Ben Bernanke and Conservative Economic Sabotage

The Republican Party's newfound political assault on Ben Bernanke is a grim reminder of the actual conservative economic agenda for the next two years. The midterm elections taught Republicans a destructive lesson: With Democrats in power, the worse the economy gets, the better Republicans do at the voting booth. Economic sabotage is the essential Republican strategy for winning the White House in 2012. They will block every effort to actually improve the economy they can, and make a big show out of criticizing any economic aid they can't block.

The Party's hypocrisy on the economy has been clear for months. They scream about the deficit when a few billion dollars worth of unemployment benefits are at stake, but deficit worries disappear when the $700 billion in Bush tax cuts for the rich are under discussion. When they do muster an economic defense of the Bush regime, it's the line that a recession is no time to raise taxes. This is a fundamentally Keynesian argument—a bad Keynesian argument, but Keynes through and through. And it's the same argument Republicans and conservative pundits deployed to enact the Bush tax cuts back in 2001 and 2003. It's a bad argument because tax cuts aren't particularly effective at stimulating the economy, especially when they target the rich. Unemployment benefits, in fact, would be a staggeringly more efficient mechanism, as former John McCain adviser Mark Zandi has repeatedly detailed.

Which brings us to Ben Bernanke, the most conservative candidate that President Barack Obama could possibly have appointed to head the Federal Reserve. The current Republican uproar against Bernanke shields the fact that he is, in fact, a Republican himself. He was a top economic adviser to President George W. Bush, who appointed Bernanke to the Fed's Board of Governors and eventually to Fed Chairman post. When Obama reappointed him to the job, a handful of Republicans objected on the grounds that Bernanke had approved generous bailouts of financial firms. Nevertheless, a majority of Senate Republicans still voted to reconfirm him—making his reappointment the most popular decision that Obama has made among Republicans. Republicans got their man, and they let him through.

But now Bernanke is taking a beating from conservative pundits and Republican politicians for the Fed's latest round of "quantitative easing." It's not just coming from the crazies [1], either. Even relatively milquetoast Senators like Bob Corker of Tennessee have threatened to strip the Fed of its mandate to promote full employment [2]. Don't worry about whether people actually have jobs, you nervous Fed ninnies. Just focus on inflation, whatever the economic cost.

The timing of this argument is particularly instructive, since, right now, we are not experiencing inflation. We are, in fact, dangerously close to deflation, as rampant foreclosures continue to drive down home values.

But the Republican assault is not an attempt to fix the economy or even say intelligible things about the economy. It's straightforward political payback. Bernanke is directly contradicting the Republican midterm message, exposing the Republican anti-spending mantra as an economic disaster, and Republicans aren't going to stand for it.

Republicans just convinced a lot of voters that socialist intergenerational thief Barack Obama caused high unemployment with his budget busting economic stimulus. Government spending is the villain-- not the Wall Street excess or predatory lending that Republicans shepherded for eight consecutive years, not even the generous bank bailouts that Republicans approved.

But last week, Bernanke gave a speech [3] emphasizing that the Fed's actions to revive the economy require Congressional help. Quantitative easing is basically an interest-free credit card for the U.S. government, allowing it to borrow money at negative real interest rates in order to spend that money on job-creation efforts. Since already record-low interest rates on Treasury bonds haven't been enough to convince congress that now is the time to borrow and spend, the Fed is driving those rates even lower. But for this credit card to work, Congress has to use it. It has to enact further economic stimulus, spending money to create jobs.

This kind of talk makes Congressional Republicans look stupid. Now it's not just Barack Obama and his anti-colonialist father who support government spending to boost the economy, it's a very high-profile Republican economist, too. Obama can't be a radical socialist when top-ranking Republicans agree with him. And God forbid that Bernanke's recent statements actually create pressure for Congress to do something about jobs. Lowering unemployment means reelecting Obama.

None of this is to say that Bernanke is some kind of liberal savior, or even a particularly good Fed Chairman. He oversaw bailouts that could have been much more effectively designed, to say the least, and he has not been open about those packages with Congress or the public. He's resisted calls for Fed transparency and waged misleading attacks on financial reform legislation.

But he isn't toeing the Republican Party line on Big Bad Government Spending. And Republicans are going to keep hammering him until he does.