This Week Under the Big Top

So I watched my president-elect this morning with George Stephanopoulos on This Week.  L'il Georgie was his usual amiable self.  I think I would have learned a lot more if they'd simply gotten out a B-ball and gone one-on-one.  

O worried me a little with his meandering answer about Guantanamo; turns out the issue is a "lot more complicated than people think," and closing it in the first 100 days is not realistic anymore.  I think he means that now that he's this close to the Oval Office, the campaign issue about American honor has lost some of its prior urgency.  He discussed the difficulty of trying some prisoners at Gitmo because of "tainted" (i.e., produced by torture) evidence, while at the same time recognizing the danger of simply letting them go in cases where that evidence, tainted or not, suggests they represent a threat.  So we need some "special" process to decide whether they can be released or detained even without a formal trial where they might actually have a chance to prove their innocence (or, in the language of due process, where the government could succeed or fail in proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt).  Someone's really gotten to this guy, I'm afraid.  Why not try these desperadoes in federal criminal court, as has been done with numerous other terrorists?  Convictions were obtained without compromising national security, and the American system of justice was both honored and vindicated. Unless, of course, the idea is to keep the torture under wraps...

This Week then transitioned to the panel, where the Resident Hysteric of the New York Times, Tom Friedman, gave his prescription for the recovery of the economy: credit must get moving again to business entrepreneurs, or nothing else can happen.  Friedman was wearing his trademark black turtleneck, which gives him a kind of techie, Steve Jobsy look, but with his bellows-like throat, it makes him look like an actual turtle.  I believe that if a contest were held to elect that human who takes himself most seriously in all the known universe, Friedman would win by acclamation.

The "recovery plan" was of course the hot topic of discussion.  Should it be $700 billion, $1 trillion, $2 trillion?  The general feeling is that it must be huge.  Newt Gingrich had the audacity to point out that of the first 50% of the TARP money, about $350 billion, no one can actually say where it went or what it's doing to help the economy.  That's a peculiar state of affairs; if the House of Representatives initiated the appropriation, as they must under the Constitution, didn't they include some process to see where the money went?  Apparently not.

This reinforces my view that the Congressional Clown Troupe, more than ever, spends its time at the Capitol Hill Big Top practicing juggling, slipping on banana peels and squirting seltzer down each other's pants.  It is for this reason that it seems highly unlikely that they will actually be able to devise a spending program to "jump start" the American economy, a strange phrase that O used over and over with George S.  The economy has a dead battery?

Or, more ghoulishly, using defib paddles on a corpse.  The principal idea seems to be that the fed government is ideally placed to do what private enterprise cannot do now, put people back to work or keep them employed (such as with state and local government).  While the fed govt. does not have the kind of money on hand to fund this kind of recovery, and must raise it by borrowing, the fed can do this because of its unique status as the issuer of the world's default currency and its triple A rating as a borrower, which comes embossed with a seal stating "backed by the Full Faith & Credit of the United States [see other side for details]."  

Supposing that Mr. Gingrich's reasonable objection can be overcome.  (By the way, with the imminent departure of W, I find myself more open to any idea from anyone on the political spectrum as long as it makes sense, i.e., sounds true.  I realize that I had gotten so sick of Bush that I just couldn't stand to hear any idea associated with him, even if, down deep, I agreed with it. For example, I always agreed with Bush that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.  How could anyone seriously argue with that?  Yet among Bush's many pernicious effects was that he drove liberals to such desperation that they began reminiscing about the "good ol' days" of the Baathist regime in Iraq.)  The basic problem with the American economy is not that there aren't jobs; it's just that a huge percentage of them are crap jobs in the consumer economy, and it's that economy which is beginning to hemorrhage and die because consumer spending is plummeting.

I'm not an economist (although I play one on my blog). However, it seems to me you can roughly divide recent American economic history into three distinct eras, from 1930 to the present.  Era I is the Depression, which lasted roughly from 1930 to 1940.  War production (a form of government stimulus) got the economy moving at last, in ways that the alphabet soup of Roosevelt's social engineering did not.  For example, a serious recession hit in 1937-38, which the Stimulus Hawks (such as Paul Krugman) attribute to Roosevelt's temporary reduction in govt. spending; still, this tends to prove that five years of govt. tinkering had not pulled the nation out of its morass.

After the rest of the world's industrial bases were destroyed (Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan), America rose to unchallenged preeminence.  We held this position for about 30 years, until the first oil shock.  It was at that point, as President Carter warned us, that a transition to renewable energy (the lifeblood of the economy) was necessary.  Brilliant environmental thinkers, such as Barry Commoner, were writing the same thing.  Carter put solar panels on the White House roof.  

The American people then conducted their first experiment in Government by Idiot and elected Ronald Reagan, who promptly removed the solar panels and all hope for a transformative energy economy.  For 30 years we've been heading steadily downhill.

You can't do 30 years of work in two or three years, and the net effects of this Recovery Program will be (1) a temporary blip downward in unemployment, (2) some new highways and overpasses and (3) a large increase in the national debt.  It's good to put people to work, for whatever length of time, but America can't attend the equivalent of an EST weekend and come home transformed.  We borrowed the economy into a hyperinflated bubble, well beyond our means of sustaining it with wages,  and now the air is leaking out.  The Congressional Clown Troupe would rather not tell you that; so watch, intead, while 535 of them climb out of a yellow Volkswagen.