I'm sure you share my fascination with the encroachment of scientific terminology on everyday conversation. It's especially prevalent among liberal arts majors, because nothing adds to the gravitas of otherwise completely unprovable assertions like the generous sprinkling of terms like "critical mass, " "quantum leap," "power curve," and "nanosecond" in otherwise banal discussions. If you add action buzzwords like "get it right" to what you're saying, almost all other content becomes superfluous. For example, if a Congressman thunders that the stimulus plan must have sufficient critical mass to jump start the economy to get us ahead of the power curve and that we don't have a nanosecond to lose if we're going to get it right, then you know you're listening to a guy who's learned to take himself very seriously, even while having no idea what he's talking about.
It's important to remember that none of this pretentious terminology actually indicates that the speaker has any quantitative command over the concepts he's pilfering; this is all qualitative bullshit. I know, because I do it all the time myself. For example, I love the term "event horizon" because it sounds so spooky and arcane, but I am unable to crunch the formulas to tell you where it is in relation to any given mass constituting a black hole. Stephen Hawking, on the other hand, can do that. I do know that the idea black holes suck up all the surrounding mass, no matter how far away, into their vortex (and over their event horizon - mooooaaaahhhhhaahhhhh!) is just fear-mongering; if the Earth were a black hole, it would be about the size of a ping-pong ball, but the Moon would go on circling the Earth as if nothing much had happened other than those annoying deposits of junk on its surface every few decades would stop. The mass of the Earth would be the same, so its gravitational pull would be nearly identical. Just, you know, kinda dense.
Black holes occur because of gravitational collapse of a massive object such as a big star, usually when it runs out of fusionable fuel to maintain the internal pressure resisting gravity. You can see where I'm going with this. Senator Chuck Schumer (Gasbag, NY) could talk like this if he would just Wikipedia that shit and read about black holes. Then he could carry on about whether America is approaching an economic event horizon.
Here's my true, honest-to-God thought on this "recovery program." All the economic experts, such as Paul Krugman and others who are pushing this massive spending solution, do not really know whether it will "work" at all. They are talking this way because they don't know what else to say. America is currently in a state of shock and denial about the "apparent" disappearance of about 40% of its net worth into thin air. Poooof! So the American economy, super-star that it was, is running out of fuel to sustain its gaseous, inflated state. To drive the metaphor into the ground, that fuel (our hydrogen - if only we'd actually developed it!) was disposable income in the hands of the vast unwashed Booboisie, the open-air Jerry Springer Green Room that is my (and your) modern Homeland, Battlestar Consumerica! Americans, during the Bush "Ownership Society" period, were getting about half that dough by treating their houses like ATMs. No more, dat kine, as Hawaii's two 84 year old Senators might say for old times' sake, with Punahou Barack chuckling along.
As the "disposable" income vanishes, the national chain stores are all going bust-o, one by one, at an accelerating pace. Just like a collapsing star accelerates in its collapse as its mass becomes more concentrated. Shopping malls empty out, the stores close, the crap jobs disappear, house payments aren't made, credit card bills are ignored, banks teeter on the edge of insolvency, et cetera et cetera, as Yul Brynner said. This description would be fantastic except that it's actually happening as I write and you read.
President Obama, who presides over this mess, doesn't really know what to do. Nothing in his specific training or education equips him to deal with this enormously complex problem. America is collapsing under its own weight - huge federal and state budgets, corporate pension obligations, an out-of-control medical system, and Himalayas of private debt. There just isn't enough money to keep it all puffed up. We're about 40% short of what we need. But what the politicians don't want to face, or to say out loud, is that maybe that's just where we are now. They're professional optimists and their job description doesn't allow them to say things like that. As Patrick Henry would say now, give me false hope or give me death!
So if Obama and the Democrats in Congress are going to fail in such a spectacular way (a singularity - there's another one), they want to be sure they fail in a way prescribed by the consensus of the experts. It's safer that way. And the Republicans, who know this massive spending thing is going to happen anyway, can thus oppose it safely, and then if we go bankrupt, or into hyperinflation because of a worthless dollar, they have another way to win, for whatever that would be worth inside our ping-pong ball sized economy.
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