One of the Democratic Party’s key selling points is that Democrats favor the little guy struggling against Big Business and other powerful forces. But Tim Carney, senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner, has spent much of his career detailing the relationship between Big Business and Big Government, and he’s spent the past three years highlighting that relationship within a Democratic administration in Washington. Carney discussed his work with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: First of all, before we get into the details of the Democratic administration, we should point out this is not something that’s a one-party deal. Both major parties are involved in this type of Big Government-Big Business collusion, aren’t they?
Carney: Yes. I would say the Democrats, the party of the little guy, are still the party of Big Business, and the Republicans, the party of small government, are still the party of Big Government. So both parties are the parties of Big Business and Big Government. And, really, the Republicans’ biggest sort of Big Government actions over the last decade have been at the requests of Big Business, whether we’re talking about the Wall Street bailout or Medicare expansion to cover prescription drugs. Those were things that the industry was lobbying for, and that was part of the reason so many Republicans were won over to the side of Big Government, I think.
Kokai: This happens on both sides of the fence, but the Barack Obama administration, which started in early 2009, we’ve seen them in action now for three years. How has it been in terms of Big Business-Big Government collusion?
Carney: I write a lot about the Obama administration. I wrote a book about them. I write columns about them — in part because somehow he gets away with pretending that he is a scourge of the special interests, but he’s not. First of all, in the 2008 election, he took more money from Wall Street and from the drug industry and from the HMO industry than any candidate in history. He took more money from Goldman Sachs employees and executives — $1 million — than anyone has raised from a single company since campaign finance reform. And so that was his campaign.
Since then, so many of his major legislative achievements have been done together with and to the benefit of Big Business, and to the detriment of smaller business, consumers, competitors, taxpayers. The health care bill is a great example. When the Senate passed it, he said, “I want to thank the Senate for standing up to the special interests.” But the drug industry, which spends more on lobbying than any other industry, supported the bill, and they got all sorts of subsidies, and they benefited from the mandates, and they benefit from the regulations that are in the bill.
So the biggest special interest in Washington supported the health care bill and stood to benefit from it, yet Obama posed as if it was some sort of broadside to K Street lobbyists. K Street is — I know it’s a Washington term, it’s sort of at least the theoretical sort of corridor of all the lobbyists there in downtown Washington. He pretended that he was fighting K Street, but he was practically letting them write part of the bill.
Kokai: Perhaps we should step back a moment and ask, “Why is this a problem?” It used to be said, at least in some quarters, that what’s good for a particular big company or for Big Business is good for America. Why is this type of relationship between government and the bigger businesses bad?
Carney: Well, I think that’s a great question because profit itself is not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing. Companies pursuing profit is why the economy grows, why people’s lives get better — because Wal-Mart tries to figure out a way to do something cheaper, and so you have more money left over in your pocket after you do your shopping for the things you need. So the pursuit of profit is good. Even big businesses getting bigger is often a sign of a strength of an economy, and what’s causing the businesses to get bigger is often helping other people. But that’s in a free-market economy where businesses profit by providing consumers with what they want at a better price or better quality.
And, in a government-subsidized and government-regulated economy, often these guys are getting rich not by providing value, but by figuring out a way to game the system. For instance, when you have the drug industry, one of the things they benefit from in the health care bill is that you are no longer allowed to use your health savings account — so pretax dollars — to buy over-the-counter medicine. So it might actually end up being slightly cheaper for you now to buy prescription drugs than over-the-counter drugs, but it’s more expensive for you to get your drugs flatly. So that doesn’t help the economy, because we’re spending more on health care, driving up health care cost. A lot of that comes out of the taxpayer dollar, so it’s hurting the taxpayer. But it’s benefiting the drug company, and they put that change in.
Or, for instance, also in the health care bill, Wal-Mart lobbying to force all employers to provide health insurance for their employees. Now, some employees will benefit from that because they’ll get health insurance when they otherwise wouldn’t have, but it will lead to a lot of smaller employers having to shut down their doors, thus giving consumers fewer choices. And again, more health insurance, it’s more spending on health care, and it drives up costs for everyone. When people benefit through using Big Government, then that often is at the expense of other people, and frankly at the expense of the whole economy broadly.
Kokai: Now I imagine that people listening to what you have to say, if they agree with the principles of the Tea Party, or if they agree with the principles of Occupy Wall Street, some of them are going to enjoy, or at least appreciate, the things you have to say —saying, “Yeah, yeah, he’s right.”
Carney: Sure.
Kokai: Why are these two groups, who seem so opposed, both interested in this idea of Big Business and Big Government and the bad things they’re doing together?
Carney: I think that Americans today, for a good reason, are distrusting concentrations of power, whether it’s a concentration of power in government or in some big business. But again, the problem in business concentration and power is not really that the businesses are getting bigger and taking over more of the market. It’s that they are rigging the game. They are unfairly profiting.
I went down to Occupy Wall Street, and many people down there think anyone getting rich is unfairly profiting, but they at least see that it’s worse to get rich off of things like getting a bailout, or it’s worse to get rich off of something like regulating your competitors out of business, than it is to get rich through the free market. And so I find that on the left and right there’s often a lot of agreement, and part of the reason is that the [ideological] middle is going to be more cozy with industry.
A lot of people think Big Business is inherently conservative. It’s not. It’s sort of right down the middle. And so when you look at the more centrist lawmakers in Washington, of both parties, they’re the ones who are getting the biggest checks from the banks or the biggest checks from the drug companies. And a Jim DeMint on the right or a Bernie Sanders, from Vermont, on the left aren’t getting a lot of industry love because they’re standing by principles, and principle is the last thing you want if you’re a lobbyist trying to game the system.
Kokai: Our time is running short, but we’ve talked a bit about the Obama administration. Elections in 2012 will help people decide whether to keep Barack Obama or install a Republican. If we have a change in administration, do we have much of a change in this Big Business-Big Government collusion?
Carney: Probably not. If Ron Paul were the nominee, we’d have changes in a lot of things, including that. You have had some of the Republicans talking what I call free-market populism — Rick Perry a little bit, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, even some from Michele Bachmann, and even a little bit from Newt Gingrich. But the Gingrich record and the Romney record and, to some extent, the Perry record all are one of — I mean, Romney and Gingrich backed an individual mandate. They backed climate change stuff that industry was standing to profit from.
So they all have similar sorts of records to Obama on the fact that they are willing to use Big Government to benefit Big Business and at the detriment of consumers, competitors, and taxpayers. So I don’t see much of a change except that — I always say, “Well, maybe then, I won’t be the only guy covering it.” If a Republican is the one who wins, all of a sudden the rest of the media will notice that Big Business is benefiting from Big Government.