Tag Archives: deficit

The Implications of Politicians Not Understanding What’s Important About the Economy

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Politicians don’t get the economy. Ever. I mean, they might even be economists, but they don’t seem to understand what is significant about the economy. You may wonder what I’m talking about considering the fact that the “economy” has been in the news constantly lately, and it would be very difficult to understand how anyone would miss this type of story. Well, let me explain what’s going on, and perhaps we might start to recognize some very obvious signs that seem to keep getting missed.

First, the average American doesn’t care one iota about the deficit. Oh, they care, but they don’t really care. It’s like when a guy tells his girlfriend he loves her. He’s the politician in this equation. He probably truly loves her. Now, when a woman tells a guy she loves him, she might actually mean she LOVES him, as in she would drag herself across the desert over jagged glass for him, or she loves him, which means she tolerates his presence and thinks he’s kind of okay, but there’s no way in the world he’s ever getting to third base with her. Yeah, when making these analogies, I sometimes use really sophomoric examples that I wouldn’t normally use in every day conversation. I don’t think I’ve referred to women, dating and baseball analogies in the same setting ever before in normal conversations.

Anyway, the point is: while our politicians might understand the economy, they don’t understand what’s important about the economy that matters to the average American. Because when it comes down to it, that’s ALL that is going to make a difference during an election. Think about that for a moment. We keep hearing gloom and doom predictions about the economy, especially if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, don’t stop the deficit from getting out of control and don’t fix the sinking ship (or whatever stupid analogy we use at any particular time). The average American is thinking: Do I have a job right now, and do I expect to have a decent one in the very near future? That’s about it. Whether or not the debt ceiling is reached, whether or not the US ever pays off its debts, or whether or not the US is perceived as still being a global, economic superpower, the average American doesn’t care. All he or she cares about is what matters to him or her at any particular time.

Which means the average person doesn’t feel any ties to the deficit of this country at all. Yes, on a surface level, they know that they are part of the mix of people who have to pay for it all. But we’ve been kicking this can down the road for so long that the average American thinks that his or her grandkids will pay for it, not him or her. We’re talking such big numbers that they’ve completely lost all sense of ability to pertain to individuals. When I’m told that the deficit is approaching $13 trillion, they may as well tell me it’s $13 BAZILLION because a trillion is an amount that my little head is never going to grasp. I’m still having a hard time grasping the thousands that one day I have to pay off for student loans. Trillions is bordering on ludicrous to me. So multiply that by 300 million people (equally ridiculous) and you start to understand why the average person doesn’t care one bit.

In the end, the average American is convinced one of two things will happen: The debt will somehow disappear, or we’ll continue to kick the can down the road for a few more decades and never deal with it in our lifetimes. The other alternative, which is the more obvious one, is that the entire system will collapse, and the US will fall into some sense of anarchy, where people will have to fend for themselves until a bunch of rich people create a new government that they argue is “for the people”. The average person, like average people throughout time, really have no say so in the whole matter and figure that the affairs of state are better left to the people who seem to enrich themselves regardless of the type of government we have. The very concept of the US collapsing is laughable to most every American, for the simple reason that it has never happened before. Sure, we’ve had revolutions (one), and we’ve had civil wars (one), but for the most part, the system has been in place for multiple generations where not a single person alive today living n the United States has ever seen this country as anything other than the government we have today. The very possibility of collapse is unimaginable.

Which means that when it happens, no one will see it coming. And that will make the anarchy that much more like a hell on Earth, kind of like St. Augustine talked about when the Roman Empire finally collapsed. No one saw it coming then, and they danced in the streets while the empire burned. And then they woke up from their drunken spree through anarchy to realize that they had to try to put it all back together again.

They didn’t call it the dark ages for nothing.

Advocating Peace Elsewhere & Still Needing to Get Your Shit Together At Home

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Over the last few days, President Obama has been trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This isn’t anything new. Every president from Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and Kennedy have been trying to do the same thing. NONE of them have ever succeeded. A couple of them got momentary results that sounded great, like Carter. And the world was so grateful, they even gave some of these presidents Nobel Peace prizes for their great efforts. But in the end, the peace fell apart because Israel and Palestine know only two modes: Cease fire and open fire. Long term peace isn’t in their vocabulary. They have generations of hate between them so that the only way they’ll ever end up with peace is for one side to completely eliminate the other. Sorry, but the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, hoping for better results.

But that’s really not even the issue I want to discuss. What I find even more fascinating is that we have a president right now who is trying to instigate peace (I guess he wants to actually earn that Nobel Peace Prize he got for just showing up for work without actually doing anything to deserve it; hey, I voted for him and supported him, but even I know that was the most ridiculous prize awarded in the history of the Nobel, right after the one they probably gave to Vlad Putin for creating peace by wresting with bears). No, what I want to talk about is this ridiculous tendency we have to try to create “peace” around the world when we can’t seem to figure out how to instigate it in our own country.

Believe it or not, there is a non-violent civil war going on in the United States right now. The only thing missing is actual violence, because we have a line right down the middle of the ideological sides of the country, and neither side is capable of getting along with the other. Just look at the current state of the Republican Party. There’s a man running for their nod for president (Gingrich) who is being chastised because he dared to side against Republicans through some of the usual stupid things he normally says (like disagreeing with Ryan over the budget mess). At the same time, we have members of Congress on the right who are probably going to lose their backing because they might have made the mistake of being friendly with other congress members on the left. And then we’re starting to see the same kinds of actions from the left, chastising their own members for daring to work with the right. The Gang of Six (a group of legislators who dared to come to the middle and try to work things out) has been deep sixed (for lack of better words) because the rest of their parties are outraged (outraged, I say!) that members on one side would dare to come to any kind of consensus with the other.

If you go to places like Wisconsin, you see entire parties rallying against the others to the point of advocating criminal actions against the other side (how dare you leave the state to avoid a lopsided vote!). Read a column by Ann Coulter, or even the more even-handed Michelle Malkin, and you read nothing but vitriolic hatred waged against the other side. Read (or listen to) anything coming out of Michael Moore’s camp, and you experience the exact same kind of hatred from the other side. People in this country are communicating behind battle lines and the hatred is so present in practically everything they say that I’m not surprised that this country has become completely dysfunctional. No one is willing to cooperate with each other because everyone is so angry, and when people become angry they become incapable of thinking clearly and justly. The goal is to achieve points in an ideological battle, not consensus and understanding. And even worse, they’re incapable of even recognizing that, or if they are capable, they see it through filters that see the other side as the one responsible and everything they do is rational and just. These are the kinds of conversations that appear as screaming sessions on late night news shows, where people aren’t communicating, but they’re trying to get as much of their arguments in as possible because if they stop to listen it would take away from the time they get to present their full case.

This is the environment we live in today, and yet our president is trying to foster peace elsewhere. If President Obama wants to foster peace, how about actually trying to do it here. I don’t mean compromising, or making the other side look bad, because that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years. I’m talking about actually putting forth a serious initiative about creating peace in the United States. Stop using rhetoric to push agendas, unless the agenda is to stop using rhetoric to push agendas. We’re really good at anger and hatred; I’d like to see how good we can become at being a unified country again. We haven’t been one for a very long time now. And I’m sure a reader is probably thinking to himself/herself, “well, that’s because of the people on the other side.” And that’s why we’ll never move forward.

Which is why we’ll never have peace in the Middle East, I should point out. Because as much as I’ve been talking about the stupid rhetoric of the people in the United States, believe it or not, it’s the same reason we’ve never had peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Both sides have to be right, to the point of swords and death. Compromising means weakness, and thus, a direction we can never move. Why would anyone expect a country where we can’t agree on whether or not fixing the budget is a national priority that we’d somehow be able to instill peace somewhere else?

When it comes to the deficit, the numbers are just too much for the American people

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There’s a brilliant scene in one of the Austin Powers movies where Dr. Evil, played by Mike Meyers, is announcing to the UN, or world council, or whatever fictitious organization was in charge of the world in those movies, that if they do not give him what he wants, he will unleash his viciously evil plan. What he asks for is “a MILLION DOLLARS” and his advisor tells him that a million dollars isn’t a lot of money anymore, so he has to up his demand to “a TRILLION DOLLARS.” They replay that same scene in a subsequent movie where he time travels back to the 1960s and he demands “a TRILLION DOLLARS”, causing the world council people to laugh at him because they recognize there’s not a trillion dollars in existence in that 1960s period.

Fast-forward to today, and the United States is trying to figure out its budget. The Republicans, the Democrats and President Obama are stuck on how to do it, how much to do it with, and what exactly they should be doing in the first place. The architect of the Republican plan, some guy previously unknown to anyone named Ryan, proposed a future budget cut over years of some numbers of trillions of dollars. President Obama, as of today, is announcing a plan to cut the budget by $4 trillion. Currently, we’re trying to head off a government collapse because our debt ceiling needs to be raised beyond its current level of $14.3 trillion, so there’s this request to raise the debt level even higher.

Here’s the problem. It’s not the fact that the government is now spending enough money that we’re currently $14.3 trillion in debt. Okay, that’s a problem. But the real problem is that $14.3 trillion means absolutely nothing to the average American, because the average American is lucky if he or she has $50,000 to access at any one time, and it’s easily arguable that most Americans are lucky to have $20 in their wallets at any one time. So talking about $14.3 trillion in debt is like saying we have a gazillion dollars that we have to cut because we’re already spending a quazillion each year. In other words, the numbers have absolutely no relevance to anyone.

Years ago, when the debt was somewhere around $1.2 billion, the news media used to do really inventive little games like say something along the lines of “if you lined up dollar bills all the way across the planet, you’d still have money left over after crossing the entire globe” or other equally interesting, yet ridiculously ludicrous examples. It would always cause the listener/reader to go, “wow, that’s a lot” but that’s usually all it would do. Then they’d go back to being oblivious to the events of the day because, to be honest, the events of the day didn’t really matter to them. Archie Bunker was on TV, so it was more important to get home and watch that.

Now, we have politicians on all sides of the aisle trying to convince the American people that this outrageous amount of money is important to the average American. But it’s not. Because it’s so much money, and so much out of control, that people just laugh at it and pretend it wasn’t mentioned. I mean, who wants to deal with the some ridiculous amount of debt when you might have debts of your own to deal with? I have a student loan I’m trying to pay off, so that number of thousands of dollars is far more significant to me than $14.3 trillion that was racked up without me ever having a say so whatsoever. Because when it comes down to it, they’re either going to figure out what to do with it, or the country is going to collapse. But no matter what they do, I’m still going to owe thousands of dollars in student loans. NO ONE is going to bail me out. Because no one cares about me like they seem to care about a phantom amount of money that was spent by people who were spending money that was never theirs to begin with.

And that’s the problem right there. The money we’re talking about was spent by people who took it upon themselves to dole it out any way they saw fit because it was never theirs to have to worry about in the first place. It was all fiat money that they imagined, yet they spent it as if it was real, lining the pockets of very rich people and very well-connected corporations. But when it came time to pay the piper, they turned back to us, the people, and said it was our responsibility to pay for what they fucked up because they never gave the implications a second thought when mom and dad went out of town and left them the keys to the liquor cabinet, the car and a credit card with no limit.

So, when the president gets on the horn and tells the rest of us that the debt is out of control, and WE need to do something about fixing it, he should sort of understand that rest of us really don’t give a fuck. We were never involved in the spending of that money, no matter how many arguments are made about how “we” put them in power to abuse the system in the first place. People we didn’t know had access to spending money they never should have spent, and now it’s time to pay up. Well, none of us are all that concerned. As a matter of fact, we see a lot of the bickering going back and forth between politicians as whines about how they don’t have access to more money to blow and spend like there’s no tomorrow. We don’t see the Republicans as the “fiscal conservatives” no matter how many times they try to pretend they are. And we don’t see the Democrats as the keepers of responsible government. All we see are a bunch of kids who had access to mom and dad’s credit card and now that mom and dad are at home, seeing the bill from the credit card company for the first time, there’s not a whole lot of compassion from the American people towards these kids who are now arguing about how we should raise their allowance because they already spent their money on video games.

So, if you’re going to try to convince the American people that they should care, you have a great deal of work in front of you. And so far, not a single politician has ever even attempted to do that.