A funny thing happened on the way to ABC’s This Week round table yesterday. The circle turned into a hexagon.
Instead of the usual balance of two–occasionally three–commentators from both political perspectives, ABC’s special Independence Day edition featured a 5-on-1 lib-to-con tilt. Crammed into the liberal corner were Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia “The People Are Stupid” Tucker, Bloomberg’s Al” Tea-Party Hater” Hunt, Nobel-laureate Paul “Stimulus Maximus” Krugman, and Univision anchor/illegal immigrant amnesty proponent Jorge Ramos.
Looking a little lonely over in the cobwebbed conservative corner was Dan Senor, former Republican foreign policy advisor to “W,” husband of Campbell Brown,and founding partner of Rosemont Capital.
Hey, that’s a pentagon, not a hexagon. No, you just forgot to add Jake Tapper, the discussion’s–cough–impartial moderator. Now we’ve got all six sides of our wobbly table. Yet despite the flawed design of the furniture, nevertheless it was the “Senor moments” that carried the day.
One of the main issues addressed by our hexagon of heated haranguers was how best to foster economic recovery.
To no one’s surprise, all except Senor parroted the administration’s position that we desperately need more stimulus. Stimulus Maximus called the first stimulus bill–nearly a trillion dollars–a “half measure” (!) and says it’s time to double-down. Tucker, in a beautifully-timed fourth-of-July display of disdain for the muddle-headed hoi polloi (you and me), empathized about how “the people” were “confused” by the word “stimulus,” and praised Democrats for rightly rebranding the next handout as a “jobs bill.” To her, we’re too stupid to understand what “stimulus” means yet stupid enough to be fooled by the new marketing campaign.
For all his dogged self-assuredness about Guv’mint’s need to intercede, Stimulus Maximus failed to comment on the 30% plunge in home sales after Guv’mint took the first-time home-buyer tax-credit punch bowl away at the end of April. No doubt SM favors a years-long, housing open-bar happy hour. That nasty deficit hangover won’t nail us until 2015 or 2020, as Tucker noted, so hey, open those spigots and laissez les bons sub-prime temps roulez!
If the home sales plummet has a familiar ring to it, a similar steep decline in automobile sales occurred in late 2009 following the cessation of Cash for Clunkers, another brilliant bit of planned economy.
In an October 2009 study of the Cash for Clunkers program, auto sales consultants Edmunds.com concluded that the $3 billion handout cost the taxpayer on average $24,000 per car purchased. Furthermore, only two of every ten new cars bought under the program were American-made automobiles.
This kind of Pyrrhic stimulus is reminiscent of Groucho Marx in that torrential downpour at the start of At the Circus. Asked if he’s wet, the only respectable Marxist replies: “If I were any drier, I’d drown.”
Of course Tucker bashed Republicans for not agreeing to sponsor extensions of unemployment benefits–neither she nor Krugman nor Ramos nor Hunt nor Tapper mentioning the well-known fact that if you subsidize something (i.e., unemployment) you get more of it. Krugman mentioned that the average unemployment benefits tenure is 35 weeks, simultaneously failing to point out that Congress has already authorized subsidies of up to 99 weeks, nearly triple the average relief sought and 73 weeks longer than the 26 weeks provided by most states. Stim-Max and Company also ignored JP Morgan Chase economist Michael Feroli’s recent study that shows unemployment benefits actually increase the unemployment rate by 1.5%. Or as The Daily Beast’s Reithan Salam wryly observes “unemployment is higher in no small part because unemployment is more pleasant than it used to be.”
All in all, Senor did an admirable job holding down the roundtable fort until George Will returns from a well-deserved sabbatical. Even outnumbered 5-to-1, the Friedman camp staved off the Keynesians one more hour, and our land-ahoy November-second delivery from Obama-led statism is now just one fewer “we need more stimulus” day away.
A wise Russian adage says “When it’s free, even vinegar is sweet.” The Obama administration’s relentless frenzy to impose governmental control over every aspect of our economic lives may taste sweet to the likes of Krugman and Tucker, but Dan Senor knows the acrid taste of vinegar when he gets a whiff. And he’s the only one at Sunday’s lopsided ABC roundtable with the good sense–or good taste–to spit it out.