Thursday, April 14, 2011

Has Heritage's farcical 2.8% unemployment prediction hurt them?

In the Ryan plan fiasco, I had hoped some focus would go to the Heritage Foundation rather than all to Ryan. Ryan is just one lousy actor in the current iteration of a long series of terrible plays that comprise conservativism, while Heritage is a big ticket promoter, working to fill the seats in show after show.  The actors come and go, but thanks to groups like Heritage, the theatre never closes.  So I'm glad for Krugman's note today:
So, has Heritage declined and lost its way? Actually, no — it was always like this.

And one of the unexpected benefits of the whole budget fiasco might be that Washington conventional wisdom starts to realize that there’s not a lot of thinking going on at these tanks.
Of course, it's difficult to get a Village to understand something when their tax cuts and spectator wars depend on not understanding it, but one can hope this has some real impact, it really was far beyond the pale of defensible analysis, which I'm guessing is why Heritage tried to quietly hide the most laughably silly part of the whole thing. 

It's also encouraging to see the whole Vast Conspiracy foul up so obviously.  Predicting 2.8% unemployment was just blatantly ridiculous and the Ryan plan itself seems to be collapsing under its own weight as the attempt to redefine destroying Medicare as some cutesy buzz phrase falls dead flat.  I'm sure there are larger strategic views under which the scheme may not be a total loss, but I doubt the forces behind it were hoping that Heritage would have to run yelping away from their own preposterous modelling and Ryan's plan would go so quickly from "courageous" to something Republicans are already running away from.  They were hoping to shift the goal posts and maybe it still will somewhat, but at least it has cost them more than these ploys usually do.  Heritage is probably their most established and respected welfare institution, and Ryan just about the only federally elected Republican given any policy credibility and both have been bloodied by this. 

They're not omnicient and for the all the advantages they have; rivers of corporate cash, private sources of information and immediate access to major media platforms, they're still at heart a bunch of ideologues with a puerile world-view that just doesn't work and isn't broadly shared once you go beyond sound bites.  I would guess they believe their own spin about the public's level of concern with the deficit, and maybe think that the disapproval of the ACA somehow translates into disapproval of Medicare too, but whatever the cause, it's nice to see even just as a reminder that they can be beaten. 

No comments:

Post a Comment