Tag Archives: economic growth

All Clear for the Mining Boom in Michigan’s UP, Unclear What That Portends

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Just before the holidays I wrote a short post about the one-two punch that Michigan legislators delivered during the 2012 lame duck session. They rushed through legislation to make Michigan a “right to work” state despite widespread protests and they passed Emergency Manager Legislation in defiance of voters.

Most of the news coverage of these bills focused on the action in Lansing and effects this legislation might have in the Detroit auto industry. I wondered aloud (or at least on Twitter) what implications these bills might carry for towns and working people in the Upper Peninsula.

There’s a new mining boom underway in the region, with global giants like Rio Tinto and Orvana exploring, leasing, and re-opening old mines.

This map [pdf], put together by the Lake Superior ad hoc Mining Committee, shows all mines, mineral exploration and mineral leases in the Lake Superior Watershed as of 2010.

Mining-Activity-Lake-Superior-2011

The map merits some careful study. As you can see, there is already significant activity in the Upper Peninsula. On the Canadian side, especially around Thunder Bay and further north, there’s been a leasing boom. Lots of gold on the eastern shore; copper and nickel as you move further west. They’re also exploring for uranium in at least two places.

The new mining is going to put enormous pressure on the Lake Superior basin. There are the usual environmental hazards associated with mining — subsidence, toxic runoff, acid mine drainage. Mining puts the waterways – the Lake and the streams and rivers that feed it – at risk. And then there is the infrastructure that’s going to be built to support all those mines. Access roads and haul roads, like the proposed CR 595 in Big Bay, roads to get to those roads, gas stations to fuel the vehicles that run along those roads, housing to shelter the people who drive on those roads to get to work and haul the ore from the mines, and so on.

Governor Snyder and his cronies in the Michigan legislature are doing everything they can to encourage this new activity. Just before the holidays, the Governor signed a third lame-duck bill, addressing the taxes that mining companies operating in Michigan will pay. The new bill, brought by outgoing Republican representative Matt Huuki, relieves mining companies of up front costs.  Indeed, they will pay no taxes at all until they start pulling minerals from the ground. Even then, companies will pay only 2.75 percent on gross value of the minerals they extract. So a million dollar sale of Michigan’s mineral wealth on the copper exchange will yield the state a paltry $27,500 in taxes.

35 percent of these so-called severance taxes will go to a “rural development fund to support long-term economic development opportunities.”

A number of things aren’t clear to me. What, exactly, is meant by “economic development” here? What’s the best course of development for a rural region, and for the Lake Superior region? How will fueling the boom benefit the region over the long term? How much if any of this money will go to alleviating the environmental impact that all this new mining is bound to have? How is it possible to talk about rural development without taking responsible stewardship of the environment into account?

It’s also unclear what sort of working conditions in the new mines the “right to work” legislation might allow, and whether the Emergency Manager bill could be used to limit community oversight.

For now, at least, it looks like the big mining companies are running the show in the UP, and the vague promise of economic development — whatever that means — has trumped all else.

O, The Humanities!

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Last week, the National Research Council of the National Academies issued Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security. I came to the report wondering how this august committee of bureaucrats, bigwigs and business people might go about defining the mission of the research university and how they would define “prosperity”; and I wanted to see what sort of future they envision for research that doesn’t immediately yield new machines, products or services, and doesn’t necessarily play well — historically has not played well — with business: namely, the kind of research I do and I value, research into the human world and the human condition.

I’ve noticed that in most national debates over educational policy and funding (which this report is supposed to inform) and in discussions of the R & D Tax Credit (which this report touches on), “research” gets defined way too narrowly. It gets restricted to scientific research and the invention of useful products and machines. As for prosperity, it tends to get confused with economic growth, or reduced to GDP and employment figures. It’s a limited, myopic view in which “research” is valued only insofar as it yields new machines and tools and products to fuel economic growth.

That’s pretty much the view here.

There are gestures throughout this report to find a place for the humanities (along with the social sciences) in the research university centered around science and engineering. The authors consistently maintain that the research university has to be “comprehensive” in scope, “spanning the full spectrum of academic and professional disciplines,” in order “to provide the broad research and education programs required by a knowledge — and innovation — driven global economy.” But there is not much ink spilled here on the value or the purpose or the place of the humanities. The idea that I advanced as a “crazy” idea in previous posts (here and here and here)– that research in the humanities might provide a much-needed critical orientation in an innovation-driven economy (and should therefore be covered by the R & D tax credit) — seems just as crazy as ever.

Perhaps we can expect a bolder stance on the humanities in the forthcoming report on the humanities and social sciences from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences mentioned in the footnotes here. Maybe without that report this group felt unqualified to tackle the subject, or they were simply being deferential to their colleagues. Be that as it may, Research Universities focuses on the humanities in just one place. This is in a chapter about “national goals.” It opens with a jingoistic account of American progress. Cue the bombastic voiceover:

In the course of our history, our nation has set grand goals that have defined us as a nation. And then we accomplished them. We created a republic, defeated totalitarianism, and extended civil rights to our citizens. We joined our coasts with a transcontinental railroad, linked our cities through the interstate highway system, and networked ourselves and the globe through the Internet. We electrified the nation. We sent men to the Moon. We created a large, strong, and dynamic economy, the largest in the world since the 1870s and today comprising one-quarter of nominal global gross domestic product (GDP).

The most muddled word in this historical muddle is, of course, “we.” The pronoun carries a lot of freight here, and it is meant to reduce history to a story of central planning. We set grand goals and we accomplish them: how grand!

At best, this version of American history is nothing more than the committee projecting the fantasy of central planning on to the past. But it’s also an attempt to sanitize history, to scrub off all the blood and dirt from our past and forget our present afflictions and troubles. Civil rights? The creation of a republic? These weren’t grand goals advanced in a planning session, set out in the form of pure ideas and then acted upon, but the very difficult, tough and very real struggles of people to gain and maintain their liberty. In the area of civil rights, some would say we still have a long way to go; in the matter of the republic, some would argue that we are now more than ever at risk of losing it, if we have not already lost it.

The railroad? Think only of Josephson’s account of how the railroads were laid. Or to take a more recent example, consider what was really involved in networking “ourselves and the globe through the Internet” (and don’t forget that networks are not only systems of inclusion, but of exclusion). The Eisenhower Interstate system may have been the closest we ever came to nation-wide military-industrial planning; but even that took a lot of cajoling, a propaganda campaign, and some serious political maneuvering, and given our current car-crazed, oil-dependent, environmentally-weakened, militarized state, it is debatable whether the Interstate system really deserves unqualified accolades.

Of course these questions and considerations were kept out of the discussion here. But I would hasten to add that these are exactly the kinds of questions and considerations that research in the humanities (and social sciences) allow us to ask. These are questions not only about the past, but also about where we are going, what we want, what we need to do, what is the best thing to do, how we should go about doing it, and how we ought to discuss all those questions.

Just as importantly, the humanities allow us to look at the American story and ask who “we” are, and help us recognize that we are a plurality, not reducible to a single historical agency or identity or even a unified, entirely coherent, unimpeachable history. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the humanities – research into a broad domain of language and historical experience, and questions about the role of language in historical experience as well as the incommensurability of language and history – give us at some very basic level an awareness that history is many stories, that we can ask questions about those stories and that doing so creates the option of telling (and living) another story.

You’d think that at least some of this thinking – which is hardly radical or new – would find its way into this report. Or at least that at some point this report would acknowledge that research into language, thought and history is of value to deliberative democracy, and to considerations of American prosperity. But, no – not even a gesture toward the traditional notion of the “liberal arts” (artes liberales) as the arts most befitting a free people – arts of language and understanding that equip a free people to deliberate and exercise their freedom. In fact, when the report turns to “civic life,” the humanities play no role whatsoever in the discussion. Instead, The Council considers research in the humanities under the heading “Enhanced Security.”

Research in the social sciences and humanities has allowed us to better understand other cultures we may be allied or in conflict with so we can adapt strategies to improve diplomatic and military outcomes.

A handmaid to military strategy and diplomacy: that is a pretty poor rationale for the humanities – about as poor as one can imagine. Humanists can help military generals and diplomatic missions “adapt strategies” for dealing with friends and obliterating enemies. The understanding of “other cultures” – which involves complex, enduring, maybe unanswerable questions of interpretation, translation, language arts, anthropology, history – has been placed here in service of the all-powerful State. “We” are no longer the people, in the plural and in all our plurality, with all the uncertainties that entails, but one singular, grand, innovation-driven, militarized, secure State.

Our friends may delight in this technocratic fantasy, but our enemies had better look out.

What’s Wrong With Howard Schultz’s Proposal To Save America From Itself?

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A letter from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been making the rounds, asking other CEOs to join with him and “forgo all political contributions until Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally-disciplined, long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.”

The idea has gained plenty of admirers: “thousands of Americans – both CEOs and everyday citizens” (as CNN puts it) have contacted Schultz to express their support. Joe Nocera dedicated his entire column in the Times last week to Schultz’s proposal, praising the boycott as “hardheaded and practical, the kind of idea you would expect from a good businessman”.

That it is. But its virtues are also its limitations. Schultz wants to tackle a very big, very difficult problem: what he calls “the lack of cooperation and irresponsibility among elected officials as they have put partisan agendas before the people’s agenda. This is not the leadership we have come to expect, nor deserve.”

We can debate that last point: the current crop of ineffectual cowards in Washington might be exactly the leadership we have come to expect and deserve. Be that as it may, I am a little suspicious of grassroots movements in which angry “everyday citizens” find themselves in cahoots with angry CEOs; and it seems odd that we are being asked to entrust “the people’s agenda” to Schultz and his gang of CEOs – who may be well-meaning, but whose agenda (it seems fair to say) may not exactly match up with the aspirations and priorities of everyday citizens, or at least those of us who don’t happen to be leading multibillion-dollar multinationals.

I know that Starbucks bristles at the suggestion that multibillion-dollar companies might not always put the interests of its people, its “baristas” and “partners,” front and center. (But just a couple of weeks ago, baristas in Chile went on hunger strike because the company refused to negotiate with them over wages.) And I understand that Schultz prides himself on being a good CEO – one who has done well by doing good. He is, in fact, regularly singled out for praise by the business press as a CEO who defies the “the power-hungry stereotype,” and who will put the long-term good of his employees, his company or the environment over short-term advantage. (That’s the story Motley Fool’s Alyce Lomax told just last week in a Howard Schultz puff piece on AOL’s Daily Finance site.)

I’m not questioning Schultz’s good intentions. But the effort he’s mounted so far has a whiff of benevolent corporate paternalism about it; and the prospect of well-meaning CEOs around the country banding together on behalf of all the little people to fight political paralysis in Washington DC should — at least — give us pause. It sounds like a bloodless coup in the making, a plutocrats’ putsch.

There is something absurd here as well: aided and abetted by a pliant and misguided Supreme Court, corporate interests have already hijacked the political process; now they plan to withhold ransom payments until the ineffectual cowards we elected to represent and defend our interests – the public interest – deliver the economy back to them in sound condition, and deliver them from all “uncertainty.” Then they will create jobs. (Be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the uncertainty canard here.)

That said, the real trouble with Schultz’s proposal is not its presumption or its absurdity or its patronizing benevolence. The real trouble here is that Schultz fails to see the big picture, the broad agenda, the scope of the problem we face right now. Like most political and corporate leaders, he sees the people’s agenda – and the country’s uncertain prospects — through the narrow lens of jobs and economic growth. And while jobs and sustainable economic growth are undeniably important, and can be made to serve the public interest, the public interest can’t be reduced merely to those things; they may sometimes even be at odds with the public interest, as they sometimes are in human rights, labor or environmental disputes.

Real prosperity can’t be measured simply in terms of economic growth or high employment figures. I fear that what we have here is a failure to imagine the American future as anything more than a sunny financial forecast, the country as anything more than a happy work camp.

Machines and Monsters or Thriving Markets?

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If you haven’t yet read it – and I admit I am late on this, as I am on nearly everything else – have a look at John Cassidy’s profile of Bridgewater hedge fund manager Ray Dalio in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker. Cassidy exerts most of his energy trying to figure out whether Bridgewater, which has bragging rights as the world’s richest and biggest hedge fund, is a Fountainhead cult, a Maoist re-education camp, or just a big bond-market player that happens to be run by a super-rich sociopath with intellectual “pretensions.” I was most struck by the passage where Dalio is “rambling” about how “everything,” or “almost everything,” is a “machine.”

“Almost everything is like a machine,” he told me one day when he was rambling on, as he often does. “Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.” His constant goal, he said, was to understand how the economic machine works. “And then everything else I basically view as just a case at hand. So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work—what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?”

I’ve talked about this view of nature, “the life cycle,” and the world as a machine in another context. Its philosophical heritage stretches back at least to the 17th century. But in Dalio’s case it’s hard to decide whether this is a considered view, informed by careful reading and thinking, or just some immature posturing, intended to create the impression that Dalio is an amoral übermensch. It’s not even clear how seriously Dalio takes himself: is everything a machine or is everything “like” a machine? The distinction is a crucial one, but Dalio wants to have it both ways.

It’s unfair, I suppose, to expect coherence and rigor from ramblings. And yet Dalio’s express goal – “to understand how the economic machine works” – deserves to be taken seriously. He’s betting the future of his firm on it; it’s key to his success. And it’s not just an offhand remark. As Cassidy explains, this mechanistic outlook is of a piece with Dalio’s crude social Darwinism.

He regards it as self-evident that all social systems obey nature’s laws, and that individual participants get rewarded or punished according to how far they operate in harmony with those laws. He views the financial markets as simply another social system, which determines payoffs and punishments in a like manner.

There’s nothing self-evident about any of this; and to track “all” social systems back to “nature’s laws,” whatever those are, is merely to admit one’s ignorance of social arrangements and social history and to confuse metaphors. The confusion, moreover, is not just Dalio’s; it’s general, and it fails us every day.

When, like Dalio, we regard the economy as a “machine,” and markets as a “social system,” we are inclined to put the system first and relegate people to the status of beneficiaries or collateral damage. The system does not serve human priorities. Instead, we put aside those priorities to keep a dysfunctional system running. The system “determines payoffs and punishments”; the system is the ultimate arbiter of our lot in life. We’ve already surrendered.

But we don’t have to. Umair Haque put up a postyesterday called “How Our Economy Was Overrun by Monsters and What to Do About It.” It offers a reminder that the market is a social construct – our construct, something not just hedge fund managers but human beings from all different places and all walks of life make and remake every day. And what we’ve created, says Haque, are monsters of opulence and greed, rather than markets that work for people and help us thrive. This is not just a moral reproach and it’s not (at all) an anti-capitalist rant. It’s simply about getting priorities right, and putting human prosperity before the efficiencies of a dysfunctional machine.

Can America Still Bring Good Things to Life?

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When announcing the appointment of General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt to lead the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness today, President Obama vowed to put “our economy into overdrive.” He meant what everybody took him to mean: we are now going to get things really going, shift America into high gear, pull out all the stops, discover our inner Edison, “build stuff and invent stuff,” and export it to the world.

But the word “overdrive” is probably not the word the President should have chosen. Or at least it commits him to positions he isn’t going to take – positions I wish he would take.

Indulge me for a moment. Overdrive is not just high gear. Overdrive also means better fuel economy. When you put your car into overdrive you get the best mileage per gallon, because the overdrive mechanism allows “cars to drive at freeway speed while the engine speed stays nice and slow.” Or, as the entry on Wikipedia puts it, overdrive “allows an automobile to cruise at sustained speed with reduced engine speed, leading to better fuel consumption, lower noise and lower wear.”

At the very heart of the President’s metaphor, then, are two ideas: one, economy, a more efficient or economical use of resources (or fuel) and two, sustainability, maintaining a constant speed without causing wear and tear. Right now, we are desperately in need of both: new ways of conserving the resources we have and a more sustainable way forward than the cycle of boom and bust, or dangerous exuberance followed by social collapse.

Those ideas were not on display today in Schenectady. There was some talk about clean energy – a business GE is in, and where, not surprisingly, Immelt thinks a “partnership” between the private and public sector is “essential.” But the main focus was on U.S. manufacturing and U.S. exports, which the President wants to double over the next five years. “For America to compete around the world, we need to export more goods around the world,” said the President. So we need to innovate and invent new “stuff,” or bring good things to life, as the people at GE used to say. “Inventors and dreamers and builders and creators,” we need to expand our manufacturing base and bring American products to the global marketplace.

Reading these remarks, I can almost hear the old General Electric jingle. “We still have that spirit of innovation,” Immelt said. “America is still home to the most creative and innovative businesses in the world,” said the President. We are “still” innovative, both leaders took care to say — almost as if we no longer believe it or doubt it’s true. We’ve still got it. Our force is not spent.

It’s great to be reassured of our continued prowess. There are, however, lots of unexamined assumptions at work here, and chief among these is one I’ve discussed in earlier posts: namely, the assumption that “innovation” is the surest path to “growth,” and that growth – even unsustainable growth – is good in and of itself.

Sustainability doesn’t really enter into this conversation – partly because, I suppose, it really isn’t a conversation. It’s all bluster and boosterism.

Nor would anyone at these events, the President least of all, take a step back and ask whether, while we are doubling our exports, we should also take some steps toward greater self-sufficiency. Doing that, especially when it comes to energy — and energy consumption — would leave us less exposed.

I’m not even convinced doubling our exports or even saying we are going to double our exports is the right thing — for the dollar, for trade agreements we have in place, for the very focus of American industry and innovation. For his part, Immelt has no doubts:

“It’s the right aspiration,” Immelt said of the president’s goal of doubling American exports to more than $2 trillion in five years, during a Nov. 6 interview in Mumbai, where he joined Obama for a meeting with business leaders. “We’ve done it in the last five years as a company.”

Maybe in the long run, or at least in five year’s time, what’s good for General Electric will turn out to be good for the republic. How could it be otherwise?

Credit Where Credit is Due: The Human Side of R & D

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Amar Bhidé argues in a recent op ed that making the R & D tax credit permanent will “not encourage the broad-based innovation that is crucial for widespread prosperity,” and he is skeptical of the idea – which has been around since the credit was first instituted, on a temporary basis, in 1981, and which has been one of the arguments advanced by the Clinton, Bush, and now the Obama administration for making the credit permanent — that there is significant “spillover” or “public benefit” from private investment in research. While his skepticism seems warranted, the question whether corporate investment in “research” can produce “higher returns for society” really turns on how we think about research, innovation and technology, and how we address the broader, unsettled question of the proper role of business in society.

“Research and experimentation” has been a murky area, even after reforms were made to correct abuses of the original 1981 statute, which yielded such triumphs of “research” as Chicken McNuggets or different flavors of soda pop, and creative accounting that wrote off failed ventures as “experiments.” In the 1986 reforms, Congress developed a test – a statement of what qualified as research — to clarify the law on this point. As Robert S. McIntyre noted in a 2002 piece on the credit and its abuses:

The IRS eventually interpreted this “public benefit” or “discovery” test to require that qualifying research must be directed at “obtaining knowledge that exceeds, expands, or refines the common knowledge of skilled professionals in a particular field of science or engineering.” In other words, if everybody already knows what a “research” project is intended to “discover,” then the government won’t foolishly subsidize it with a tax credit.

This excess, expansion, or refinement of “knowledge” – something that goes beyond what “skilled professionals” in “a particular field of science and engineering” already know, or can anticipate or intend – is where the law tells us to look for the public benefits of corporate R & D. True innovation lies in unexpected outcomes. And businesses should be rewarded for advancing technical knowledge, or at least given an incentive to do so, because the advancement of technical knowledge will bring economic prosperity and other benefits.

There are lots of assumptions being made here about the way things work, and it’s not at all clear that things really do – still — work this way. Much of the thinking here and business, society and technology goes back to the post-war era. There are, for instance, connections to the theories of economist Robert Solow about the role of technical progress in growth of industrialized countries. Solow observed that technological advancement is the key force in economic growth – the “residual” after all conventional inputs, including capital and labor, are accounted for. It seems reasonable to conclude from his observation that if we encourage capital-rich companies to invest more in R & D, technological advancement will propel the economy forward — while at the same time delivering new “knowledge” and new “discoveries” (and, the Obama administration hopes, new jobs).

It is no discredit to Solow to say that his thinking exemplified and helped fuel the technological optimism of the postwar period. He famously calculated that four-fifths of the growth in US output per worker could be attributed to technical advances. Now, certain technical advances have led to a decline in US productivity, or threaten US workers with obsolescence. This is just a small instance of the way in which our experience challenges our faith in technology.

Belief in the “residual” power of technology to fuel economic growth and materially benefit society has survived well beyond the industrialized national economies Solow studied for a number of reasons. Corporations do not simply – or cynically — want to encourage the belief that tax breaks they receive will somehow benefit the larger society; corporations, too, are creatures of technology and wholly captive to technological optimism. More broadly, the notion that technology can deliver economic as well as social benefits is still something Americans believe, or want to believe, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. We’ve staked our whole way of life on the idea.

Of course, Bhidé doesn’t go this far. Instead, he argues, we need a more “inclusive” view of innovation – one that takes into account “innovations in design, marketing, logistics and organization” – if we are to get beyond the narrow (and, to his mind, mistaken) view that increased R & D spending is going to correct market failures or produce beneficial outcomes.

But that broader view is not something we should expect scientists and engineers, or lawmakers and the IRS, to deliver. Nor is it a subject on which we should simply defer to professors of business or economists — who will never settle the matter anyway. Part of the trouble, in my view, is not simply with the idea of innovation. It’s with the idea of “research” as something that produces only scientific and technical knowledge, or as an activity to be undertaken solely by scientists and engineers (aided and abetted, perhaps, by economists and professors of business administration).

It seems to me that if we are going to provide incentives for research, we can try to do better than hope for spillovers or accidental benefits from the lab-work of scientists and engineers. Why not broaden the scope of the research we encourage and underwrite with tax credits to include other kinds of research that might benefit the public? What would the corporate R & D picture look like then? How might organizations capture research into the human condition or the social world, and develop its discoveries and perspectives to improve their own performance, or obtain a truer and more complete picture of the world? How would their performance measures change, along with measures of prosperity, or real wealth?

You have to wonder why these considerations don’t really have a place in the conversation, and even seem out of bounds, far-fetched. It’s worth remembering, in this context, that to “credit” something is to put stock in it, believe in it, lend it credence. Are we now so captive to the story of scientific and technical progress that we think other forms of research could never benefit the public or contribute to the common wealth?

This much is clear. Scientific research unchecked by critical judgment, historical perspective, the broad study of culture and society, or meaningful public debate, is bound to lack human scale and a vital connection to the very “public” it is supposed to benefit. And the study of the choices we make, or how we make them, or what it is like to live in this moment, at this particular time and in this particular place, is bound to yield some richer understanding of what it will take to make the right choices tomorrow.

Fleischer’s Utopia

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Ari Fleischer is no poet, and it may be unfair to subject his literary figures to very close scrutiny; but I do expect a certain level of rhetorical competence from the man who once was entrusted with making dread pronouncements and weasel-like prevarications from the White House bully pulpit.

That’s why I was a little dismayed as I tried to follow Fleischer’s argument in today’s Wall Street Journal. The central figure of his op-ed asks us to imagine the federal tax code as “an inverted pyramid scheme,” in which the tax code appears in the shape of an upside-down pyramid.

The only the way the pyramid can stand is by spinning fast enough or by having a wide enough tip so it won’t fall down. The federal version of this spinning top is the tax code: the government collects its money almost entirely from people at the narrow tip and then gives it to the people at the wider side.

Leave aside, for the moment, the strange inversion of social class that this metaphor requires: the top ten percent of earners are actually on the bottom of the spinning top and everybody else occupies the ever widening area of the inverted pyramid. Fleischer’s intention is clear enough: he wants to make the point that the 10 percent earning over 92,400 dollars pay over 72 percent of the taxes. They are the tip at the bottom of the top — the tip on which it all spins.

To rectify this situation, and in the name of a “more conservative, fiscal discipline,” Fleischer calls for an “Economic Growth Code,” under which everyone — he even repeats the word for emphasis, everyone — would pay their fair share.

Odd that in this critique of wealth redistribution we should hear a faint echo of Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”); but maybe not so odd: after all, this is Fleischer’s Utopia, where the Republicans have abolished Medicare, Social Security and estate taxes and are running a progressive income tax scheme with “no deductions or credits at all.”

In this topsy-turvy world, “the bottom 50%” — those are people at the broad top of the inverted pyramid — will pay for the government services they now mooch; top earners will sacrifice loopholes and deductions on which they now rely to reduce their tax burden. The tax base will broaden widely. Politicians will no longer exploit the tax code to divide us along class lines.

You may be excused if you don’t yet feel the love. It’s all about keeping the pyramid spinning: “Growth is the key to keeping the pyramid spinning, and to keep spinning the pyramid’s tip needs to be broadened.”

I am no physicist, but the figure here gives me pause. And I can’t get past the rhetorical failure to consider whether there is wisdom in Fleischer’s policy. After all, the broader you make the spinning top’s narrow tip, the more the pyramid will come to resemble a cube, and the slower it will spin. And you will necessarily have to apply more force to keep it spinning.

This isn’t a quibble — or if it is, it may be an important one. Remember, at the start of his piece Fleischer says we have two options: one, to keep the pyramid spinning fast enough; and, two, to broaden the base. What happened to the first option? What happened, in other words, to the argument for increased velocity, or just the image of economic velocity? Why opt for deceleration or cubic inertia if there is, in fact, another option? And what would that option look like? And why doesn’t Fleischer want to entertain that option here?

I don’t want to live or work in a cube; and there is, overall, something gray and grim, something intellectually parsimonious and unexciting, in Fleischer’s notion of growth. Though he says Republicans should “make their mark” by concentrating on economic growth, he never really specifies how they ought to do that, beyond following his prescriptions for tax reform.

No doubt, the tax code needs reform. But rejiggering or revamping the tax code does not add up to a strategy for growth; only a wonk — and a Republican wonk at that — would think it does.

Innovation, new industries and technologies, new business models and new ideas about the role of business in society — none of these have a place in Fleischer’s Utopia, at least as he presents it here. Entrepreneurs, too, go largely unrecognized and uncelebrated, even though their efforts and energies make the top go round and round, sometimes very fast — sometimes even too fast.

No Promethean fire, just a cold calculation of how much each of us owes. Why? Maybe because Ari Fleischer really does think that changing the tax code is the most urgent thing we can do right now to spur growth, or at least the best thing the Republicans can do to regain political advantage. Or maybe because he’s still just the public face of a shady ventriloquist act on which the curtain should have gone down long ago.

Nostalgia Hour at the Club for Growth

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Daniel Henninger has one thing right: the Republicans had better start talking about economic growth. But first they have to stop dithering and consorting with buffoons like Rush Limbaugh or threatening to go beyond the cutting edge and get really hip hop.

Then (one hopes) they will join the conversation about growth that’s already underway in many quarters — not just within the Obama administration, but also and especially in the private sector, which, if we are to believe Henninger, is the Republicans’ political bailiwick.

But (please) the public should not have to suffer through more teary-eyed sentiments or television specials about Ronald Reagan. Nor should we be asked to consider Ronald Reagan one of the great economic minds of the 20th century. He was not; and to put Reagan on a par with Milton Friedman or Henry Hazlitt is to misread history and to ignore the difference between political leadership (which Reagan provided) and philosophical range and depth.

What’s more, invoking the ghost of Ronald Reagan and hoping that he offers a way out of the darkness is just bad political strategy, unless of course the Republicans are intent on being the party of — well — sentimental old Republicans. Many young voters (most of whom were Obama voters this time around) were born during Reagan’s second term. To them, I’ll wager, “Ronald Reagan” sounds a bit like “William McKinley” or “Teddy Roosevelt.”