Sumner thinks that Obama has been unmasked:
"Clinton said the era of big government is over. Obama seems determined to prove Clinton wrong. (Don’t ya just love it when progressives insist Obama is a centrist. Yes, he’s right in the center of progressivism.) This data has support for both sides. It shows that a country can be fairly rich, and still have a very large government. But it also suggests that if Obama pushes the size of government substantially higher, there may be a price to pay. We’ll still be rich, but not as rich. More like France than Switzerland or Norway. I’m not sure how voters would react to that outcome."
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=18942
Aha! He's not a centrist!! For me I never considered him a "centrist" at least as Sumner defines a centrist. Obama's a liberal. Interestingly, my argument over the last 2 years was with liberals who didn't think he was a real liberal. They thought he was a centrist or even a conservative. So far from feeling that Obama has been unmasked I feel vindication in his forceful stand for liberalism. I'm glad he is a liberal and I welcome the end of the Reagan Revolution.
What's striking in Sumner's little missive is how similar it sounds to what Rush Limbaugh said. He too thinks Obama has been unmasked.
"There should have been something for everyone in President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. For liberals, a full-throated call to arms. For conservatives, vindication."
"Obama settled once and for all the debate over his place on the political spectrum and his political designs. He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country irrevocably to the left. In other words, Obama’s foes — if you put aside the birthers and sundry other lunatics — always had him pegged correctly."
"If you listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, you got a better appreciation of Obama’s core than by reading the president’s friends and sophisticated interpreters, for whom he was either a moderate or a puzzle yet to be fully worked out."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/rush-limbaugh-was-right-86641.html#ixzz2J78cbdqV
If the political defeat of conservatives gives them vindication, more power to them. I think it vindicates liberals but hey, you say tomato I say... I have a hard time seeing how someone like Hannity who spent the last year predicting a Romney landslide is suddenly a seer because he was wrong and the Reagan Revolution is over but hey conservatives are sophisticated people. Way too much so for a simple minded liberal like me to understand.
Still reading Rush and Sumner the question begs: Did Scott write this after hearing Rush or do great minds just think alike?
In our last piece we looked at Sumner's not so impressive attempts to somehow suggest that there's some meaningful correlation between less government spending and more wealth.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/01/sumner-on-government-spending-and-wealth.html
This effort has inspired the American Enterprise Institute who no doubt need some reason for optimism these days.
"Sumner’s big point is that the few countries that continued to gain on America were either more aggressive, pro-market reformers (Chile and Britain), or were developing countries that adopted the world’s most capitalist model."
"See, few expected this. In 1980, there were plenty of forecasters who thought the American standard of living would decline over coming decades. Just look at all the dystopian films back then: Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Americathon, Escape from New York. Gloomy stuff."
"But by the mid-1980s, those films were giving way to ones depicting a much sunnier tomorrow such as Back to the Future, Part II and the Star Trek revival. Indeed, from 1983-2007, U.S. real GDP grew by 3.3% a year, 2.2% on a per capital basis. Now, this was not as fast as the 1950s and 1960s when GDP growth averaged near 4%. But as Sumner explains, “Growth has been slower, but that’s true almost everywhere. What is important is that the neoliberal reforms in America have helped arrest our relative decline."
"And the key reforms, by the way, are lower marginal tax rates and less intrusion by government into markets and the private sector via deregulation, eliminating price controls, and privatization.
Why would the president want to reverse course instead of recommitting America to the successful policies of the past decades?"
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/04/i-wish-obama-could-time-travel-back-to-1980/
The fact that they can actually ask this question seriously-not a joke-shows why the GOP and conservatives are in such bad shape. They truly believe we've been living in a golden age.
I left this comment in response to Sumner's post that claimed Reaganism was some big success-he actually uses the words "amazing success."
" Is this a trick question? Obviously most Americans missed the golden age he’s looking back on so nostalgically. I think the fact that you ignore things like median income is a problem for your analysis Scott."
"You believe that consumption per capita is a better gauge which using shows that Americans haven’t been doing so bad. Yet most Americans think they’ve been doing pretty bad, certainly over the last 10 years.
"While I know that the Marco establishment is rather cavalier about something as ephemeral as the American people’s own opinion about how the economy is doing-I know “there’s no such thing as public opinion”-it seems to me that if people don’t think they’ve been doing so well, but consumption per capita suggests they’ve been doing fine, then maybe there’s something wrong with the consumption per capita gauge as a better metric."
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=5164&cpage=4#comment-222957
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