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The Republicans Are Deficit Hypocrites. The Democrats Should Be, Too.

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Barack Obama is dumbfounded. The Republicans harangued him for eight straight years over the federal budget deficit. Now, under President Trump, the deficit is skyrocketing—with nary a peep from the GOP. “This is supposed to be the party, supposedly, of fiscal conservatism,” he said in a speech in September. “Suddenly deficits do not matter, even though just two years ago, when the deficit was lower, they said I couldn’t afford to help working families or seniors on Medicare because the deficit was an existential crisis. What changed?”

The former president is not naive; he knows the answer. What changed was that Republicans, having swept the 2016 election, now fully control the government’s purse strings. By the end of Trump’s first year, the Republicans jacked the military’s budget by $80 billion and approved a $1.5 trillion tax cut. So it was no surprise when the Treasury Department reported last week that the deficit rose 77 percent in the first quarter of the fiscal year over the same period the previous year. This week, in its latest budget proposal, the White House had the gall to warn that we “must protect future generations from Washington’s habitual deficit spending,” but nonetheless projected the deficit would rise substantially over the next three years.

The question many are asking is whether the GOP’s about-face matters, politically speaking. As recent headline in The Week put it, “Will Republicans’ deficit hypocrisy haunt them this year?” The White House is confident that it won’t. Trump’s acting chief of staff, former Congressman Mick Mulvaney, spent years ripping Obama about the deficit. Asked recently why Trump’s 2019 State of the Union didn’t mention the deficit, he replied, “Nobody cares.”

The better question is whether the Democrats will continue to be haunted by Republicans’ deficit-shaming. The Democrats have long pushed deficit reduction in the hopes of convincing America that they are the true party of fiscal responsibility. America, like Mulvaney, has responded with a shrug. So instead of complaining about Republicans’ deficit hypocrisy, Democrats ought to mimic it.

The notion that the GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility is one of the most persistent myths in American politics. Republican presidential administrations have consistently driven up the deficit—the amount that government spending exceeds revenue—over the past four decades. The 1981 tax cut signed into law by Ronald Reagan, which slashed the rate for the highest earners from 70 to 50 percent, “led to an explosion in the budget deficit, hitting close to 6 percent of gross domestic product in 1983” The Washington Post’s Daniel Drezner observed last year. When that tax cut failed to pay for itself and the deficit ballooned, the Reagan administration responded with a series of largely forgotten tax increases—while also passing the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986, which further cut the top rate to 28 percent.

Reagan’s deficit shenanigans became the playbook for generations of conservative policymakers. “By creating a fiscal straitjacket through lower taxes, conservatives leave Washington with less money and raise the specter of deficits damaging the economy as a rationale to take away the benefits that millions of Americans depend on,” wrote Julian Zelizer in The Atlantic shortly before Trump signed his cuts into law. George W. Bush, meanwhile, squandered a budget surplus by gifting enormous tax cuts to the rich, then blew up the deficit to pay for two failed wars.

Democrats, meanwhile, have dutifully focused on reducing the deficit. Bill Clinton began his administration by signing a bill that increased taxes and cut spending; it squeaked through Congress with zero Republican votes. He would go on to embrace the language of fiscal discipline and benefit cuts, signing a welfare reform bill into law that has had devastating reverberations to this day. In a 1993 speech outlining an economic program that would lead to budget surpluses by the end of the decade, Clinton presented deficit reduction as a precursor to social spending. “We’re not cutting the deficit just because experts say it’s the thing to do, or because it has some intrinsic merit,” he said. “We have to cut the deficit because the more we spend paying off the debt, the less tax dollars we have to invest in jobs and education and the future of this country.” (During the 2016 campaign, his wife, Hillary Clinton echoed this line.) By the time Clinton left office, the $290 billion budget deficit he had inherited had been transformed into a $124 billion surplus.

Like Clinton, Obama dealt with a Republican Congress for much of his time in office and made similar concessions and overtures, tailoring budgets and programs like the Affordable Care Act to conservative demands for deficit reduction. Even though Democrats controlled both houses of Congress at the time, the hunt for Republican votes—and perhaps intoxicated by his belief that he could transcend partisan politics—guided much of the bill’s framing. (Obama did also have to contend with the then-powerful conservative Blue Dog Coalition.) The Affordable Care Act was convoluted and made less ambitious in part due to concerns about the deficit—concerns that also guided the administration’s decision to push for smaller stimuluses during the Great Recession than economists recommended, as well as its approach to budget negotiations. If the goal was to control the deficit, it worked. The deficit spiked early in Obama’s presidency due to a combination of Bush leftovers, economic stimulus, and automatic increases in social spending caused by the recession, but he left it roughly where he inherited it.

Where has this gotten Democrats, politically? Nowhere. Republicans have consistently rejected Democratic proposals that would reduce the deficit, and there’s no evidence that voters have rewarded Democrats for their fiscal responsibility. But Democrats continue to live in fear of being seen as the party of reckless spending and “free stuff.” At the start of the current Congress, Nancy Pelosi pushed the Democratic House to adopt archaic and unnecessary pay-as-you-go rules that would require any new spending to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts—a plan that would make bold new policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal impossible to pass. As The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner wrote last month, “Democrats’ restoring a PAYGO rule ignores a three decades history of getting fleeced, and is worse than nothing. It is like wearing a sign that says to Republicans, ‘Kick me.’ To the broad voting public it signals nothing at all.”

Instead of cowering in fear of Republican attacks, and trying to dig the country out of the holes caused by GOP tax cuts, Democrats should accept what their opponents already have: The deficit is a useful political weapon, and there is little to no penalty for being a deficit scold one minute and a deficit denier the next. Even many former deficits hawks, like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard, have come around to the idea that deficit spending and a growing national debt are not such a bad thing—certainly not to the extent that Republicans have claimed that they are.

What really matters is when to grow the deficit, and why. There are times when it’s unavoidable, like when automatic spending kicks in during a downturn. There are times when it’s sound economic policy, as when large fiscal stimuluses are necessary to pull the economy out of recession. And there are times when it’s a moral good, as it is now in the fight for universal health care and slowing climate change. So Democrats, by all means, should complain ad nauseam about the deficit explosion caused by Trump and the Republicans. But when Democrats regain power in Washington, whenever that may be, they should do exactly as Republicans are doing today: Increase the deficit to achieve their policy goals, and ignore the wails about their egregious hypocrisy.

The Aftermath Is a Superficial, War-Torn Love Story

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The first shot of The Aftermath is a dispassionate view of an aerial attack, a bombing run that blows the city below into smithereens. The city is Hamburg, which was set ablaze in 1943 and lay in ruins after the end of World War II. But, disfigured by rubble, it could be mistaken for almost anywhere—just one way the director James Kent tries to convey the terrible might of the bombardment. When a British woman named Rachael Morgan (played by Keira Knightley) arrives in Hamburg three years later, she beholds a place so ravaged by war that it’s hard not to have some sympathy for those who live there.

That might sound like a difficult premise to get on board with—that Rachael, visiting an occupied Germany still in the process of denazification, should be able to quickly set aside Britain’s enmity toward the country. But that’s the argument that The Aftermath, based on a 2013 novel by Rhidian Brook, attempts to make by having Rachael move to Hamburg with her military husband, Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke), and try to get along with the German family she has to share a home with. Then, the story enters even trickier territory, as Rachael begins to fall in love with her Teutonic host, Stephen Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård).

Stephen is haunted not by the sins of Nazi Germany, but by the personal toll the war took on him. That’s why The Aftermath begins with a devastating glimpse of the Hamburg firebombing campaign. Stephen and Rachael are both scarred by the conflict—he lost his wife in the blaze, and Rachael lost her son to a German bomb not long after. Those twin tragedies draw the pair to one another, and Kent’s film is primarily concerned with how shared loss can bind even the most disparate people together. But given that this is a drama set in the shadow of Nazism, embracing that idea may require too big an emotional leap for some viewers.

As Stephen repeatedly insists to the U.S. military forces occupying Hamburg, he was a reluctant Nazi. He was never an official member of the party, but rather someone who stood by mutely as his country fell to fascism. His stately home is requisitioned and handed to Lewis and Rachael as housing, but Lewis allows Stephen and his daughter to stay, arguing that the occupying British soldiers ought to be magnanimous in victory. Over the following months, a romance between Stephen and Rachael develops, starting with hostility, building to flirtation, and then blooming into a full-on, clandestine affair.

Star-crossed passion can be the stuff of great drama, but The Aftermath never digs into the muddy details of Rachael and Stephen’s relationship, or the fraught implications of falling for the enemy. The film has the glossy sheen of a 1950s Hollywood drama, with impeccable costuming, slightly leaden dialogue, and many charged looks exchanged from the opposite ends of sumptuous rooms. Skarsgård’s biggest asset as an actor is his icy, piercing eyes, and Kent (a British TV director who also made the 2014 World War I film Testament of Youth) takes full advantage of them, having Stephen gaze at Rachael mysteriously as often as possible to build up the sexual tension.

Even though Knightley and Skarsgård’s chemistry is strong enough to make the affair plausible, the plot mostly dances around the darker underpinnings of their relationship. Soon after moving in, Rachael inquires about a discolored spot on Stephen’s wall; he remarks that the painting that once hung there was damaged and removed. Quickly enough, Rachael figures out the truth: That was where his portrait of Adolf Hitler hung, a symbol of acquiescence to the Nazi government that cannot be easily erased. But though that stain is a powerful visual metaphor, the film doesn’t explore it much further once the affair has begun.

The Aftermath asks the audience to forgive Stephen because of his own personal tragedy—in the movie, he’s defined largely by the death of his wife, just as Rachael is defined by the death of her son (a trauma that Lewis, who takes a stiff-upper-lip approach, failed to emotionally process). The script, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conveys little beyond the fact that Stephen and Rachael are both sad, nice to each other, and very attractive. Their coupling should be somewhat shocking and transgressive, but the film somehow manages to make the story of a fiery tryst with an ex-Nazi dull by diluting every character so that modern audiences can better relate to them. The Aftermath might have succeeded had it challenged viewers. But by squeezing the story into a plain period-romance format, Kent achieved the precisely opposite.

The Moral Center of Meritocracy Collapses

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You are shocked—shocked—I know. According to the FBI, a network of 33 wealthy parents engaged in a massive fraud to buy places for their children at elite colleges. Didn’t they realize that there are many perfectly legal ways to do that?

You can hire a legitimate college counselor for $10,000 and up. You can get test prep for anything from $120 to $375 an hour. You can buy personal coaches, fencing equipment, and squash-club memberships, often for less than the price of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. You can arrange for unpaid internships that will allow Junior to shine as a true humanitarian. You can game your way into a great private school—it’s so much easier to play the angles in kindergarten or sixth grade than in college admissions. If all else fails, you can just make a big donation to the school of your choice.

Have the rich gotten dumber? Or are they getting cheaper? Actually, the affidavit suggests that there are two deeply connected structural problems. The first is that the price of admission has gone up. The second is that the moral center of the meritocracy has collapsed.

[Read: Why the college-admissions scandal is so absurd]

Back in 1988, buying a spot at Harvard cost $2.5 million—or at least that’s what the case of Jared Kushner suggests, according to reporting from ProPublica’s Daniel Golden. But in this affidavit, William Singer—identified as “Cooperating Witness 1”—informs one of his parental conspirators that it takes “in the many millions” now to accomplish the same trick. Much more sensible to fork over something between $400,000 and $1.2 million, as Singer’s clients allegedly did.

College-admissions policies are going to take a lot of heat in the next few days, and they will deserve it. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this scandal, like so many others, is firmly rooted in rising inequality and the class system that has come with it.

According to the story that Americans usually tell ourselves, inequality is a game played by flashy celebrities, tech bros, and other freaks of nature. The coverage of this fast-breaking scandal, true to form, has focused with laserlike imprecision on the two of the 33 defendants who happen to be semi-famous Hollywood stars.

But rising inequality has also produced a large upper-middle class—the 9.9 percent—and it is made up of some much more ordinary characters: business executives, bankers, lawyers, physicians, dentists, and real-estate developers, more or less in that order. Nice people. People with good families, good degrees, living in good neighborhoods. People who have learned how to use all those good things as weapons in the struggle to preserve privilege.

Now take a look at the list of defendants. It consists of business executives, bankers, one lawyer, several real-estate developers, a physician, a dentist, and, yes, the pair of desperate Hollywood stars. The entertainment angle here isn’t that a few corporate types succumbed to Hollywood values. It’s that even starlets aren’t free from the grip of the culture of meritocracy.

[Alexandra Robbins: Kids are the victims of the elite-college obsession]

Probably the least surprising thing about this case is the neighborhood setting. Go to your nearest geographic database and look for the neighborhoods with the highest median home prices, the best-rated public schools (for the little people), and the highest number of advanced degrees per capita. Yep, they’re right there in the affidavit: Mill Valley, Atherton, La Jolla, and Newport Beach in California, and Greenwich, Connecticut.

Now let’s talk family values. “The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” says Andrew E. Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts. It is touching, and sad, that many of the defendants appear to have taken great care to make sure their children did not learn about the efforts to cheat on their behalf. But it’s also deeply twisted. “Son, I love you, but you’re too stupid to know what I have to do for you”—Is that the message?

Family life itself has become part of the battleground of the classes. There are two kinds of families in America now, down from an infinity or so. There are the “good” families that mostly have two parents and invest huge amounts of their own money and time, and of their nanny’s time, in the cultivation of their offspring. And then there are the families that have been stuck into the bottom 90 percent of the economic pile.

For the “good” families, getting kids into the “good” schools isn’t just about loving the kids. It’s proof of status. That’s probably why the defendants in this case were so desperate to get their kids into academic institutions so ill-suited to their evident lack of academic talent. Much more was at stake here than Junior’s happiness. Setting aside the allegations that these defendants have engaged in truly reprehensible behavior—and trust me, with a daughter applying to college next year, I will not be outdone in outrage—the defendants represent these “good” families.

Meanwhile, the rest of America’s families haven’t got the time or money for the helicopter bills, they are much more likely to find themselves in single-parenting situations, and they have longer commutes from neighborhoods with less desirable schools. They are the ones who are counting on public schools to prepare their children for the future, and on colleges to give their children a chance to do good things. And they are the ones that this system, and the 9.9 percent, is shafting on an epic scale.

This case should open the eyes of the people who haven’t yet learned to use their families as weapons in their ongoing fight to maintain privilege. The core of the problem that emerges with rising inequality is that it makes everybody unreasonable. And it’s a very short step from unreasonable to flat out immoral.

If you read the affidavit, you can see that step illustrated by the slightly thuggish cellphone dialogue. The defendants here are all winners in the meritocratic system. But even they think merit has nothing to do with it. “The way the world works now is pretty unbelievable,” says one parent, as he arranges a scheme to pass off his athletically challenged scion as a sports icon. “The whole world is scamming the system,” Cooperating Witness 1 assures another client. Indeed.

Brutal mass sacrifice saw 140 children have hearts ripped out to appease gods…

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Brutal mass sacrifice saw 140 children have hearts ripped out to appease gods

The remains of 140 children whose hearts were ripped out in a mass sacrifice have been discovered in Peru.

Dozens of boys and girls, aged between five and 14, were killed in the largest known mass sacrifice of children in The Americas.

Many had their hearts removed as part of the grisly spiritual ceremony which happened at the height of the ancient Chimu civilisation in the 15th Century.

Researchers suspect major flooding and storms caused by an El Nino weather event could have sparked a panic to appease the gods with the systematic killing – which was also the largest known llama sacrifice in the world.

The children’s skeletal remains and those of more than 200 juvenile llamas found in a 7,500-square foot area were carbon dated to around 1450.

The Huanchaquito-Las Llamas burial site is less than half a mile from the Chimu’s capital Chan Chan, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Its ancient empire controlled a 600-mile-long territory along the Pacific coast and interior valleys from the modern Peru-Ecuador border before the Incan empire took over.

The study findings come after six years of excavation work at the site from 2011 to 2016.

Study author John Verano, Professor of anthropology at Tulane University, in Louisiana, US, said: “This site opens a new chapter on the practice of child sacrifice in the ancient world.

“This archaeological discovery was a surprise to all of us – we had not seen anything like this before, and there was no suggestion from ethnohistoric sources or historic accounts of child or camelid sacrifices being made on such a scale in northern coastal Peru.

“We were fortunate to be able to completely excavate the site and to have a multidisciplinary field and laboratory team to do the excavation and preliminary analysis of the material.”

Professor Gabriel Prieto, of the National University of Trujillo in Peru, said cut marks transecting the sternums and displaced ribs suggest both the children and llamas may have had their chests cut open, possibly during ritual removal of the heart.

Human and animal sacrifices are known from a variety of ancient cultures, often performed as part of funerary, architectural, or spiritual rituals.

But very little evidence of the brutal practice is known from the northern coast of Peru.

Prof Prieto said: “In number, it greatly exceeds the known sample of Inca child sacrifices from high altitude sites in the Andes.

“It also is substantially larger than the only other mass sacrifice of children known from the New World, that of 42 children in Offering 48 at the Mexica Templo Mayor in Central Mexico.

“The presence of a thick layer of mud on top of the sand in which the children and camelids were buried, as well as the presence of human and animal footprints made while the mud was still wet, suggest that the sacrificial event occurred shortly after heavy rainfall and flooding, in an arid region that receives negligible rainfall under normal conditions.

“While the correlation between heavy rains and the sacrifice may be coincidental, it is tempting to hypothesise that the two events are associate, and that the mass offering of children and camelids may have been an attempt to appease the gods and mitigate the effects of a major El Ni o-Southern Oscillation event that occurred around 1400-1450.”

The study found the human remains were almost entirely children, and the animal remains, all juvenile, were identified as most likely llamas, but possibly alpacas.

Anatomical and genetic tests suggested the children included boys and girls between five and 14 years old, according to the findings published in the journal PLOS One.

Prof Prieto said cuts across the children and llamas’ sterna suggested they had their chests cut open to remove their hearts.

He said: “Accessing the heart by transverse sectioning of the sternum is a technique familiar to modern thoracic surgeons, and is known by various names.

“The purpose of opening the chests of the children at HLL can only be hypothesizsd, but heart removal is a likely motivation.”

The researchers now hope to study the ritual’s victims, by analysing the life histories and cultural origins of the sacrificed children.

Wednesday round-up

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At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Ralph Steinhardt discusses Jam v. International Finance Corporation, in which the court held that international organizations have the same immunity from lawsuits that foreign countries currently have and can therefore be sued in U.S. courts for their commercial activities, suggesting that the case “may be understood as a continuation of the effort to hold intergovernmental organizations accountable for violations of international law, without relying on their internal watchdogs.” At Law360 (subscription required), James Berger explains why “Jam effects a sea change in the legal posture of international organizations before U.S. courts.”

In an op-ed at The Daily Signal, Michael Berry maintains that “[t]he Supreme Court is the last hope for preserving the Bladensburg World War I Memorial” in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, an establishment clause challenge to a memorial shaped like a cross on public property, and “[i]t may also be the last hope for returning the First Amendment to its original intent and meaning.” At The Harvard Law Review Blog, Luke Goodrich advocates “a historical approach” to the case that “is not only more objective and administrable than the alternatives, it is more faithful to the underlying purpose of the Religion Clauses—which is to leave religion as untouched by government power as possible.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in this case.]

Briefly:

  • At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston writes that “[t]he high-stakes fight now unfolding in the Supreme Court over the 2020 census [in Department of Commerce v. New York], testing whether everyone in America should be asked about their citizenship, is now intensifying into a major constitutional controversy.”
  • At NBC News, Pete Williams looks at Iancu v. Brunetti, in which the court will consider whether a ban on the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks that led the government to refuse to trademark a “brand name [that] was phonetically equivalent to the past tense form of the universally known f-word” violates the First Amendment.
  • At SCOTUS OA, Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag discuss data from their recent paper on laughter at Supreme Court oral arguments, arguing that laughter can be used to predict case outcomes because “for the most part, the justices use courtroom humor intentionally and strategically.”
  • In an op-ed for The New York Times, Jonathan Metzl weighs in on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, a challenge to New York City’s limits on transporting personal firearms that will be heard next term, arguing that the case “has implications far broader than sport shooting,” and that “[i]f the court decides against the city, New York City and other cities around the country could become far more dangerous places.”
  • At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the justices’ frequency in the majority over time, concluding that “[w]hatever led to the past high level of consensus no longer holds quite as true.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!

The post Wednesday round-up appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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