Glenn Hubbard saying "personnel is policy" makes me realize irony, satire, self-awareness & shame all must've died in same massive car crash
— billmon (@billmon1) July 27, 2013
Via Billmon, Glenn Hubbard shares his Penthouse White House fantasies with the Economist:
“DON’T blame me, I voted Romney,” proclaims a T-shirt popular among Republicans. Another gag, popular in the conservative blogosphere, begins: “They told me that if I voted for Romney…” and then adds the horror of the week. For example: “They told me that if I voted for Romney, Detroit would go bankrupt. And they were right!” All this is nearly as much fun as obstructing Barack Obama in the House of Representatives.
But what if Mitt Romney had won in 2012? America would now be nearly 200 days into his first term in the White House. It is worth pondering how different things might look…
Romney aides wince at the comparison, but their 200-day plans sound like a Bain turn-around for America’s economy: a co-ordinated series of shocks aimed at impressing investors, but likely to startle and anger many ordinary folk. Democrats would have scorned it as a wish-list for bosses and billionaires. But Mr Romney believed his reforms would work, and work fast. Benefits would follow swiftly, in the form of private investment and job creation: persuading the wider public to trust in President Romney’s competence, if not to love him.
Team Romney’s 200-day plans included immediate, 5% cuts to public spending excluding security and social payments (though more money for defence), a weakening of the rules that Republicans say favour trade unions, a squeeze on public-sector jobs and pay, and a global push for free trade. Mr Romney would also have proposed lower income- and corporate-tax rates, offset by closing loopholes. Abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, a conservative dream, was not on the cards. But “personnel is policy”, notes Glenn Hubbard, Mr Romney’s chief economic adviser. Those chosen to regulate energy and tackle climate change would have weighed costs against benefits minutely. A long-term squeeze on welfare and health spending was a priority: wholesale immigration reform was not…
A Romney win would have shown that America is a centre-right country, says Lanhee Chen, Mr Romney’s chief policy adviser; enough Democrats would have got the message and co-operated with him. That belief—in a conservative America—unites the Republicans’ quarrelsome tribe. Conservatives do not accept that re-election gave Mr Obama a mandate for very much. They see him as a huckster who bribed and talked some of America’s least-informed voters into backing him. (More politely, a Romney aide calls Mr Obama “extremely gifted, as a campaigner”.) His last election behind him, Mr Obama now looks to Republicans like a huckster out of fresh patter, peddling ideas far from the mainstream. That is why they defy him without fear, and embrace gridlock in Congress as a badge of honour….
From Glenn Hubbard’s Wikipedia page:
… Hubbard was interviewed in Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary film, Inside Job (2010), discussing his advocacy, as chief economic advisor to the Bush Administration, of deregulation. Ferguson argues that deregulation led to the 2008 international banking crisis sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch. In the interview, Ferguson asks Hubbard to enumerate the firms from whom he receives outside income as an advisory board member in the context of possible conflict of interest. Hubbard, hitherto cooperative, declines to answer and threatens to end the interview with the remark, “You have three more minutes; give it your best shot.” After the release of the film, Columbia ramped up ongoing efforts to strengthen and clarify their conflict of interest disclosure requirements… One of his consulting contracts was examined in a deposition in 2012. His work for Countrywide Financial for $1200/h’r, attesting that the lender’s loans were no worse than a control group of mortgages and not fraudulent, was examined by an attorney for MBIA. MBIA was suing Countrywide over its mortgage practices…
SiubhanDuinne
I am looking for the list of email addresses for front pagers that used to show up with every thread. Anyone know where it’s gone, and how to find it??
Omnes Omnibus
So doesn’t a Romney loss indicate that this is not the case? Or do conservatives just accept facts that support their theories? Those were rhetorical questions.
Gin & Tonic
I’m not going to read through the day’s open threads, as I spent the day at the beach and just recently got back, so I don’t know if it was mentioned, but J.J Cale has died. A real shame, for someone who should have been better known.
SiubhanDuinne
This makes my head hurt. The obvious corollary is that an Obama win shows that America is a centre-left country — yet not enough Republicans have been able to get the message and co-operate with him. Conservatives would have accepted that a 50%+1 election would have given Mr. Romney a mandate for anything he fuckin’ pleased.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Apparently, a Romney win would have caused the U.S. to adopt British spelling of words.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
What Omnes said.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Hey, I’ll be out of town next weekend, so before in case it doesn’t come up again, early Happy Birthday.
peej
@SiubhanDuinne: On the upper right side of the page, there’s a drop-down under “Contacts”. Just pick the person you want to contact and it’ll bring up your e-mail with the contact address.
peej
@efgoldman: We need to contact him to get more pet pix.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and if your grandmother had wheels, you’d be a bike?
I hear a lot of this. What’s so radical? infrastructure spending? slight increases in the top marginal tax rate?
oh, that old projection monkey clinging to their backs. They squealed like stuck pigs when Dems said Ryan’s voucher program was a voucher program. I wish Republicans would just run on their actual platform, undoing the New Deal.
Hungry Joe
Hubbard’s dismantling in “Inside Job” was brilliant. In a matter of seconds he transformed himself/was transformed from a savvy, patient, kinda smug pundit who is Explaining It All to Us, to a vile, hissing, reptilian villain. I kept expecting a forked snakey-tongue to leap from his mouth and then get slurped back in. Astonishing moment in a very good film.
Davis X. Machina
I didn’t think you could pitch “If my aunt had wheels, she’d be a trollybus” to the Economist and not get laughed out of the room. I mean, it’s a real magazine and shit.
Joseph Nobles
A local actor here in Dallas has passed today: Charles Ryan Roach. He was a fantastic person and beloved by so many. He’d gotten ordained (probably the Universal Life church) and had officiated at the weddings of so many friends in the Dallas theater community. The pictures flowing past on my Facebook feed right now are astonishing. At 44 years old, Ryan was Too Damn Young.
PeakVT
His last election behind him, Mr Obama now looks to Republicans like a huckster out of fresh patter, peddling ideas far from the mainstream. That is why they defy him without fear, and embrace gridlock in Congress as a badge of honour…
ETA: Edited b/c not a quote from Hubbard. Still surprised a line like that made it into print.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman: Thanks! I completely missed that, was looking for the list of names.
Jewish Steel
A Romney win would have shown that America is a centre-right country
I think this better reflects the sentiment.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus: Happy birthday to you, too, Omnes! We share with such a great crew.
Jewish Steel
@Jewish Steel: Maybe italicize the is too.
Patricia Kayden
“But what if Mitt Romney had won in 2012?”
He didn’t so I don’t have to wonder about that. Thank goodness!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Sitting in a restaurant waiting for G. It’s cool, though — I have a Dark & Stormy (rum+ginger ale) and focaccia to see me through until he gets here.
I bought everything else I wanted/needed for my dad’s memorial next Sunday, so I think I’m just about ready for it. Materially, anyway.
The Dangerman
Meaning, any cost higher than some arbitrary amount (I’m guessing zero) would have scuttled that regulation; basically, we would have had an environmental policy that would make Dick Cheney erect.
peej
@The Dangerman: That is not an image I want to even contemplate.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Dangerman: Fuck you and damn you to being eternally forced to listen to Kenny G’s greatest hits for putting that image in my head.
Karen in GA (who really needs a better name)
The Iggy has landed!
Turns out cutting their coats short turns Bichons into Schnauzers.
He’s about a year old.
No accidents in the house, but we keep taking him outside, so maybe we just haven’t given him a chance to mess up the floor?
I spent about 10 minutes tossing treats into his crate to make him comfortable with it, then left it alone. An hour or so later he just walked right into the thing, curled up and let me lock the door. I was stunned.
He’s shown some curiosity about the cats, and made a couple of attempts at butt-sniffing, but he’s made no attempt to chase them.
He’s barely eaten — it might be skittishness, or it might be because of the treats from my attempts at clicker training. I think I need a trainer; I’m probably going to suck at it if I try it myself.
He hardly ever pulls at the leash.
He closes his eyes when I pet him — I’ve never seen a dog do that before. I could be scratching his head or rubbing his back, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t appear to be defensive.
I think he’s still a little bit skittish; I’m not sure how much of his calmness is his temperament, and how much is “I’m terrified and have no idea what to do.”
I do know that of all of the things I was afraid would happen today (a million potty accidents, attacking the cats, etc.), not one of them has happened.
The hubby and I are looking forward to getting to know him better. For right now, though, we already know he’s perfect.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): My condolences.
My dad passed a couple of weeks ago, but it was long term vascular dementia; we said goodbye three years ago.
Still. Tough.
The Dangerman
@Omnes Omnibus:
Kenny G has more than 1 hit?
Omnes Omnibus
@The Dangerman: Fuck if I know.
Mike in NC
No, it’s not, you fucking wankers.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike in NC:
And we have a winner.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
The semi truck is warming up so we can deliver the internets to Mike in NC as I type.
SiubhanDuinne
@WereBear: I’m so sorry, WereBear. My dad passed in February 1995. I still miss him.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So a Romney win proves the Republicans were right and an Obama win proves that Obama is wrong. They don’t have a political philosophy so much as a religious belief.
Chris
Romney’s people were the ones who, when the most reliable pollster in the country started releasing polls that they didn’t like, reacted by saying “yeah but he’s a homo, so what can he know” and “yeah but he must be liberally biased so it’s all a lie,” releasing their own polls skewed to say what they wanted to hear, and apparently truly believed that vocally disagreeing with the truth would make it go away.
You want to know how Romney would have addressed any of the problems that would’ve cropped up during his presidency? There’s your answer.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mike in NC: No, it’s not, you fucking wanker
And Mike sums it all up perfectly.
Yes, even though the polls showed Mittens stood absolutely no chance of wining that election, still, willfully ignoring what really happened and why it happened, if Mittens had won the plan the plan he never shared with anyone during the campaign would have worked perfectly.
I think if Mittens won it would more likely be Mitten claiming credit for everything Obama did that work, blaming Obama and Bush for everything else and damn little beyond it.
Chris
@PeakVT:
1) They’ve been defying him in exactly the same way since November 2008. There’s nothing recent about any of that.
2) The reason they “defy him without fear” is because they know that as long as they do, nothing bad can happen to them – if they lose the election, the wingnut welfare circuit will find them a sweet gig at a think tank, a corporation, a media outlet, or wherever. If they don’t defy him, they’ll be kicked to the curb and forgotten.
Tripod
As I noted in a previous thread, his pick for VP was Paul Ryan. His incompetence is self evident.
Most Americans know Romney. He’s the senior management asshole who comes in for the all hands meeting on Monday. Everyone knows the company is fucked, but he still blathers a bunch of onward and upward bullshit. Then payroll checks don’t show up on Thursday. Direct deposit goes through, because this asshole has to get paid. Always screwing the folks with the least margin. Fuck him. His administration would have made Bush look competent.
Southern Beale
Well you know we got a junior-Romney-wannabe as our governor here in Tennessee, someone with all the credentials to “run state government like a business,” yada yada, and our unemployment continues to increase and the governor’s family business is embroiled in a fraud scandal and wracked with debt.
So, y’know, I have a feeling we’re seeing what a Romney presidency would look like …
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
On my screen (Firefox 22.0, WinXP), at the upper right, about level with the Billmon tweet, is the text “Contact” above a drop-down box containing the text “Select an Author.” You can open the drop-down list and select a front-pager to whom to send an e-mail.
Chris
@Tripod:
Yes. That’s been the terrifying thought for me ever since the teabaggers cropped up four or five years ago; no matter how bad the Bush presidency was (easily the worst we’ve had since Hoover, at least), the next Republican president, whoever and whenever he is, will be even worse. That’s something to chew on.
hamletta
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I’m so sorry. My mom passed a month ago, and the memorial service was…interesting.
Everything will be OK, because it’s done with love.
Steeplejack
The hypocrisy is stupefying. A Romney victory would mean that acceptance of his agenda and coöperation should naturally follow, but Obama’s (second!) victory is some sort of aberrational fluke that the GOP can justifiably ignore.
terben
Hubbard is correct in asserting that America is a centre-right country. That’s why Obama was re-elected, he was the centre-right candidate. What America is not (most of the time) is a looney-right country. Which is, of course, why Romney was rejected.
MikeInSewickely
I watched “Inside Job” two times – the first time in amazement, the second time screaming. Every one of these bastard banksters and economists made me ill just watching them try to explain away the total corruption of American Capitalism.
My son is a pretty strong conservative but when I start to rant about the system and that capitalism is broken and none of these criminals went to jail, he corrects me and says “What we have is not capitalism, it’s cronyism and it’s broken”.
The problem is that these guys own Congress and the White House. For the Obama team to even consider Summers for Fed Chairman tells me they’re not nearly as different from the Romney Crew as most people think they are, at least when it comes to the economy. Maybe it’s because of a completely bat shit crazy Congress that won’t allow them to do anything that hints of helping the middle class. I want to think so, but I’m getting more disillusioned with every passing day.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder who would have made the foreign policy decisions in a Romney administration.
Elie
@WereBear:
Condolences to you and Mnemosyne…. Said goodbye to my Dad similarly five years ago after a long slide of Parkinson dementia. What sticks in my head was his wonderful laugh from before the illness overcame him…
Chris
@Steeplejack:
They’ve won the popular vote in exactly one election in the last two decades. One (not even two). Out of six. That’s one thing you won’t hear them or the media dwelling on.
schrodinger's cat
Speaking of Glenn Hubbard, I saw Inside Job yesterday. Unmasking of Hubbard was quite something. The other economist in the film, Mishkin, is also quite a tool. Also too, Larry Summers, Do Not Want as the Treasury Secretary.
Mike G
A Romney win would have shown that America is a center-right country, and given divine mandate to turn the country into a Bain takeover/looting target.
Whereas Obama’s clear re-election means nothing at all.
Repuke Calvinball.
Mike G
The trouble is freewheeling capitalism leads inevitably to cronyism in the absence of strong moderating forces, because those who accumulate wealth don’t just spend it on consumption or reinvest in competitive business activity. They aren’t content to continue subjecting themselves to the forces of untrammeled competition and creative destruction – they use that wealth to buy political influence and manipulate the system to perpetuate their advantage.
If you look at the most capitalist societies on earth, like Hong Kong or Dubai, they all have major issues with corruption and privilege, and large sectors of the economy that are cozy oligopolies run by powerful insiders.
Defending some perfect version of unmoderated capitalism that has never existed outside a textbook reminds me of the ideologues who defended communism after decades of ruin and oppression in the Soviet Union and China, on the grounds that they weren’t practicing “true communism”, which hadn’t been tried yet and so had not failed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike G:
Adam Smith figured all this out over two centuries ago, and he’s been studiously ignored by the Ferengi ever since.
Chris
@Mike G:
Not that I’m disagreeing because I think you’re totally right, but isn’t this the way it always goes regardless of ideology? Doesn’t every political-economic system eventually revert to aristocracy (as the elites gobble up more and more money, power and influence and set up as many barriers as possible to keep it in the club and pass it on to their children) if it’s left unchecked?
SFAW
SSDD.
I don’t know why any of youse guys [sic] still get upset by this. It’s just a re-hash of the Rethug belief that they are the only legitimate rulers of the
peonscountry. Mittens could have lost by 40 points, and received 47 Electoral Votes, and they’d still believe that Obama won because he bought off the darkies/browns/commies/whatever, or because 70% of the country is too stooooopid to recognize the Kenyan Muslim fascist socialist for what he is.Which is even more interesting because study after study shows that it’s the Rethug-supporters who are completely fucking wrong about most issues of fact, and that the Red states are the ones whose students are negative-two-sigma on the intelligence/education/schooling scale. Yet another case of Rethug projection.
Ah, fuck it, they get to me, too.
SFAW
@Chris:
What about anarchy? The elites don’t run/own that, do they?
catclub
@Chris: I just had a happy read of a profile Joe Biden as likely next president.
GQ
I have nothing particularly against Hillary, but Joe sounds like the energizer bunny.
Also irritated that the writer had to keep referring to a woman aide by her first name. … and it was a woman writer.
catclub
@Mike G: “those who accumulate wealth don’t just spend it on consumption or reinvest in competitive business activity.”
They do if the marginal income tax is high enough. Too low and they just try to keep it.
catclub
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Bibi Netanyahu
MuckJagger
Three years ago, I lost my job specifically because of Countrywide Financial.
So it’s not like I needed another reason to keep voting against the kind of policies guys like Hubbard espouse — but I do appreciate the continued vigilance of shining a flashlight on these rats.
dww44
@terben: Well, I aim to make sure this country gets labelled center left, pdq. One of the ways I will do that is put an end to memes like the one on this page up top on the right: “Obamacare Funding Threatens to Shutdown the Government”. We need more pushback to the ridiculous themes from the right., cause I know and am related to lots of folks who believe this crap.
From that same source, NewsMax, I got this one in my email this evening” “Zuckerman: Obama’s Shabby Treatment of Bernanke is Unpardonable.” WTF?
SectarianSofa
@SFAW:
Yes, that sums it up ; thanks for that.