Re: Gloom, despair, woe, and President Bush -- SPEAK UP

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Date Posted: 11:19:45 03/21/03 Fri
Author: Arkady
Author Host/IP: NoHost / 148.183.241.15
Subject: Re: Gloom, despair, woe, and President Bush
In reply to: Richard 's message, "Gloom, despair, woe, and President Bush" on 08:03:24 03/21/03 Fri

I can see the point you're making -- it's a lot easier to take swipes at the other side than to offer a plan of your own. Fair enough. But, I can also see why the Dems are starting by focusing on the symptoms, before offering up a cure. It seems a lot of people are in deep denial about the state the US has found itself in, and the Dems want to make them see the problems, as a first step in figuring out how to fix them.

It's actually reminding me a lot of the Reagan years, when people took Reagan's word on it that things were getting better on his watch, while most hard indicators show either stagnation or worsening: average unemployment from 1981-1988 was fairly high, poverty ended the Reagan years at the same point it had been in his first year (compared to the general trend of it dropping over the past five decades), deficits exploded, real wages dropped, and all sorts of social problems festered (divorce, teen pregnancy, violent crime, etc.) It's hard to get into a discussion of the why Reaganomics failed unless you can first establish that there was a failure. Likewise, prepping the country for a change in the direction Bush has taken us first means showing them that we've gone downhill for the last two years. That means emphasizing the exploding deficits, the growing anti-American sentiment abroad, the rift with our allies, our diplomatic failures, rising poverty, rising crime, rising unemployment, increasing social problems, and a basket-case stock market.

For my own part, I think the problem is that we're wasting our productive potential on luxuries for the wealthy and a bloated military. If our productivity were instead coaxed towards gains for the middle and lower classes, and towards "seed programs" (infrastructure, education, job training, r&d), we'd be doing much better. That doesn't mean you need to be looking for one "big idea". In fact, that's been part of the problem during the periods when this country has been in decline (1929-1932, 1969-1992, 2001-2003). We've been so wrapped up in "big ideas" (laissez-faire dogma or massive tax-cutting) that it has hurt us.

What we need are small, smart, gradual uses of the government's leadership to improve things. I often use an agricultural metaphor to describe economics, because I think it's so appropriate. In agriculture, basic plant biology sets the core rules, and you try to alter them to your detriment. You're not going to grow coconut groves in Minnesota no matter how much you'd like to. The Soviets made that mistake, both in their agriculture and their economics, blinded by their idealogy to the point they couldn't recognize the basic natural rules at work.

In agriculture, ultimately you need to get out of the way and let nature do its thing... a plant grows because that's what it naturally does, not because the farmer is out there trying to stretch it. Likewise, in economics, you ultimately need to get out of the way and let capitalism do its thing... an economy grows because of all the natural forces of a capitalist system, not directly because of government action.

But, in agriculture the farmer can have a role, in sowing seeds, fertilizing the fields, killing pests, and making sure the plants get enough (but not too much) water. It isn't enough for the farmer to just get out of the way -- laissez-faire agriculture will give you a crop, but perhaps not the crop you wanted and certainly not optimal growth; likewise with economic. The government needs to look to take small, proven steps to improve the economy -- not overtraining or overwatering or over-fertilizing, or anything else that might stunt the crop, but also not leaving the fields of economic and social activity entirely to their own devices.

I think Clinton's years are a model of good economic husbandry. He was never one for the "big idea", like the massive tax cuts of the post-Johnson pre-Clinton era. Instead, he was fond of small programs and gradual changes. He (and Congress) gave us the FMLA, a big minimum wage hike, increased childcare funding for those trying to get off welfare, improvements in the student loan programs, NAFTA, the WTO round of the GATT, incremental deregulation, Americorps, more cops on the beat, slow deficit reductions, "common sense gun control" ;) , controlled defense-spending, etc. Those things tended to create nice fertile grounds for growth (less crime, better-educated workers, increasing prosperity for the middle class, better opportunities for people in the lower class to move up, the improvements associated with increased global trade, etc.)

So, even though I think your critique is fair, I think there's also an extent to which you are looking for the "big idea" that Dems are offering as a counterproposal, when, perhaps, another "big idea" is the last thing we need. What we need is to get away from a reliance on upper-class tax-cutting to act as an economic panacea. What we need to do is get over the long-disproven notion that less government "interference" is always better. What we need is to get over our national neuroses that have cropped up since 9/11 and the perpetual state of almost-war we've had since then. What we need is someone to put lots of little ideas to work, and to let the inherent strength of our nation do the rest.

Step one is seeing how badly things have gone since Bush took office (and how badly they have always tended to go under Republican presidents).

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Replies:

That's a nice spin, but . . . -- Richard, 00:50:58 03/22/03 Sat
- Re: That's a nice spin, but . . . -- Arkady, 15:55:44 03/24/03 Mon
  - And that is where you depart from other liberals -- Richard, 09:28:41 03/25/03 Tue
    - Re: And that is where you depart from other liberals -- Arkady, 18:58:18 03/25/03 Tue