Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Felix Salmon ponders the political brawl surrounding the Fed’s quantitative easing program:

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the debate over QE2 has divided along party-political lines, with the Republicans lining up against it and the Democrats attacking them….Interestingly, this is one of those old-fashioned technocrat vs technocrat policy debates, in contrast to the technocrat vs populist debates which seem to have taken over far too much airtime of late. But it’s just as shrill.

….Bernanke, then, has every reason to want to reduce the volume on this debate: the mere existence of the debate itself can easily counteract any good which comes from QE2. One way of doing that would be to admit that QE2 is an untried experiment: while QE1 worked as a weapon in the crisis-fighting arsenal, QE2 is being asked to do something quite different. So the Fed should define much more clearly than it has done until now what exactly QE2 is designed to achieve, and what criteria might be used to determine whether it is succeeding or failing. And if it’s showing signs of failing, then the Fed should also be explicit about how and when it might be unwound.

I’m not a monetary economist, and the technical arguments about the mechanics of QE2 and what it will accomplish are impossible for me to evaluate properly. However, one thing does seem to be fairly clear: despite the scary sounding $600 billion number, the actual impact of QE2 is almost certain to be fairly small. With interest rates already so low, there’s simply not enough money involved to move markets substantially.

In other words, regardless of whether you think QE2 is good policy, it’s next to impossible to understand the increasingly hysterical Republican reaction to it. Unless, of course, you consider the context: Republicans aren’t just mounting a campaign against the Fed. They’re equally dedicated to championing a damaging economic argument about regulatory uncertainty that doesn’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny; they’ve already rejected several compromise opportunities to extend the Bush tax cuts unless a permanent extension of the high-end cuts was included; and they’re apparently planning to play a high-stakes game of chicken over raising the debt ceiling in a few months.

None of these things bespeaks a genuine concern with the economy. Instead, they suggest a party that’s simply jockeying for political advantage and figures that maximum chaos is in its best interest. It also explains why QE2 has divided along party-political lines: it hasn’t. Only Republicans are wholeheartedly on one side. Democratic reaction has been both varied and fairly subdued.

QE2 is vanishingly unlikely to either succeed or fail strongly enough for either side to make a bulletproof argument about whether it worked, and in any case benchmarks aren’t really what Republicans are after. They just want the economic argument to be focused solely on taxes, taxes, and taxes. The more noise the Drudge/Rush/Fox axis can generate over everything else — in other words, the more they can argue that nothing else works — the better their tax argument looks.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate