Recently Arnold Kling spoke about the bailout, and his comments were twisted beyond recognition by one James Wolcott of Vanity Fair:
A few days ago notice was taken (I’m practicing my passive voice) of economist Arnold Kling’s contention that the Obama stimulus plan was actually “reparations” in disguise. Given the complexion of our new president, this was interpreted as injecting a needless bit of race-baiting into the economic debate, raising the specter of a million Jeremiah Wrights marching on the capital mall with outstretched hands, demanding their cut of the action. Oh dear me no, protested Kling. No coded race talk was intended. He was actually thinking of the Treaty of Versailles, as reflected in the sentence “To the Democrats, the Bush tax cuts were a heinous evil, comparable to Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in World War I.” Idiotically hyperbolic and baseless as Kling’s caricaturing is (seriously, name me one frigging Democrat who invoked violations of Belgian neutrality in railing against the Bush tax cuts), it did open the door ajar to possible acquittal on the racebaiting charge. To cool things down, Kling (an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, which has been taking out all those big ads) closed off comments before the mosh pit got any gnarlier.And there the matter might have rested had not Kling surrendered to heat of candor today at a Heritage Foundation/Club for Growth confab and decried, “Barack Obama is destroying my daughter’s future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs.”
Now if Kling can’t comprehend the implication of racial menace encoded in daughter-gang-thugs/home invasion, he’s either fatuously clueless — too innocent for this wicked world — or weaselly disingenuous, and a drama queen either way. Did he feel the sanctity of his home was being violated when the costs of the Iraq war shot into outer space? Did he picture marauders smashing cherished mementoes when Hank Paulson introduced TARP? Anytime Obama’s name and “thug” are thrown in close proximity, it’s a pretty sure bet that the speaker or author intends to fan the anxiety and animosity of those who think Obama’s presidency represents black grievance gloved with the iron fist of the state — and out to punish whitey. No wonder so many would-be Wolverines in the right blogs are talking about stocking up on assault rifles and ammo — they’ve got ransackers running wild in their imaginations too. I urge these people to confront their racial fears, think of Scarlet Johansson and strawberry snowflakes and the musical numbers in Rent, and join the rest of us in Matisse’s dancing daisy-chain of eternal spring.
I was not familiar with Mr. Wolcott’s work — I don’t read Vanity Fair — but I now know not to.
Is this what crypto-racism looks like?
Here’s what Kling actually said in his intro:
Thank you. I’d like to thank the sponsors of this conference for inviting me to speak. I think about what’s going on, what’s happening today, as an economist, but I feel it as a father. My wife and I have three daughters, aged between 19 and 25, and when I see what’s being done to their future, I am really angry. Back in September, when they were talking about taking $700 billion to “unclog the financial system,” I wanted to take Henry Paulson and yank him out of the TV screen and say, “You keep your hands off my daughters’ future!” But he got away with it. And I had to — for me it was like sitting there watching my house being ransacked by a gang of thugs. And now we’ve got a new gang of thugs, and they’re going to do the same thing. So, anyway, that’s how I feel, we’ll go back to how I think.
So, comparing Henry Paulson spending $700 billion of our money to a gang of thugs ransacking his house is racist? Because Obama’s continuing the misplaced spending, and he‘s (half) black? And any reference to thugs is crypto-racist?
Anyway, don’t forget to watch the rest of the video for the substance of Kling’s argument:
- This is a big bill, but not a big stimulus.
- A better alternative would be to cut the employer portion of the payroll tax.
- These are dangerous times, and we should be trying to craft policies that reduce risks, not policies that increase risks.
Addendum: Here is what Kling had to say in his Stimulus Bill or Reparations Bill?:
I think that President Obama set the bar ridiculously low when he said that 75 percent of the stimulus should kick in within by the end of 2010, but the House bill did not even get over that bar. Why is the stimulus bill so filled with non-stimulus while it omits real stimulus measures, such as cutting payroll taxes?I think the answer is that it is a reparations bill, not a stimulus bill. People who pay income taxes tend to vote Republican. People who live off taxes tend to vote Democratic. To the Democrats, the Bush tax cuts were a heinous evil, comparable to Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in World War I. Now, they are demanding reparations, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be paid into teachers unions and other members of the coalition that won the election.
Most of the bill makes no sense from a stimulus perspective. But all of it makes sense from a reparations perspective.
Obviously an attack on Obama’s race.