Emperor Malarkey I

Do you know what Joe Biden has in common with Kevin McCarthy? 

They both were elected. 

That means what it means—nothing more, to be sure, but nothing less, either. 

President Biden says he will not negotiate with congressional Republicans over a bill to increase the debt ceiling. This is preposterous and indefensible, for several reasons: For one thing, taxing, spending, and borrowing are inherently congressional powers, not presidential powers. For another thing, Joe Biden is president—not king. The idea that a president would refuse to negotiate with Congress over congressional action is nonsensical from a constitutional point of view and autocratic from a political point of view. Congress is not there to do the president’s bidding—if anything, it is the other way around: The president is charged with the faithful execution of the laws Congress passes, not with barking orders at the branch of government that is actually charged by the Constitution with responsibility for this issue. 

President Biden’s argument is, in essence, “I won’t negotiate with these guys, because they are schmucks.” And they are schmucks. Kevin McCarthy is an old-school schmuck from Schmuck Street with a Ph.D. in schmuckery from Schmuck U. His familiar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is a schmuck. They are the leading figures in a schmuck caucus. 

And they are the schmucks that the American people elected to the positions they hold. 

There is no getting around that. The voters gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives, which has the first and foremost constitutional role in purse-string management. President Biden doesn’t like that. He doesn’t have to. He just has to do his job. 

No one is above negotiation, Biden’s inappropriately haughty posturing notwithstanding. And nobody elected to federal office is beneath negotiating with, either: Not Kevin McCarthy, not Marjorie Taylor Greene, not Chuck Schumer, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not Ilhan Omar. We live under a system of government that gives people choices about whom they send to Washington to represent them. The freedom to choose means the freedom to make dumb choices—President Biden should understand that, because he was, after all, one of those dumb choices. (Oh, settle down: There are 334 million Americans—the fact that the 2020 election ended up being a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was the result of a whole lot of dumb choices.) Nobody has to love the outcome. We all have to live with it. There is more than one way to refuse to accept the outcome of a legitimate democratic election. 

What Biden ought to do is to call McCarthy’s bluff and give him the big thing he is asking for: a cap of 1 percent in discretionary-spending growth. Why not sign that and, in doing so, send the ball back into McCarthy’s court and enjoy the spectacle of watching Republicans try to enforce some spending discipline without making any cuts to anything anybody cares about? Why not give Republicans the politically impossible task they are demanding for themselves? It would be good politics—and, if Republicans actually managed to contain growth in discretionary spending to 1 percent, it would be good policy, too. 

What we call “discretionary spending” means spending on programs other than entitlements, and it is a small part of the budget: $1.7 trillion in 2022, versus $4.1 trillion in so-called mandatory spending. (When it hits the fan, all spending is discretionary. But that’s a different column.) Republicans being Republicans, they also say they won’t cut defense or veterans’ programs, which takes about half of discretionary spending off the table. Non-defense discretionary spending in 2022 added up to less than $1 trillion of $6.3 trillion in outlays ($4.1 trillion mandatory, $1.7 trillion discretionary, $475 billion interest on the debt), so, focusing on that leaves most spending on the table. But, even so, capping discretionary spending growth at 1 percent will not be politically easy, especially if you aren’t willing to touch the biggest piece of discretionary spending, which is defense. 

As with any system of government based on formal procedure, there are choke points in our system, one of which is the need to periodically raise the debt ceiling. Bills to fund government operations are another. So are defense bills, to which all sorts of special-interest issues end up being attached so that anybody who votes against them can be accused of being an unpatriotic scoundrel who won’t pay the troops. President Biden knows this. So does Chuck Schumer: Both of them voted against debt-ceiling increases in the past and made unbearably sanctimonious speeches about why they were doing so. They can’t act like they don’t know how this game is played—it is their game. 

It is a stupid game. 

But playtime is over. I have no interest in carrying any political water for a hack like Kevin McCarthy or the collection of miscreants he leads in Congress, but it is President Biden here who is being the irresponsible obstructionist. 

Knock it off, Joe. 

Remember who you work for—and that you are the head of one branch of a democratic-republican government, not Grand Poobah God-King Emperor Malarkey I.

Economics for English Majors

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jackie Calmes repeats, in woeful hackish fashion, the predictable Democratic talking points about the debt ceiling:

Remember, first, that all the struggling underway is simply to get enough Republicans to help avert an economic catastrophe—by raising the debt limit so the nation can keep paying for past spending that presidents and Congresses of both parties racked up for years. In other words, to get Republicans to take an action that should be bipartisan. And nonnegotiable, as Biden says. When Trump was president, Republicans joined Democrats three times to hike the debt limit without drama.

(Words About Words has addressed that underway before: Better to write under way. But this is E4EM, not WAW.)

Calmes’ characterization is not quite right. This is not about paying for “past spending that presidents and Congresses of both parties racked up for years.” As I have argued before, there is no fiscal reason that failing to raise the debt ceiling should result in defaulting on the debt: We will have about $4.8 trillion in tax revenue this year and less than $650 billion in interest to pay on the debt, or $7.50 in tax revenue for every $1 in interest we have to pay to creditors. The spending that already has been racked up can be met without increasing the debt ceiling now or for a very long time, if ever. (To repeat an earlier point: When you actually have to take on new debt to keep good on your existing debt obligations, that is when you are positively hosed, as the economists say.) What is at issue is spending that has been authorized without the money’s having yet gone out the door. One of the fundamentals of democratic practice is that no parliament or legislature can forever tie the hands of subsequent parliaments and legislatures, that laws and programs put into place by one Congress can be undone by a future Congress. Yes, prior Congresses have made many promises; this Congress, and future Congresses, will be breaking some of those promises in the future as it becomes necessary to impose some fiscal sanity on the federal government. 

Of course, it would be foolish and counterproductive to use the debt ceiling to suddenly impose a radical cut in federal spending—and without Congress having passed new appropriations bills to enact those cuts rather than simply acting as agents of chaos. But there is nothing wrong, in principle, with Congress saying: “The Congress before us made a lot of big, expensive promises, but we think that was unwise, and we have been elected to represent our constituents by doing what we believe to be prudent and expedient. So, we’re not actually going to spend that money.” There is a procedure for doing that, and it is entirely fair to criticize House Republicans for being grandstanding buffoons who don’t give a fig about procedure or legislative process—or basic responsibility.

But that isn’t an argument against rescinding previously authorized spending—that is an argument against chaos and misgovernance. 

Not to mention … 

Economic inequality is habitually listed alongside climate change and China as the big challenges facing the United States, at least if you are talking with, say, a Council on Foreign Relations type such as Robert Rubin. 

But is it? 

The United States has high (and rising, since the 1990s) income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, a metric about which there is much to criticize but which will do for our purposes here. But as income inequality has grown, absolute standards of living have increased and absolute measures of poverty have decreased. So what we have seen is modestly higher inequality in a well-off society in which living standards at the lower end of the income distribution have risen significantly—i.e., a country in which the population as a whole is making steady economic progress while there has been disproportionate growth at the very high end of the income distribution. (Similar though not identical findings hold true for wealth, as distinct from income.) You can read that as a story of economic oligarchy, the way Bernie Sanders does (he calls it “allah-garky”), or you can read that as a story of successful entrepreneurship, because a huge driver of tippy-top incomes and shockingly large personal fortunes from the 1990s until now has been the fact that a relatively small number of Americans founded companies of global importance in those years. If Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., all had been launched in Iceland, then Iceland would probably be the most unequal country in the world, albeit a very rich and happy one. 

A lot of that wealth gets spread around in obvious and non-obvious ways: Big pension funds such as CALPERS, for example, are venture-capital investors, and thereby capture returns on successful startups for government employees of relatively modest wealth and income. But in a globalized economy, the returns to successful entrepreneurship (or successful investment) can be very, very large, and it is natural (and good!) that these returns accrue disproportionately to the people who take the risks and make the investments. Money moves around. Jeff Bezos is not the only person Jeff Bezos has helped to make richer over the years. 

If the choice is between a dynamic economy with rising standards of living and relatively high inequality or egalitarian stagnation, then you should choose the former—if human flourishing is what you really care about. 

Words About Words

Writing in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd offers this monstrosity: 

It seems so quaint now, the idea of respecting the president. Gallant has vanished; gladiatorial is in. Patriotism is no longer a premier American virtue. … When I flip on Fox News at night, I cringe at the way they make fun of President Biden, the sick delight they take in sniping at any perceived infirmity.

Patriotism is love of country, not admiration for the president, who is one elected official in the federal government. Until we liberate ourselves from the idolatry of the presidency, we will never have a healthy, normal civic culture. 

The president isn’t the country, the pope isn’t the church, the CEO isn’t the firm, etc. 

In other wordiness … 

Lamenting that a small number of elite economists went to a small number of elite schools (gotta find something!) Pete McKenzie writes in Slate:

A budding economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, he had been accepted into Ph.D. programs at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Oxford. He chose the latter.

Denunciations of elite universities should be written in good English, or better English, if not the best English. 

English has three degrees of comparison for adjectives: the positive, which asserts only a quality; the comparative, which asserts a quality in superior or greater degree; the superlative, which asserts a quality in the highest degree. Think: good, better, best; big, bigger, biggest; beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful, etc. 

Latter is comparative in character, being a variation of later: late, later, last, or late, latter, lattermost. The comparison-between-two-things nature of latter is embedded in its habitual pairing with former: “A house and a car are both big investments, but if you end up living in the latter rather than the former, you have done something wrong along the way. On the other hand, you can live in your car, but you can’t drive your house, unless it’s a Winnebago.”) 

So, if the sentence had been: “He had been accepted at Stanford and Oxford, and he chose the latter,” that would work just fine. But with more than two items on the list, you want last or lattermost. 

What you want to keep in mind is meaning rather than some abstract formality—because the same guidance applies even when you are not working with a list of discrete items. (Incidentally: I write discreet when I mean discrete about half the time, and always have to check myself.) For example, you might write that something happened in the “late 19^th century” if that is all you want to indicate, or in “the latter half of the 19^th century” if it is important to note the halfway mark, or in “the last years of the 19^th century” if you want to emphasize the sense of finality or terminality. 

And furthermore … 

Yes, I know the literal meaning of schmuck. And it is the word I meant. We don’t use schmuck literally in English. 

Elsewhere

Do you know what would help Republicans win mayors’ races in big cities? Running candidates. But they don’t, even in conservative states such as Texas. They should contest those races. A radical idea, I know. More in the New York Post. 

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

You can buy my other books here. 

You can see my New York Post columns here. 

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t. 

In Closing

Donald Trump really, really likes the Village People. Also the music from Cats. I get the feeling there is a missing chapter of his biography waiting to be written.