Deficit Discourse (3) ~ The Oligarchy Comes Into View

Yesterday I posted a graphic from The New York Times showing that regardless of party affiliation the public thinks job creation and economic recovery are considerably more important than deficit reduction. It turns out that the public is pretty smart. They know where the shoe pinches.

But suppose one were really, really wound up about deficits? In the past I have posted graphics [1] [2] showing the sources of our current deficit woes - primarily military adventures abroad and the Bush tax cuts bequeathed to us by Republicans and more or less enthusiastically embraced by the Obama administration. (Let's be fair, it was less enthusiasm than political incompetence on the part of Democrats that insured the tax cuts would be renewed last winter.Lesson? If you have a majority use it to advance important policy goals because you may well lose it and then you are screwed.) In any case, the underlying problem has not altered on bit as the graphic I've lifted here makes clear. As this graphic indicates (the grey portion at bottom) the non-war, non-oligarchic (tax cut) portions of the pubic debt account for a declining portion of the deficit going forward.

So, why has the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats allowed the Red-state types set the economic agenda? The mandate of the 2010 elections hardly is as crystalline as the deficit hawks claim. End the wars rescind the tax cuts and we need not be cutting programs that impact only poor, working class and middle class Americans. But that is bound to infuriate our oligarchs. And there is the nub of the problem: the Democrats are not interested in doing that.

Yet they may not have a choice. Because it also is becoming clear that job creation, even as an explicit policy, is not a sufficient remedy for our political economic problems. As Dani Rodrik has pointed out here and Mark Thoma amplifies his point here, a good portion of the problem is distributive. And in order to remedy that pattern it is necessary to step on some oligarchic toes.

Front Stoop Politics in Brooklyn

I have posted here a number of times about the anonymous artist JR and his work. In The New York Times today there is a story about a current project of his in Park Slope, Brooklyn celebrating local shop keepers in the face of what passes for economic development.* I am not so convinced that the imagery transcends class - it seems that the pressures on the shopkeepers reflect deep class divisions, with the less well off pressured by larger economic forces working to the benefit of the better off. And I am not sure that the project will mitigate the displacement caused by the development project in the neighborhood.

But I am impressed by the way the project brings voices and faces into public, indeed by the way that seemingly private concerns are re-framed as a public matter. And in that sense, while the project is not in itself directly political, it may afford some basis on which people in this neighborhood might, in the words of C. Wright Mills, more successfully translate their "personal troubles" into "public issues."** In fact, as the report in The Times makes clear, the images and the people installing them seem to have actually established public space, however fleeting, in which people can interact in new ways. And that is political to the core.
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* The actual execution here seems to be by Inside Out. The images here are lifted from this post by Emily Nonko.
** In that sense the images here bring to mind those that I note in this post.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

This graphic (click for a legible version) is telling. I accompanies this frank Op-Ed from The New York Times. If the Democrats really wanted to relegate the Republicans to more or less total irrelevance they would ignore the right wing deficit hawks and take steps to mitigate economic hardship for the bulk of the population. That, after all, seems to be a universally popular policy stance. Forget doing something because it is the right thing to do. Craft a politically popular policy and sell it. Apparently, the Democrats cannot even pursue their own political interests.