In his piece “There Is No Green New Deal,” Charlie writes:
What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrust upon our national conversation is not, in any sense, a “Green New Deal.” It does not resemble a Green New Deal. It does not approximate a Green New Deal. It does not so much as represent the shadows or the framework or the embryo of a Green New Deal. It is, instead, the inchoate shopping list of a political novice who has managed to get herself elected to Congress and believes that this has turned her into a visionary.
I agree with that, but it’s worth reminding folks that there was never any single coherent thing called “the New Deal.” From the beginning, FDR was clear that he was winging it. At Oglethorpe University, he famously set the tone for what they were up to: “bold, persistent experimentation.” He added, “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
Roosevelt fans on the left — and of late on the right — have lionized FDR’s “pragmatism” ever since. But this is a terrible credo for a nation committed to the idea that we live under the rule of law, not of men. Some avenues are supposed to be closed off from “experimentation.” Let’s try getting rid of the Bill of Rights for a bit and see if we can’t get great things done! Let’s be — as Tom Friedman puts it — “China for a Day.” Implicit in the idea of experimentation from Washington is the idea that planners should not be constrained. Implicit in the idea of a constitutional republic is that they should be. As we put it in our editorial on the Green New Deal, “The Left really has only one idea: control” — and that is the idea implicit in New Deal–style “experimentation.”
But there’s something else implicit in the idea of such experimentation: a total lack of policy coherence.
The New Deal cargo-cultists have a vexing habit of pointing at the things they like or liked about the New Deal and saying, “That’s the New Deal.” So they like Social Security but are silent — usually from ignorance — about the policies that caused blacks to protest the NRA (National Recovery Administration) as the “Negro Run Around” and “Negroes Ruined Again.” They like all the government makework for artists and writers but don’t talk about the little things, like Jacob Maged or the scuttling of the London Economic Conference, that helped deepen the Depression.
The simple fact, as I argued here, is there was no single New Deal (which is one reason why historians talk about the second New Deal, which produced most of the stuff people associate with the good New Deal). It was the steady pursuit of control and constantly updated wish lists. As FDR told Congress in 1936:
We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.
In other words, so long as we have the power, whatever we want to do is “wholesome and proper.” But if our political opponents get power, look out!
“I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”
The New Deal wasn’t a program, it was the by-product of ad hoc experimentation by people who thought their own power was self-justifying. And to look back on it as somehow more coherent than the would-be Green New Deal is to give it too much credit.
“To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of his rule, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940 — whether “the basic principle of the New Deal” was “economically sound,” he responded, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”
It was control. And wish lists. And it was ever thus.
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No comments on The (Green) New Deal wasn’t (and isn’t)
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On Valentine’s Day, this song, tied to no anniversary or birthday I’m aware of, nonetheless seems appropriate:
The number one British single today in 1968 was written by Bob Dylan:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Motown Chartbusters Volume 3”:
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Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to cut middle-income taxes by raising taxes on Wisconsin’s vital manufacturing sector is making some employers nervous.
And that’s not what the doctor ordered for a resurgent sector that not that long ago seemed to be on life support.
“I have an advanced manufacturer in my district in the process of trying to expand their business. Now they are are concerned, with the rhetoric coming out of the East Wing, they’re not sure if it’s the right to expand their business,” state Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) told MacIver News Service last week on the Vicki McKenna Show on NewsTalk 1130 WISN.
The markets may hate uncertainty, and business deplores it.
“This is not the time we should send out mixed messages within the state of Wisconsin that’s going to put any new development or growth on ice,” Testin said. “We should continue to pursue policies that are going to grow our economy.”
Evers campaigned on a pledge to cut taxes 10 percent on middle-income earners, amounting to about $225 in tax relief for the average filer. The Democrat’s plan, yet to be fully defined, would be paid for in large part by hiking taxes on manufacturers that make more than $300,000 annually. Those who do exceed the income limit would no longer receive the state’s manufacturing and agricultural tax credit. Evers says the cap would generate about $518 million to pay for his proposal, leaving nearly $375 million at present unpaid for.
An Assembly Republican tax relief packagewould also target middle-income earners, delivering a $300-plus income tax cut for the median income family, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Republicans fund their proposal using about $340 million annually from the projected $2.4 billion in additional tax revenue over the next couple of years.
The bill, which passed last week in the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on a party-line vote, is slated for floor debate this week in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Evers’ plan appears to be a nonstarter for Republicans.
“We are not going to raise taxes — period,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester). “We are not going to raise taxes, especially on our job creators, when we have a huge budget surplus.”
Capping the tax credit, critics say, could be disastrous for a rapidly expanding manufacturing sector that has helped the Badger State keep its unemployment rate at 3 percent or lower for nearly a year.
The state added 9,100 private-sector jobs in December, according to the latest preliminary data from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.Wisconsin’s unemployment rate remained at 3 percent.
Wisconsin added 44,900 private-sector jobs from December 2017 to December 2018, with weekly wages rising a robust 4.5 percent in year-over-year comparisons. Wisconsin’s private-sector wages grew on average by 5.7 percent in the first five months of 2018, according to Census Bureau data. That compared to 2.7 percent for the entire U.S.
Manufacturing has had a lot to do with the strong economy. …
A big reason for manufacturing’s resurgence in Wisconsin is tax policy change over the last eight years, particularly the manufacturing and agriculture tax credit that was among Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s top first-term initiatives. A 2017 University of Wisconsin-Madison analysis of the tax credit found it had accounted for the addition of more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs and more than 42,000 total jobs over a three-year period.
Capping the tax credit would have real-world implications on businesses that have helped build Wisconsin’s economic turnaround.
The vast majority of Wisconsin businesses in the U.S. — and Wisconsin — are pass-throughs, such as S-corporations and sole proprietorships. The tax structure passes income through to the businesses owners to be taxed under the individual income tax, not at the corporate rate. It reduces the effects of double taxation faced by traditional C-corporations.
In December’s extraordinary session, the Legislature passed a bill allowing pass-throughs the ability to choose between filing under the individual tax code or the higher 7.9 percent corporate rate. In that case, the businesses aren’t capped by the $10,000 limit on individual income tax deductions.
Most pass-throughs are small businesses with $10 million or less — much less in many cases – in sales or receipts. Evers’ tax increase on small manufacturers with taxable income of more than $300,000 would more than likely stymie job creation and production expansion in Wisconsin, Testin said.
That’s why it’s critical, Testin said, that the Legislature hold the line on any attempt to raise taxes.
“That’s the wrong approach right now. We don’t need to,” the senator said. “The (Legislative) Fiscal Bureau numbers show we are in sound fiscal ground right now. To upend the apple cart and send a chilling message to the business community in the state that we have an administration that wants to be tax happy, it’s the wrong call.”
Ask Bill Smith what he thinks about the legislative battle over tax cuts and he’ll tell you lawmakers should instead focus on repealing one of the state’s most inequitable taxes: The personal property tax.
“We urge the governor and the Legislature to get rid of the personal property tax and give Main Street some real relief,” Smith, state director of NFIB Wisconsin told MacIver News Service.
Wisconsin law has long taxed businesses on their personal property. The business community got a partial victory in the last session, when the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a $75 million repeal, exempting machinery, tools and patterns from the personal property tax code.
True fairness, Smith said, will come when the entire tax is wiped out.
“Doing so would impact every business on Main Street equally, without picking winners and losers,” he said.
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The number two single, believe it or don’t, today in 1961:
In an unrelated development that day, Frank Sinatra began Reprise Records, which included artists beside Sinatra:
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On Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced what many news outlets described as “legislation” for the Green New Deal, a wildly ambitious plan to eliminate the American fossil fuel industry within a decade or so. It’s worth noting that it’s not legislation as people normally understand the term. It’s a resolution titled “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” In other words, even if it passed — a considerable if — nothing would really happen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t taking it too seriously. She didn’t put Ocasio-Cortez on the new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and when asked about the resolution, she was dismissive.
“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
I bring this up for the simple reason that a lot of people on the left and right have every incentive to make this thing a much bigger deal than it is.
Still, given that almost everyone running for the Democratic presidential nomination feels obliged to say they’re for it, it’s worth taking somewhat seriously.
This raises the first of several problems: It’s not a very serious proposal. The goal is to eliminate the fossil fuel industry over a decade and, perversely, phase out nuclear power over a slightly longer period. All of the jobs dependent on these industries would be replaced by government-guaranteed jobs.
“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years,” the backers explain in an outline, “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.”
Well, at least the plan isn’t too ambitious. Retrofitting “every building in America” can be done in 10 years, but eliminating all the gassy cows will take a bit longer. Maybe we’ll move them all to Hawaii, which with the near-abolition of airplanes will be effectively cut off from America anyway.
Even if you take these goals seriously, as a practical matter it’s a fantasy masquerading as green virtue-signaling.
But it’s a fantasy based on a worldview that should be treated seriously because it’s so dangerous. NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Ocasio-Cortez whether she was comfortable with the “massive government intervention” critics say is required by such an undertaking.
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The number one R&B single today in 1961 was Motown Records’ first million-selling single:
The number one single today in 1972:
Birthdays begin with that well known recording star Lorne Greene:
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No, the headline is not an accident for this piece from David Harsanyi:
A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls — including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke, for starters — have already endorsed or expressed support for the “Green New Deal” (GND). [Thursday], Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.
It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal costs are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing are but trifling projects compared to a plan overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.
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Today in 1964 — one year to the day after recording their first album — the Beatles made their first U.S. concert appearance at the Washington Coliseum in D.C.:
The number one album today in 1969, “More of the Monkees,” jumped 121 positions in one week:
Today in 1972, Pink Floyd appeared at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, during their Dark Side of the Moon tour.
The concert lasted 25 minutes until the power went out, leaving the hall as bright as the dark side of the moon.
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The first gold record — which was only a record spray-painted gold because the criteria for a gold record hadn’t been devised yet — was “awarded” today in 1942:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Four Tops’ “Greatest Hits”:
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The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1964, three years to the day from their first appearance as the Beatles, the Beatles made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one single today in 1974 could be found for years on ABC-TV golf tournaments:
The number one single today in 1991:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 