Why I Am Not Thrilled (Among Other Reasons)

[grendel317]

One party now controls the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.

I think I would have rather seen the McCain / Lunatic Nutjob ticket win.

Comments

[grendel317]

Well, that's a fair point. Controlling all three gives a party enormous power to "do stuff," and sometimes that stuff will be things I agree with. However, on average I would prefer higher barriers to government action. I would argue that many (if not all) of the worst excesses of the Bush administration were either attempts to tear down some of those barriers or a direct result of the consequent lack of checks and balances. Obviously, illegal end-runs around judicial review and the legislature are qualitatively different than simply winning all the elections, but if the end result is a party with relatively few constraints or safeguards, I can't say I'm happy about the situation either way.

I would love to be pleasantly surprised. If Obama starts his term by putting some of those safeguards back in place and reducing presidential power to pre-Bush levels, that would be a nice start, though clearly a less meaningful act than it would have been with a Republican-controlled House or Senate.

Also, to quibble with your specific examples, I think a lot of the measures taken during the Depression were terrible ideas that have plagued us to this day, the Civil Rights Act or something very like it were going to happen eventually regardless (though I'll agree it was admirable and might have taken significantly longer), and it's quite a stretch to say that one party was in control of the country when the slaves were freed. :-)

[grendel317]

Darn it, LJ just ate a great big response. Here it is again, somewhat summarized.

Regarding the CRA, it's possible that you're right - lots of things look like juggernauts of inevitability in retrospect that were actually quite tenuous at the time. However, I think the real driving forces were those decades of work you mentioned and the accompanying cultural changes. If somehow the CRA hadn't been passed up until today, I don't think it would have any trouble in the current political environment. You could argue that the cultural changes wouldn't have happened without the legal ones, but I think the causative lines run more strongly in the other direction.

(Bad ideas from the New Deal, according to John, in a separate post.)

[grendel317]

Bad Ideas from the New Deal, according to John:

• Massive deficit spending, as initiated in the Economy Act
  
• Massive farm subsidies, which have their roots in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (the AAA was later declared unconstitutional, but the general policies and approaches stay with us in the Farm Bill)
  
• I believe some form of wellfare is probably a good idea, but our system is wretchedly bad. Count this one half.
  
• Similarly, I could be convinced that federally managed retirement funds might not be a terrible idea, but our implementation seems very mismanaged. I put a lot of money in, but I seriously doubt it will still be viable by the time it might do me any good.
  

On the other hand, I like the Fair Labor Standards Act, and I approve of the creation of the SEC in principle (though I would say they have dramatically failed in practice).

[grendel317]

Well, note that I said *massive* deficit spending. If the deficit spending really had been temporary, and they had then balanced the books again, that might have been ok (or even necessary - there are alternate views on that, and I am not smart/educated/omniscient enough to have a strong position). Deficit spending on the level initiated then and continued now is almost certainly a very bad idea.

And woah. Farm subsidies. Woah. The AAA actually directed farmers to produce less food, artificially restricting the supply and raising food prices at a time when people had little food and less money. Agriculture was in trouble, but this was not the way to save them, and having done it, it should have stopped as soon as the Depression was over. Corn and wheat and soy subsidies today are wildly out of control and horrible for a lot of reasons, but I won't argue with you on the current state of things since we seem to agree that it's mismanaged.

Social security might be around for me, and it might be less of a gigantic pain in the ass by the time it's my turn, and it might not end up becoming a de facto global citizen id number (or rather, it might stop being one), but I doubt all of these things. I believe our implementation is pretty bad, and the Boomers are hitting SS now. I am skeptical that it can stand the strain, and even if it does I suspect the cost will be so high that as the Boomers die off it will be dismantled by the political backlash anyway (right as I'm about to finally get it).

At the same time, I also believe most people wouldn't (and a few couldn't) adequately prepare for their retirement if left to their own devices, and what would we do as a country then? So like I said, I could be convinced on the general idea of some sort of federal retirement fund. Ideally something optional, assuming you were making reasonable alternative arrangements.

Anyway, my overall theme here seems to be that the Depression was crazy times, and hey, FDR probably did the best he could without knowing how things were going to turn out. I don't fault him for that. But, there were a lot of programs and policies that absolutely did not work and needed to be removed or heavily revised after the crisis, and while some of that did happen, much more needed to.

[grendel317]

Yes, I am familiar with the theory and agree that action was necessary, and believe me, I am no free market economist. It is my (admittedly amateur) opinion that grants, low- or no-interest loans, or something along similar lines would have had the same end result (farms have enough money to survive for a while) without putting the burden of higher prices and reduced supplies on consumers. A loan or a grant would also have had a more concrete endpoint, rather than dragging out in to the mess that is the Farm Bill today.