Of budgets and values

It is shockingly hard to come up with an image
to accompany a post about budgeting.

Budgets are beautiful.

Gordon Gekko's motto--"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good"--was willfully contrarian but hardly persuasive. Greed has the virtue of predictability, but it is not good unless incentives are extremely implausibly aligned.

But budgets are beautiful.

Budgets are beautiful because they are stark and truthful. They tell you everything you need to know about an organization. Does the organization assign resources politically or logically? Does the organization think hard about planning for contingencies? Does the organization recklessly commit all of its funding with no reserve?

Budgets are especially beautiful when they are based on lies.

Consider what Enron's balance sheet said about the organization. The budget was based on lies, and because it was based on lies you could tell that the organization was based on lies. A management that has to lie to make its numbers is an organization that's condemned to fail. (Although not necessarily quickly.)

But it's impossible to make those lies last forever. Eventually, revenues have to meet expenses. And eventually assets (and equity) have to total liabilities.

Organizations do lots of things that aren't beautiful, because they don't have to be true. Organizations sponsor charitable works, even when those organizations' missions are the antithesis of charity. Organizations pass resolutions declaring that they're in favor of women or civil rights, even when those organizations are opposed to both. And organizations say they hire and promote on merit, even when all the top-ranked people in an organization look and sound the same because they're from the same school, same town, same class.

But budgets can't be hypocritical. An organization either spends what it has on a priority or it doesn't. Budgets, therefore, are the ultimate statement of an organization's real values. If an organization values foresight and preparedness, the budget will reflect that. If it's a risky and venturesome organization, the budget will reflect that, too. And if the organization is rotten to its core, then the budget will reveal that, too.

Is "Starve the Beast" Conservatism on Its Last Legs?

The question: The Honorable Mr. Williams asks, "Is the coming debt ceiling fight the watershed moment for this strategy? Put another way, is this the culmination of Starve the Beast?"

The answer: No.

The Honorable Mr. Williams is a good man of sound judgment and public spirit, and so he believes that all men are like himself. But everyday politics has never been a game played only by the public-spirited, which is why Cincinnatus and the Duke of Zhou are remembered. Were their virtue normal, and not exceptional, we would have no need to remember their names. In essence, he proceeds from the false assumption that "starve the beast" means (a) starving the beast and (b) that it is possible to sate elite activists' demands.

Sometime around 1975, American politics irrevocably changed. The confluence of post-Roe, anti-ERA, and pro-Reagan mobilization created a new, self-consciously unified conservative elite which has dominated GOP politics for nearly 40 years and whose generational reproduction seems assured. (Eric Cantor was not there with Phyllis Schafly, but he is no different from the hungry young men who took part in killing ERA.) Among Democrats, the fracturing of the New Deal coalition healed, as it had to but the elite consensus that guided the Democratic Party and left politics has never recovered. It is telling that the Democratic Party features a far richer diversity of intramural debate than the Republican Party; the liberal movement inhabits dozens of "little magazines" where the intellectual Marines of an even larger number of factions contend.

The conservative movement is not monolithic, but its distribution of opinion has far less variance than its liberal counterpart. And Republicans have consistently shown a vastly greater ability to mobilize resources, direct policy, and maintain caucus discipline than Democrats--even when those goals are fundamentally not conservative. (Think, for instance, of the brutal whipping the leadership applied on Medicare Part D, which was more hated at the time among conservatives than the Iraq War. I know, because at the time I was writing for a conservative blog and that is what we all agreed.)

"Starve the beast" was never a strategy for the anti-tax, pro-military, and de-regulation faction that has been largely predominant in Republican circles since Ford fired Rockefeller. it was, instead, a slogan, rather like the Leninist "peace, land, bread" slogan that excused the practical surrender of Russian lands. The "beast" that was to be starved has, in fact, never been touched; Republicans are quite happy to put it on reduced rations by maintaining policy drift while giving the top 1% (and the top 0.1%, and the top 0.01%) of households by income generous tax breaks. Think not "starve the beast"--rather, think "feed the rich."

The acid test of whether Republican elites are more interested in serving what we used to call the moneyed interests lies in examining carefully legislative initiatives like Medicare Part D or the Walker plan for Wisconsin. These are not first-order priorities for conservatism. Indeed, it is difficult to deduce how most of these initiatives flow from the sincerely expressed ideals that philosophical conservatives embrace. But it is very easy to deduce how they serve the interests of key Republican constituencies. As those constituencies rack up the score in the Congress and in state houses across the country, it is difficult to see why they would ever relent.

Lombardi was wrong about football, but right about politics, when he said that winning wasn't everything--it was the only thing. And so too in politics. Government is for keeps, and there should be no unilateral disarmament. (One thing that I have never understood is the mentality prevalent among self-identified progressives that holds that compromise is a good thing of itself. It is one thing to take half a loaf; it is another to take half a loaf simply because someone has asserted, with no justification, that he deserves half of your whole loaf.)

The debt ceiling will be raised; it will be raised at the last possible moment; it will be raised at great cost to the poor and the Democratic. In this, Boehner is simply responding both to the structural pressures on him within his caucus but also to the fact that to do otherwise would be to miss an opportunity to press what are, I'm sure, his sincere policy preferences. And why should he do so? It is not "statesmanlike" to forbear from using your advantage in such a situation; it is merely weak. And so the "starve the beast" strategy will, apparently, fail, but it will have actually succeeded, because any concessions that he will have wrung out of the White House on this will be a net gain for his party.

Jon Huntsman and the Desperate Appeal

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman nobly sacrificed his presidential ambitions in 2009, when he accepted President Obama's nomination to serve as ambassador to China. Unfortunately for Huntsman, nobody has fully explained to him that being a part of the Obama administration is disqualifying for Republican caucus voters, who believe that the president was born in a Hamas-run madrasa in a small Indonesian village somewhere in Kenya. Also, there are rumors that the president's children are black.

Not that Huntsman's own background will fill the average believer in the wonder-working power of the evangelical Christian church with much more confidence. Most GOP voters, in my experience, know two things about Mitt Romney: the second is that he passed Obamacare in one state, and the first is that he is what they charmingly describe as a cultist. Huntsman combines all of the cult appeal of Romney with a C.V. that may be described as "Romney lite": just another rich, good-looking Mormon with a photogenic family and a record as a pragmatic, problem-solving governor. (Also like Romney, Huntsman's father served in the Nixon administration.) There is, consequently, little chance that Huntsman will ever exceed the 5 percent mark in any competitive primary, except Utah, and he will probably still lose that. (If Bob Bennett is too liberal for Utah Republicans, what hope for sensible moderate Huntsman?)

(If I seem a little bitter about all of this, it is because there was a time, namely early 2008, when I thought that something like a Daniels-Huntsman ticket was possible. And given that one of the two parties' nominees will inevitably win the White House, I prefer to have the sanest possible people running on both tickets. But the enduring appeal of birtherism and the splenetic chants to keep government out of our Medicare have rather soured me on the prospect.)

So, Huntsman's campaign faces some uphill battles. And he is trying to prevail by positioning himself as some sort of a Bobby Kennedy for the right: young, competent, passionate, and dedicated to national service. Hence, this Huffington Post coverage of Huntsman commencement speech at the University of South Carolina. Huntsman, in a bid to win the votes of young people (long a crucial Republican demographic), led the students in their traditional football cheer--"Go, fight, win, kick ass!"--and also sought to portray himself as a hep cat by talking about his ambitions to be a rock and roll musician.

Yes, because rock and roll is what all the kids are about. To be fair, I don't think MC Moroni would really fly.

To prove his rock bona fides, Huntsman quoted Ben Folds' song "The Luckiest" at length. Ah, "The Luckiest"--the second-sappiest song on the sappiest BF solo album, a song seemingly designed to be played as the night wears on at an emo wedding, a song that is pretty much the anti-BF5 ballad, a song that is ... intrinsically not cool.

We should spare asking Huntsman whether he knows any other BF songs, or what he thinks that "Philosophy" (for instance) is really about, or whether he's ever asked a girl to give him back his black T-shirt. But if Huntsman really wants to stake his credibility to coolness in 2011 on knowledge of Ben Folds lyrics, then let's raise him and call:

Governor Huntsman, what do you think about "Brick"?