Bipartisanship is not a magic word
Jeb Bush caused a stir this week when he said partisanship in Washington had gone too far. If that doesn’t sound like news, what really drew attention was the former Florida governor’s apparent belief his father and Ronald Reagan would find it difficult to become the GOP nominee these days.
I say “apparent” because Bush’s statement, in an interview with Bloomberg, included one enormous qualifier. Reagan and George H.W. Bush would have trouble with today’s GOP, the younger Bush said, “if you define the Republican Party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”
Well, that settles that!
The notion that Reagan, at least, would be spurned by the contemporary GOP is odd. In 1980 he was considered far more conservative than the elder Bush, who succeeded him as the Republican standard bearer. Nothing about nominees Bob Dole (1996) or John McCain (2008) places them to Reagan’s right. Even George W. Bush was less aggressive than Reagan on taxes, and his spending, given that unlike Reagan he had a fully GOP-led Congress to work with, is less forgivable.
Yet, Bush didn’t mean Reagan was too conservative for the 2012 GOP.
Until cloning technology allows us to re-create Reagan in the flesh, however, this is just a parlor game. The more pertinent matter is whether Bush was correct to point the finger at partisanship.
Or, even better, whether bipartisanship is the cure for what ails us.
Bipartisanship gave us the No Child Left Behind Act, which both sides now criticize (for different reasons). There was significant support from each party in Congress to authorize the Iraq war, which the left eventually disowned and of which the right grew weary.
The same goes for McCain-Feingold — formally, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act — which sought to get “soft money” out of elections but instead led to super PACs.
That’s just in the past 11 years. Back in the Reagan era, when the president struck those bipartisan deals of which Jeb Bush approves so much, “working together” brought us tax cuts but only unfulfilled pledges of reduced spending, and amnesty for illegal immigrants without the promised border enforcement to prevent future illicit border crossings.
I could go on, just as Bush or others could point to good laws that passed with bipartisan support: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance.
The point is that being “bipartisan” doesn’t necessarily make a bill good.
Obamacare wouldn’t have magically become good law if a few Republicans had voted for it. The handful of GOP votes for the Dodd-Frank financial reform didn’t prevent it from enshrining “too big to fail” into the law or squeezing credit markets.
A common argument today is that the problem has more to do with obstructionism, that too often one side stands in the other’s way to forestall legislative progress.
The left trotted out this argument back in the health-care debates of 2009-10. In fact, very liberal Democrats spent several months trying to bully moderate Democrats into supporting very liberal policies before Scott Brown’s election to the Senate gave Republicans enough votes even to be obstructionist.
Lately, the GOP-led House and majority-Democrat Senate have disagreed about long- and even short-term plans for taxes and spending. The bipartisan solution being urged is for Republicans to accept higher taxes in order to get lower spending. That happens to be the exact kind of arrangement, economists now warn, that would lead our economy off a “fiscal cliff” in 2013. But at least we’d be holding hands as we took the plunge!
When “bipartisan” means taking the best ideas from both sides, it’s not such a bad thing. If this happens less frequently these days, I chalk it up to two things.
First, while there’s an apparent cry for compromise, there’s very little consensus about what’s an acceptable compromise. We want other people’s taxes raised, or spending that affects other people cut. Politicians don’t advocate splitting things down the middle, because there’s no sign of a constituency for shared pain.
Second, even when combining ideas is practical, the results tend to be smaller than the kind of Grand Compromise we think we need for our toughest problems. But in some cases — health care comes to mind — it’d be better to take several nibbles at problems than to go whole-hog.
Making both sides mad, or happy, too often is just an excuse for not making sure to make good law.
– By Kyle Wingfield
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268 comments Add your comment
md
June 14th, 2012
6:13 pm
“They may make noises, but it will NOT happen.”
No such thing……everything is possible, and if they get to a point where they hold the upper hand then they may get to make the rules…….how do you think we ever got to the point where we got to make the rules??
MarkV
June 14th, 2012
6:22 pm
Everything is indeed possible. But you have no better crystal ball than I have.
The main point is that the money they have lended us (in a way of speaking) gives us the leverage. Would they want to lose a substantial portion of it? And why are they still buying our securities?
MarkV
June 14th, 2012
6:34 pm
md @ 6:10 pm
“Mark…..in both cases, the money to run either must be generated by the private sector. So for the gov’t to do any function, it must “take” the money first from the private sector.”
You are not making sense, and you do not answer questions.
Lynn
June 14th, 2012
6:49 pm
DaveTV,
Sadly, you know, hospital emergency rooms don’t provide Chemo. therapy to those with cancer. Heck, these days, hospitals usually won’t even set a broken limb. They will stabilize it, rest it on splint, maybe give you a pain shot, probably a script, and a list of ortho. doctors, and a good luck wish, as they send you out the door.
md
June 14th, 2012
6:55 pm
“The main point is that the money they have lended us (in a way of speaking) gives us the leverage. Would they want to lose a substantial portion of it? And why are they still buying our securities?”
Read the link I posted…….they want to create an alternative IMF currency and then unload their dollars in exchange for the new currency……then they don’t take the hit when we print money.
md
June 14th, 2012
6:56 pm
“You are not making sense, and you do not answer questions.”
I don’t answer questions?? I’ve been asking you for 3 days now where you think the gov’t gets it’s money………and still no answer.
MarkV
June 14th, 2012
7:06 pm
md @6:56 pm: “I don’t answer questions??”
Have you answered the question about how the people collecting garbage would have changed from consumers to producers just by doing the same work for a private company instead of the government? Have you answered my writing about GDP?
“ I’ve been asking you for 3 days now where you think the gov’t gets it’s money………and still no answer.”
That is another silly question, made even worse by your assertion that “the money to run either must be generated by the private sector.” Money is “generated by the private sector?” Can you explain how? Does the private sector prints the money, for crying out loud?
md
June 14th, 2012
7:16 pm
“Money is “generated by the private sector?” Can you explain how? Does the private sector prints the money, for crying out loud?”
Wow….just wow……I think we now see who needs that economics class.
Printing money does nothing but add supply……and devalue the currency……something else the private sector must overcome as the dollar drops in value.
Of course the private sector has to generate all the capital…..where do you think it comes from? It comes from consumers buying products and services mark………….and they buy them in the private sector mark……
printing money…..too funny.
MarkV
June 14th, 2012
10:28 pm
md @ 7:16 pm
It is obvious that you do not understand the meaning of the words you use. Generate is one of them.
Generate: To cause to exist; bring into being
Money is currency. How do you cause currency to exist by private enterprise?
And you still have failed to answer those other questions.
“Printing money does nothing but add supply……and devalue the currency…”
Another example of your incomprehension and inability to express thoughts. “Printing money” may under some circumstances devaluate the currency, but only under those specific circumstances. Where do you thing the money came from in the first place? The private sector just “generated” it out of thin air? How can you write these ridiculous sentences?
MrLiberty
June 15th, 2012
9:21 am
md – give it up on MarkV. If he wants to get a real education that doesn’t involve economic smoke and mirrors he will go to http://www.mises.org and avail himself of all the free articles and books that will provide him with a sound Austrian school economics training. If not, he will remain an ignorant Keynesian believing the lies of government and the media that public sector spending is good for the economy.
Education is at the heart of the battle. Keep up the good fight, but realize that sometimes you just have to walk away because some are too emotionally tied to their world-view to have it destroyed by facts and reality. Ultimately the collapse of the US economy will come – just like in Greece, Spain, Italy, and hundreds of failed empires before it. Maybe then MarkV will see the truth of what the massive public sector spending has done to our economy as well.
And here’s a quick one for you MarkV – yes, the private sector absolutely CAN do everything the government sector does. The difference is that if we have a fully free market with open competition among numerous business to provide “needed” services, it would be the market that would be deciding what services were ACTUALLY needed/required and the competitive market would also be determining the value of those services and their price. Picking up garbage is certainly something most everyone would be willing to VOLUNTARILY pay for from a private company, I can imagine hundreds if not thousands of things most folks would NOT be willing to voluntarily pay for that are currently considered “essential” by politicians and other who benefit from the service being taxpayer financed (involuntarily). That is the essential point MarkV. When one looks to Greece and other welfare state countries like the US, that is exactly the root of the problem. Those of us who create wealth through the productive private sector do not begrudge those companies who freely compete to secure our business (and who we can voluntarily REFUSE to purchase services from). What we are upset with are those government services we do not want, do not want to pay for, and have no other option but to pay as that payment is ultimately enforced at the point of a gun.
Hope that provides some clarity.
Check out mises.org. There is a lot you could learn.
MrLiberty
June 15th, 2012
9:27 am
MarkV:
Here are a couple of great books on the origin and nature of money (all free):
http://mises.org/daily/1333
http://mises.org/daily/3993/Menger-Explains-the-Origins-of-Money
And here is Mises’ great book on the subject:
http://library.mises.org//books/Gary%20North/Mises%20on%20Money_Vol_4.pdf
Just saying..
June 15th, 2012
9:28 am
Dusty
June 14th, 2012
12:00 pm: “Just saying, 11:53
I am glad you know that President OBAMA is still president. I was beginning to think that all liberals had forgotten about him. President OBAMA is seldom mentioned by liberals. Wonder why?
Is he still in Washington or you don’t know either?”
My goodness, aren’t you the informed voter!
MarkV
June 15th, 2012
2:03 pm
MrLiberty @9:27 am
Thank you. The issue here, however, is not the origin of money. The issue debated here is the money supply in a modern state. And we know where that comes from, don’t we?
MarkV
June 15th, 2012
2:06 pm
Just saying.. @9:28 am
Why not give Dusty a pass on a little innocent sarcasm? It is better than some of her really uninformed opinions
MrLiberty
June 15th, 2012
5:53 pm
MarkV – no, the issue has nothing to do with the “modern state.” The unbacked paper that governments/central banks create out of thin air is just paper. It has no wealth behind it, does not create wealth, but certainly is a mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the productive sector to the first recipients of the new money. Wealth only comes from the input of labor to transform raw materials into something useful/edible. These articles/books are about money in general and you would do well to read them. You definitely were not exposed to this clarity in school – none of us were.
md
June 15th, 2012
6:58 pm
Mr Liberty……I hear you loud and clear…..but sometimes I just feel like wasting a little time on these here blogs. Maybe there are a few that are not a lost cause……..I was once a card carrying democrat and loved the idea of getting stuff for free…….until I realized nothing is free.
Just saying..
June 16th, 2012
11:41 am
MarkV
June 15th, 2012
2:06 pm: “Just saying.. @9:28 am
Why not give Dusty a pass on a little innocent sarcasm? It is better than some of her really uninformed opinions”
She Is edging into the Linda nebula, isn’t she…?
MarkV
June 16th, 2012
10:41 pm
MrLiberty @5:53 pm
I would be willing to take you seriously, if you knew what you were talking about. Unfortunately, you do not. md was not talking about creating wealth – he wrote about “generating money.” Money is a measure of wealth, but wealth is not money. And please, do not give me advice about reading books, or about my education. You do not know me. But one of the marks of good education is to be able to express oneself accurately, and to recognize, what is the subject of the argument. Which you have failed to do.