Home / General / AmericansElectUnityBlueRibbonNoLabels — The Excitement Continues!

AmericansElectUnityBlueRibbonNoLabels — The Excitement Continues!

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Have you been waiting for another “nonpartisan” movement urging everyone to come together and concede that conservatives are right about everything? Who hasn’t! Which brings us to No Labels, who have an exciting new book blurbed by noted opponent of partisan polarization Newt Gingrich.

What’s the political valence of this project? Well, I think we can guess:

And in an interview, former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, one of the two political figures leading No Labels (the other being Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia)…

In other words, we have a “nonpartisan” group headed by a Republican with orthodox conservative Republican policy views and a conservative Democrat. What agenda are they working on? Well, the book has four announced goals:

No Labels is presenting a new book that lays out the four big goals it thinks the country’s political leadership, regardless of party, ought to rally around: creating 25 million jobs over the next 10 years

Well, this is a good start if you want to try to pretend that there’s real potential for consensus here — who’s against creating jobs in principle? Of course, this will all collapse in the details, because of the inevitable Republican proposals to create said jobs (spoiler: “Upper class tax cuts and plenty of them!” “More ability for companies to violate the rights of workers, consumers, air breathers, and water drinkers!”), but at least this could be fairly seen as a bipartisan goal. This ends quickly:

balancing the federal budget by 2030

Wait, what? Why does the federal budget need to be in full balance? And why on earth would we commit to this for a given year without even knowing what the state of the economy will be then? Why is this a priority?

making America energy independent by 2035

Leaving aside the viability, this is a meaningless goal. Climate change is a real issue. Renewable energy is a real issue. “Energy independence” is a bullshit non-issue, and moreover focusing on it won’t help with the fact that there stark partisan divisions on the environmental issues that actually matter. (Huntsman is allegedy a moderate on these issues because his his position that climate change is real but we shouldn’t do much of anything about it. I’m sure this will allow him to find common ground with Manchin, who believes that action on climate change represents a “war on America,” but there’s no potential for consensus here.)

making Social Security and Medicare secure for another 75 years.

I trust that I don’t have to elaborate about what this is code for — i.e. “how much should we cut Social Security and how exactly should we destroy Medicare?” And this is not, in fact, a consensus goal. Also, making policy on the basis of projections about health care and pension costs 75 years out is really dumb — unless your goal is, you know.

Anyway, I’m sure this will get exactly the same amount of traction as all previous similar efforts. Now to wait with bated breath for the next exciting Politico primary!

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