We shouldn't move toward the center and "cannot" move to the left, but we gotta go somewhere

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

So where do we go from here?

In conventional political terms we should head for the center.

But there are no actual solutions to any of our problems in the center.

Take unemployment... there is not any centrist policy that would even dent the numbers. Centrist policy would be something like tax breaks that would disproportionately benefit companies that are already doing well.

The way to quickly reduce the unemployment rate much beyond its current trend would involve dramatic deficit spending and a willingness to let the government actually do something--direct hiring WPA-style and/or Humphrey-Hawkins style or direct payments to businesses to pay wages as Germany has done recently, or some other approach that many Americans would denounce as socialism.

Progressives would like that. Centrists would hate it.

So the conventional purely-political course, moving rightward toward some perceived center, means that the problems that are making people mad cannot be fixed.

So they stay mad.

The way to get centrist voters on board for government solutions is clear tangible benefits. The people will go for progressive approaches as long as they perceive immediate benefits to themselves or to someone they feel sympathetic toward.

Ironically this means that direct government hiring of the poor (fairly socialist) would go over better than tax credits (centrist but not very visible or dramatic) because you could see it. (The stimulus will not be televised, but should be.) The average American is skeptical of government and has to be shown fast that she or someone in need is a beneficiary or she will assume she's just getting screwed-over.

(I am not saying that politically-ineffective measures aren't also needed. In the stimulus bill, sending money to the states to avoid firing people was very, very important economic policy but not very visible. Making such quiet policy visible is a PR problem and the only measure of PR is what people think, so the PR obviously needed to be better.)

Similarly, if HCR had been required to hit fast and be clearly beneficial to Jane six-pack it probably would not be deficit neutral in the first decade. But Jane will never believe it is deficit neutral anyway! So we get little political benefit from playing HCR cheap. The independent voter knows in her bones (incorrectly) that it's a budget-buster and she doesn't like that unless it helps her a lot and right away. But the bill that would make her happy really would be expensive. And so on.

Since the public seems to want either big benefits or zero taxes there is an argument to be made for boldness.

In practice the people might like big government or they might like small government, but they'll never see either one.

And what they cannot stand (while being the cause of it) is medium-sized government. Just big enough to be expensive, just small enough to be ineffective.

[sandnsea]

1. 1935 - This Business Of Relief, The Nation

REPEAT - 1935

"Everything is going up. Stock-market quotations are at new highs. The business index is rapidly approaching "normal." The index of food prices has risen 14 per cent since the first of the year. The WPA has reached its goal in New York City.

Only the unemployment index in New York has remained stationary. Today, as two years ago, there are still a million unemployed in the city. But real wages, including relief income, have gone down. While the New York Times business index has risen from approximately 88 in August to nearly 93 on November 10, the number of families on the relief rolls (including work relief, now handled by WPA) rose from the peak of 338,000 to a new high of 363,000 during the same period. And the number continues to rise. Five weeks ago 1,600 new families were added to the home-relief rolls. During the past week 6,900 were added.

When the WPA was launched as the solution of the unemployment problem, the President announced that "the federal government must and will quit this business of relief." The new program was to give a job to every able-bodied man whom the new prosperity did not place in private industry. WPA in New York City has put 223,000 persons to work. This still leaves 750,000 unemployed who can hope for no help from WPA, since it has already reached its quota. Private industry cannot be depended upon to absorb any appreciable number of these, since business is now operating at nearly "normal" capacity without having made any great inroad on unemployment totals. In the face of these facts Victor Ridder, the Works Progress Administrator, promises a steady "deflation" of the WPA program. This will inevitably throw the released WPA workers back on the local home-relief rolls, repeating the cycle of home relief to local made work, to home relief, to federal CWA, back to home or work relief, back again to federal WPA, then on to home relief. And so round and round.

It was the purpose of WPA to absorb all employable persons on the home-relief rolls. But even with the WPA quota reached, there are still some 140,000 families left on home relief, of whom more than half have one or more employable members. And these numbers on home relief arc rapidly increasing. The increase comes from three sources: first, families who have reached the end of their savings; second, workers with seasonable jobs who formerly earned enough to carry them through the slack season, but who now because of low wages and depleted resources must apply for relief at each layoff; third, workers discharged by WPA as projects are completed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/32_f_roosevelt/psources/ps_bizofrelief.html

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

3. Sounds like the WPA needed higher targets in NY

If they did their job and it didn't budge the NYC employment index then their job wasn't defined correctly.

I recognize that FDR was unable to make desired progress. The scale of stimulative and relief efforts was determined by politics and it is the nature of politics to try to do things on the cheap. (Like Susan Collins carving 40 billion from the stimulus bill just because she could.)

So as unemployment went from 25% to 15% the pressure eased off... each additional point off becomes more and more difficult politically since the crisis is one point smaller.

We were new at big-government relief/stimulus back then and didn't have the example of the '37 return to depression to caution us.

I admit I'm not sure what point your post aims at, but it's quite interesting. Thanks.

[sandnsea]

7. *sigh*

FDR did not believe in the "business of relief". So much for your socialist hero.

The WPA did not relieve unemployment, not in New York, not anywhere. When people finished their WPA project, the unemployment rate was still right there.

This is The Nation. Not any sort of revisionism.

FDR got the same kind of attacks then as Obama gets now.

FDR was limited in what he could do.

Obama has poured tons of money into all kinds of programs, to the extent that part of the attacks on him in Mass are that people didn't vote for higher taxes and more spending.

But even when it's right there in black and white, in print, from 1935; you don't get the point.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

8. You have rebutted a bunch of stuff I don't think, so that's cool.

You have rebutted a bunch of stuff I don't think, so that's cool.

You believe that the 1930s are a perfect analog of today and that FDR did infinity so the efficacy of any concept can be judged by whatever happened in the 1930s.

You think that money cannot address unemployment then brag about how much money we're spending.

You dismiss the fact that the mind-set in 1935 led to a return to depression in 1937...

Whatever.

It was all worth it to read the phrase "So much for your socialist hero"

[sandnsea]

9. "direct hiring WPA style"

Did you not say that is the solution to unemployment?

Edit:

Not "the" solution, rather a short term solution until the economy can be rebuilt.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

14. I offered a non-comprehensive list of examples. I'm not in love with the WPA.

The statement is that any policy that affects the unemployment rate medium-term is big government. I listed a few things to offer a general idea of what I mean. In Germany they have been paying businesses to hire people to kept the unemployment rate below certain levels which may be faster and more efficient that direct government hiring. That may be better, since businesses have employment infrastructure in place.

(Germany has suffered the same or greater GDP crater as we have but with less unemployment so one way or another bigger-government can do something about the problem.)

It is well known that the WPA did not end chronic high unemployment but that was not due to a repeal of mathematics. If the government hired everyone who asked for a job and kept doing so it would eventually eliminate unemployment.

That doesn't mean it would be the best policy, but it's important to start out recognizing that *some* conceivable government effort could end unemployment by fiat. It might not be the wisest policy in practice, but conceptually the concept is that really effective unemployment reduction lends itself to big-government solutions.

(I think the biggest bang for the buck would be Humphrey-Hawkins style direct hiring from the bottom. Make low-wage jobs available to anyone who wants them. If nobody wants them, cool. But until there is no surplus labor at the bottom of the skill/wage ladder the whole system has a wage-defaltion bias. It may not be the biggest problem but its a problem we could fix for relatively small money, so it interests me.)

We also have the "saved or created" problem... if we note that FDR policies did not end the depression the conservatives take that as a refutation of Keynes and of active government engagement in the economy.

But as everyone today should recognize from our current situation, had FDR not done the New Deal stuff the numbers would have been much worse. Only an arch conservative would argue today that FDR prolonged or exacerbated the depression. (Some conservative economists still argue that but they are thankfully few.)

The reason unemployment stayed over 10% throughout FDR's pre-WWII presidency is that we considered unemployment over 10% to be tolerable. Since policy is politics there is a dynamic back-and-forth... programs went full tilt vs. 20% unemployment but when we got under the low teens the political pressure eased.

It does not follow that it was impossible for government action to drive unemployment to 7% in 1935. It was not politically viable.

I wasn't being snarky saying the NYC WPA needed higher targets. There is a difference between setting a target that "should" accomplish a goal and having an open-ended policy where the goal itself is the target. (If unemployed people flow to areas with the most effective jobs programs then jobs programs will appear to cause unemployment... unemployment may actually go up in areas with the best jobs programs. But that doesn't mean that hiring a person doesn't reduce unemployment overall.)

Just as in the 1930s, I doubt we can craft the political will to do big-government. That's life. But the point remains that centrism is not well-equipped to solve problems because it is intrinsically cautious and thus a day-late and a dollar-short in any real crisis.

[rwheeler31]

2. We have gone so far right , we better get as far to the center

as we can. Getting the DOJ to act would be a good start.

[Democrat_in_Houston]

4. We don't have to go anywhere. I'm drawing a line in the sand and not moving.

[Enrique]

5. I agree, but...

but why do you say "we can't move to the left." It sounds like you are saying that's what we need to do. Which I agree with.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

6. I see what you mean. I edited to put "can't" in quotes.

It started out can't left, can't center.

Then I realized that since we will probably move center that obviously we can... so I changed that can't to "shouldn't" but that change made it confusing.

Sorry.

[TheKentuckian]

10. I'm unclear what this mystical center is

Are we talking Rainbow Ronnie? In other words just being Republicans but more ethnically diverse with more women in prominent positions?

I don't see much room to the right that can allow the party to hold the actual moderates even (ignoring the corporatist and/or neocon "centrists"). We're already dangerously approaching right of Nixon territory now.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

16. Our leaders seem to "know"

It amazes me how every single line of legislation is assigned a left-right position and battles are fought on that basis.

Medicare+5%, public option, exchanges, cadillac tax... all these things are seen as major left-right issues and "everyone" knows where they fall relative to the supposed center.

But the actual centrist, a fairly clueless independent, has no coherent theory of left and right and cannot describe the differences between those policies.

In the OP I am arguing that the supposed centrist is not idealogical and isn't thinking in classical right-left terms. I think you and I agree on that.

[baldguy]

11. How do we *know* we can't move to the left if no one ever tries?

The problem with Democrats isn't that they're too liberal, it's that they don't take principled stands non any issues & follow through with appropriate legislation. Just look at the health care "reform" debate. The first thing the Dem leadership did was write off any notion of a real govt run system, or even single payer. The "liberal" options were never even considered - even as bargaining chips to be negotiated away.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

12. What if people just took principled stands that were obviously for the common good

without worrying if it was "right" left" or "center"?

I think most of those stands would fall into the left side of the equasion, but that's just because in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert "the facts have a liberal bias."

[Orsino]

13. Forward.

Wobbling left and right on America's current political spectrum gets us exactly nowhere.

Progressive change will be the only progress.

[Phx_Dem]

15. Center. That's how you get the indies back, who are drifting away.