http://www.thenation.com/article/37534/deficits-mass-destruction
Deficits of Mass Destruction
By Christopher Hayes
The Nation: July 15, 2010
If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to
learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive,
well- nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by
the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic
over government debt is shocking.
First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those
projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the
ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession.
The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to
expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will
require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with
single-payer systems do.
But right now we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a
long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause
tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire
cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank
sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government
spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but
that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics
even after you start to feel better.
And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic
grows louder by the day. Judging by its schedule and online video, this
year's Aspen Ideas Festival was an open-air orgy of anti-deficit moaning.
The festival is a good window into elite preoccupations, and that its
opening forum featured ominous warnings of future bankruptcy from Niall
Ferguson, Mort Zuckerman and David Gergen does not bode well. Nor does the
fact that there was a panel called "America's Looming Fiscal Emergency: How
to Balance the Books." This attitude isn't confined to pundits. The heads of
Obama's fiscal commission have called projected deficits a "cancer." The
hysteria has reached such a pitch that Republican senators (joined by
Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson) have filibustered an extension of unemployment
benefits because it was not offset by spending cuts. Keep in mind, the cost
of the extension for people unlucky enough to be caught in the jaws of the
worst recession in thirty years is $35 billion. The bill would increase the
debt by less than 0.3 percent.
This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation-if it can be called
that-about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the
run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once
accepted by the establishment as tolerable-Saddam Hussein-became
intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were
required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden
of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the
argument was lost.
We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid
official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn't
even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance
into the club of the "serious" requires not a plan for reducing unemployment
but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized
international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar.
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its
false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as
Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So
it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really
care about deficits; they care about austerity-about gutting the welfare
state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are
just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis.
Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as
much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should
never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates
on Americans." So there you have it.
Remember that the Iraq War might have been prevented had more Congressional
Democrats stood up to oppose it. Instead, many of those who privately knew
the entire enterprise was a colossal disaster in the making buckled to
right-wing pressure and pundit hawks and voted for it. That mistake is being
repeated. Despite White House economists' full realization of the need for
stimulus in the face of astronomically high unemployment, the New York Times
has reported that the political minds inside the White House, David Axelrod
and Rahm Emanuel, have decided that the public has no appetite for increased
spending. "It's my job to report what the public mood is," Axelrod
explained. He then showed up on ABC's This Week to wave the white flag,
saying that the president would continue to press to extend unemployment
benefits; conspicuously omitted was any mention of aid to state governments,
which had originally been included in the president's June letter to
Congress asking for a new stimulus package.
There is hope, however: the public is nowhere near as obsessed with the
deficit as are those in Washington. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, 60
percent of Americans support "additional government spending to create jobs
and stimulate the economy," with 38 percent opposed. A Hart Research
Associates poll published in June showed that two-thirds of Americans favor
continuing unemployment benefits. There is also very little public appetite
for "entitlement reform," a k a cutting Social Security.
The lesson of the Iraq War is that over the long haul, good politics and
good policy can't be separated. If the White House is tempted to support bad
policy in the short term because it seems less risky politically, it should
give John Kerry a call and ask him how that worked out for him with Iraq.
***
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/16-1
Last Month Was the Hottest June Recorded Worldwide, Figures Show
US government climate data suggests 2010 on course to be warmest year since
records began
by John Vidal
The GuardianUK: July 16, 2010
Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide and the fourth
consecutive month that the combined global land and sea temperature records
have been broken, according to the US government's climate data centre.
The figures released last night by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) suggest that 2010 is now on course to be the warmest
year since records began in 1880.
The trend to a warmer world is now incontrovertible. According to NOAA, June
was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface
temperature above the 20th-century average. The last month with
below-average temperatures was February 1985. Each of the 10 warmest average
global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last 15 years
with the previous warmest first half of a year in 1998.
Temperature anomalies included Spain, which experienced its coolest June
temperature since 1997, and Guizhou in southern China, which had its coolest
June on record. According to Beijing Climate Center, Inner Mongolia,
Heilongjiang, and Jilin experienced their warmest June since their records
began in 1951.
Scientists expressed surprise that the June land surface temperature
exceeded the previous record by 0.11C (0.20F). "This large difference over
land contributed strongly to the overall global land and ocean temperature
anomaly", said John Leslie, a spokesman for NOAA.
Seperate satellite data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center shows
that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic was at its lowest for any June
since satellite records started in 1979. The icy skin over the Arctic Ocean
grows each winter and shrinks in summer, reaching its yearly low point in
September. The monthly average for June 2010 was 10.87 km sq. The ice was
declining an average of 88,000 sq km per day in June.
In a further sign of a warming world, the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of
the largest in Greenland, lost a 2.7-square mile chunk of ice between 6-7
July - one of the largest single losses to a glacier ever recorded.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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