No Plan...No Clothes

Another link from some guy who calls himself Atrios (I hear he's kind of popular on the internets), although I also saw a reference over at The Poor Man. Campus Progress sat down for a chat with Paul Krugman:

CP: I get the feeling that we’re living in a really good political satire.

PK: Yeah, or a really tawdry political novel. If you tried to make this stuff up, nobody would dare – they’d say that it’s ridiculous.

CP: You’ve written economics textbooks before. If you had to imagine writing another textbook thirty years from now characterizing economic policy under various presidents, how would you talk about the Bush administration?

PK: Well, the answer is that there is no policy. What’s interesting about it is that there’s no sign that anybody’s actually thinking about “well, how do we run this economy?” Everything becomes an excuse to do pre-set things instead of an actual response to an event or a real problem. So, the idea was “we’re going to cut taxes on capital income, as opposed to earned income” and whatever happened became a reason to do that...

CP: One of the most troubling provisions in the budget reconciliation is HB609, which could cut billions in federal aid for higher education. Seems like this is adding yet another blow by some politicians who do not properly value equal accessibility to education and opportunity.

PK: We have disturbing trends in our society, and instead of doing things to counter them, the current political majority seems to be out to accentuate them, inequality in general. Now, what’s happening to the democratization of education that we achieved half a century ago? We seem to be losing it and going back towards some kind of a hereditary, aristocratic model where only the people from the right families get to go to the right schools. Instead of doing something about it, the government is cutting financial aid, which is one of the things that allows kids who don’t come from the right families to go to the best schools.

CP: You’ve spoken before about post-Katrina reconstruction. Many were horrified by certain conservatives pushing towards a permanent Estate Tax repeal in its immediate wake. Do you see any bright spots of opportunity in the reconstruction?

PK: Disaster sometimes gives you an opportunity to rethink your premises and really go out and do something that becomes a model for future policy. What strikes me is that nothing is happening post-Katrina. There’s no sign of planning, there’s no sign of urgency, there aren’t even any discussions over how we should handle reconstruction. I just think that, faced with a genuine policy challenge that wasn’t part of their pre-existing agenda, the Bushies just lost interest. Where is the plan for reconstruction? We’re in the process of forgetting all about the Gulf Coast.

CP: Though a number of folks are jumping on the opportunity to change all of the New Orleans schools into charter schools.

PK: I don’t know how we’re going to handle this. I know that the problem has created an opportunity for privatization, but basic public schooling is one of America’s great institutions.

And, as a bonus, there's a link to P.K.'s November 4th column--Hans Christian Andersen updated for the 21st Century:

Hans Christian Andersen understood bad rulers. "The Emperor's New Suit" doesn't end with everyone acclaiming the little boy for telling the truth. It ends with the emperor and his officials refusing to admit their mistake.

I've laid my hands on additional material, which Andersen failed to publish, describing what happened after the imperial procession was over.

The talk-show host Bill O'Reilly yelled, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" at the little boy. Calling the boy a nut, he threatened to go to the boy's house and "surprise" him.

Fox News repeatedly played up possible finds of imperial clothing, then buried reports discrediting these stories. Months after the naked procession, a poll found that many of those getting most of their news from Fox believed that the emperor had in fact been clothed.

Imperial officials eventually admitted that they couldn't find any evidence that the suit ever existed, or that there had even been an effort to produce a suit. They insisted, however, that they had found evidence of wardrobe-manufacturing-and-distribution-related program activities.

Bill Frist owned stock in the company that "produced" the new suit: but he directed his blind trust to sell just before the unveiling, based on disappointing returns from the previous quarter. And Tom DeLay got them to donate $25,000 to TRMPAC.