Barack Obama, Leninist?

Posted by David Boaz

In his much-discussed New Yorker article on the strategy memos that have shaped the Obama administration, Ryan Lizza writes:

Most of Obama’s conservative dinner companions from his evening at George Will’s home now describe him and his Administration in the most caricatured terms. Will declared Obama a “floundering naïf” and someone advancing “Lenin-Socialism.”

Really? Mild-mannered George Will compared President Obama to Lenin? That set off my skepticism meter. So I summoned the vast fact-checking resources of the Cato Institute and Googled the phrase. Which quickly turned up this video:

And as you can clearly hear at 1:30, Will isn’t saying “Lenin socialism.” He’s making the much milder and entirely valid charge of “lemon socialism,” which he described as “transferring wealth from the successful to the unsuccessful.” That’s an old term for the government takeover or bailout of failing firms. On the left it’s often described in terms such as “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” or “privatizing profits and socializing losses.” People on the right deplore the practice of bailing out unsuccessful firms with taxpayers’ dollars.

That’s a point that Will also made in his column, first when the Bush administration started bailing out failing banks and auto companies. And it’s also been made by Charles Krauthammer on the auto bailout and again on the Solyndra deal. And by Cato adjunct scholar Lawrence H. White. And by lots of Cato-at-Liberty bloggers. Even Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.

Where was the skepticism of a New Yorker reporter when he thought he’d found the prudent, mild-mannered George Will comparing the president to Lenin? Where were the famous New Yorker fact-checkers? Some things, I guess, are just too good to check. So to answer the question in the title, Is Barack Obama a Leninist? No, just a lemonist.

Democratic Deficit Hawks?

Posted by David Boaz

In a hagiographic profile of Obama budget director Peter Orszag, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker writes of the “pressure” he might get from congressional deficit hawks:

The respective heads of the House and Senate Budget Committees, John Spratt, Jr., of South Carolina, and Kent Conrad, of North Dakota, have spent years trying to control the deficit…

Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has made eradicating the federal budget deficit his life’s work.

Now, you’d think that if the ranking Democrats on the congressional budget committees had made deficit reduction their life’s work, the budget wouldn’t have, you know, skyrocketed over the past decade and more. So let’s go to the tape.

The National Taxpayers Union has given Spratt an F for his votes on federal spending every year for more than a decade. (He had a couple of D’s earlier in his career.) In the past two years, he voted with the taxpayers 5 and 6 percent of the time. He voted for spending bills more often than the average member of the House, and more often than the average Democrat. Some deficit hawk!

Conrad has an almost identical record — almost all F’s, with ratings of 5 and 6 in the past two years.

By another measurement, in the 109th Congress (the most recent for which these calculations are available), Spratt voted for $184 billion in additional spending and voted to cut — drum roll, please — $4.8 billion in spending. Conrad voted to cut $8 billion, but he also voted to hike spending by $362 billion. In what world are these guys “trying to control the deficit”?

NTU does have one analysis that makes Conrad and Spratt look a little better: the bills they have sponsored or cosponsored. Spratt introduced 32 bills that would increase spending and 2 that would cut spending. While that may not sound very thrifty, it compares favorably to, say, Hilda Solis’s 110 bills to increase spending or Barney Frank’s 112. And the total new spending in Spratt’s bills — $7 billion — is positively Randian. Conrad’s record is similar — 36 bills to increase spending by $8 billion, which compares very favorably to, for instance, Hillary Clinton and Thad Cochran.

Apparently Conrad and Spratt don’t introduce too many spending bills, but they vote for all the ones that get to the floor. Not exactly a strategy that holds the budget down. The search for a fiscally conservative Democrat continues.