard wrote a very interesting paper ( Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought) setting the record straight, and I think it bears striking relevance to Obama's intellectually dishonest characterization of GOP free market policies (for context, note that SDAT, Hofstadter's 1942 dissertation, was published in 1944):
Bannister (1988) and Bellomy (1984) established that “social Darwinism” was all but unknown to English-speaking readers before the Progressive Era, a mere eleven instances of “social Darwinism” in the Anglophone literature before 1916. “Social Darwinism” did not acquire much greater currency between 1916 and 1943; a mere 49 articles and reviews employ the term. “Social Darwinism” had Continental not Anglo-American origins, and, its convoluted semantic history notwithstanding, more commonly referred to competition among groups (nations or races) than to competition among individuals within a group. The rare uses of “social Darwinism” before SDAT ordinarily referred to the uses of biology to defend militarism and war.
Many businessmen were prepared to oppose reform and to justify laissez-faire, but their defenses of laissez-faire much more commonly invoked religion, the common good, Horatio Alger mythology, the American republican tradition, and even, if less frequently, classical political economy.
A close reading of the theories of Sumner and Spencer exonerates them from the century-old charge of social Darwinism in the strictest sense of the term. They themselves did not advocate the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, ‘the law of the jungle,’ to human society”. So what are Spencer and Sumner doing in a volume entitled “Social Darwinism in American Thought”? The answer, of course, is that Hofstadter is using “social Darwinist” in the traditional way: as an epithet to discredit views he opposed. What is new in the Anglophone literature is Hofstadter’s applying the term to free-market economics.And let me say for the record: Paul Ryan is miles better than any Democrat when it comes to fiscal responsibility. But I am not happy with Congressman Ryan's reforms which I personally believed are too watered down. If Obama thinks that Ryan is a social darwinist, let me state for the record, he has no clue what a real libertarian conservative would do.
I would start off with a minimum 10% cut across the board on discretionary spending (including defense) and I would establish a ceiling on aggregate transfer payment disbursements (as a transitory step to privatization). I would engage in large-scale business reorganizations and privatize government employment and nonessential government functions. I would decentralize authority by reestablishing a federalist system balance.
So, Mr. Obama, before you continue smearing the loyal opposition for the fact they are filling in the void for your leadership, which has been AWOL since you were sworn in as President, I suggest you aim your comments at me. Fair warning, though: unlike conservative politicians, I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a Master's minor in philosophy. (I would have gone for my doctorate, but there aren't a lot of jobs for professional philosophers.) As pissed off I am over your smearing conservatives and libertarians, I'm also pissed off by the fact you're participating in an ongoing smear of a great philosopher.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Doobie Brothers, "Takin' It To the Streets"
