November 10, 2010
If Ruth Marcus did not exist someone would have to invent her. She is the living embodiment of an ill-informed Washington pundit who desperately wants to meld the world to fit her preconceptions. (Okay, her colleagues at the Post, Fred Hiatt and David Broder give her stiff competition.)
Anyhow, the theme today is that Obama failed to recognize that his shellacking was from too much big government. First, it is important to recognize that there is a large body of research that shows that President Obama’s shellacking was overwhelmingly the result of 9.6 percent unemployment, coupled with the fact that the Democrats held many marginal districts as a result of their gains in the last two elections. Models that incorporate only these variables predict most of the Democratic losses last week.
In other words, if President Obama could not do more to bring the unemployment rate down, then he should have expected his shellacking. Those opposed to more stimulus (like the Post crew) in effect wanted to see the Dems trounced since it was an entirely predictable outcome of the policy.
But, let’s get to the big government story. Ms. Marcus tells us that the public is upset about big government interventions in the economy, like President Obama’s health care plan and cap and trade.
Let’s consider each of these in turn. Has the public seen President Obama’s health care plan? That doesn’t seem likely, since very few of the provisions have been implemented thus far. What the public knows of the health care plan is what the media has reported. This has included stories of “death panels,” government takeover of the health care industry, and massive cuts in Medicare.
These charges have the common characteristic of not being true. (I will acknowledge that the cuts in Medicare are a real possibility, but please note that this would mean smaller government, not bigger government.) Polls bear out the fact the public is extremely ill-informed about the health care plan. We can blame media outlets like the Washington Post for this failure. (This is the principle, strongly endorsed by the Post, that if the students don’t learn, then it is the teacher’s fault.)
So, how is over-reaching and excessive government intervention the problem if the public doesn’t really have a clue about the health care reform? Basically, the Republicans made things up and they stuck in the minds of millions of voters. That is the story.
Describing cap and trade or related measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) as big government intervention is also peculiar. Are the zoning restrictions that prevent me from building a slaughterhouse across the street from Bill Gates’ house “big government?” I suspect that most people would say no. The issue here is of protecting property rights and making people accountable for externalities.
The externalities from GHG are destroying property and causing millions of people to die from such things as floods in Bangladesh and Pakistan and droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa. We can call rules designed to prevent this harm “big government,” but that is just name-calling. In reality, this is just about limiting externalities in the same way as zoning ordinances do. But hey, that wouldn’t fit the Post’s story.
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