What are we supposed to do when we've "won". Whatever that means. The last eight years have been fairly gruesome. We started with our budget running a modest surplus, not huge, but capable of gradually paying down the national debt. For the moment let's forget about those who say that HAVING a "national debt" is really a good thing. Those who say that are the same dolts who say that school shootings are "highly educational". Owing money, as a nation, is pretty much the same as owing money as an individual. Think about it as a mortgage. Can anyone honestly say they enjoy having a mortgage? Oh come on, not while they are sober and not in the middle of a complete emotional breakdown. When anyone is lucky enough to pay of a mortgage, what do they do? Do they (a) weep from a sense of loss, or (b) crack a bottle of available champagne because they no longer owe some goddamn bank that monthly payment. The answer is (b).
As a nation we owe a massive amount of money to a large group of nervous Eurotrash financiers and various foreign governments who are trying to curry favor in the US by holding our increasingly shaky mortgage note. We are on the cusp of giving other nations and assorted Eurotrashistas the power to tell our government what it may do, or not do, and when. Let me speak slowly and clearly here: any part of that is a very, very bad idea. If assorted foreigners wish to mismanage their own nations, I applaud their zeal towards public service. The poor, as they always have, will bear the brunt of their mismanagement by dying young. But not in my country. At our worst we have done some awful things. We can argue over which of the things we have done, as a nation, that are the most awful. The point is, whichever awful things we do, even when we do them for a long time, eventually we shake ourselves and turn away from those actions and express the strong wish to never do such things again. Sometimes we screw up and go do it all over again. Sometimes less than honorable people do it in our name, though most of us cannot recall asking them to do so. But most of the time we struggle towards something better, something more just, something more compassionate. Often our efforts are lame, halt and spastic. Often our political leaders are lame, halt, spastic and corrupt. But we seem to be capable, judging by the recent election, to rise above ourselves, shake off our depression and malaise and believe in something again, when many may have thought that such a suspension of cynicism was beyond them.
So while I am a huge fan of the long-suffering (trust me on this, they are) Chinese people that does not translate into my being willing for the monumentally creepy Chinese government to tell our government what to do. Their idea of responding to dissent, if we can judge from their actions toward restive members of the slightly deranged Tai-chi exercise cult Falun Gong, strongly suggests they are Neanderthals. Handling dissent by mass imprisonment and execution, often timed to permit the harvesting of human organs for resale on the secondary market to "transplant tourists", is not my idea of a government who has anything much to tell us about what choices we should make, as a people.
But we're really stuck right now. Including the in-process "bailout" (aka "rescue package") the Bush administration came very near to doubling our national debt. For nothing. What do I mean by that? I mean, we ran up our national credit card for a Chuck Norris fantasy, leaving us nothing to show for it but a bad hangover. We paid out a massive amount of money for nothing in return. Seriously. Are we more safe? Nope. Are wages up? are we a more competitive economy because of all of the investments we made in manufacturing and infrastructure? Oh, no? Well, did we invest that money in building our international stature, in light of our investments in selfless and farsighted good works? Gee, flubbed that one, too? So wait, we pissed Five Trillion Dollars down the drain for nothing? And we're worse off than we were eight years ago?
Wow. Isn't that special.
And now? Now we've seen more progressive political forces win a significant victory. We can look forward at least to some accounting for the various things done over the last eight years, though it is impossible to roll back those actions to return us to a more innocent era. But it feels... sort of okay. We really did kick some ass.
What now?
When you get done "kicking some ass", then what?
How does one translate that achievement into something useful and enduring? More importantly, how the heck do we bail ourselves out of the massive "mortgage" that the Village Idiot and his coterie of second-rate minds fob off on us? The only sensible way to grasp our plight, as a nation, is to see ourselves as a people who have suffered a terrible natural disaster or a devastating plague. Historically terrible events have overtaken other nations, leaving them reeling but eventually able to recover. We have enormous advantages today because of vastly improved communications and technology. What it takes is to know what to use those tools for. Far worse things have happened in history. The "Black Plague" managed to kill nearly half of the population of Europe, yet those nations survived. There was a time in Chinese history when through war, plague, famine and flood China's population fell from sixty million to fifteen million over a ten year period, yet that culture survived that terrible period. Compared to that, this is child's play.
Understand, there is some real stuff going on. Painful things will happen, but this is far from the gravest challenge our nation has faced. The Civil War probably takes pride of place as "the gravest challenge". Most American families can trace their descent from those who fought or were connected in some way to those who died in that conflict. It is said that two percent of America's population died during in that war. As a reference to our current population that would mean the loss of Six Million Men. The death toll in World War II was smaller than the death toll in the Civil War. As a percentage of the American population it caused the death of 0.32% of our population. As horrible as the losses were, they were less than one- sixth as devastating as the losses in the Civil War. Oh, and the Revolutionary War? A shade over four thousand Americans died. No, the Civil War was the test of our resolve, as a people, a test of our capacity to take a terrible loss and somehow rise above it. Again, despite the wonderful hyperbole the pundits are spouting, this is no big deal. Will it last for years? Will it be a grinding loss of our marvelous prosperity? Is the American Dream a goner?
Naah. This is a sort of "thing" that seems to happen every once in a while in modern economies. Economic systems seem to lurch from panic to euphoria without ever stopping to rest in between. This could be a grinding mess, or a depressing period of "stagflation" (a stagnant economy coupled with inflation) but it is far more likely to be a badly needed correction to the exuberance of recent years, where great minds seemed to think that relatively modest homes should sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to buyers without the income to afford buying a house that cost that much. What a genius idea! Who imagined that was going to work out well? Did anyone? or isn't it more likely that most of the players ASSUMED that the entire house of cards was going to tumble eventually, but they were making so much money that they were afraid to say anything? I vote for the latter. It looked like easy money, it felt like easy money, temporarily it was "too good to be true" and you know what they say? "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is".
Will it all be okay? yeah, I am inclined to think so. Will this be a "fun" period of time? only when looked at from a longish distance in the future, say twenty to thirty years from now when people may feel all nostalgic about it. Again, not to dwell on China, but there is a theme-bistro that is keyed to nostalgia for the period of the "Cultural Revolution" in China (1966-1976) which is generally agreed to be one of the worst periods in recent Chinese history, where parents were turned against children and children betrayed their parents and life was often short and nasty. As big a mess in its own way as our Civil War, and yet, and yet, some ten years ago that nightspot opened up with memorabilia of the period, to cash in on nostalgia for that really horrible period. One of the odd things about the human race is that we seem to have the capacity to become nostalgic about the damndest things. So my advice would be to relax and enjoy the turmoil and the stress of this year. It will all work out and we might as well enjoy it while it is happening, instead of waiting twenty years until it is trendy to recall it fondly. We'll be okay, I think. No one can say anything with certainty, but it is a lot more enjoyable to be irrationally optimistic than rationally depressed... and since the world will do what it is going to do, pretty much independently of whether we are grumpy or cheery, we might as well make a stab at trying to enjoy ourselves, but without any grand expectations. Then when good things happen we can be pleasantly surprised.
Meanwhile, sales of Ferraris, Maseratis and Rolls Royces are holding up quite nicely. How can that be? Warren Buffet made $9 Billion in September. How can that be? Let's all take a deep breath and see how this all plays out. Who knows? maybe after a needed readjustment of our economy we will not see the road to wealth and fame as through real estate speculation and day trading of stocks. What will we fantasize about then? Rest easy. Another of mankinds' great gifts is the ability to dream up improbable paths to wealth. Some other fiscal fad will replace those of today and have no more substance than the current ones. And we will survive them as well.
In the meantime it might be worth going out and kicking some more ass, since it worked out pretty well this last time. There are two Senate races left, that between Al Franken (no, seriously... ) and cosmetically-enhanced Norm Coleman in Minnesota and the race between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin in Georgia. Franken appears to be pulling even, probably ahead, but the December 2nd run-off between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss is going to be a symbolic battle for the soul of... I guess the south and Georgia? Who knows. Chambliss is a nasty piece of work, Martin looks like a slighly vague Sunday School teacher; too nice to qualify. Esquire Magazine voted his opponent Senator Saxby one of "The Ten Worst Senators" and since he is still in his first term, he is a quick study. Martin needs your love, your money and you can even hook up through the Obama phone bank to make calls on his behalf, though presumably you have to fake a Georgia accent to have any luck convincing anyone. Click here.
Or we could sit around and fret, but given a choice between fretting and kicking some additional ass, I am inclined to vote for ass.
Arthur
As a nation we owe a massive amount of money to a large group of nervous Eurotrash financiers and various foreign governments who are trying to curry favor in the US by holding our increasingly shaky mortgage note. We are on the cusp of giving other nations and assorted Eurotrashistas the power to tell our government what it may do, or not do, and when. Let me speak slowly and clearly here: any part of that is a very, very bad idea. If assorted foreigners wish to mismanage their own nations, I applaud their zeal towards public service. The poor, as they always have, will bear the brunt of their mismanagement by dying young. But not in my country. At our worst we have done some awful things. We can argue over which of the things we have done, as a nation, that are the most awful. The point is, whichever awful things we do, even when we do them for a long time, eventually we shake ourselves and turn away from those actions and express the strong wish to never do such things again. Sometimes we screw up and go do it all over again. Sometimes less than honorable people do it in our name, though most of us cannot recall asking them to do so. But most of the time we struggle towards something better, something more just, something more compassionate. Often our efforts are lame, halt and spastic. Often our political leaders are lame, halt, spastic and corrupt. But we seem to be capable, judging by the recent election, to rise above ourselves, shake off our depression and malaise and believe in something again, when many may have thought that such a suspension of cynicism was beyond them.
So while I am a huge fan of the long-suffering (trust me on this, they are) Chinese people that does not translate into my being willing for the monumentally creepy Chinese government to tell our government what to do. Their idea of responding to dissent, if we can judge from their actions toward restive members of the slightly deranged Tai-chi exercise cult Falun Gong, strongly suggests they are Neanderthals. Handling dissent by mass imprisonment and execution, often timed to permit the harvesting of human organs for resale on the secondary market to "transplant tourists", is not my idea of a government who has anything much to tell us about what choices we should make, as a people.
But we're really stuck right now. Including the in-process "bailout" (aka "rescue package") the Bush administration came very near to doubling our national debt. For nothing. What do I mean by that? I mean, we ran up our national credit card for a Chuck Norris fantasy, leaving us nothing to show for it but a bad hangover. We paid out a massive amount of money for nothing in return. Seriously. Are we more safe? Nope. Are wages up? are we a more competitive economy because of all of the investments we made in manufacturing and infrastructure? Oh, no? Well, did we invest that money in building our international stature, in light of our investments in selfless and farsighted good works? Gee, flubbed that one, too? So wait, we pissed Five Trillion Dollars down the drain for nothing? And we're worse off than we were eight years ago?
Wow. Isn't that special.
And now? Now we've seen more progressive political forces win a significant victory. We can look forward at least to some accounting for the various things done over the last eight years, though it is impossible to roll back those actions to return us to a more innocent era. But it feels... sort of okay. We really did kick some ass.
What now?
When you get done "kicking some ass", then what?
How does one translate that achievement into something useful and enduring? More importantly, how the heck do we bail ourselves out of the massive "mortgage" that the Village Idiot and his coterie of second-rate minds fob off on us? The only sensible way to grasp our plight, as a nation, is to see ourselves as a people who have suffered a terrible natural disaster or a devastating plague. Historically terrible events have overtaken other nations, leaving them reeling but eventually able to recover. We have enormous advantages today because of vastly improved communications and technology. What it takes is to know what to use those tools for. Far worse things have happened in history. The "Black Plague" managed to kill nearly half of the population of Europe, yet those nations survived. There was a time in Chinese history when through war, plague, famine and flood China's population fell from sixty million to fifteen million over a ten year period, yet that culture survived that terrible period. Compared to that, this is child's play.
Understand, there is some real stuff going on. Painful things will happen, but this is far from the gravest challenge our nation has faced. The Civil War probably takes pride of place as "the gravest challenge". Most American families can trace their descent from those who fought or were connected in some way to those who died in that conflict. It is said that two percent of America's population died during in that war. As a reference to our current population that would mean the loss of Six Million Men. The death toll in World War II was smaller than the death toll in the Civil War. As a percentage of the American population it caused the death of 0.32% of our population. As horrible as the losses were, they were less than one- sixth as devastating as the losses in the Civil War. Oh, and the Revolutionary War? A shade over four thousand Americans died. No, the Civil War was the test of our resolve, as a people, a test of our capacity to take a terrible loss and somehow rise above it. Again, despite the wonderful hyperbole the pundits are spouting, this is no big deal. Will it last for years? Will it be a grinding loss of our marvelous prosperity? Is the American Dream a goner?
Naah. This is a sort of "thing" that seems to happen every once in a while in modern economies. Economic systems seem to lurch from panic to euphoria without ever stopping to rest in between. This could be a grinding mess, or a depressing period of "stagflation" (a stagnant economy coupled with inflation) but it is far more likely to be a badly needed correction to the exuberance of recent years, where great minds seemed to think that relatively modest homes should sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to buyers without the income to afford buying a house that cost that much. What a genius idea! Who imagined that was going to work out well? Did anyone? or isn't it more likely that most of the players ASSUMED that the entire house of cards was going to tumble eventually, but they were making so much money that they were afraid to say anything? I vote for the latter. It looked like easy money, it felt like easy money, temporarily it was "too good to be true" and you know what they say? "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is".
Will it all be okay? yeah, I am inclined to think so. Will this be a "fun" period of time? only when looked at from a longish distance in the future, say twenty to thirty years from now when people may feel all nostalgic about it. Again, not to dwell on China, but there is a theme-bistro that is keyed to nostalgia for the period of the "Cultural Revolution" in China (1966-1976) which is generally agreed to be one of the worst periods in recent Chinese history, where parents were turned against children and children betrayed their parents and life was often short and nasty. As big a mess in its own way as our Civil War, and yet, and yet, some ten years ago that nightspot opened up with memorabilia of the period, to cash in on nostalgia for that really horrible period. One of the odd things about the human race is that we seem to have the capacity to become nostalgic about the damndest things. So my advice would be to relax and enjoy the turmoil and the stress of this year. It will all work out and we might as well enjoy it while it is happening, instead of waiting twenty years until it is trendy to recall it fondly. We'll be okay, I think. No one can say anything with certainty, but it is a lot more enjoyable to be irrationally optimistic than rationally depressed... and since the world will do what it is going to do, pretty much independently of whether we are grumpy or cheery, we might as well make a stab at trying to enjoy ourselves, but without any grand expectations. Then when good things happen we can be pleasantly surprised.
Meanwhile, sales of Ferraris, Maseratis and Rolls Royces are holding up quite nicely. How can that be? Warren Buffet made $9 Billion in September. How can that be? Let's all take a deep breath and see how this all plays out. Who knows? maybe after a needed readjustment of our economy we will not see the road to wealth and fame as through real estate speculation and day trading of stocks. What will we fantasize about then? Rest easy. Another of mankinds' great gifts is the ability to dream up improbable paths to wealth. Some other fiscal fad will replace those of today and have no more substance than the current ones. And we will survive them as well.
In the meantime it might be worth going out and kicking some more ass, since it worked out pretty well this last time. There are two Senate races left, that between Al Franken (no, seriously... ) and cosmetically-enhanced Norm Coleman in Minnesota and the race between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin in Georgia. Franken appears to be pulling even, probably ahead, but the December 2nd run-off between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss is going to be a symbolic battle for the soul of... I guess the south and Georgia? Who knows. Chambliss is a nasty piece of work, Martin looks like a slighly vague Sunday School teacher; too nice to qualify. Esquire Magazine voted his opponent Senator Saxby one of "The Ten Worst Senators" and since he is still in his first term, he is a quick study. Martin needs your love, your money and you can even hook up through the Obama phone bank to make calls on his behalf, though presumably you have to fake a Georgia accent to have any luck convincing anyone. Click here.
Or we could sit around and fret, but given a choice between fretting and kicking some additional ass, I am inclined to vote for ass.
Arthur
Postscript:
Does anyone think I am being too harsh about our national priorities? Hah. Remember the HUGE looming crisis of the bankruptcy of the Social Security system, which absolutely REQUIRED us to set up private investment accounts? Does anyone else recall the massive, impossible amount of money it would cost to make the SSI account solvent again? Take your time. $75 Billion. Yup. Now remember, it was such a HUGE CRISIS to do this $700 Billion bailout/rescue that Congress agreed to toss in $140 Billion in pork to get it passed, to save our economy and the world. So the cost of the bailout/rescue was really about $840 Billion. That is more than eleven times larger than saving the SSI system. Okay? So how many people benefit from Social Security? As of 2005 more than 47 million Americans received SSI benefits. So one in every six Americans. But understand, the Republican conservatives have always HATED Social Security. Hard to believe? They have hated it ever since FDR put it in place. They think people should (a) save (b) work hard (c) never get sick, or (d) rely upon their church for help. What, you say some people do get sick and do not belong to a church? In that case, they have made their bed, let them lie in it and die in it, unless they get evicted first. In which case, who cares about them? Let them go live in a shelter. That in a nutshell, once you strip away all of the lies and public relations bullshit, is the core of the Republican Party's world view. And no, I don't much care what Mitch McConnell thinks the Democrats in the Senate should do. Silly, feckless, dishonest dough-faced moron that he is...
1 comment:
For the moment let's forget about those who say that HAVING a "national debt" is really a good thing.
Well let's don't, OK? Did balancing the budget help FDR save the economy during the depression? Did the New Deal save the US economy? How bout raising taxes to create revenue, did that help pull us out of the depression? And finally, what was the magic public works project that finally provided the fiscal stimulus to sustain the US economy and end the depression lasting from the end of 1929 until the early 1940s?
Let's ask Pulitzer Prize winning liberal Keynesian economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
I submit that the average man on the street will get each of these questions wrong.
Actually, why don't you just read it for yourself. The article in question is entitled "Franklin Delano Obama?" (just google it) By Paul Krugman
Published: November 10, 2008, NYTimes.
I will send it to the editor-in-chief of this publication for his personal examination.
A side note: Keynesian economics did not have the answer for the stagflation of the Carter years. Sluggish economy, high unemployment and hyper inflation didn't make any sense to them. Who saved the day? Paul Volcker who is actually on Obama's advisory team but a bit too old to for a cabinet spot.
In 1980, after years of double-digit inflation the Federal Reserve Board (Fed), under Paul Volcker, prodded banks to raise interest rates to record levels of more than 20 percent to induce a recession and break the inflation cycle. Painful but it worked.
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