Our New Ruling Class...

...is, according to Robert Samuelson, the mighty Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It warps American public policy by successfully lobbying for policies that take the wealth of the deserving rich and give it to the middle class and the poor.

Robert Samuelson:

We here in Washington are anticipating a stampede of lobbyists, influence peddlers, media consultants, paid "experts" and self-styled crusaders. Who brought us this onslaught of special pleaders? Why, it's Barack Obama, the man who vowed to "change" how Washington works and banish from the political arena all those "special interests" that were depicted as a form of low-life devoid of all respectability.... The more powerful government becomes, the more lobbying there will be.... Obama's ambitions for more expansive government will promote special pleading.... Lobbyists have a bad rap.... Myth number one is that lobbying is anti-democratic, because it frustrates "the will of the people." Just the opposite is true: lobbying is an expression of democracy. We are a collection of special interests.... A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy... the facts contradict that.Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants.... As for the poor and middle class, they do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees and near retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Close down Newsweek. Close it down yesterday. Close down the Washington Post. Close it down ten years ago. Sow the furrows with salt. Each day that they dirty more paper with their garbage is an offense against Nature and Nature's God!

Comments

[John Howard Brown]

AARP actually fits the Public Choice models of rent seeking better than any model of advocacy for us olden folks.

BTW, Brad, have you destroyed your chances of a sub-cabinet appointment by being so outspoken here? It would be a shame if true, you have a lot to offer in the public policy arena.

[DrDick]

I think you are perhaps overly generous here. Burning them to the ground and piling up the skulls of the editorial, reporting, and commentary staff might be a good start. We can move on from there to salting the earth.

[low-tech cyclist]

How about if we just shut down their opinion pages? The rest of the paper isn't so bad, really.

But can anyone explain to me why anyone bothers to publish anything that Robert J. Samuelson writes? Guy's not just an ignoramus on the economic matters that are supposedly his area of expertise, but he's very, VERY boring to read.

As a WaPo subscriber, I'd like the opportunity to vote Samuelson off the op-ed island.

[kharris]

There is serving one's masters, and then there is publishing evidence of one's bought-and-paid-for status in a public place. This guy has apparently stopped having any sense of how people other than his masters will perceive him.

[leo]

Wow, those poor people have their own lobby? Jerks.

[Robert Waldmann]

I think I am going to take Samuelson's argument seriously. Obviously, I'm not going to pretend that the CBPP is powerful enough to balance business interests, but he does make a more general and less obviously stupid claim which happens to be stupid and false.

"The more powerful government becomes, the more lobbying there will be." He left out "other things equal". This is actually a deliberate equivocation. He isn't saying a) that the amount of lobbying depends only on the power of government and he isn't saying that b) if everything else is the same then the amount of lobbying would depend on the power of government. Rather he means b) when he is casually asserting the claim relying on the fact that b) does seem to be obviously true and he means a) when he predicts an increase in lobbying.

Now the amount of lobbying (in number of lobbyists and their fees) has increased enormously since 1994. The power of government has increased too if by power you mean uhm power to lock people up without trial and such. But that's not the kind of power he is talking about (the ACLU and CCR aren't big players in dollars spent). He means the budget of government and the economic activism of government. Taht decreased from 94 through 200 while lobbying was increasing.

Of course other things weren't equal. In particular, the power was held by a gang of crooks who sold legistlature to the highest bidder. The volume of lobbying had a lot more to do with the power of Tom DeLay than with the power of government.

A third thing. It is not clear that e.g. the power to tax is increased when taxes are increased. Congress had the power to tax and regulate back when it cut taxes and regulations. Lobbyists clients care about the difference with and without lobbying. Consider straight up corruption "I can tax you but I won't if you pay me" is just as convincing as "I am taxing you, but I'll stop if you pay me." What matters is the range over which policy might shift due to corrupt office holders. Even if they were just as many crooks in the next congress as the last (which there aren't) the fact that policy shifts away from Laissez Faire doesn't mean it is easier to move it with money. Pure laissez faire like a requirement that everyone have equal income and wealth no matter what would eliminate corruption as both would be rigid policy rules allowing no special favors. That tells us nothing about the relative gains from lobbying for policies which are somewhere in between.

Finally, worse than claiming the CBPP is a powerhouse, worse than ignoring the actual history of lobbying completely when making forecasts, Samuelson defines increased taxes on the rich, universal health insurance and cap and trade as an increase from the limited government which only locked up citizens indefinitely without trial and tortured prisoners.

OK OK I see. I should never start trying to list Robert Samuelson's errors. It's like eating potato chips.

[Noni Mausa]

That was an OP-ED? I thought it was a rather inept blog posting.

His thesis, of course, is nonsense. AARP and the unions speak mostly for the well-to-do, who are still well-to-do because of such organizations. The deeply poor seldom organize. I had a friend who advocated for them for a couple of decades, and tried to organize them, but to participate in such an association requires at least a little bit extra in one's life -- whether time, energy, a little money, or just enough hope to get you out the door. For someone on welfare to go out once a week for coffee and a muffin, would have cost about a quarter of the money left for food after the rent and utilities were paid -- a big cost for a slim return.

"Those poor people have thousands of food banks -- nobody supplies food banks for us lobbyists!" [frowneyface]

Noni

[Stlinquirer]

Time to get out in front of this and reap the rewards...(or perhaps shorter Robert Samuelson)

"Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the SDJ of Economist Brad DeLong, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The United States has been taken over — 'conquered', if you will — by a master race of giant wonks representing the poor. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume us captive earth men or merely enslave us. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the wonks will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new CBPP overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted web blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to...toil in their underground position paper caves."

Hail Wonks!

[Neil B]

Of course lobbying is not a true expression of "democracy." The core principle of democracy is "one person one vote." The principle behind lobbying is, "one dollar one vote." There's a hell of a difference. Samuelson is just that certain type of semi-intellectual wank that you despise even if you can't hate him like a genuinely evil flack or wrangler.

BTW, the following thread about science and economics is very interesting, very developed back and forth from cogent participants, I've got some good zingers against the Lousy-Fare proponents there myself:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2008/12/can-science-help-solve-economic-crisis.html

[john]

Ticky-tack: I'd say the principle behind lobbying is more that there's a market for legislation, just like for everything else that has an economic impact on large numbers of people. As such, it's a true expression of free markets, not of democracy.

[save_the_rustbelt]

When Madoff gets out of prison in 30 years, can he use the poor people's lobbyists?

Just wondering......

[The Raven]

Well, welcome to the left. Pay's lousy, but the company's good, and we have all the good songs. Well, some lefty critters have good songs, anyway. Krawk!

[Lee A. Arnold]

Brad, I think you should take pity on these poor benighted boneheads such as Samuelson and Krauthammer who are completely out of ideas not to mention without a connection to the real world because if you will please disregard their vile and meretricious standards of rationality not to mention their extraordinary culpability by virtue of their pundit positions in cheerleading the foul and incomprehensible disaster of the last eight years since these clowns have feelings too and might get laughed at at parties and after all because they are still paid walloping scads of cash money to come up weekly with something that the rightwing nutcases elsewhere can start propagating in the memosphere to beat the Democrats with even though the rest of us must laugh at these backward pathetic and ridiculous attempts to find something that will stick together as their new workable political storyline because if you would just stop beating on these poor bastards and think about it for a minute it is very very very hard labor to affect the appearance of truth using an economic ideology that has finally and justly imploded while possessing neither a shred of evidence nor a lick of personal brainlobe to really go any further.

[Dennis Szilak]

When the words controlled by the reptilian brain are spoken to the reptilian understanding of others in the interest of the purely reptilian this nullity images it has attained a level of social evolution uncommon to a cohort of vipers. Yet there would be less for the amusement and edification of less naturally maladaptive creatures if the Washington Post did not provide this classy exhibition of hissing and writhing in a safe environment.

[Chris]

I mourn the increasing danger faced by newspapers, but face it, as long as they're continuously publishing douchebags and hacks like Krauthammer and Samuelson, they're *not* helping their own cause...

We get it, Chuck, you think Democrats are mentally unhinged.

We get it, Rob, you hate anyone who doesn't take losing the class war gracefully.

But you're stealing money from the Post as long as you keep retyping that shit.

(Actually, I get the impression the Post may not mind all that much...)

[kharris]

Robert W's comment suggests we need to think about lobbying in terms of marginal utility. I don't know how to model private demand for access to government power, but I think supply is pretty obvious. The relevant supply of government power to private interests through lobbying is a function of the overall amount of government power being exercised or likely to be exercised, and the amount of access granted to that power through lobbying. The first term, Robert's "economic activism", diminished, while the second term, Robert's "Tom Delay", increased. What we seem to glean from the rise in lobbying is that the marginal product of lobbyingn rose while activism diminished and and Delay incerased.

The marginal product of lobbying is more sensitive to "Delay" than to activism. If were take the Romer approach and look into the policy statements the relevant actors, we find that the sensitivity of lobbying outcomes to "Delay" is entirely understandable. "Delay" meant for lobbying to provide increased access to the spoils of government economic activism.

[the idler]

Almost delusional in his lack of reality perception. Samuelson joins Alan Reynolds and Amity Shlaes as a denizen of economic Bizarro World.

[Moral Panicker]

Support Newsweek! Support the Washington Post! They do important work providing shared non-judgmental information about the world to their readers that new media cannot do and that old media cannot do as well as they can when new media are turning people against old media.

Opinion articles are meant to provide support to people who generally agree with their authors and to provide diversity in public culture. What Samuelson writes is not ridiculous. It's just the same old affectation of callousness to other people's problems passing as perceptiveness. Of course DeLong, does not care for diversity. Otherwise he would not work for a university, the bold credentializer for civilization which gives bachelor's degrees in exchange for replacing diversity with globalized angst (at a steep price).

[Moral Panicker]

Even if disagreeing with DeLong (and me) makes your contribution to the press corps bad, that does not mean the entire press corps is stuck in some unfortunate counter-productive situation. Why oh why can't we have a better Berkeley faculty? (John Yoo everybody, and no it doesn't matter than DeLong has come out against academic freedom to try to get Yoo fired. It's all about the institution.)

[Kyle]

Love him? Hate him? How do YOU feel about our soon to be former President? Take part in a chance to immortalize your views in book form by visiting http://goodbyegeorgew.com/ and letting your opinion be read!

[the idler]

Dear Moral Panicker:

Join Kyle at http://goodbyegeorgew.com and immortalize your angst.

[RW]

The right-wing knows that re-infecting the country sufficiently to get citizens to vote against their self-interests will involve many false starts, many infectious agents such as Robert Samuelson scattering conceptual viruses to bore into and weaken the democratic immune system but, for a little while perhaps, the drug cocktail promised by the Obama medical team may suffice to return us to a semblance of health.

And in the meantime I vote Lee A. Arnold today's "William Faulkner of the Blogosphere" for that single-sentence, stream of consciousness comment above.

[Shuar Health Project]

Favorite line:
>

So, Dr. DeLong, which media sources would you recommend that would be not be offensive to our Creator?

[bakho]

It pains Samuelson to know he will be asked to pay his fair share of taxes going forward.

[AndrewBWAndrewBW]

Everyone knows the saying "Money talks and bullshit walks." Yet it never ceases to amaze me how many people are convinced that the people with the least money in this country are the most powerful. If Robert Samuelson is convinced that that's the case, maybe he should just donate his entire year's salary to charity. Think what great things he could accomplish then!

[J. Powers]

"We are a collection of special interests."

No person who genuinely sees things this way can engage, in any meaningful way, in politics. There is no _res publica_ in a solipsism.