David Brooks Has Discovered A New Way To Frame The 2012 Elections

David Brooks does what he does best in this article.  He linked to a lengthy article recently published in Foreign Affairs, which raises many fundamental questions, and he over-simplified it into nonsense.  I will respond to the Foreign Affairs article in a subsequent post, but its quicker to dispense with the Brooks caricature of that article.

Brooks found a new way of organizing the world that he derived from the Foreign Affairs article.  The world consists of those who view the unemployment problem as a cyclical problem.  They believe that government should increase spending and deficits during a recession to restore growth.  Others, that he calls structuralists, believe that there are fundamental problems in the economy, and that government stimulus will not solve the underlying structural problems.  He puts himself in the camp of the deeper thinkers who understand the real problems in the economy.

He devotes a sentence or two to each of the structural problems that the deep thinkers have identified.  Globalization, a weak educational system, and a political system that benefits entrenched interests which keep markets from being competitive.  He sums up the current model as one that compensates for structural problems with tax cuts, and a welfare state that is not sustainable.

The major problem with his analysis is that the distinction between cyclicalists and  structuralists is not valid.  Most economists who favor stimulus in a recession, also believe that there are underlying structural problems in the economy that need to be addressed.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Government should address both of these problems.  Moreover, Brooks wants to cut government spending, and he wants to improve the education system.  Apparently, he knows how to provide a quality education to more Americans, simultaneous with cuts in spending on public education. Furthermore, its hard to understand what's wrong with higher education in the US since it is one of our leading exports.  Our colleges attract students from all over the world who believe that they provide a quality education.  Our problem is that they are becoming less affordable for many citizens, and that a decline in public funding may erode the quality of the state colleges that educate the large majority of our students.  Much of the decline in public funding is due to the recession and declining state tax revenues.  About 30% of the federal stimulus package was funneled to the states to help them to deal with their funding problems.  If it were not for the "cyclicalists" our education system would be even worse off than it is today.

One could save a lot of time when reading one of Brook's op-eds, by reading the last couple of paragraphs which make the real points that he wants to make.  They are always political points.  He dismisses the cyclicalists by declaring that further stimulus is not doable, and then he moves to his real point.  Obama is a minimalist who does not understand the big structural issues that we face.  Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are big thinkers who understand them.  They are impeded, however, by the small thinkers, who have a narrow focus on tax cuts.  Perhaps if Romney wins the election, he will turn his big mind to the big structural problems that we face.  Wink, Wink, don't believe the Romney that you saw during the primary campaign.  He will provide solutions for our structural problems that our minimalist president does not understand.  Perhaps, that means that he will dismantle the welfare state that Brooks believes to be one of our major structural problems.