The Arizona Law: Why Rachel Maddow's Approach is Wrong

Discussing the new Arizona immigration law in his NYT column today, Ross Douthat writes:

Critics of Arizona’s new immigration law have not been shy about impugning the motives of its supporters. The measure, which requires police to check the immigration status of people they question or detain, has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

Faced with this kind of hyperbole, the supposed bigots have understandably returned the favor, dismissing opponents of the Arizona measure as limousine liberals who don’t understand the grim realities of life along an often-lawless border. And so the debate has become a storm of insults rather than an argument.

I think this is absolutely correct. Instead of an honest discussion over whether this legislation could lead to unequal treatment, we've seen a barrage of ad hominem attacks against those who supported it.

The other night on MSNBC, for example, Rachel Maddow spend an awful lot of time accusing members of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) organization -- a group that lobbied in favor of the Arizona law -- of racism:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I'm sure that Maddow is right on the specifics here. It certainly seems that Dan Stein, the president of FAIR, distorted the facts. And I have no doubt that some members of FAIR have made racist comments in the past.

But FAIR is a large organization, with members from many different backgrounds. Maddow's attempts to portray FAIR as some kind of hate group strike me quite a stretch. Though some left-wing groups have leveled similar charges against FAIR in the past, the organization has really been able to maintain its tax-exempt status because it's not all that radical, and it adheres to the strict legal guidelines that are imposed on all tax-exempt groups.

In 2005, it was FAIR that explicitly condemned a leading member of the Protect Arizona Now (PAN) committee for her unabashedly racist remarks. (That member, Virginia Abernethy, was ultimately expelled from PAN.)

FAIR has worked hard to reject the use of discriminatory language, but the sad truth is that FAIR is an anti-immigration organization, and it's not difficult to find some members in any anti-immigration organization who have racist views. There is clearly some ideological overlap between those who oppose immigration and those who support white nationalism.

But even if FAIR is a racist organization, what does this really tell us about the legitimacy of the Arizona law?

Today, you can find dozens of explicitly racist groups that support gun rights. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center -- which has identified FAIR as a "hate group" -- has often pointed to the strong political ties between pro-gun organizations and white supremacist groups.

Does this mean that any bill designed to protect gun rights that is strongly endorsed by white supremacist organizations should be dismissed as racist? Maybe. But lots of other people -- myself included -- strongly support gun rights for completely legitimate reasons. Proving that some supporters of a piece of legislation are racist does not prove that all supporters of the legislation are racist, or that the legislation itself is racist.

Instead of trying to show that the Arizona law is racist because some groups that supported it may have racist motives, why not just look at what the law does? These other debates quickly distract us from the point. It's not difficult to see why the Arizona law may lead to unequal treatment under the law. For those of us who oppose the legislation, that should really be our primary focus.

Calling people racists doesn't usually make them rethink their position. When you begin with these kinds of ad hominem attacks, the argument quickly becomes about the character of those who support or oppose the law, rather than the lives of those who are actually affected by it.

Maddow on the Spending Freeze, Continued . . .

The exchange between Rachel Maddow and Jared Bernstein is still bothering me, so I thought I'd offer some additional comments.



First, while I understand that Maddow is a strong-minded progressive, it's infuriating to hear someone -- even a left-wing television host -- assert the correctness of Keynesian theory without even acknowledging the opposition.

If Maddow had suggested that "many economists believe" that the Roosevelt Recession of 1937 and the Japanese Lost Decade were the result of contractionary fiscal policy, she would've been on much sounder footing. But Maddow didn't qualify her statements at all.

This kind of provincial thinking is exactly the reason liberals criticize conservative pundits, who seem unable to accept that there are often many legitimate views when it comes to complex economic problems. But for some on the left, fiscal stimulus seems to have become the liberal substitute for conservative tax-cutting ideology.

Second, Maddow's interpretation of both these events is, at best, extremely narrow-minded.

A more nuanced reading of the Japanese crisis provides a dramatically different story of the potential problems with a poorly-designed fiscal stimulus package:

For many, the moral of the story isn't that Japan erred in deciding to use fiscal policy to fix their economy -- its failure was in the execution.

For one thing, there was dubious logic behind too many of Japan's infrastructure projects. "It was the epitome of bridges to nowhere," says economist Ed Lincoln, director of the Center for Japan-U.S. Business and Economic Studies at New York University. "There was apparently a $2 billion bridge built to an island of 800 people."

. . .

Lincoln adds that at its peak in the 1990s, the government was spending 8% of GDP on public works projects. By comparison, the United States now spends about 3% - even several hundred billion dollars in proposed projects would not get the United States to Japan's peak.

. . .

Finally, any action by the government needs to be done swiftly and decisively.

The Japanese government's efforts were spread over several years but it was as if its leaders couldn't pick one strategy and stick to it. After passing a series of stimulus packages in the early 1990s, the economy showed signs of improving; by 1995, GDP was growing at roughly an annual rate of 2.5%.

And then the government took a fateful step. Worried about its growing debt, Japan raised its consumption tax two percentage points, to 5%, in 1997. And the economy, by now also hobbled with deflation, sunk into a recession.

"When you look at the Japanese crisis, you really don't see the drama of a collapsing economy and a big contraction of the economy and sharp increase in unemployment," says Reinhart. "What you see is this lingering malaise in which a very rapidly growing, buoyant economy becomes one that's limping along."

The trouble with any debate over Japan's stimulus in the 1990s is that it's impossible to know what would've happened if the government had taken lesser action. Many argue the situation would've been worse.

One thing is certain: Japan still faces a mountain of debt from all its spending; debt is now around 200% of GDP, vs. 45% for the U.S. And the U.S. can count on a similar situation if it embarks on more big-government spending.

In the end, though, looking to history can yield only so many lessons. Very few other countries have faced a comparable crisis followed by a huge government stimulus, and Japan is only one scenario. "I think it is extremely dangerous...to draw large lessons from one observation," says Reinhart. "Using the Japan example to make a bold statement about whether stimulus packages work or not I think is on very shaky ground."

Interpreting the cause of the Roosevelt Recession is an equally complicated business, and there are a number of different theories. Many economists attribute the rapid decline in 1937 to a contraction of the money supply, in addition to Roosevelt's dramatic reductions in the deficit spending. This was Milton Friedman's view of the problem, and those who took an introductory macroeconomics class may also remember that he wrote a whole book criticizing the Keynesian interpretation of the Great Depression.

Either way, Obama's proposed spending freeze -- which targets only non-defense discretionary funds, and is specifically designed to avoid impacting jobs -- is not remotely comparable to Roosevelt's large-scale reversal in federal spending, including vast reductions in funding to the WPA and other public works agencies.

Even some on the left have been savvy enough to criticise Maddow's faulty analogy. The more I watch Rachel Maddow, the more frustrated I become with her apparent lack of consideration for the other side.

Stimulus and the Spending Freeze

Rachel Maddow chastises the President for his supposed plan to freeze federal spending:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maddow argues that anyone who's taken an introductory macroeconomics course knows that you don't reduce federal spending during a recession. And, certainly, that seems to be the prevailing wisdom these days.

But it's not the only perspective. Perhaps Maddow should watch the second half of this video:



Here's another point that Maddow may be loath to acknowledge:

While it's true that two-thirds of economists surveyed by USA Today seem to favor a second stimulus, one third of those surveyed also said that they prefer tax cuts as the primary stimulus method.