By Matt Miller, Tuesday, August 21, 6:23 AM
As Republicans head toward next week’s convention something extraordinary has come into view now that their ticket is complete.
Mitt Romney came from wealth and went on to build his own quarter-of-a-billion dollar fortune. Paul Ryan, who has never worked a day in the private sector (outside a few months in the family firm) reports a net worth of as much as $7 million, thanks to trusts and inheritances from his and his wife’s family.
Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.
Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon.
(In case you were wondering, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a Drawbridge because he entered office when marginal rates, at 70 percent, were truly damaging to the economy. But as GOP business leaders now tell me privately, the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent, let alone today’s 35 percent, are hardly a barrier to work or investment).
Most rich Republicans who champion regressive tax plans find it necessary to at least pretend they’re doing something to help average folks. John McCain, who’s lived large for decades thanks to his wife’s inheritance, famously had trouble keeping track of how many homes he owned — but McCain also tried bravely to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” and touted education initiatives that made this claim plausible.
Today’s Drawbridge Republicans can’t be bothered. Yes, when their political back is to the wall — as Romney’s increasingly is — they’ll slap together a page of bullet points and dub it “a plan for the middle class.” But this is only under duress. The rest of the time they seem blissfully unaware of how off-key they sound. As the humorist Andy Borowitz tweeted the other day, “As a general matter, it’s a bad idea to talk about austerity if you just had a horse lose in the Olympics.”
Contrast conservative Prime Minister (and heir) David Cameron’s decision to defer his plans to lower the top 50 percent marginal rate in the UK. “When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions,” Cameron said, “you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.” As his spokesman added: “We need to ask those with the broadest shoulders to contribute the most.”
Now that’s a conservative ruling class with a conscience! Can anyone imagine Romney and Ryan saying the same?
The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).
But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”
My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.
Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy. For years, whenever I’ve heard people criticize “limousine liberals,” I’ve always thought, well, at least that’s better than being a “limousine jerk.” Now it turns out that’s exactly what a Drawbridge Republican is.
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-host of public radio’s “Left, Right & Center.” He writes a weekly online column for The Post.
Showing posts with label WashingtonPost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WashingtonPost. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Recognizing Paul Ryan’s ‘tell’ when he is trying to avoid something
By Matt Miller, Published: August 16
In poker a “tell” is the physical giveaway or tic that lets you know someone is lying about his or her hand. In politics it’s the mode of evasion a politician chooses to sidestep a truth he or she doesn’t want to admit or to avoid saying something against self-interest. In his debut interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan’s “tells” were audacious and revealing. They suggest an opening Democrats would be wise to pursue.
Ryan (R-Wis.) tried to cloak himself in his supposedly charming “wonky-ness” to sidestep two simple questions from Hume: When does Mitt Romney’s budget reach balance, and when does Ryan’s own budget plan do the same? Ryan pirouetted because Hume’s queries threatened to expose his famed “fiscal conservatism” as a fraud.
It’s worth parsing Ryan’s tactics in this exchange because it shows the brand of disingenuousness we’re dealing with. So let’s go to the videotape. Have a look at the relevant two-minute portion of the clip (excerpted on this CNN video) and then we’ll dissect it.
Okay, you’re back. Hume started with a simple question: “The budget plan that you’re now supporting would get to balance when?”
Now, for context, recall that in the last era of epic budget smackdowns, 1995 and 1996, Newt Gingrich would have had an equally simple answer: in seven years. President Bill Clinton’s failure to embrace the goal of a balanced budget at all was a major political liability that Clinton finally (and shrewdly) erased when he came out with his own 10-year plan in mid-1995. (It’s worth underscoring that a 10-year path to balance was viewed then as the outer limit of credibility — pledging to end the red ink any further than a decade out didn’t pass the laugh test.)
Since Ryan knows that Romney’s bare sketch of a plan never reaches balance, he stumbles momentarily before trying to move the conversation to his comfortable talking points about Romney’s goal of reducing spending to historic norms as a share of gross domestic product.
But Hume grows quietly impatient. He practically cuts Ryan off.
“I get that,” Hume says. “But what about balance?”
You can see Ryan flinch. He doesn’t know, he says. Why not? “I don’t want to get wonky on you,” he says, recovering, “because we haven’t run the numbers on that specific plan.” But that’s not “getting wonky” at all. As common sense (and the Gingrich/Clinton approach) suggests, there’s nothing arcane about this subject. You decide on a sensible path to balance as a goal and come up with policies that achieve it. All this means is that Romney hasn’t done what a fiscally conservative leader would do. Trying to evade this as a matter of not “getting wonky” is Ryan’s tell. He’s betting Hume is too dumb, uninterested or short on time to press the point.
Ryan then adds that “the plan that we’ve offered in the House balances the budget.” But he immediately stops short of saying when — you see his eyes dart to the right at that moment, his next tell — because that would mean admitting it reaches balance in the 2030s. And Ryan wants to get through this interview without saying that, because he knows it doesn’t sound good. After all, what kind of “fiscal conservative” has a 25-year plan to balance the budget? Instead, in a practiced maneuver signaled by his telltale sideways glance, he moves to a contrast with President Obama, who he says has never offered a budget that ever reaches balance.
This is true — but is a plan to balance the budget when Ryan is nearly 70 really different enough to make Ryan the “deficit hawk”? Please.
Meanwhile, Hume’s quiet baritone presses on.
“Your own budget . . . when does that contemplate reaching balance?” Hume asks.
There’s no exit. Not until the 2030s, Ryan finally admits, looking uncomfortable — but then he quickly adds, making a face, that’s only under the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring rules, implying that they’re silly constraints every Fox News viewer would agree are ridiculous (instead of sensible rules meant to credit politicians only for policy proposals that are real). Ryan adds that “we believe” if we get the economy growing, “it would balance in 10 years.” But that’s supply-side faith-based budgeting again — exactly what we ran an empirical test on in the 1980s. (And the truth is, if Ryan’s big tax cuts were properly accounted for, his plan’s real date of balance would push well beyond 2040).
Why am I harping on this? Because it’s impossible to overstate how central the unjustified label of “fiscal conservative” is to the Ryan brand and the GOP’s strategy. As Clinton understood in the 1990s, “fiscal responsibility” is a values issue important to the voters who decide modern presidential elections.
The point: Democrats can’t afford to let Ryan/Romney’s phony image as superior fiscal stewards survive. And Hume’s interview shows how swiftly this charade can be exposed if Democrats and the press zero in on simple questions like Hume’s. If the press is primed to cover this more intelligently, such queries will also expose the big Republican lie — the idea that you can balance the budget as the baby boomers age without taxes rising.
Let me be clear. The most important issue facing the country isn’t when we’re going to balance the budget. It’s how to get growth and jobs reignited in the near term and how to renew the country’s promise and competitiveness after that (an agenda in which long-term budget sanity is just the ante). But if Democrats spend all their energy on Medicare — and don’t knock out the GOP ticket’s undeserved reputation for fiscal responsibility — they’ll find themselves in unexpected peril as the race heads to the fall.
In poker a “tell” is the physical giveaway or tic that lets you know someone is lying about his or her hand. In politics it’s the mode of evasion a politician chooses to sidestep a truth he or she doesn’t want to admit or to avoid saying something against self-interest. In his debut interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan’s “tells” were audacious and revealing. They suggest an opening Democrats would be wise to pursue.
Ryan (R-Wis.) tried to cloak himself in his supposedly charming “wonky-ness” to sidestep two simple questions from Hume: When does Mitt Romney’s budget reach balance, and when does Ryan’s own budget plan do the same? Ryan pirouetted because Hume’s queries threatened to expose his famed “fiscal conservatism” as a fraud.
It’s worth parsing Ryan’s tactics in this exchange because it shows the brand of disingenuousness we’re dealing with. So let’s go to the videotape. Have a look at the relevant two-minute portion of the clip (excerpted on this CNN video) and then we’ll dissect it.
Okay, you’re back. Hume started with a simple question: “The budget plan that you’re now supporting would get to balance when?”
Now, for context, recall that in the last era of epic budget smackdowns, 1995 and 1996, Newt Gingrich would have had an equally simple answer: in seven years. President Bill Clinton’s failure to embrace the goal of a balanced budget at all was a major political liability that Clinton finally (and shrewdly) erased when he came out with his own 10-year plan in mid-1995. (It’s worth underscoring that a 10-year path to balance was viewed then as the outer limit of credibility — pledging to end the red ink any further than a decade out didn’t pass the laugh test.)
Since Ryan knows that Romney’s bare sketch of a plan never reaches balance, he stumbles momentarily before trying to move the conversation to his comfortable talking points about Romney’s goal of reducing spending to historic norms as a share of gross domestic product.
But Hume grows quietly impatient. He practically cuts Ryan off.
“I get that,” Hume says. “But what about balance?”
You can see Ryan flinch. He doesn’t know, he says. Why not? “I don’t want to get wonky on you,” he says, recovering, “because we haven’t run the numbers on that specific plan.” But that’s not “getting wonky” at all. As common sense (and the Gingrich/Clinton approach) suggests, there’s nothing arcane about this subject. You decide on a sensible path to balance as a goal and come up with policies that achieve it. All this means is that Romney hasn’t done what a fiscally conservative leader would do. Trying to evade this as a matter of not “getting wonky” is Ryan’s tell. He’s betting Hume is too dumb, uninterested or short on time to press the point.
Ryan then adds that “the plan that we’ve offered in the House balances the budget.” But he immediately stops short of saying when — you see his eyes dart to the right at that moment, his next tell — because that would mean admitting it reaches balance in the 2030s. And Ryan wants to get through this interview without saying that, because he knows it doesn’t sound good. After all, what kind of “fiscal conservative” has a 25-year plan to balance the budget? Instead, in a practiced maneuver signaled by his telltale sideways glance, he moves to a contrast with President Obama, who he says has never offered a budget that ever reaches balance.
This is true — but is a plan to balance the budget when Ryan is nearly 70 really different enough to make Ryan the “deficit hawk”? Please.
Meanwhile, Hume’s quiet baritone presses on.
“Your own budget . . . when does that contemplate reaching balance?” Hume asks.
There’s no exit. Not until the 2030s, Ryan finally admits, looking uncomfortable — but then he quickly adds, making a face, that’s only under the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring rules, implying that they’re silly constraints every Fox News viewer would agree are ridiculous (instead of sensible rules meant to credit politicians only for policy proposals that are real). Ryan adds that “we believe” if we get the economy growing, “it would balance in 10 years.” But that’s supply-side faith-based budgeting again — exactly what we ran an empirical test on in the 1980s. (And the truth is, if Ryan’s big tax cuts were properly accounted for, his plan’s real date of balance would push well beyond 2040).
Why am I harping on this? Because it’s impossible to overstate how central the unjustified label of “fiscal conservative” is to the Ryan brand and the GOP’s strategy. As Clinton understood in the 1990s, “fiscal responsibility” is a values issue important to the voters who decide modern presidential elections.
The point: Democrats can’t afford to let Ryan/Romney’s phony image as superior fiscal stewards survive. And Hume’s interview shows how swiftly this charade can be exposed if Democrats and the press zero in on simple questions like Hume’s. If the press is primed to cover this more intelligently, such queries will also expose the big Republican lie — the idea that you can balance the budget as the baby boomers age without taxes rising.
Let me be clear. The most important issue facing the country isn’t when we’re going to balance the budget. It’s how to get growth and jobs reignited in the near term and how to renew the country’s promise and competitiveness after that (an agenda in which long-term budget sanity is just the ante). But if Democrats spend all their energy on Medicare — and don’t knock out the GOP ticket’s undeserved reputation for fiscal responsibility — they’ll find themselves in unexpected peril as the race heads to the fall.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Contemporary Classical: a Primer - Anne Midgette, WaPo
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Contemporary classical: a primer
By Anne Midgette,
“I’m writing to ask for advice,” the e-mail began. “I want to know more about contemporary music. Where should I start?”I get letters like this every few months, and I am often puzzled about how to answer. Gone are the days when there was a fixed canon of “good” composers (or, worse, “approved” ones), and a critic told you what you were supposed to like. Today, musical taste has blown wide open. If you love music, chances are that you like lots of different things: Ornette Coleman and Bruce Springsteen and Dmitri Shostakovich and Sufjan Stevens. If you’re a longtime orchestra subscriber, you may be passionate about Brahms but leery of the unfamiliar names and sounds that occasionally emerge onto concert programs. And chances are, whatever you like, you are equally passionate about what you don’t like — even more passionate, in fact, to judge from some of the rest of my mail.
So here, O fictive reader, are answers to some of the questions that, over the years, I’ve heard you ask. These answers are the equivalent of a one-day tour of a major metropolis, pointing out a few highlights to give you a general sense of the landscape of living composers, hoping that you’ll return to visit, in depth, whatever grabs your interest. This is not a “best of” guide, but rather an aide to orientation: Whatever your individual taste, these are pieces worth exploring.
1.Why should I care about minimalism?
Minimalism is a frustratingly incorrect term for a compositional approach that developed in the second half of the 20th century and that, in hindsight, turns out to be the most important contribution the United States has made to the field of composition.
“Minimalism” is a flawed term because most of the composers associated with it — notably Steve Reich and Philip Glass — reject it. It’s also a term that inspires fear and loathing in the hearts of some listeners who think it describes works that simply do the same thing over and over and over and over again — like passages of Glass's seminal and divisive 1976 opera “Einstein on the Beach.” “It’s not music,” say detractors.
Ah, but it is. Even the earliest seminal works of so-called minimalism share a lyric freshness. They do indeed take a step away from the conventional narrative of traditional classical music forms. Rather than taking a theme and develop it, they put musical elements together and let them shift into different, ever-changing combinations, like images in a kaleidoscope. The classic example is Terry Riley’s “In C” from 1964, consisting of 53 numbered phrases that are played by any number of musicians, lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of hours, creating a dreamy, beguiling, mutable colorscape in the process. Equally iconic is Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” which references influences all the way back to medieval chant in the way it revolves around the same 11 chords, played at different speeds, within the compass of individual human breaths.
And the real hallmark of so-called minimalist music is not its repetition but this way of approaching musical form. (Anton Bruckner, the 19th-century symphonic composer, has been called a proto-minimalist for the way he juxtaposes great blocks of sound.) As minimalist ideas have evolved, the genre’s sounds have become ever richer. Louis Andriessen, the maverick Dutch composer, has jokingly called himself a “maximalist” (check out his huge, powerful opera-oratorio “De Materie” to hear the way he creates powerful music out of layers of sound). John Adams, who used to be seen as a young minimalist, now writes scores with veritably Wagnerian overtones for full orchestra and/or opera. (My favorite introduction to Adams is “Harmonium,” a big, shining, early piece for chorus and orchestra that radiantly sets texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson, ending in a whirl of taut, bright sound.)
Bottom line: “Minimalism” isn’t the threat to classical music’s bastion that some people have perceived it to be. Instead, it has provided a new strain of energy and ideas that have helped revivify the field and continues to influence new works, even by composers who aren’t labeled “minimalist” at all.
2. I like traditional orchestral music. Why can’t they just go on writing that?
They can, and they do. The conventional wisdom is that contemporary music in the 20th century was taken over by serialism, a compositional technique that involves creating music according to series of values other than melody and harmony. (The most notorious serialist technique is 12-tone music, which creates a musical phrase by combining all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a fixed order, and then uses that phrase as the basis of a musical work.) The resulting works are sometimes fascinating, but seem difficult and unappealing to some lay audiences; and (still following the conventional wisdom) a generation of composers shied away from serialist strictures. Minimalism was one reaction; neo-romanticism — a return to the melodic, tonal, timbral values of romantic music — was another. This story is a little too pat — for one thing, neo-romanticism has been a force in American music throughout the 20th century (see Samuel Barber) — but it’s certainly true that David Del Tredici, for one, got a lot of attention back in the 1980s when he turned from serialist orthodoxy and began writing big, lush scores for full orchestra (including “Final Alice”).
Like minimalism, neo-romanticism is a facile and not entirely accurate label. It’s often applied, for instance, to John Corigliano, who writes well for orchestra and with an acute sense of the past — his 1991 opera “The Ghosts of Versailles” is one of the best syntheses of the grand opera tradition and contemporary music that anyone’s managed to come up with — but whose sensibility, sound, and sophistication are firmly rooted in the present. The neo-romantic sensibility, however, is kept most vividly alive in contemporary American opera, which tends to pursue a kind of Broadway-like accessibility in a tonal musical language, from William Bolcom’s “A View from the Bridge” to Jake Heggie’s recent “Moby-Dick.”
But neo-romanticism isn’t the only path composers use to access traditional forms with a fresh eye. Some of today’s most successful orchestral composers are writing symphonies and concertos — like Jennifer Higdon, whose Percussion Concerto won a Grammy in 2010, and whose Violin Concerto was recently recorded to great acclaim by Hilary Hahn (though not everyone shared my affection for her Piano Concerto at its NSO premiere). Higdon writes athletic, energetic music that’s smart and solid and wins over audiences, bright and forward-propelled as a Tour de France rider.
Another acclaimed recent concerto was written by the Finnish composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, best known in this country for the years he spent as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1992-2009). His Piano Concerto sounds as if it had been written to reassure those who were worried that, when he stepped down from the post to devote himself entirely to composing, he was going to float off into the world of the avant-garde. Without losing the quirky touch of his earlier compositions, this concerto is rife with references to its virtuosic predecessors in the canon: You can hear hints of Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Ravel in what amounts to one long finger-busting, hyperactive, crowd-pleasing outburst. When a composer spends years conducting week in and week out, he sure ends up knowing how to write for an orchestra.
3.What about the younger generation? And what is this “alt-classical” stuff you keep praising?
“Younger generations” are notoriously slippery things in this field: Anybody under 50 still counts as “young.” “Young,” indeed, becomes more about an attitude than chronological age: Writing music that incorporates electric guitar and acoustic violin is now a hallmark of the 50-something set, from Steven Mackey, the guitarist turned Princeton teacher, to the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the performing arm of the eponymous composers’ collaborative formed by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolf. The idea that good music can bring together a range of traditions, from rock to West African drumming to Javanese gamelan, is today a given for most younger composers, and emerges in surprising ways (like Lang’s “Little Match Girl Passion,” a translucent piece for small chorus that won him the Pulitzer Prize).
Another current trend that’s been on the rise over the last five decades is the return to the age of the composer-performer. Those who write music and want it performed go out and play it themselves — like Derek Bermel, a clarinet player whose Clarinet Concerto “Voices”mingles elements of a wide range of musics in ways both thoughtful and fun — or form their own bands, like Missy Mazzoli, whose group Victoire played the Library of Congress earlier this summer with music from their debut album.
“Alt-classical” is a term coined to describe the indie-rock sensibility of a lot of these genre-defying efforts, which are becoming ever more prevalent on every level of the musical establishment. Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took the notable step last year of naming, as co-composers in residence, Mason Bates, who has an active career as a DJ as well as writing works for places like the San Francisco Symphony, and Anna Clyne, another 30-something who incorporates sampling and amplification in her music.
That’s not to say that all young composers are wedded exclusively to rock-inspired sounds: simply that genre boundaries no longer function as limits. Nico Muhly, who turns 30 this summer, is one of the most successful composers around, with two operas opening this calendar year (one, “Two Boys,” will appear at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013-14); a musical omnivore, he is inspired by everything from the English choral tradition to Icelandic pop to Philip Glass. And Jefferson Friedman, who has played with several rock groups, has written some of the best contemporary string quartets I know.
4. Tell me the names of some significant contemporary composers or pieces you think everyone should know.
Here are a few iconic works by a few major living composers whom I haven’t yet mentioned:
George Crumb, “Black Angels,” a searing expressionistic string quartet written during the Vietnam War by a distinctive musical maverick.
Meredith Monk, “Songs of Ascension,” the latest recording by one of our greatest innovators, rich treasure from the seam of expanded vocal techniques and artless sound juxtapositions that she’s been mining tirelessly for decades.
Frederic Rzewski, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” an hour-long, impassioned, political, eclectic set of variations (including shouting at the piano) on a Chilean protest song.
Elliott Carter, First String Quartet, a breakout work from 1951 that still sounds as radical and new as it did when it was written, by the grand old man of the 20th-century American establishment, who’s still going strong at 102.
Pierre Boulez, “Pli selon pli,” one of the longest and in many ways most beautiful pieces, a lyrical exegesis on poems by the French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme in which a high soprano soars over and around the instruments of the orchestra, written by a former lion of European serialism who has mellowed considerably in his later years.
Via Spotify, listen to the music from this story on our contemporary classical playlist. Read more about classical music on Anne Midgette’s blog, The Classical Beat.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
The GOP’s fuzzy math By Matt Miller
The GOP’s fuzzy math By Matt Miller, Wednesday, July 20, 8:40 AM
It’s one thing for a political party to lose its moral bearings – after all, community values evolve, and large swaths of people and their elected representatives can end up on the wrong side of history on such questions as slavery, suffrage, and civil rights. But when a party loses its mathematical bearings – well, that’s a little shocking.
Yet that’s what’s happened to the Republican Party. The debt ceiling endgame has exposed the denial gripping the GOP in the face of the inevitable loss of “lower taxes” as the core of the party’s identity. You can feel the Republicans’ pain; tax cuts have been the party’s defining issue since Ronald Reagan rode them to power in 1980. But in an aging America, the numbers no longer work, and Republicans have failed to develop a new conservative vision to replace their fading mantra.
The “cap, cut and balance” plan passed by the House Tuesday night captures Republican denial perfectly. The plan would cap federal spending at 19.9 percent of GDP by 2018, with the goal of lowering it to18 percent over time. Similar caps have been endorsed by most of the GOP’s presidential candidates.
You’d never know from listening to Republicans that these goals are mathematically and politically unattainable.
But they are. Why? If there’s one fact you need to emblazon in your mind to make sense of the current debate, it is that Ronald Reagan ran the federal government at 22 percent of GDP back when our population was much younger. (Under President Obama, the extraordinary measures enacted to fight the recession – plus a collapse in the denominator, GDP -- have boosted spending to around 24 percent, while revenue has dropped to 15 percent from its 18-19 percent longtime average).
It is simply not plausible to argue that as we double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare, Uncle Sam will be able to operate at spending levels 10 to 20 percent below those over which America’s modern conservative icon presided. (Though, as my colleague Dana Milbank notes, Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.) Today there’s no question: Taxes must rise.
Republican “thinking” about these facts is telling. According to the Wall Street Journal, House leaders picked 19.9 percent as their cap “because it is in line with the average spending level over the last thirty years.”
Well, sorry, GOP: The average spending levels of the last 30 years are irrelevant because we weren’t retiring 76 million baby boomers over the last 30 years. And decades ago per capita health costs for seniors were far smaller than they are today.
Let me pause so there’s no caricaturing of these views as belonging to some “tax and spend liberal.” I’ve advocated more “conservative” changes to Social Security than Paul Ryan did in his budget or his prior “roadmap.” I’ve urged progressives to realize that if we don’t slow Medicare’s outsized growth, there will be no money left for poor children, infrastructure, or R&D. And I’ve said we need to learn from countries like Singapore that get outstanding results in health care while spending a fraction of what we spend. So count me as a longtime entitlement reformer who has the arrows from my friends on the left to prove it.
Here’s the point: Even if we enacted the platonic ideal of sane entitlement reform, and trimmed defense (as we need to), Republican budget math still doesn’t come close to adding up. Instead, as my colleagues at the Center for American Progress have shown, shrinking spending to sub-Reagan levels while retiring the boomers would involve dramatic cuts in everything else Americans think of as government – from national parks to NASA to the FBI to cancer research to student loans.
So why does the GOP pretend otherwise? Because acknowledging mathematical reality is too politically painful. Because uttering this simple phrase – “to accommodate the retirement of the baby boomers, taxes will need to rise” – is forbidden by official Republican doctrine.
Because official Republican doctrine has banned honest math.
Aversion to honest math explains why the Ryan budget embraced by the GOP doesn’t balance the budget — even after Medicare changes that may prove fatal to the party -- until the 2030s and racks up at least $14 trillion in debt between now and then.
That’s because the Ryan budget cuts taxes. Balanced budget math in an aging America doesn’t work without higher taxes.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cut taxes in the near-term to goose the economy. But when it comes to a long-term fiscal fix, the GOP’s math anxiety has produced months of debt ceiling charades instead of framing the debate we really need, which is this: Once the economy has more fully recovered, how do we lift taxes to fund the boomers’ retirement in ways least harmful to economic growth?
My own view is that this means slashing payroll taxes and corporate income taxes, while more than offsetting those tax cuts with higher taxes on consumption and dirty energy. But we can’t even get to this conversation until Republicans relinquish the fantasy that we can keep cutting overall taxes as America ages.
At bottom, this fantasy masks fear. Republicans’ refusal to let go of the old time religion shows how little work the party has done to craft an agenda equal to America’s current challenges. The party has abandoned problem-solving for brand preservation. If tax cuts aren’t our defining issue, Republican pols ask themselves, what distinguishes us from Democrats? Why should voters choose us?
Maybe the Gang of Six can end the GOP’s war on math, but I’m skeptical. For now, if it’s a choice between defying math and staring into this policy and political abyss, Republicans choose defiance.
It’s one thing for a political party to lose its moral bearings – after all, community values evolve, and large swaths of people and their elected representatives can end up on the wrong side of history on such questions as slavery, suffrage, and civil rights. But when a party loses its mathematical bearings – well, that’s a little shocking.
Yet that’s what’s happened to the Republican Party. The debt ceiling endgame has exposed the denial gripping the GOP in the face of the inevitable loss of “lower taxes” as the core of the party’s identity. You can feel the Republicans’ pain; tax cuts have been the party’s defining issue since Ronald Reagan rode them to power in 1980. But in an aging America, the numbers no longer work, and Republicans have failed to develop a new conservative vision to replace their fading mantra.
The “cap, cut and balance” plan passed by the House Tuesday night captures Republican denial perfectly. The plan would cap federal spending at 19.9 percent of GDP by 2018, with the goal of lowering it to18 percent over time. Similar caps have been endorsed by most of the GOP’s presidential candidates.
You’d never know from listening to Republicans that these goals are mathematically and politically unattainable.
But they are. Why? If there’s one fact you need to emblazon in your mind to make sense of the current debate, it is that Ronald Reagan ran the federal government at 22 percent of GDP back when our population was much younger. (Under President Obama, the extraordinary measures enacted to fight the recession – plus a collapse in the denominator, GDP -- have boosted spending to around 24 percent, while revenue has dropped to 15 percent from its 18-19 percent longtime average).
It is simply not plausible to argue that as we double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare, Uncle Sam will be able to operate at spending levels 10 to 20 percent below those over which America’s modern conservative icon presided. (Though, as my colleague Dana Milbank notes, Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.) Today there’s no question: Taxes must rise.
Republican “thinking” about these facts is telling. According to the Wall Street Journal, House leaders picked 19.9 percent as their cap “because it is in line with the average spending level over the last thirty years.”
Well, sorry, GOP: The average spending levels of the last 30 years are irrelevant because we weren’t retiring 76 million baby boomers over the last 30 years. And decades ago per capita health costs for seniors were far smaller than they are today.
Let me pause so there’s no caricaturing of these views as belonging to some “tax and spend liberal.” I’ve advocated more “conservative” changes to Social Security than Paul Ryan did in his budget or his prior “roadmap.” I’ve urged progressives to realize that if we don’t slow Medicare’s outsized growth, there will be no money left for poor children, infrastructure, or R&D. And I’ve said we need to learn from countries like Singapore that get outstanding results in health care while spending a fraction of what we spend. So count me as a longtime entitlement reformer who has the arrows from my friends on the left to prove it.
Here’s the point: Even if we enacted the platonic ideal of sane entitlement reform, and trimmed defense (as we need to), Republican budget math still doesn’t come close to adding up. Instead, as my colleagues at the Center for American Progress have shown, shrinking spending to sub-Reagan levels while retiring the boomers would involve dramatic cuts in everything else Americans think of as government – from national parks to NASA to the FBI to cancer research to student loans.
So why does the GOP pretend otherwise? Because acknowledging mathematical reality is too politically painful. Because uttering this simple phrase – “to accommodate the retirement of the baby boomers, taxes will need to rise” – is forbidden by official Republican doctrine.
Because official Republican doctrine has banned honest math.
Aversion to honest math explains why the Ryan budget embraced by the GOP doesn’t balance the budget — even after Medicare changes that may prove fatal to the party -- until the 2030s and racks up at least $14 trillion in debt between now and then.
That’s because the Ryan budget cuts taxes. Balanced budget math in an aging America doesn’t work without higher taxes.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cut taxes in the near-term to goose the economy. But when it comes to a long-term fiscal fix, the GOP’s math anxiety has produced months of debt ceiling charades instead of framing the debate we really need, which is this: Once the economy has more fully recovered, how do we lift taxes to fund the boomers’ retirement in ways least harmful to economic growth?
My own view is that this means slashing payroll taxes and corporate income taxes, while more than offsetting those tax cuts with higher taxes on consumption and dirty energy. But we can’t even get to this conversation until Republicans relinquish the fantasy that we can keep cutting overall taxes as America ages.
At bottom, this fantasy masks fear. Republicans’ refusal to let go of the old time religion shows how little work the party has done to craft an agenda equal to America’s current challenges. The party has abandoned problem-solving for brand preservation. If tax cuts aren’t our defining issue, Republican pols ask themselves, what distinguishes us from Democrats? Why should voters choose us?
Maybe the Gang of Six can end the GOP’s war on math, but I’m skeptical. For now, if it’s a choice between defying math and staring into this policy and political abyss, Republicans choose defiance.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Five myths about the debt ceiling By Bruce Bartlett
Five myths about the debt ceiling By Bruce Bartlett
Published: July 7
In recent months, the federal debt ceiling — last increased in February 2010 and now standing at $14.3 trillion — has become a matter of national debate and political hysteria. The ceiling must be raised by Aug. 2, Treasury says, or the government will run out of cash. Congressional Republicans counter that they won’t raise the debt limit unless Democrats agree to large budget cuts with no tax increases. President Obama insists that closing tax loopholes must be part of the package. Whom and what to believe in the great debt-limit debate? Here are some misconceptions that get to the heart of the battle.
1. The debt limit is an effective way to control spending and deficits.
Not at all. In 2003, Brian Roseboro, assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial markets, explained it best: “The plain truth is that the debt limit does not affect the deficits or surpluses. The critical revenue and spending decisions are made during the congressional budget process.”
The debt ceiling is a cap on the amount of securities the Treasury can issue, something it does to raise money to pay for government expenses. These expenses, and the deficit they’ve wrought, are a result of past actions by Congress to create entitlement programs, make appropriations and cut taxes. In that sense, raising the debt limit is about paying for past expenses, not controlling future ones. For Congress to refuse to let Treasury raise the cash to pay the bills that Congress itself has run up simply makes no sense.
Some supporters of the debt limit respond that there is virtue in forcing Congress to debate the national debt from time to time. This may have been true in the past, but the Budget Act of 1974 created a process that requires Congress to vote on aggregate levels of spending, revenue and deficits every year, thus making the debt limit redundant.
2. Opposition to raising the debt limit is a partisan issue.
Republicans are doing the squawking now because there is a Democrat in the White House. But back when there was a Republican president, Democrats did the squawking. On March 16, 2006, one Democratic senator in particular denounced George W. Bush’s request to raise the debt limit. “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” the senator thundered. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. . . . Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”
That senator was Barack Obama, and he, along with most Democrats, voted against a higher limit that day. It passed only because almost every Republican voted for it, including many who are now among the strongest opponents of a debt-limit increase.
3. Financial markets won’t care much if interest payments are just a few days late — a “technical default.”
Some Republicans believe that bondholders know they will get their money eventually and will understand that a brief default — just a few days — might be necessary to reduce future deficits. “If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told CNBC in May, “what is more important [is] that you’re putting the government in a materially better position to be able to pay their bonds later on.”
This is nothing but wishful thinking. The bond-rating agencies have repeatedly warned that any failure to pay interest or principal on a Treasury security exactly when due could cause the U.S. credit rating to be downgraded, which would push interest rates upas investors demand higher rates to compensate for the increased risk.
J.P. Morgan recently surveyed its clients and asked how much rates would rise if there was a delay in payments, even a very brief one. Domestic investors thought they would go up by 0.37 percentage points, but foreign buyers — who own close to half the debt — predicted an increase of more than half a percentage point. Any increase in this range would raise Treasury’s borrowing costs by tens of billions of dollars per year.
Some may think that a rise in rates would be temporary. But there was a case back in 1979 when a combination of a failure to increase the debt limit in time and a breakdown of Treasury’s machines for printing checks caused a two-week default. A 1989 academic study found that it raised interest rates by six-tenths of a percentage point for years afterward.
4. It’s worth risking default on the debt to prevent a tax increase, given the weak economy.
While Republicans’ concerns about higher taxes are not unreasonable, most economists believe that any fiscal contraction at this time would be dangerous. They note that a large cut in spending back in 1937 brought on a sharp recession, which undermined the recovery the country was making after the Great Depression.
Republicans respond that tax increases are especially harmful to growth. However, they made the same argument in 1982, when Ronald Reagan requested the largest peacetime tax increase in American history, and again in 1993, when Bill Clinton also asked for a large tax boost for deficit reduction. In both cases, conservative economists’ predictions of economic disaster were completely wrong, and strong economic growth followed.
5. Obama must accept GOP budget demands because he needs Republican support to raise the debt limit.
Republicans believe they have the president over a barrel. But their hand may be weaker than they think. A number of legal scholars point to Section 4of the 14th Amendment, which says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned.”
Some scholars, including Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University Law Schooland Garrett Epps of the University of Baltimore Law School, think this passage may make the debt limit unconstitutional because by definition, the limit calls into question the validity of the public debt. Thus Treasury may be able to just ignore the debt limit.
Other scholars, such as Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, say the 14th Amendment will force Obama to prioritize debt payments and unilaterally slash spending to pay bondholders. But this would involve the violation of laws requiring government spending.
Either way, a failure to raise the debt limit would force the president to break the law. The only question is which one.
Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration, is the author of “The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward.” He will be online at 11 a.m. on Monday, July 11, to chat. Submit your questions and comments now.
Want to challenge everything you know? Visit our “Five myths” archive , including “Five myths about interest rates,” “Five myths about the Bush tax cuts,” “Five myths about defense spending,” and “Five myths about the deficit.”
Published: July 7
In recent months, the federal debt ceiling — last increased in February 2010 and now standing at $14.3 trillion — has become a matter of national debate and political hysteria. The ceiling must be raised by Aug. 2, Treasury says, or the government will run out of cash. Congressional Republicans counter that they won’t raise the debt limit unless Democrats agree to large budget cuts with no tax increases. President Obama insists that closing tax loopholes must be part of the package. Whom and what to believe in the great debt-limit debate? Here are some misconceptions that get to the heart of the battle.
1. The debt limit is an effective way to control spending and deficits.
Not at all. In 2003, Brian Roseboro, assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial markets, explained it best: “The plain truth is that the debt limit does not affect the deficits or surpluses. The critical revenue and spending decisions are made during the congressional budget process.”
The debt ceiling is a cap on the amount of securities the Treasury can issue, something it does to raise money to pay for government expenses. These expenses, and the deficit they’ve wrought, are a result of past actions by Congress to create entitlement programs, make appropriations and cut taxes. In that sense, raising the debt limit is about paying for past expenses, not controlling future ones. For Congress to refuse to let Treasury raise the cash to pay the bills that Congress itself has run up simply makes no sense.
Some supporters of the debt limit respond that there is virtue in forcing Congress to debate the national debt from time to time. This may have been true in the past, but the Budget Act of 1974 created a process that requires Congress to vote on aggregate levels of spending, revenue and deficits every year, thus making the debt limit redundant.
2. Opposition to raising the debt limit is a partisan issue.
Republicans are doing the squawking now because there is a Democrat in the White House. But back when there was a Republican president, Democrats did the squawking. On March 16, 2006, one Democratic senator in particular denounced George W. Bush’s request to raise the debt limit. “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” the senator thundered. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. . . . Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”
That senator was Barack Obama, and he, along with most Democrats, voted against a higher limit that day. It passed only because almost every Republican voted for it, including many who are now among the strongest opponents of a debt-limit increase.
3. Financial markets won’t care much if interest payments are just a few days late — a “technical default.”
Some Republicans believe that bondholders know they will get their money eventually and will understand that a brief default — just a few days — might be necessary to reduce future deficits. “If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told CNBC in May, “what is more important [is] that you’re putting the government in a materially better position to be able to pay their bonds later on.”
This is nothing but wishful thinking. The bond-rating agencies have repeatedly warned that any failure to pay interest or principal on a Treasury security exactly when due could cause the U.S. credit rating to be downgraded, which would push interest rates upas investors demand higher rates to compensate for the increased risk.
J.P. Morgan recently surveyed its clients and asked how much rates would rise if there was a delay in payments, even a very brief one. Domestic investors thought they would go up by 0.37 percentage points, but foreign buyers — who own close to half the debt — predicted an increase of more than half a percentage point. Any increase in this range would raise Treasury’s borrowing costs by tens of billions of dollars per year.
Some may think that a rise in rates would be temporary. But there was a case back in 1979 when a combination of a failure to increase the debt limit in time and a breakdown of Treasury’s machines for printing checks caused a two-week default. A 1989 academic study found that it raised interest rates by six-tenths of a percentage point for years afterward.
4. It’s worth risking default on the debt to prevent a tax increase, given the weak economy.
While Republicans’ concerns about higher taxes are not unreasonable, most economists believe that any fiscal contraction at this time would be dangerous. They note that a large cut in spending back in 1937 brought on a sharp recession, which undermined the recovery the country was making after the Great Depression.
Republicans respond that tax increases are especially harmful to growth. However, they made the same argument in 1982, when Ronald Reagan requested the largest peacetime tax increase in American history, and again in 1993, when Bill Clinton also asked for a large tax boost for deficit reduction. In both cases, conservative economists’ predictions of economic disaster were completely wrong, and strong economic growth followed.
5. Obama must accept GOP budget demands because he needs Republican support to raise the debt limit.
Republicans believe they have the president over a barrel. But their hand may be weaker than they think. A number of legal scholars point to Section 4of the 14th Amendment, which says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned.”
Some scholars, including Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University Law Schooland Garrett Epps of the University of Baltimore Law School, think this passage may make the debt limit unconstitutional because by definition, the limit calls into question the validity of the public debt. Thus Treasury may be able to just ignore the debt limit.
Other scholars, such as Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, say the 14th Amendment will force Obama to prioritize debt payments and unilaterally slash spending to pay bondholders. But this would involve the violation of laws requiring government spending.
Either way, a failure to raise the debt limit would force the president to break the law. The only question is which one.
Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration, is the author of “The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward.” He will be online at 11 a.m. on Monday, July 11, to chat. Submit your questions and comments now.
Want to challenge everything you know? Visit our “Five myths” archive , including “Five myths about interest rates,” “Five myths about the Bush tax cuts,” “Five myths about defense spending,” and “Five myths about the deficit.”
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt By Lori Montgomery, Saturday, April 30, 8:02 PM
Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt By Lori Montgomery, Saturday, April 30, 8:02 PM
The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.
Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.
Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.
Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.
The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.
Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.
Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.
As Congress prepares this week to launch a high-stakes battle over whether to raise the legal limit on borrowing, the analyses offer a clearer view of the drivers of the debt — and of the difficulty of re-balancing the budget without new tax revenue.
Most Republicans reject raising taxes as part of the solution; House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) has called it a “non-starter.” But Democrats won’t go for a proposal based solely on spending cuts. The“Gang of Six,” a bipartisan Senate group dedicated to debt reduction, is expected to unveil a strategy as soon as this week that couples sharp spending cuts with a rewrite of the tax code that would raise additional revenue.
(The debt ceiling, set at $14.3 trillion, covers all federal debt, including money the Treasury owes other federal entities, such as the Social Security trust fund. The CBO data focus on the portion of the debt borrowed from outside investors. The debt is the accumulation of annual deficits; if annual budgets are in surplus, the nation can pay down the debt.)
The annual surpluses that set the nation on this course emerged in the final years of the Clinton administration. In the typical American household, a surplus comes as welcome news. But the White House is not a typical household. When Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin saw the budget shift into the black in 1998, he immediately warned President Bill Clinton that, politically, it was a mixed blessing.
Rubin wanted to use the surplus to start repaying the debt, which was then just more than $3 trillion. The White House billed it as “saving Social Security first,” viewing the surplus as an opportunity to shore up the nation’s finances before huge numbers of the baby boom generation began claiming federal retirement benefits. “The problem was a whole other part of the political spectrum wanted to use the surplus for tax cuts,” Rubin said in an interview. “They said they wanted to give the people back their money. Of course, it was also the people’s debt.”
What to do with the surplus became a central issue of the 2000 presidential campaign, with Vice President Al Gore arguing that much of it should be put in a “lockbox” to protect Social Security and Medicare. Bush pushed for a broad tax cut, arguing that taxpayers at all income levels were owed a refund. “Some say that the growing federal surplus means Washington has more money to spend, but they’ve got it backwards,” Bush said as he accepted the GOP nomination in August 2000. “The surplus is not the government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money.”
As soon as he took office, Bush pushed Congress to make good on his tax pledge. Less than a week after his inauguration, he got a boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified before the Senate Budget Committee that “tax reduction appears required” to prevent the federal government from accumulating too much cash. Greenspan feared that large surpluses would turn the government into the nation’s largest investor, creating distortions in the markets.
A chorus of skeptics warned against spending the surplus. Some stressed the inherent uncertainty of the CBO projections. Others said a big tax cut would unleash pent-up desire in both parties to pursue expensive priorities without the pay-as-you-go restraints that had helped produce the surplus.
Congress approved a $1.35 trillion tax cut in record time. A second package, worth $350 billion, followed in 2003. Together, they constituted one of the largest tax cuts since World War II, according to the conservative Tax Foundation.
Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, resigned after the White House decided to pursue the 2003 measure. “I believed we needed the money to facilitate fundamental tax reform and begin working on unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare,” O’Neill said in an interview. But the White House, he said, was focused on improving economic growth for the fourth quarter of 2004. “They wanted to make sure economic conditions were great going into the president’s reelection.”
Proponents of tax cuts argue that the legislation merely returned tax collections to their appropriate levels. They note that the CBO’s 2001 forecast assumed that tax collections would stay above 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (defined as the total of all economic output) — well above the historic average of 18 percent of GDP.
“It’s not obvious that America was ready to have taxes at a level this high persistently,” said Donald Marron, a former CBO director who now heads the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “Some degree of tax cutting was inevitable.”
But some key advocates of the tax cuts now say such a large reduction was probably ill-advised.
“Nobody would have thought that all these things would have happened after you cut taxes,” Domenici said. “That you’d have two wars and not pay for them. That you’d have another recession. A huge extravaganza of expenditures” for the military and homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “You would pause before you did it, if you knew.”
Bill Thomas, the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman who helped shepherd the tax cuts through Congress, defended the 2003 package as “fuel for the economy.” But he said in an interview that the 2001 measure was larded with “stuff that I was not all that wild about,” including bipartisan priorities such as a big increase in the child tax credit and a break for married couples — provisions Thomas believes did little to promote economic growth and amounted to “throwing money out the window.”
“I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Thomas, a California Republican who retired in 2006. “You’re the candy man when you advocate those kinds of tax cuts.”
In the end, Bush cut taxes and spent more money. Good times masked the impact, as surging tax revenues reduced the size of year-to-year deficits during the first three years of his second term. But after the economy collapsed during Bush’s final year in office, deficits — and therefore the debt — began to explode as Obama sought to revive economic activity with more tax cuts and federal spending.
Today, the CBO forecasts are unrelievedly gloomy, showing huge deficits essentially forever. As policymakers grapple with the legacy of the past decade, a demographic wave of senior citizens is crashing at their doorstep, driving up the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
William Hoagland, who was for years a top budget aide to Domenici and other GOP Senate leaders, said it is simplistic to think today’s fiscal problems began just 10 years ago. In 1976, as a young CBO analyst, Hoagland produced a long-term simulation that showed entitlement costs gradually overwhelming the rest of the federal budget.
“This situation really goes back to long before [the Bush administration], which is to say to old dead men that have long left the Congress,” he said.
Still, Hoagland said, the abandonment of fiscal discipline in the wake of the surpluses clearly didn’t help. “Nobody pushed for paying for this stuff,” he said. Not even after “it became very clear in the middle of 2003 that the line had turned on us. And the surpluses as far as the eye could see were no longer there.”
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Five myths about defense spending By Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman
Five myths about defense spending By Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman
Friday, January 14, 2011; 8:40 PM
Defense spending is a massive part of our federal budget - and a cause of equally massive debate, whether in wartime or in peace. With fiscal pressures rising, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has detailed a reprioritization of Pentagon resources and a $78 billion reduction in planned defense spending over the next five years. But he has also argued that "when it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem." Still, the $720 billion defense budget is a very large share of federal discretionary spending - more than half in 2010. We can no longer separate national security from fiscal imperatives. Unfortunately, several myths keep us from a more disciplined defense budget.
1. Defense spending is dictated by the threats we face.
The challenges posed by terrorism, cyber-threats and military buildups by potential adversaries clearly play a role in shaping our national security strategy and defense budget. But so do competing government priorities in the face of limited resources, political and bureaucratic interests, and the influence of the defense industry. At times, these issues overwhelm security concerns.
As a result, budgeting decisions can appear off-course. Should we invest in our military's capacity to rebuild post-conflict societies, even if we are unlikely to engage soon in another war of regime change? Or should we spend as if we will soon confront China at sea and in the air, even if we are unlikely to do so? The White House, the Pentagon and Congress have enormous discretion in these decisions.
Sometimes funding also meets purely parochial or industrial needs. In August, for example, Gates announced his decision to close the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, which costs $240 million annually to operate. But after heavy criticism from state officials, Gates decided that half of the command's activities should continue, to be carried out by other Defense Department organizations in Virginia's Tidewater region. Local politics trumped efficiency.
2. The larger the Pentagon's budget, the safer we are.
Excessive defense spending can make us less secure, not more. Countries feel threatened when rivals ramp up their defenses; this was true in the Cold War, and now it may happen with China. It's how arms races are born. We spend more, inspiring competitors to do the same - thus inflating defense budgets without making anyone safer.
For example, Gates observed in May that no other country has a single ship comparable to our 11 aircraft carriers. Based on the perceived threat that this fleet poses, the Chinese are pursuing an anti-ship ballistic missile program. U.S. military officials have decried this "carrier-killer" effort, and in response we are diversifying our capabilities to strike China, including a new long-range bomber program, and modernizing our carrier fleet at a cost of about $10 billion per ship.
This country has remained secure in eras of declining defense budgets, such as the postwar period of the Eisenhower presidency and the early post-Cold War years. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced active-duty forces by 700,000, Pentagon civilians by 300,000, defense procurement dollars by 53 percent and overall national defense spending by 28 percent - and we were still able to carry out one of the Pentagon's top planning scenarios: occupying Iraq in 2003. (The wisdom of that decision is a different matter.)
3. Republicans like defense spending; Democrats don't.
Since 1945, defense spending has risen in wartime and fallen as conflicts end. Dwight Eisenhower reduced national defense outlays by 28 percent from their 1953 Korean War peak. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford went even further, cutting 37 percent from the defense budget after the Vietnam-era high in 1968. And President George H.W. Bush had cut 14 percent compared with the 1989 Cold War budget by the time he left office.
All these presidents were Republicans. Meanwhile, after adjusting for inflation, the most expensive defense budget in more than 60 years belongs to President Obama, a Democrat.
Of course, Democrats have also found savings at the Pentagon. Clinton extended the post-Cold War drawdown through his 1998 budget, and Obama will probably start post-Iraq and Afghanistan defense cuts soon - potentially with support from new Republican House leaders such as Eric Cantor (Va.) and Paul Ryan (Wis.), who have said that defense will not be exempt from the fiscal axe.
4. Today's levels of military pay and benefits are necessary.
Just as in any other labor market, the supply of and demand for workers determines the pay needed to maintain a professional military. But military pay and benefits are affected by other factors: Congress has learned that boosting military compensation is the easiest way to show that you're supporting the troops.
Gates expressed frustration in May with Congress's practice in recent years of adding half a percent to the military pay raises the Pentagon requested. While it does not sound like much, that increase is enormous - as much as $450 million a year - because it applies to all active-duty troops rather than targeting key specializations that the military needs.
Benefit costs for the military have also been increasing. Health care has been a particular problem, with Pentagon health-care budgets rising from $19 billion in 2001 to more than $50 billion today. This increase has been driven largely by the growth in the cost of health care generally and the expansion of the beneficiary pool to include more retirees and reservists. Congress has also resisted the Pentagon's recent annual requests to increase enrollment fees for working-age retirees, even though these have not changed in 15 years.
5. Gates's cuts are enough.
They're a small step in the right direction, but the proposed cuts would still leave the level of defense spending far above what we need. The United States spent more on national defense last year, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than in any year during the Cold War, even though we no longer face an existential Soviet-style threat.
Our security situation permits us to spend in a more disciplined way, and our fiscal circumstances require it. Publicly held federal debt takes up a greater share of the U.S. economy - roughly 64 percent, according to the Office of Management and Budget - than any time since 1951. Failing to control this debt means that interest payments will consume future budgets and limit our spending, even for defense.
As we detail in an essay in the latest Foreign Affairs, the national defense budget proposals could be lower by an aggregate of roughly $1 trillion through 2020, still leaving us to spend $6.3 trillion on defense over that period. This can be done while retaining our military dominance and building a more effective and efficient force.
Gordon Adams is a professor of international relations at American University and a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a global security think tank. Matthew Leatherman is a research associate at the Stimson Center.
Friday, January 14, 2011; 8:40 PM
Defense spending is a massive part of our federal budget - and a cause of equally massive debate, whether in wartime or in peace. With fiscal pressures rising, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has detailed a reprioritization of Pentagon resources and a $78 billion reduction in planned defense spending over the next five years. But he has also argued that "when it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem." Still, the $720 billion defense budget is a very large share of federal discretionary spending - more than half in 2010. We can no longer separate national security from fiscal imperatives. Unfortunately, several myths keep us from a more disciplined defense budget.
1. Defense spending is dictated by the threats we face.
The challenges posed by terrorism, cyber-threats and military buildups by potential adversaries clearly play a role in shaping our national security strategy and defense budget. But so do competing government priorities in the face of limited resources, political and bureaucratic interests, and the influence of the defense industry. At times, these issues overwhelm security concerns.
As a result, budgeting decisions can appear off-course. Should we invest in our military's capacity to rebuild post-conflict societies, even if we are unlikely to engage soon in another war of regime change? Or should we spend as if we will soon confront China at sea and in the air, even if we are unlikely to do so? The White House, the Pentagon and Congress have enormous discretion in these decisions.
Sometimes funding also meets purely parochial or industrial needs. In August, for example, Gates announced his decision to close the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, which costs $240 million annually to operate. But after heavy criticism from state officials, Gates decided that half of the command's activities should continue, to be carried out by other Defense Department organizations in Virginia's Tidewater region. Local politics trumped efficiency.
2. The larger the Pentagon's budget, the safer we are.
Excessive defense spending can make us less secure, not more. Countries feel threatened when rivals ramp up their defenses; this was true in the Cold War, and now it may happen with China. It's how arms races are born. We spend more, inspiring competitors to do the same - thus inflating defense budgets without making anyone safer.
For example, Gates observed in May that no other country has a single ship comparable to our 11 aircraft carriers. Based on the perceived threat that this fleet poses, the Chinese are pursuing an anti-ship ballistic missile program. U.S. military officials have decried this "carrier-killer" effort, and in response we are diversifying our capabilities to strike China, including a new long-range bomber program, and modernizing our carrier fleet at a cost of about $10 billion per ship.
This country has remained secure in eras of declining defense budgets, such as the postwar period of the Eisenhower presidency and the early post-Cold War years. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced active-duty forces by 700,000, Pentagon civilians by 300,000, defense procurement dollars by 53 percent and overall national defense spending by 28 percent - and we were still able to carry out one of the Pentagon's top planning scenarios: occupying Iraq in 2003. (The wisdom of that decision is a different matter.)
3. Republicans like defense spending; Democrats don't.
Since 1945, defense spending has risen in wartime and fallen as conflicts end. Dwight Eisenhower reduced national defense outlays by 28 percent from their 1953 Korean War peak. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford went even further, cutting 37 percent from the defense budget after the Vietnam-era high in 1968. And President George H.W. Bush had cut 14 percent compared with the 1989 Cold War budget by the time he left office.
All these presidents were Republicans. Meanwhile, after adjusting for inflation, the most expensive defense budget in more than 60 years belongs to President Obama, a Democrat.
Of course, Democrats have also found savings at the Pentagon. Clinton extended the post-Cold War drawdown through his 1998 budget, and Obama will probably start post-Iraq and Afghanistan defense cuts soon - potentially with support from new Republican House leaders such as Eric Cantor (Va.) and Paul Ryan (Wis.), who have said that defense will not be exempt from the fiscal axe.
4. Today's levels of military pay and benefits are necessary.
Just as in any other labor market, the supply of and demand for workers determines the pay needed to maintain a professional military. But military pay and benefits are affected by other factors: Congress has learned that boosting military compensation is the easiest way to show that you're supporting the troops.
Gates expressed frustration in May with Congress's practice in recent years of adding half a percent to the military pay raises the Pentagon requested. While it does not sound like much, that increase is enormous - as much as $450 million a year - because it applies to all active-duty troops rather than targeting key specializations that the military needs.
Benefit costs for the military have also been increasing. Health care has been a particular problem, with Pentagon health-care budgets rising from $19 billion in 2001 to more than $50 billion today. This increase has been driven largely by the growth in the cost of health care generally and the expansion of the beneficiary pool to include more retirees and reservists. Congress has also resisted the Pentagon's recent annual requests to increase enrollment fees for working-age retirees, even though these have not changed in 15 years.
5. Gates's cuts are enough.
They're a small step in the right direction, but the proposed cuts would still leave the level of defense spending far above what we need. The United States spent more on national defense last year, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than in any year during the Cold War, even though we no longer face an existential Soviet-style threat.
Our security situation permits us to spend in a more disciplined way, and our fiscal circumstances require it. Publicly held federal debt takes up a greater share of the U.S. economy - roughly 64 percent, according to the Office of Management and Budget - than any time since 1951. Failing to control this debt means that interest payments will consume future budgets and limit our spending, even for defense.
As we detail in an essay in the latest Foreign Affairs, the national defense budget proposals could be lower by an aggregate of roughly $1 trillion through 2020, still leaving us to spend $6.3 trillion on defense over that period. This can be done while retaining our military dominance and building a more effective and efficient force.
Gordon Adams is a professor of international relations at American University and a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a global security think tank. Matthew Leatherman is a research associate at the Stimson Center.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Five myths about cutting the deficit By William G. Gale
Five myths about cutting the deficit By William G. Gale
Sunday, November 28, 2010;
Suddenly, debt commissions --and commissioners, and reports, and even draft reports -- are everywhere. The president's bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is due to vote on its final recommendations by Dec. 1 (its co-chairs having put forward a draft plan earlier this month). And earlier this month, another commission -- the Bipartisan Policy Center's Debt Reduction Task Force led by economist Alice Rivlin and former senator Pete Domenici -- reported its own plan.
Budgets may be boring, but the stakes before us are exceedingly high. As we go about reducing the deficit, who will pay which taxes? How will we defend our country? And how will we treat our elderly? Unfortunately, questionable thinking and outright distortions by critics from across the political spectrum are getting in the way of these and other difficult decisions.
1. The United States is on the verge of a fiscal crisis.
Not really. Greece faced a fiscal crisis earlier this year when it had to slash its deficit immediately or risk capital flight and economic collapse. Ireland is in the same straits now, and Portugal may soon be headed that way. The United States faces a very different situation. Long-term interest rates on government debt are low. Investors are not fleeing U.S. capital markets; instead, America continues to be a magnet for capital from around the world.
Of course, the lack of an imminent crisis hardly means there is no problem. If our current policies continue, by 2020 net interest payments on the national debt will exceed $1 trillion, 20 percent of federal revenues, annually - enough for rating agencies to downgrade the quality of U.S. debt, which in turn would raise borrowing costs and increase the deficit further.
Even in the absence of a crisis or a downgrade, the effects of persistent deficits are substantial. For example, the International Monetary Fund has found that for every 10 percentage-point increase in the national debt relative to the size of the overall economy, economic growth in an industrialized country will fall by 0.15 percentage points.
That may not sound like much, but the United States is on a path for its debt-to-GDP ratio to rise from about 40 percent in 2008 to about 90 percent in 2020. That means that our annual growth rate could fall by more than 0.75 percentage points - with major negative consequences for employment and standards of living.
Just because there is no crisis right now, however, doesn't mean we can afford to wait. If we address our fiscal challenges sooner, we can make gradual - if difficult - changes. If we wait too long, we really will be facing a crisis, and the necessary adjustments will be far more severe and sudden.
2. The deficit commissions should propose reforms that are politically viable.
No solution to this problem is going to be politically popular. But even if Congress disregards the current proposals, dismissing them as politically unfeasible, that will not mean the commissions' efforts will have failed.
By publicly proposing deficit solutions, these commissions already have fulfilled their main function: to start a serious national conversation. While the combination of spending cuts and tax reforms recently suggested by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson - the co-chairs of the president's deficit commission - may not even win the support of all the panel's members, they might induce the commission's anti-tax and pro-spending forces to release their own proposals. This would allow voters and policymakers to compare plan against plan - and that is exactly the discussion the country needs to have.
Any eventual solution to the deficit problem will involve measures currently considered politically impossible. For example, anti-tax advocates have objected that the co-chairs' plan would constitute a tax increase - even though Congress would raise more revenue by doing nothing for the next 10 years than it would by enacting the plan. Social Security supporters, meanwhile, have heaped criticism on Bowles and Simpson for their proposal to raise the early and normal retirement ages by one year per generation for the next two generations - even though the average lifespan will probably increase even faster, so retirement periods would still grow.
Objecting to these proposals without proposing alternatives is not productive.
3. Social Security has a surplus, so it shouldn't be cut.
Supporters of Social Security argue that the program's 2010 surplus, combined with its projected 27-year solvency, should exempt it from the budget axe.
But ruling out cuts is a bad idea. First, Social Security faces a long-term deficit. And even if the program were running a long-term surplus, the simple arithmetic of the overall fiscal situation dictates that everything - everything - should be on the table.
Simply reducing earmarks; limiting waste, fraud and abuse; or cutting back on government workers won't come close to solving the problem. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and net interest payments typically account for 70 percent of federal spending and are on course to account for 80 percent by 2020. Any serious effort on the spending side needs to address each of these items.
Medicaid and Medicare pose the biggest challenges to long-term fiscal conditions, of course, but defense cuts are also critical. (While we're on the topic of defense, it's worth noting that officials such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, have said that the deficit itself poses a threat to national security.)
Finally, keeping Social Security reform on the table isn't just good fiscal policy, it's good politics. It underscores the importance of shared sacrifice. If we are to find a solution that is politically sustainable, we cannot exempt large segments of society from pitching in.
4. We can balance the budget without raising taxes.
Although it is mathematically possible to balance the budget without raising taxes, it is impossible in a political sense.
Budget discipline works only when it is imposed on both sides of the ledger. In 1990 and 1993, the last time we faced a serious fiscal crunch, Congress did just that, slashing spending and raising taxes. In contrast, in 1981 and 2001, massive tax cuts did not lead to reduced spending, despite the hopes of those who espouse the "starve the beast" theory of fiscal reform.
Instead, the tax cuts were accompanied by big increases in spending, thus boosting the deficit from both sides. The logic is clear: If some politicians reward their constituents through tax cuts, other politicians will see no reason that they can't reward their own constituents through more spending. It is only when fiscal discipline is comprehensive and coordinated that it works and endures.
Moreover, we shouldn't balance the budget without tax increases - they are the only way to ensure that high-income households pay a fair share of the deficit burden. Without higher taxes as part of the fiscal reform package, middle- and low-income households - which tend to feel spending cuts most acutely - will end up bearing almost all of the burden.
The nation rapidly raised tax revenues and rates during World War II; for a long time, those rates persisted, and the economy performed well. Well-designed tax increases could help the economy and the budget now, too. We should cut the mortgage interest deduction, which is expensive and regressive and helped deepen the housing crisis. We should impose taxes on greenhouse gases, for revenue and for the environment. And we need to tax consumption, to reduce our propensity to overspend.
5. A new short-term stimulus would be fiscally irresponsible.
The Rivlin-Domenici plan proposes higher near-term deficits as a means of economic stimulus, to be followed by cuts down the line. Some may see this as Washington-style "business as usual" - always putting off cuts until tomorrow - but it makes sense economically. With the recovery stalling, spending more and taxing less now to get the economy going is perfectly consistent with the need for medium- and long-term fiscal discipline. A strong economy can do the budget a lot of good by boosting tax revenues and reducing spending on unemployment benefits and other need-based programs.
As always, there is a balancing act between immediate and longer-term concerns. Fiscal responsibility requires that we spend stimulus funds wisely on projects with the biggest bang for the buck. According to the Congressional Budget Office, these would include infrastructure spending, aid to the states, higher unemployment benefits, hiring credits and a payroll tax holiday.
The other key to a responsible stimulus package is timing. Short-term stimulus cannot become long-term policy. Congress should explicitly legislate an end date for any new stimulus and couple it with a medium-term deficit-reduction package. Together, these policies would do more to spur the economy and curb the deficit than either would alone.
William G. Gale is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
Sunday, November 28, 2010;
Suddenly, debt commissions --and commissioners, and reports, and even draft reports -- are everywhere. The president's bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is due to vote on its final recommendations by Dec. 1 (its co-chairs having put forward a draft plan earlier this month). And earlier this month, another commission -- the Bipartisan Policy Center's Debt Reduction Task Force led by economist Alice Rivlin and former senator Pete Domenici -- reported its own plan.
Budgets may be boring, but the stakes before us are exceedingly high. As we go about reducing the deficit, who will pay which taxes? How will we defend our country? And how will we treat our elderly? Unfortunately, questionable thinking and outright distortions by critics from across the political spectrum are getting in the way of these and other difficult decisions.
1. The United States is on the verge of a fiscal crisis.
Not really. Greece faced a fiscal crisis earlier this year when it had to slash its deficit immediately or risk capital flight and economic collapse. Ireland is in the same straits now, and Portugal may soon be headed that way. The United States faces a very different situation. Long-term interest rates on government debt are low. Investors are not fleeing U.S. capital markets; instead, America continues to be a magnet for capital from around the world.
Of course, the lack of an imminent crisis hardly means there is no problem. If our current policies continue, by 2020 net interest payments on the national debt will exceed $1 trillion, 20 percent of federal revenues, annually - enough for rating agencies to downgrade the quality of U.S. debt, which in turn would raise borrowing costs and increase the deficit further.
Even in the absence of a crisis or a downgrade, the effects of persistent deficits are substantial. For example, the International Monetary Fund has found that for every 10 percentage-point increase in the national debt relative to the size of the overall economy, economic growth in an industrialized country will fall by 0.15 percentage points.
That may not sound like much, but the United States is on a path for its debt-to-GDP ratio to rise from about 40 percent in 2008 to about 90 percent in 2020. That means that our annual growth rate could fall by more than 0.75 percentage points - with major negative consequences for employment and standards of living.
Just because there is no crisis right now, however, doesn't mean we can afford to wait. If we address our fiscal challenges sooner, we can make gradual - if difficult - changes. If we wait too long, we really will be facing a crisis, and the necessary adjustments will be far more severe and sudden.
2. The deficit commissions should propose reforms that are politically viable.
No solution to this problem is going to be politically popular. But even if Congress disregards the current proposals, dismissing them as politically unfeasible, that will not mean the commissions' efforts will have failed.
By publicly proposing deficit solutions, these commissions already have fulfilled their main function: to start a serious national conversation. While the combination of spending cuts and tax reforms recently suggested by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson - the co-chairs of the president's deficit commission - may not even win the support of all the panel's members, they might induce the commission's anti-tax and pro-spending forces to release their own proposals. This would allow voters and policymakers to compare plan against plan - and that is exactly the discussion the country needs to have.
Any eventual solution to the deficit problem will involve measures currently considered politically impossible. For example, anti-tax advocates have objected that the co-chairs' plan would constitute a tax increase - even though Congress would raise more revenue by doing nothing for the next 10 years than it would by enacting the plan. Social Security supporters, meanwhile, have heaped criticism on Bowles and Simpson for their proposal to raise the early and normal retirement ages by one year per generation for the next two generations - even though the average lifespan will probably increase even faster, so retirement periods would still grow.
Objecting to these proposals without proposing alternatives is not productive.
3. Social Security has a surplus, so it shouldn't be cut.
Supporters of Social Security argue that the program's 2010 surplus, combined with its projected 27-year solvency, should exempt it from the budget axe.
But ruling out cuts is a bad idea. First, Social Security faces a long-term deficit. And even if the program were running a long-term surplus, the simple arithmetic of the overall fiscal situation dictates that everything - everything - should be on the table.
Simply reducing earmarks; limiting waste, fraud and abuse; or cutting back on government workers won't come close to solving the problem. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and net interest payments typically account for 70 percent of federal spending and are on course to account for 80 percent by 2020. Any serious effort on the spending side needs to address each of these items.
Medicaid and Medicare pose the biggest challenges to long-term fiscal conditions, of course, but defense cuts are also critical. (While we're on the topic of defense, it's worth noting that officials such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, have said that the deficit itself poses a threat to national security.)
Finally, keeping Social Security reform on the table isn't just good fiscal policy, it's good politics. It underscores the importance of shared sacrifice. If we are to find a solution that is politically sustainable, we cannot exempt large segments of society from pitching in.
4. We can balance the budget without raising taxes.
Although it is mathematically possible to balance the budget without raising taxes, it is impossible in a political sense.
Budget discipline works only when it is imposed on both sides of the ledger. In 1990 and 1993, the last time we faced a serious fiscal crunch, Congress did just that, slashing spending and raising taxes. In contrast, in 1981 and 2001, massive tax cuts did not lead to reduced spending, despite the hopes of those who espouse the "starve the beast" theory of fiscal reform.
Instead, the tax cuts were accompanied by big increases in spending, thus boosting the deficit from both sides. The logic is clear: If some politicians reward their constituents through tax cuts, other politicians will see no reason that they can't reward their own constituents through more spending. It is only when fiscal discipline is comprehensive and coordinated that it works and endures.
Moreover, we shouldn't balance the budget without tax increases - they are the only way to ensure that high-income households pay a fair share of the deficit burden. Without higher taxes as part of the fiscal reform package, middle- and low-income households - which tend to feel spending cuts most acutely - will end up bearing almost all of the burden.
The nation rapidly raised tax revenues and rates during World War II; for a long time, those rates persisted, and the economy performed well. Well-designed tax increases could help the economy and the budget now, too. We should cut the mortgage interest deduction, which is expensive and regressive and helped deepen the housing crisis. We should impose taxes on greenhouse gases, for revenue and for the environment. And we need to tax consumption, to reduce our propensity to overspend.
5. A new short-term stimulus would be fiscally irresponsible.
The Rivlin-Domenici plan proposes higher near-term deficits as a means of economic stimulus, to be followed by cuts down the line. Some may see this as Washington-style "business as usual" - always putting off cuts until tomorrow - but it makes sense economically. With the recovery stalling, spending more and taxing less now to get the economy going is perfectly consistent with the need for medium- and long-term fiscal discipline. A strong economy can do the budget a lot of good by boosting tax revenues and reducing spending on unemployment benefits and other need-based programs.
As always, there is a balancing act between immediate and longer-term concerns. Fiscal responsibility requires that we spend stimulus funds wisely on projects with the biggest bang for the buck. According to the Congressional Budget Office, these would include infrastructure spending, aid to the states, higher unemployment benefits, hiring credits and a payroll tax holiday.
The other key to a responsible stimulus package is timing. Short-term stimulus cannot become long-term policy. Congress should explicitly legislate an end date for any new stimulus and couple it with a medium-term deficit-reduction package. Together, these policies would do more to spur the economy and curb the deficit than either would alone.
William G. Gale is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
What we can learn from Singapore's health-care model By Matt Miller
What we can learn from Singapore's health-care model By Matt Miller
Wednesday, March 3, 2010; 10:45 AM
We interrupt Washington's feud over the president's "way forward" for a brief word on a path not taken, courtesy of the only rich nation that boasts universal coverage with health outcomes better than ours while spending one-fifth as much per person on health care. Introducing (drum roll please): Singapore.
Yes, it's an island city-state of just 5 million people. Yes, it's more or less a benevolent dictatorship. And, yes, until recently, bringing chewing gum into Singapore could land you in jail. But Singapore, a poor country a few decades ago, now boasts a higher per capita income (when adjusted for local purchasing power) than the United States. And here's the astonishing fact: Singapore spends less than 4 percent of its GDP on health care. We spend 17 percent (and Singapore's somewhat younger population doesn't begin to explain the difference). Matching Singapore's performance in our $15 trillion economy would free up $2 trillion a year for other public and private purposes.
Do I have I your attention?
Today we can't find cash to recruit a new generation of great teachers, rebuild our roads and bridges, pay down the national debt, or invest in better airports, high-speed rail, a clean energy revolution or any of a hundred other things sensible patriots know we should do to renew the country. We can't do these things in large part because the Medical Industrial Complex vacuums up every spare dollar in sight. It's only slightly melodramatic to assert that if we could run our health-care system as efficiently as Singapore's, we could solve most of our other problems.
So how does Singapore do it?
In health circles it's always conservatives who bring up Singapore, because of the primacy it places on personal responsibility. According to Phua Kai Hong of the National University of Singapore, roughly one-third of health spending in Singapore is paid directly by individuals (who typically buy catastrophic coverage as well); in the United States, by contrast, nearly 90 percent is picked up by third-party insurers, employers and governments. Singaporeans make these payments out of earnings as well as from health savings accounts. The system is chock-full of incentives for thrift. If you want a private hospital room, for example, you pay through the nose; most people choose less expensive wards.
Conservatives are right: Singaporeans have the kind of "skin in the game" that promotes prudence.
But that's only half the story. There's also a massive public role. For starters, adequate savings for retirement and health expenses are mandated by government (employees must sock away 20 percent of earnings each year, to which employers add 13 percent). Public hospitals provide 80 percent of the acute care, setting affordable pricing benchmarks with which private providers compete. Supply-side rules that favor training new family doctors over pricey specialists are more extensive than similar notions Hillary Clinton pushed in the '90s. And in Singapore, if a child is obese, they don't get Rose Garden exhortations from the first lady. They get no lunch and mandatory exercise periods during school.
There's more (including an ample safety net for the poor), but you get the gist: Singapore achieves world-class results thanks to a bold, unconventional synthesis of liberal and conservative approaches. It's further to the left and further to the right than what President Obama or his foes now seek. The island's real ideology is pragmatic problem-solving. It works thanks to cultural traditions that let this eclectic blend flourish. The system is nurtured by talented, highly paid officials who have the luxury of governing for the long-term without being buffeted much by politics.
We obviously can't transplant Singapore's approach wholesale to the United States. But the reason we can't emulate even some of Singapore's success has to do with that iron law of health-care politics: Every dollar of health-care "waste" is somebody's dollar of income. As a stable advanced democracy, we're so overrun by groups with stakes in today's waste that real efficiency gains are perennially blocked.
Any hope for something better starts with tallying the price of today's paralysis. Think about that $2 trillion the next time you see states, citing budget woes, shut the door to college on tens of thousands of poor American students. Or when the next firm moves jobs overseas because health costs here are soaring. Or when the next bridge collapses. Thanks, Medical Industrial Complex!
We return now to our regularly scheduled political battle, which (no matter the outcome, according to some projections) will leave health costs headed to more than 20 percent of GDP by 2019.
Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-host of public radio's "Left, Right & Center," writes a weekly column for The Post. He can be reached at mattino2@gmail.com.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010; 10:45 AM
We interrupt Washington's feud over the president's "way forward" for a brief word on a path not taken, courtesy of the only rich nation that boasts universal coverage with health outcomes better than ours while spending one-fifth as much per person on health care. Introducing (drum roll please): Singapore.
Yes, it's an island city-state of just 5 million people. Yes, it's more or less a benevolent dictatorship. And, yes, until recently, bringing chewing gum into Singapore could land you in jail. But Singapore, a poor country a few decades ago, now boasts a higher per capita income (when adjusted for local purchasing power) than the United States. And here's the astonishing fact: Singapore spends less than 4 percent of its GDP on health care. We spend 17 percent (and Singapore's somewhat younger population doesn't begin to explain the difference). Matching Singapore's performance in our $15 trillion economy would free up $2 trillion a year for other public and private purposes.
Do I have I your attention?
Today we can't find cash to recruit a new generation of great teachers, rebuild our roads and bridges, pay down the national debt, or invest in better airports, high-speed rail, a clean energy revolution or any of a hundred other things sensible patriots know we should do to renew the country. We can't do these things in large part because the Medical Industrial Complex vacuums up every spare dollar in sight. It's only slightly melodramatic to assert that if we could run our health-care system as efficiently as Singapore's, we could solve most of our other problems.
So how does Singapore do it?
In health circles it's always conservatives who bring up Singapore, because of the primacy it places on personal responsibility. According to Phua Kai Hong of the National University of Singapore, roughly one-third of health spending in Singapore is paid directly by individuals (who typically buy catastrophic coverage as well); in the United States, by contrast, nearly 90 percent is picked up by third-party insurers, employers and governments. Singaporeans make these payments out of earnings as well as from health savings accounts. The system is chock-full of incentives for thrift. If you want a private hospital room, for example, you pay through the nose; most people choose less expensive wards.
Conservatives are right: Singaporeans have the kind of "skin in the game" that promotes prudence.
But that's only half the story. There's also a massive public role. For starters, adequate savings for retirement and health expenses are mandated by government (employees must sock away 20 percent of earnings each year, to which employers add 13 percent). Public hospitals provide 80 percent of the acute care, setting affordable pricing benchmarks with which private providers compete. Supply-side rules that favor training new family doctors over pricey specialists are more extensive than similar notions Hillary Clinton pushed in the '90s. And in Singapore, if a child is obese, they don't get Rose Garden exhortations from the first lady. They get no lunch and mandatory exercise periods during school.
There's more (including an ample safety net for the poor), but you get the gist: Singapore achieves world-class results thanks to a bold, unconventional synthesis of liberal and conservative approaches. It's further to the left and further to the right than what President Obama or his foes now seek. The island's real ideology is pragmatic problem-solving. It works thanks to cultural traditions that let this eclectic blend flourish. The system is nurtured by talented, highly paid officials who have the luxury of governing for the long-term without being buffeted much by politics.
We obviously can't transplant Singapore's approach wholesale to the United States. But the reason we can't emulate even some of Singapore's success has to do with that iron law of health-care politics: Every dollar of health-care "waste" is somebody's dollar of income. As a stable advanced democracy, we're so overrun by groups with stakes in today's waste that real efficiency gains are perennially blocked.
Any hope for something better starts with tallying the price of today's paralysis. Think about that $2 trillion the next time you see states, citing budget woes, shut the door to college on tens of thousands of poor American students. Or when the next firm moves jobs overseas because health costs here are soaring. Or when the next bridge collapses. Thanks, Medical Industrial Complex!
We return now to our regularly scheduled political battle, which (no matter the outcome, according to some projections) will leave health costs headed to more than 20 percent of GDP by 2019.
Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-host of public radio's "Left, Right & Center," writes a weekly column for The Post. He can be reached at mattino2@gmail.com.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Best of Decade: Theatre By Peter Marks
Best of Decade: Theatre By Peter Marks
Sunday, December 27, 2009
This was the decade of the Great Real Estate Rush, as virtually every major theater in these parts built itself a new place to put on plays. The construction dust finally settles next fall, with the scheduled reopening of Arena Stage's waterfront campus after an astonishing $125 million facelift. In the aftermath of the building boom, the region has some lovely new playhouses.
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But with the economy limping and the audience pool essentially stagnant, some companies have been adjusting better than others to the pressures created by these spaces. The next few years will reveal what effect the huge focus on bricks and mortar will have had on the ambitions to elevate theater in this town -- and how much of what's to come will be as good as the best of what we've recently seen.
The best
1. "Passion," Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration (2002). A deeply insightful reconsideration of Stephen Sondheim's psychologically nuanced musical, and a revelatory facet of the most significant theater event at the center this decade.
2. "A Streetcar Named Desire," Kennedy Center (2009). The great Cate, as in Blanchett, was one of the many eye-opening features of Liv Ullmann's devastating, Sydney Theatre Company production.
3. "Measure for Measure," Folger Theatre (2006). A hauntingly beautiful, hypnotically up-to-date handling by Aaron Posner of a difficult play that did not so much fiddle with Shakespeare as illuminate him anew.
4. "Host and Guest," Synetic Theater (2002). Synetic has offered more lyrical evenings, particularly in its series of wordless Shakespeares, but this dance play about honor and savagery in the Caucasus Mountains was the piece that put the company indelibly on the map.
5. "Frozen," Studio Theatre (2006). Under David Muse's direction, a superb ensemble of Washington veterans -- Nancy Robinette, Andrew Long, MaryBeth Wise and later, Kimberly Schraf -- showed in this exploration of the mind of a child killer why talent in this town doesn't require a label marked "imported."
6. "August Wilson's 20th Century," Kennedy Center (2008). A monthlong marathon of the plays of one of the country's most important playwrights, the staged readings of the 10 works could have developed into static acting exercises. Instead, they were positively luminous.
7. "110 in the Shade," Signature Theatre (2003). Eric Schaeffer's effort to find intimate expression for large-scale musicals reached a deeply affecting peak with his treatment of this musical adaptation of "The Rainmaker," by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones.
8. "King Lear," Shakespeare Theatre Company (2009). Along with Rebecca Bayla Taichman's "Taming of the Shrew" (2007) and Mary Zimmerman's "Pericles" (2004), Robert Falls's chillingly violent updating of this majestic tragedy exposed audiences to the best kind of modern (and post-modern) Shakespeare, courtesy of the city's premier classical troupe.
9. "Scenes From the Big Picture," Solas Nua (2007). Let's hear it for the small fry. With an energetic cast and the resourceful Des Kennedy as director, the scrappy folks at tiny Solas Nua (Gaelic for "New Light") put together this deeply invigorating excursion into the lives of Belfast's hard-pressed average citizens.
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10. "Next to Normal," Arena Stage (2008). After a so-so reception off-Broadway, this bristling American musical drama about a family coping with mental illness came to Arena for a major retooling, then returned to the Big Apple for an acclaimed Broadway opening.
The worst
Not a production, a trend: The Post-Show Talk Back. There was a time when you saw a play and debated its merits afterward with your friends. Now, you remain in your seat and discuss its meaning with the cast. Yes, interactivity is everything these days, and theaters are increasingly desperate to add extra value to the steep ticket prices. But can't we go back to the days when a drama simply spoke for itself?
Best of the decade: Theater - washingtonpost.com (29 December 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122400127.html?sid=ST2009122401455
http://snipurl.com/twigo
Sunday, December 27, 2009
This was the decade of the Great Real Estate Rush, as virtually every major theater in these parts built itself a new place to put on plays. The construction dust finally settles next fall, with the scheduled reopening of Arena Stage's waterfront campus after an astonishing $125 million facelift. In the aftermath of the building boom, the region has some lovely new playhouses.
This Story
*
Best of the decade: Film
*
The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
*
Best of the decade: Television
*
Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
*
Best of the decade: fashion
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But with the economy limping and the audience pool essentially stagnant, some companies have been adjusting better than others to the pressures created by these spaces. The next few years will reveal what effect the huge focus on bricks and mortar will have had on the ambitions to elevate theater in this town -- and how much of what's to come will be as good as the best of what we've recently seen.
The best
1. "Passion," Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration (2002). A deeply insightful reconsideration of Stephen Sondheim's psychologically nuanced musical, and a revelatory facet of the most significant theater event at the center this decade.
2. "A Streetcar Named Desire," Kennedy Center (2009). The great Cate, as in Blanchett, was one of the many eye-opening features of Liv Ullmann's devastating, Sydney Theatre Company production.
3. "Measure for Measure," Folger Theatre (2006). A hauntingly beautiful, hypnotically up-to-date handling by Aaron Posner of a difficult play that did not so much fiddle with Shakespeare as illuminate him anew.
4. "Host and Guest," Synetic Theater (2002). Synetic has offered more lyrical evenings, particularly in its series of wordless Shakespeares, but this dance play about honor and savagery in the Caucasus Mountains was the piece that put the company indelibly on the map.
5. "Frozen," Studio Theatre (2006). Under David Muse's direction, a superb ensemble of Washington veterans -- Nancy Robinette, Andrew Long, MaryBeth Wise and later, Kimberly Schraf -- showed in this exploration of the mind of a child killer why talent in this town doesn't require a label marked "imported."
6. "August Wilson's 20th Century," Kennedy Center (2008). A monthlong marathon of the plays of one of the country's most important playwrights, the staged readings of the 10 works could have developed into static acting exercises. Instead, they were positively luminous.
7. "110 in the Shade," Signature Theatre (2003). Eric Schaeffer's effort to find intimate expression for large-scale musicals reached a deeply affecting peak with his treatment of this musical adaptation of "The Rainmaker," by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones.
8. "King Lear," Shakespeare Theatre Company (2009). Along with Rebecca Bayla Taichman's "Taming of the Shrew" (2007) and Mary Zimmerman's "Pericles" (2004), Robert Falls's chillingly violent updating of this majestic tragedy exposed audiences to the best kind of modern (and post-modern) Shakespeare, courtesy of the city's premier classical troupe.
9. "Scenes From the Big Picture," Solas Nua (2007). Let's hear it for the small fry. With an energetic cast and the resourceful Des Kennedy as director, the scrappy folks at tiny Solas Nua (Gaelic for "New Light") put together this deeply invigorating excursion into the lives of Belfast's hard-pressed average citizens.
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10. "Next to Normal," Arena Stage (2008). After a so-so reception off-Broadway, this bristling American musical drama about a family coping with mental illness came to Arena for a major retooling, then returned to the Big Apple for an acclaimed Broadway opening.
The worst
Not a production, a trend: The Post-Show Talk Back. There was a time when you saw a play and debated its merits afterward with your friends. Now, you remain in your seat and discuss its meaning with the cast. Yes, interactivity is everything these days, and theaters are increasingly desperate to add extra value to the steep ticket prices. But can't we go back to the days when a drama simply spoke for itself?
Best of the decade: Theater - washingtonpost.com (29 December 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122400127.html?sid=ST2009122401455
http://snipurl.com/twigo
Best of Decade: Architecture By Philip Kennicott Sunday, December 27, 2009
Best of Decade: Architecture By Philip Kennicott
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Architecture is symbiotically linked to the flow of money, and so it was a topsy-turvy decade, beginning in exuberance, and ending with talk that perhaps the days of the great mega-project are over. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inspired speculation about the future of the skyscraper, but the jitters passed quickly and the race to be the world's tallest building continued -- in such places as Taiwan and Shanghai, and now Dubai. Even so, security fears had a severe and depressing effect on architecture, taking their greatest toll on public and government structures, such as embassies, which became even more fortresslike and forbidding than ever.
This Story
*
Best of the decade: Film
*
The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
*
Best of the decade: Television
*
Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
*
Best of the decade: fashion
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Perhaps the greatest and most encouraging architectural trend was the widespread acceptance of new and green building technologies, and the pervasive use of a common environmental standard to judge sustainability. Near the end of the Aughts, hardly a week passed without the announcement of a new LEED silver or gold or platinum building, proof that sustainable design wasn't just a fashion, but a bottom-line value recognized by architects and investors alike.
But if you wanted to describe what the buildings of the past decade looked like, you'd be hard-pressed to settle on any particular description. A cool, sleek, almost chilly modernism prevailed among some designers, while others pursued exuberant and dazzling forms. Museums went through a great age of expansion, though as the decade ends, it's not clear if they may also be in for a new age of overextension hangover. The "starchitect," a neologism that seemed to define the decade, also became something of a dirty word, as momentum grew for a new kind of modesty and problem-solving, rather than flamboyance and busted budgets.
The best
Tate Modern. Two of the best buildings of the decade came from the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron. In 2000, they opened the Tate Modern, a vast outpost of the venerable London museum, which repurposed a once-grim and dour power plant on the banks of the Thames. The place bustles with all the right kinds of energy.
Beijing National Stadium. Or just call it the Bird's Nest. Herzog and de Meuron's steel fantasy defined the over-hyped, media-saturated, authoritarian 2008 Summer Olympics, and redefined the possibilities of the mass sports venue.
Disney Hall. Frank Gehry built a lot of problematic buildings over the past decade, but with this new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he got just about everything right. Its exuberance and metallic sheen recalls his chef-d'oeuvre, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, but Disney Hall also captures the energy and spirit of an orchestra looking for new directions in the 21st century.
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Seattle Central Library. Locals aren't entirely sold on this 2004 glass behemoth designed by Rem Koolhaas, and you can't deny that it is a startling, even terrifying building. But need to do some research? This is a lovely place to read, to wander the stacks, to look out upon a city where the weather is half the drama. It works.
Alice Tully Hall. The redesign of this 1969 structure by the New York-based firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro should be studied carefully by anyone interested in making Washington's Kennedy Center a more urban, more dynamic, more fun place. To bring the street in, and the art out, the architects literally cut the Lincoln Center open. Nothing they did harmed the spirit of Pietro Belluschi's original, and everything touched got better.
The worst
The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless. His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic. But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.
And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors. And it cost only $250 million.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Architecture is symbiotically linked to the flow of money, and so it was a topsy-turvy decade, beginning in exuberance, and ending with talk that perhaps the days of the great mega-project are over. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inspired speculation about the future of the skyscraper, but the jitters passed quickly and the race to be the world's tallest building continued -- in such places as Taiwan and Shanghai, and now Dubai. Even so, security fears had a severe and depressing effect on architecture, taking their greatest toll on public and government structures, such as embassies, which became even more fortresslike and forbidding than ever.
This Story
*
Best of the decade: Film
*
The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
*
Best of the decade: Television
*
Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
*
Best of the decade: fashion
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This Story
Perhaps the greatest and most encouraging architectural trend was the widespread acceptance of new and green building technologies, and the pervasive use of a common environmental standard to judge sustainability. Near the end of the Aughts, hardly a week passed without the announcement of a new LEED silver or gold or platinum building, proof that sustainable design wasn't just a fashion, but a bottom-line value recognized by architects and investors alike.
But if you wanted to describe what the buildings of the past decade looked like, you'd be hard-pressed to settle on any particular description. A cool, sleek, almost chilly modernism prevailed among some designers, while others pursued exuberant and dazzling forms. Museums went through a great age of expansion, though as the decade ends, it's not clear if they may also be in for a new age of overextension hangover. The "starchitect," a neologism that seemed to define the decade, also became something of a dirty word, as momentum grew for a new kind of modesty and problem-solving, rather than flamboyance and busted budgets.
The best
Tate Modern. Two of the best buildings of the decade came from the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron. In 2000, they opened the Tate Modern, a vast outpost of the venerable London museum, which repurposed a once-grim and dour power plant on the banks of the Thames. The place bustles with all the right kinds of energy.
Beijing National Stadium. Or just call it the Bird's Nest. Herzog and de Meuron's steel fantasy defined the over-hyped, media-saturated, authoritarian 2008 Summer Olympics, and redefined the possibilities of the mass sports venue.
Disney Hall. Frank Gehry built a lot of problematic buildings over the past decade, but with this new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he got just about everything right. Its exuberance and metallic sheen recalls his chef-d'oeuvre, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, but Disney Hall also captures the energy and spirit of an orchestra looking for new directions in the 21st century.
ad_icon
Seattle Central Library. Locals aren't entirely sold on this 2004 glass behemoth designed by Rem Koolhaas, and you can't deny that it is a startling, even terrifying building. But need to do some research? This is a lovely place to read, to wander the stacks, to look out upon a city where the weather is half the drama. It works.
Alice Tully Hall. The redesign of this 1969 structure by the New York-based firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro should be studied carefully by anyone interested in making Washington's Kennedy Center a more urban, more dynamic, more fun place. To bring the street in, and the art out, the architects literally cut the Lincoln Center open. Nothing they did harmed the spirit of Pietro Belluschi's original, and everything touched got better.
The worst
The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless. His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic. But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.
And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors. And it cost only $250 million.
Best of Decade: Classical Music By Anne Midgette
Best of Decade: Classical Music By Anne Midgette
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Digital revolution. It was the catchphrase of the 2000s, and it affected classical music as much as any other medium. Downloads brought the classical recording industry to its knees and rendered the standard format of the $25 CD an endangered species by decade's end. But downloads also led to a wider consumption of classical music. Artists found that there was less advantage to an affiliation with a major label, and went out and made recordings on their own -- from classical stars such as violinist Gil Shaham to the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and other free agents. Institutions learned to sell tickets on their Web sites, and the Metropolitan Opera broke ground with its live HD broadcasts, a new way to bring high-class classical music to a wider audience. And while YouTube created a symphony orchestra, its real service lay in making a treasure-trove of great recordings available to a young audience.
This Story
*
Best of the decade: Film
*
The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
*
Best of the decade: Television
*
Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
*
Best of the decade: fashion
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The best
1. A new downloading service from Apple called iTunes, introduced in 2001, was at the forefront of the digital revolution and dealt one of several death-blows to the recording industry. One casualty: Tower Records, 1960-2006. R.I.P.
2. The composers' collective Bang on a Can morphed from outsiders to leaders in the field, setting the tone for a new generation of "alt-classical" musicians who find it perfectly normal to mingle rock, pop, world music and electronica with so-called classical influences.
3. Peter Gelb arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, and, love him or hate him, the general manager created a buzz around the house that had been absent for too long, particularly with live opera broadcasts to movie theaters around the world.
4. Venezuelan Wunderkind conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had musicians and audiences eating out of his hand with his talent, charisma and symbolism of hope for the future.
5. "On the Transmigration of Souls" wasn't his best piece, but this 9/11 commemoration won John Adams the Pulitzer Prize and cemented his place as the decade's reigning contemporary American composer, whose activities include: curating new-music festivals, writing a memoir and creating much-discussed works such as the opera "Doctor Atomic."
6. Recessions didn't stop the construction of fancy new concert halls: Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center (2006), Segerstrom Hall (2006) in Orange County, Calif., Dallas's Winspear Opera House (2009), Philadelphia's Kimmel Center (2001), and, best of all, Frank Gehry's 2003 Fisher Center at Bard College and Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
7. Almost 40 years after his right hand was incapacitated by focal dystonia, the pianist Leon Fleisher gave a two-handed recital at Carnegie Hall in 2003.
8. The tenor Juan Diego Flórez and soprano Anna Netrebko were among the bright lights of an opera world that was left dimmer, or less glitzy, by the death of Luciano Pavarotti in 2007.
9. In 2001, the latest edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians appeared, 29 volumes strong. In 2005, Richard Taruskin brought out his staggering, brilliant, opinionated Oxford History of Western Music.
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10. Germany's guard changed when Simon Rattle became leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002, and Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier took control of the festival of their great-grandfather Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in 2008.
The worst
Opera improved on its glitz factor thanks to HD broadcasts and tabloid publicity, but lost sight of its artistry. Administrators and critics fostered the wholly erroneous notions that singers of the past couldn't act and singers today could; while the jet-set demands of the international lifestyle fostered hothouse careers: the next great hope comes along, wins acclaim, oversings and fades from sight. The tenor Rolando Villazón became a poster boy for opera in the 2000s: not, alas, for his huge talent, but for singing his voice to shreds.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Digital revolution. It was the catchphrase of the 2000s, and it affected classical music as much as any other medium. Downloads brought the classical recording industry to its knees and rendered the standard format of the $25 CD an endangered species by decade's end. But downloads also led to a wider consumption of classical music. Artists found that there was less advantage to an affiliation with a major label, and went out and made recordings on their own -- from classical stars such as violinist Gil Shaham to the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and other free agents. Institutions learned to sell tickets on their Web sites, and the Metropolitan Opera broke ground with its live HD broadcasts, a new way to bring high-class classical music to a wider audience. And while YouTube created a symphony orchestra, its real service lay in making a treasure-trove of great recordings available to a young audience.
This Story
*
Best of the decade: Film
*
The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
*
Best of the decade: Television
*
Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
*
Best of the decade: fashion
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This Story
The best
1. A new downloading service from Apple called iTunes, introduced in 2001, was at the forefront of the digital revolution and dealt one of several death-blows to the recording industry. One casualty: Tower Records, 1960-2006. R.I.P.
2. The composers' collective Bang on a Can morphed from outsiders to leaders in the field, setting the tone for a new generation of "alt-classical" musicians who find it perfectly normal to mingle rock, pop, world music and electronica with so-called classical influences.
3. Peter Gelb arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, and, love him or hate him, the general manager created a buzz around the house that had been absent for too long, particularly with live opera broadcasts to movie theaters around the world.
4. Venezuelan Wunderkind conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had musicians and audiences eating out of his hand with his talent, charisma and symbolism of hope for the future.
5. "On the Transmigration of Souls" wasn't his best piece, but this 9/11 commemoration won John Adams the Pulitzer Prize and cemented his place as the decade's reigning contemporary American composer, whose activities include: curating new-music festivals, writing a memoir and creating much-discussed works such as the opera "Doctor Atomic."
6. Recessions didn't stop the construction of fancy new concert halls: Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center (2006), Segerstrom Hall (2006) in Orange County, Calif., Dallas's Winspear Opera House (2009), Philadelphia's Kimmel Center (2001), and, best of all, Frank Gehry's 2003 Fisher Center at Bard College and Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
7. Almost 40 years after his right hand was incapacitated by focal dystonia, the pianist Leon Fleisher gave a two-handed recital at Carnegie Hall in 2003.
8. The tenor Juan Diego Flórez and soprano Anna Netrebko were among the bright lights of an opera world that was left dimmer, or less glitzy, by the death of Luciano Pavarotti in 2007.
9. In 2001, the latest edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians appeared, 29 volumes strong. In 2005, Richard Taruskin brought out his staggering, brilliant, opinionated Oxford History of Western Music.
ad_icon
10. Germany's guard changed when Simon Rattle became leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002, and Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier took control of the festival of their great-grandfather Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in 2008.
The worst
Opera improved on its glitz factor thanks to HD broadcasts and tabloid publicity, but lost sight of its artistry. Administrators and critics fostered the wholly erroneous notions that singers of the past couldn't act and singers today could; while the jet-set demands of the international lifestyle fostered hothouse careers: the next great hope comes along, wins acclaim, oversings and fades from sight. The tenor Rolando Villazón became a poster boy for opera in the 2000s: not, alas, for his huge talent, but for singing his voice to shreds.
Best of Decade: Ann Hornaday on top movie moments; Films
There Will Be Blood: "I drink your milkshake"
Move Down
2]
Hunger: The scene with Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham talking across a table
Move Down Move Up
3]
25th Hour: The scene where there's a reveal in the background of Ground Zero
Move Down Move Up
4]
The Hurt Locker: Jeremy Renner in the supermarket
Move Down Move Up
5]
Junebug: Amy Adams doing Embeth Davidtz's nails
Move Down Move Up
6]
Children of Men: The ping-pong ball scene in the car
Move Down Move Up
7]
Moulin Rouge: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" number
Move Down Move Up
8]
Once: The shot of Marketa Irglova singing in her bedroom slippers walking down the street
Move Down Move Up
9]
Tropic Thunder: Robert Downey Jr.'s "I'm the dude playing the dude" speech
Move Down Move Up
10]
WALL*E: opening sequence
Best of the Decade: Ann Hornaday on top movie moments - washingtonpost.com (29 December 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/12/16/DI2009121601465.html
http://snipurl.com/twiel
By Ann Hornaday
Sunday, December 27, 2009
I'm arguing with myself already. "What, 'Y Tu Mamá También' and no 'Children of Men'? 'The Lives of Others' and no 'Diving Bell and the Butterfly' ?
This Story
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Best of the decade: Film
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The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
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Best of the decade: Television
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Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
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Best of the decade: fashion
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"And really, Ann? Finding Freaking Nemo?!"
Actually, on that last one, I stand firm. I fly the little clown-fish flag proudly, on the grounds that one of the organizing principles of Top 10 lists is not only tolerating but wanting to watch something over and over and over again. "Finding Nemo" fits that description, which I discovered firsthand five years ago, when we brought our then 3-year-old daughter home. It wasn't long before "Finding Nemo" was on heavy rotation in the DVD player. And I never tired of the movie, from its gorgeous visuals and fabulous voice work by Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres, to its message of loving by letting go.
But "Finding Nemo" also deserves the decade's No. 1 slot because it so aptly symbolizes how important animated family features have become in the movie business -- along with toy and book franchises, they're the last of the reliables in prying people off their couches -- and the leaps they've taken aesthetically. This was a decade, after all, that included such masterworks as "Spirited Away," "Howl's Moving Castle," "WALL E" and, this year alone, "Up," "Ponyo," "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "The Princess and the Frog." All are movies I could happily watch over and over again.
But the one I reach for first will always be the little clown fish.
The best
1. "Finding Nemo" (2003)
2. "You Can Count on Me" (2000)
3. "The Lives of Others" (2006)
4. "The Hurt Locker" (2009)
5. "Y Tu Mamá También" (2001)
6. "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006)
7. "The Edge of Heaven" (2007)
8. "A Mighty Wind" (2003)
9. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004)
10. "There Will Be Blood" (2007)
The worst
"Star Wars: Clone Wars" (2008)
If "Finding Nemo" represents the best of the animation decade, this misfire represents the very worst, punctuating a decline in the "Star Wars" franchise that began in 1999 with "The Phantom Menace" and continued its downward spiral through "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." Sad.
Move Down
2]
Hunger: The scene with Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham talking across a table
Move Down Move Up
3]
25th Hour: The scene where there's a reveal in the background of Ground Zero
Move Down Move Up
4]
The Hurt Locker: Jeremy Renner in the supermarket
Move Down Move Up
5]
Junebug: Amy Adams doing Embeth Davidtz's nails
Move Down Move Up
6]
Children of Men: The ping-pong ball scene in the car
Move Down Move Up
7]
Moulin Rouge: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" number
Move Down Move Up
8]
Once: The shot of Marketa Irglova singing in her bedroom slippers walking down the street
Move Down Move Up
9]
Tropic Thunder: Robert Downey Jr.'s "I'm the dude playing the dude" speech
Move Down Move Up
10]
WALL*E: opening sequence
Best of the Decade: Ann Hornaday on top movie moments - washingtonpost.com (29 December 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/12/16/DI2009121601465.html
http://snipurl.com/twiel
By Ann Hornaday
Sunday, December 27, 2009
I'm arguing with myself already. "What, 'Y Tu Mamá También' and no 'Children of Men'? 'The Lives of Others' and no 'Diving Bell and the Butterfly' ?
This Story
*
Best of the decade: Film
*
The 10 most important blockbusters of the decade
*
Best of the decade: Television
*
Best of the decade: Theater
*
Best of the decade: Pop music
*
Best of the decade: Dance
*
Best of the decade: Art
*
Best of the decade: Architecture
*
Best of the decade: Classical music
*
Best of the decade: fashion
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This Story
"And really, Ann? Finding Freaking Nemo?!"
Actually, on that last one, I stand firm. I fly the little clown-fish flag proudly, on the grounds that one of the organizing principles of Top 10 lists is not only tolerating but wanting to watch something over and over and over again. "Finding Nemo" fits that description, which I discovered firsthand five years ago, when we brought our then 3-year-old daughter home. It wasn't long before "Finding Nemo" was on heavy rotation in the DVD player. And I never tired of the movie, from its gorgeous visuals and fabulous voice work by Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres, to its message of loving by letting go.
But "Finding Nemo" also deserves the decade's No. 1 slot because it so aptly symbolizes how important animated family features have become in the movie business -- along with toy and book franchises, they're the last of the reliables in prying people off their couches -- and the leaps they've taken aesthetically. This was a decade, after all, that included such masterworks as "Spirited Away," "Howl's Moving Castle," "WALL E" and, this year alone, "Up," "Ponyo," "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "The Princess and the Frog." All are movies I could happily watch over and over again.
But the one I reach for first will always be the little clown fish.
The best
1. "Finding Nemo" (2003)
2. "You Can Count on Me" (2000)
3. "The Lives of Others" (2006)
4. "The Hurt Locker" (2009)
5. "Y Tu Mamá También" (2001)
6. "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006)
7. "The Edge of Heaven" (2007)
8. "A Mighty Wind" (2003)
9. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004)
10. "There Will Be Blood" (2007)
The worst
"Star Wars: Clone Wars" (2008)
If "Finding Nemo" represents the best of the animation decade, this misfire represents the very worst, punctuating a decline in the "Star Wars" franchise that began in 1999 with "The Phantom Menace" and continued its downward spiral through "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." Sad.
Best of Decade : Television By Tom Shales
Best of Decade : Television By Tom Shales
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Television itself -- the machine, not the medium -- changed more in the first decade of the 21st century than it had in the 50-plus years that followed its arrival on the American scene right after World War II. Among the most major of changes: On June 12, 2009, after considerable delay, TV went digital and left its analog past, and millions of now-useless receivers, behind.
When TV changed from black-and-white to color in the 1950s, the effect was gradual, and because the FCC had mandated that color TV be backward compatible -- capable of receiving black-and-white signals without compromise -- no one had to toss a TV set into the trash. With the change to digital, obsolescence could be theoretically sidestepped by purchasing an analog-to-digital converter box, but the history books, if there are going to be any history books, will probably look back on it as a clean break.
With the digital transition came a new shape for the TV picture, a 16x9 aspect ratio replacing the long-standard 4x3, and the spread of sets that can hang on walls like paintings -- or mirrors. With prices for new high-definition sets eventually brought down to relatively tolerable levels, cutting-edginess became something within the reach of the great middle-class mass of viewers.
Sometimes competition is the mother of invention and sometimes desperation is. To combat the popularity of satellite-delivered television systems like DirecTV, the cable industry came up with such technical innovations as "On-Demand" -- which makes programs available at times of the viewer's, not the network's, choosing; and the Digital Video Recorder (DVR), which records shows on a hard-drive. (This followed in the footsteps of TiVo, a wizardly time-shifter introduced back in the 20th century that also gave viewers added control over what could be seen on TV and when.)
For all the technological upheaval, however, what viewers now saw digitally and high-definitionally was, for the most part, the same old Shinola they'd watched for the previous half-century or so. To some degree, almost everything new was old again; one of the true blockbuster programming concepts, the Disney Channel's "High School Musical 1, 2 and 3," was clearly a throwback to the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney backyard musicals of the MGM '30s and '40s -- with Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron the stunningly attractive new Judy and Mickey.
Even if the program types were basically the same, however, there were new approaches, new attitudes, new contours -- even new cliches to be coined. When TV was good, it was at least the equal of good TV from any other era -- and chances were excellent that it was also much, much prettier.
The best
1. Sept. 11, 2001. Nothing originated by television could or would approach the impact of a seminal event transmitted while it happened, a nation clinging to the messenger even as the message grew darker and more terrible by the moment. Television united the nation in sorrow and horror as it had not done since 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
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2. "Planet Earth," co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, was the show of the decade, a majestic and unforgettable ecological statement and a testament to the wonders of new technology -- science and nature not at odds with each other but allied in ecstatic exploration.
3. Tina Fey, who went from being the first female head writer of "Saturday Night Live" to the star and auteur of her own "SNL"-derived NBC sitcom, "30 Rock," with a detour to play the role she seemed born for, Alaska politician and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
4. "The Sopranos." Though it premiered in 1999, the gangster epic will probably go down in history as the first television masterpiece of the new century.
5. "Survivor." Producer Mark Burnett persuaded CBS to experiment with a still-fresh form of programming, reality TV, in a breakthrough competitive travelogue shot on tape all over the planet. With its cast of unknown amateurs, "Survivor" brought TV into a new age that made formulaic scripted fare an embattled if not endangered species.
6. "American Idol," another best-of-its-kind reality-derived program, was the biggest hit series since "The Cosby Show" and the most positive and edifying success in the trash-strewn history of the Fox network. Once again, the basic concept was represented in TV's earliest years -- the "amateur hour," brought over from radio.
7. Rachel Maddow blossomed forth on the revamped MSNBC and proved that the political left doesn't have to be locked out of TV by the garrulous right.
8. Barack Obama, a president as ideally suited for the new information age (the one that has supplanted the old information age) as his predecessor, George W. Bush, was ill-equipped. Also unlike Bush, Obama seemed to thrive under TV lights, and spent more time under them than any president to precede him.
9. "Monk," one of the best scripted shows in the annals of cable, was a prime example of cable's ability to beat the broadcast networks at some of their own games -- in this case, the character-driven, quirky detective show, which the networks had largely abandoned for high-tech, ultra-violent crime "procedurals."
10. Winston Churchill's Stormy Years. While no movie or miniseries of that title showed up, HBO did offer two different Churchill movies, set in two different time periods and starring two different actors in the lead role, that singly or together re-emphasized the glories of TV historical drama at its best.
The worst
One series seemed to embody all the worst traits of reality competition trash and slavish, sleaze-ball pandering -- "Fear Factor," an abomination from self-destructive NBC that featured supposedly ordinary people risking lives and limbs on idiotic stunts to win a few bucks. The show got off to a tasteless start when it dared an African American man who grew up in the inner city to lie in a plastic coffin and be covered with live rats (wisely, he walked off). On another episode, the loutish host got into a fistfight with one of the contestants. Whoever first said "the show must go on" would probably retract that statement if he'd seen this show.
Best of the decade: Television - washingtonpost.com (29 December 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122400133.html
http://snipurl.com/twi9b
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Television itself -- the machine, not the medium -- changed more in the first decade of the 21st century than it had in the 50-plus years that followed its arrival on the American scene right after World War II. Among the most major of changes: On June 12, 2009, after considerable delay, TV went digital and left its analog past, and millions of now-useless receivers, behind.
When TV changed from black-and-white to color in the 1950s, the effect was gradual, and because the FCC had mandated that color TV be backward compatible -- capable of receiving black-and-white signals without compromise -- no one had to toss a TV set into the trash. With the change to digital, obsolescence could be theoretically sidestepped by purchasing an analog-to-digital converter box, but the history books, if there are going to be any history books, will probably look back on it as a clean break.
With the digital transition came a new shape for the TV picture, a 16x9 aspect ratio replacing the long-standard 4x3, and the spread of sets that can hang on walls like paintings -- or mirrors. With prices for new high-definition sets eventually brought down to relatively tolerable levels, cutting-edginess became something within the reach of the great middle-class mass of viewers.
Sometimes competition is the mother of invention and sometimes desperation is. To combat the popularity of satellite-delivered television systems like DirecTV, the cable industry came up with such technical innovations as "On-Demand" -- which makes programs available at times of the viewer's, not the network's, choosing; and the Digital Video Recorder (DVR), which records shows on a hard-drive. (This followed in the footsteps of TiVo, a wizardly time-shifter introduced back in the 20th century that also gave viewers added control over what could be seen on TV and when.)
For all the technological upheaval, however, what viewers now saw digitally and high-definitionally was, for the most part, the same old Shinola they'd watched for the previous half-century or so. To some degree, almost everything new was old again; one of the true blockbuster programming concepts, the Disney Channel's "High School Musical 1, 2 and 3," was clearly a throwback to the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney backyard musicals of the MGM '30s and '40s -- with Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron the stunningly attractive new Judy and Mickey.
Even if the program types were basically the same, however, there were new approaches, new attitudes, new contours -- even new cliches to be coined. When TV was good, it was at least the equal of good TV from any other era -- and chances were excellent that it was also much, much prettier.
The best
1. Sept. 11, 2001. Nothing originated by television could or would approach the impact of a seminal event transmitted while it happened, a nation clinging to the messenger even as the message grew darker and more terrible by the moment. Television united the nation in sorrow and horror as it had not done since 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
ad_icon
2. "Planet Earth," co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, was the show of the decade, a majestic and unforgettable ecological statement and a testament to the wonders of new technology -- science and nature not at odds with each other but allied in ecstatic exploration.
3. Tina Fey, who went from being the first female head writer of "Saturday Night Live" to the star and auteur of her own "SNL"-derived NBC sitcom, "30 Rock," with a detour to play the role she seemed born for, Alaska politician and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
4. "The Sopranos." Though it premiered in 1999, the gangster epic will probably go down in history as the first television masterpiece of the new century.
5. "Survivor." Producer Mark Burnett persuaded CBS to experiment with a still-fresh form of programming, reality TV, in a breakthrough competitive travelogue shot on tape all over the planet. With its cast of unknown amateurs, "Survivor" brought TV into a new age that made formulaic scripted fare an embattled if not endangered species.
6. "American Idol," another best-of-its-kind reality-derived program, was the biggest hit series since "The Cosby Show" and the most positive and edifying success in the trash-strewn history of the Fox network. Once again, the basic concept was represented in TV's earliest years -- the "amateur hour," brought over from radio.
7. Rachel Maddow blossomed forth on the revamped MSNBC and proved that the political left doesn't have to be locked out of TV by the garrulous right.
8. Barack Obama, a president as ideally suited for the new information age (the one that has supplanted the old information age) as his predecessor, George W. Bush, was ill-equipped. Also unlike Bush, Obama seemed to thrive under TV lights, and spent more time under them than any president to precede him.
9. "Monk," one of the best scripted shows in the annals of cable, was a prime example of cable's ability to beat the broadcast networks at some of their own games -- in this case, the character-driven, quirky detective show, which the networks had largely abandoned for high-tech, ultra-violent crime "procedurals."
10. Winston Churchill's Stormy Years. While no movie or miniseries of that title showed up, HBO did offer two different Churchill movies, set in two different time periods and starring two different actors in the lead role, that singly or together re-emphasized the glories of TV historical drama at its best.
The worst
One series seemed to embody all the worst traits of reality competition trash and slavish, sleaze-ball pandering -- "Fear Factor," an abomination from self-destructive NBC that featured supposedly ordinary people risking lives and limbs on idiotic stunts to win a few bucks. The show got off to a tasteless start when it dared an African American man who grew up in the inner city to lie in a plastic coffin and be covered with live rats (wisely, he walked off). On another episode, the loutish host got into a fistfight with one of the contestants. Whoever first said "the show must go on" would probably retract that statement if he'd seen this show.
Best of the decade: Television - washingtonpost.com (29 December 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122400133.html
http://snipurl.com/twi9b
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