Exit Port A: Republican

11 August 2009

Small Goverment, No Government

I just read this article on the Beeb about the possibility that protests against the democrats' health care plans might be phoney, staged events put on by "birthers" and bitter republicans. I confess, I don't really care. What did bother me is this line:

...'small government good, big government bad' is the Republican motto.

Are you sure? Lazily, I'm going to take some figures from the Wikipedia to show that this is profoundly misleading. Let's have a look at deficits as a percentage of GDP. Negative numbers indicate surpluses and positive ones indicate new debt. Generally speaking, a number under 3% (the EU's allowable limit) is pretty respectable. Let's eliminate the figures for Roosevelt/Truman because winding down WWII was bound to save a lot of money, and that trend continues through Eisenhower, so let's start with Kennedy/Johnson. The average deficit as percentage of GDP for democratic presidential terms since Kennedy is -5.7, for republicans in the same period, it's 7.0. In recent history, republican presidents lose slightly more money than democrat ones save. If we look at just the most recent two-termers for the most recent trend, we get -4.4 for Bubba and 9.3 for Dubya. You can give Clinton a handicap because he inherited a big deficit from Bush senior that he was able to turn around, whereas GWB inherited a handsome surplus from Clinton that he managed to run into the ground.

The so-called Blue Dogs have been getting a lot of press lately, and their message of fiscal conservatism is music to my liberal ears (though I do support universal health care for fiscal and normative reasons). I would like to submit, though, that even the reddest (as in "most commie") democrat would have a hard time beating a republican in terms of fiscal profligacy. There is an old idea in American foreign policy analysis that republicans can be more dovish because other countries expect them to be the toughest hawks, and democrats have to be more hawkish than they would like, because nobody will take them seriously otherwise, assuming they're a bunch of softies. The same seems to be the case in fiscal policy: people assume republicans will save, so they have the freedom to spend and bloat government. It's perverse. Don't buy it.

Other news that caught my eye (for the anarchically and totalitarian-inclined):
Living human rights advocates in Chechnya are becoming about as common as Aung San Suu Kyi's days at the beach.

There also seems to be a growing movement to have children-free zones in public places in Germany. Thank goodness! There was a smoking law in my hometown for a while that allowed restaurants and bars to admit minors or smokers. Being a childless smoker at the time, I was very satisfied. Even after having quit, I'd still prefer second-hand smoke to first-hand brattiness!

26 July 2009

The best or worst side of American democracy?

An article today by Nate Silver discusses Arlen Specter's voting patterns and the question of self interest in the actions of senators related to the danger of possible primary challengers. The article isn't long, so go ahead and read it.

The basic question (or comment i guess) that Silver poses is whether Arlen Specter's party switching and predicatable voting patterns (siding with Republicans when he has a republican challenger and with Democrats when hes up against a democrat) are necessarily a bad thing. The money quote is, "Arlen Specter is either just about the best reflection or the worst reflection on the state of our Democracy -- it's just hard to say which one."

I guess I'll leave the obvious comment aside that one would hope that senators act in the interests of voters as opposed to following the political winds, but i do wonder if there is a problem here at a deeper level of democracy. If the point is to give the voters what they want as a representative, Specter has seemed to do a pretty good job of it; he's been in office for a long time and sits on fairly important committees. He keeps getting reelected as well, and the way he's done it seems to be to protect his right and left flanks with votes for a short period of time (we'll see if his new found liberalism sticks around after his primary challenger is wiped from the field). This voting on both sides of the issue, however, makes Specter a fairly moderate voice in the Senate, something that has gotten rarer over the past few years (especially when he was still in the republican party). Some might say that there are already too many moderate democrats in the senate, but I tend to prefer moderation to the extremes on both ends. He's also seemed to have chosen the right side of a lot of issues over the years for his constituents, regardless of his party affiliation. He doesn't seem to pander to either side too much (unless we count his voting pattern itself as pandering). He's not wedded to a specific ideology, except maybe getting Arlen Specter reelected.

So I guess the question stands: is Arlen Specter a good or bad example?