People who would try to deny The Washington Post is a liberal newspaper should look no further than the star columnist of the Business section, Steven Pearlstein, and his Wednesday column, headlined "GOP to jobless: Drop dead." A reader who thinks this will be a plea for further extensions of unemployment benefits would be wrong. Pearlstein's attacking Republicans for criticizing the Federal Reserve's "stimulus" attempts and for -- fact checkers, please? -- "more tax cuts for the rich," a curious description of leaving the present tax rates where they are.
This is nothing new, this bomb-throwing from a Post business editor. After all, this is the same columnist who blasted Republicans last year as “political terrorists” who are “poisoning the political well” by peddling “lies” about liberal health care plans, lies that are “so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage.” When you disagree with him, you're a "terrorist," and now you want the jobless to "drop dead." It sounds like Jon Stewart may want to make a "Rally for Sanity" phone call.
On Wednesday, Pearlstein really unleashed on "radical" conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh in his focus on the Fed:
The first efforts to turn Ben Bernanke into a modern day William Jennings Bryan came from those giants of economic thinking, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. A few days later the mantle was taken up by a group of Republican economists and policy wonks who gathered at the University of Pennsylvania Club in Manhattan to craft a public letter criticizing the Fed.
Then last weekend at the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul, the Republican campaign for "hard money" received aid and comfort from foreign leaders concerned that quantitative easing might substitute American jobs for Chinese and German ones. Also jumping on the bandwagon was Robert Zoellick, the American president of the World Bank, who no doubt hoped to boost his prospects as the next Republican Treasury Secretary by floating the idea of a partial return to the gold standard.
Finally Tuesday, Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking Republican in the House, and Sen. Bob Corker, an influential Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, announced a proposal to strip the Fed of its "dual mandate" that would have the central bank focus solely on ensuring price stability without the distraction of also worrying that 15 million Americans are unemployed and underemployed. "The Fed's dual mandate policy has failed," Pence declared, citing the stubbornly high unemployment rate. It's not exactly clear how unemployed workers would benefit from the Fed's benign neglect.
If you want a serious discussion about changing the structure or mandate of the fire department, the time to have it is not when the entire squad is out fighting a three-alarm blaze. That's exactly the situation with the Federal Reserve and the debate over the dual mandate. Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.
This criticism of the timing of the Fed criticism would make more sense if Pearlstein hadn't just finished explaining that the Fed deserved criticism, just not from those stupid people on the right:
This policy of "quantitative easing," has its detractors, including this columnist, who warned that it would prove more effective at creating asset bubbles at home and abroad than at stimulating productive investment and job creation. There was even some skepticism within the Fed when the policy was finally approved two weeks ago. Now, however, those disagreements have been seized upon by Republican ideologues and partisan opportunists who are intent on punishing the Fed for its participation in the bank bailouts and discrediting all forms of Keynesian monetary and fiscal stimulus.
Pearlstein championed "inconvenient truths" which are not "truths," but merely forecasts from favored experts that extending the life of the Bush tax cuts will do nothing to ease unemployment, such as Eric Toder of the "nonpartisan" Tax Policy Center, a former Clinton appointee. He suggested conservative arguments that hiking taxes on the "rich" small businesses will harm job creation is "largely bogus." Naturally, Pearlstein expected that Republicans should forego the "partisan opportunism" and embrace the economic proposals of "centrist" Democrats like Sen. Mark Warner:
In fact, if Republicans were truly interested in reducing the deficit while stimulating private-sector job creation, they would have jumped to embrace the idea floated last week by Sen. Mark Warner, the centrist Democrat from Virginia: let high-end tax rates return to where they were during the Clinton years and use the $65 billion in additional income over the next two years for tax breaks for businesses that increase investments or hire new employees. After that, the extra revenue would go toward deficit reduction.
And how many of Warner's Republican colleagues have called to express interest in his idea? So far, not a one.
