McCain’s “American Homeowner Resurgence Plan”

8 October 2008, 1831 EDT

Brad DeLong finds… uh… fault with McCain’s “game changer.”

His conclusion?

There’s a big difference here: Democrats want to prevent depression and support the financial markets by investing taxpayer money in banks with troubled assets. Republicans want to give taxpayers money away to the shareholders and managers of banks with troubled assets.

I would say that this is unbelievable, but I do believe it.

My guess, however, is that most Republicans don’t want to do this. Those “reaction meters” took a nosedive among Republicans when McCain proposed the plan at last night’s debate.

Anyway, I get the sense that a great many of the People Who Know What They’re Talking About^TM think the United States should be doing something along the lines of what the Labour government in the UK has proposed. And there’s even some indication Treasury may be heading in that direction. So why can’t we just explicitly adopt such a policy?

I think there’s a good argument to be made here for the importance of norms and discourse in understanding political economy. “Material incentives” can’t easily explain the way that most people “just assume” explicit and comprehensive nationalization “isn’t politically viable.” Those hurdles have everything to do with current cultural constraints.

Image source: Damn Interesting

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.