Tag Archives: Finances

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.

Sidelined Onlookers Documenting the Last Days of the Republic?

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When I was working on my Ph.d for political science (how’s that for a first line, name-dropping, “look how important I think I am” opening?), one of the observations I kept making was how so many political pundits of their day were constantly making the prediction that the empire was about to crumble. There would be all sorts of analogies pointing at the fall of Rome, and yet another self-important political pundit of that time and day was convinced that the United States republic was about to collapse upon itself. It got to the point where I started to make predictions about the predicters, figuring that the eventual demise of a political entity is the propensity to fall into the ultimate entropy of political discourse: The belief that eventual destruction has to come on that person’s watch.

So, as I am watching the events of today unfold, I can’t help but find myself making the same mistake that everyone of these Thomas Paines, Mark Twains, Bill Buckleys and Helen Caldicotts kept making. We underestimate the inevitable apathy of the American people to care enough about their own circumstances to ever want to try to make things better.

You see, that’s pretty important, and as a political observant, it’s equally important to understand why people don’t do something as well as why people do the things they eventually do. Political scientists are very good at seeing French Revolutions under every rock, but incapable of seeing Moscovites living in squalor and despair, yet never doing anything to change their personal situation because while the payoff might seem great, the cost of achieving that payoff is sometimes just a bit more than any one man (or woman) is willing to pay. It’s one thing to complain about current events and to demand justice, but when that demand requires that you stand up against oppression by personally risking your own hide, that dynamic changes quickly. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We’re really good about making grandiose statements, like “give me liberty or give me death” or “I may disagree with you but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” but when it comes down to actually putting up one’s survival against one’s survival instincts, survival instincts win almost every time. We’re really good at complaining and claiming a backbone that we believe we might have, but like every bad war movie there’s that inevitable scene where the cigar-chewing sergeant reveals that a soldier may act all tough, but it’s only on the battlefield when you see whether he puts up or shuts up. In reality, we’re very much like that. We’re often all talk and very little action. I’ve often thought that political science could benefit from incorporating psychology into its discipline (where we put people into a room to see how much their political rhetoric stands up to experimentation…for the record, we don’t do that sort of thing because it’s ethically vacant in social science, but I’m really only talking in semantics right now).

Which brings me to my thesis for today, and that’s that I’m seeing all sorts of “fall of the Republic” activity happening on a daily basis right now, and I wonder how much of it is in place observation that always happens versus actual observations of real implications. In other words, I wonder how much my educated observations are really seeing as opposed to how much my educated perspectives are skewed by that same institutional framework I’ve been talking about since the beginning of this essay. In even more words, am I really seeing what I think that I’m seeing, or am I just another one of those overly observational folk that see things that have always been there but our current paradigm now recognizes it as something less than it really is?

I mean, let’s look at some of the evidence. We’re currently in a budget mess that this country has never been in before. Unlike the past, our solutions were usually to go back to the drawing board and come up with new solutions. Today, we aren’t going back to the drawing board but spitting out rhetoric that doesn’t solve anything but actually makes things worse. People are out of jobs because we may have exhausted the majority of the low-hanging fruit that was once available to us by virtue of our ever-expanding economy and untouched resources. Our economy is no longer expanding, and our resources are essentially tapped, overtapped possibly. The solution was always to find cheaper labor and cheaper resources, but we’ve run out of those options because the former labor solutions have wised up to this act and now controls the labor channels that we used to exploit. Instead, we have lost revenue sources, labor pools, and our own people don’t seem to be able to find the jobs that they used to find that usually existed on top of these other resources and lower income labor pools. If you look to our political leaders, the choices are either to raise more taxes or to cut spending. But neither solution is a solution to the actual problems we seem to be facing. Raising taxes doesn’t do any good if you have no one to raise them on, especially if we have fewer and fewer jobs. Cutting spending is great, but at the same time that only kicks the can down the road again because as we lose that choice labor we used to have, more people end up relying on government to fill in the gaps, yet cutting spending makes that even harder. In the end, we have what’s called the continuous rush to the bottom, and rather than recognize this and try to push back up, we are building infrastructure to make sure the trip to the bottom happens a lot more comfortably.

So what’s the solution to all of this? Well, if you’re a naysayer or a doomsayer, your answer is pretty simple. We let it all collapse and start over again. And sadly enough, we have political leaders that seem to be advocating just that. Oh, they won’t say that exactly, but their solutions are just that. Rather than try to find viable solutions to build prosperity, we seem to have a lot of leaders who are basically just trying to fund the megastupidopoly a little bit longer so they can cash out before it all comes crashing down. The solutions all appear to be named: I’ll get mine and the hell with the rest of you.

Which brings us back to the “people”, the ones who are responsible for fixing it all sans great leaders. But what can we really expect from them when the only input we allow from them is to punch a Yes or No hole on a ballot? We don’t ask for their ideas. To be honest, our political leaders don’t care about their ideas and are really only interested in their money, support and again, what the people can do for their leaders rather than the other way around. Oh, the rhetoric always sounds the opposite of what I just said, but actions speak much louder than words, and those bad actions have been speaking a lot lately.

When the economy started to collapse, our leaders bailed out the car companies, the banks and Wall Street gazillionaires. The common person received zilch. When the common person had his house foreclosed on, the government backed the banks. When it become political impossible to keep doing that, the government stepped in and demanded the banks be slower about taking everything away from their customers. Not that they stop taking everything away. Instead, they gave the banks everything they wanted in practically every area of discourse. Credit card companies received guarantees that people could no longer go completely bankrupt without some kind of continuous debt to the banks involved. When banks were discovered with their pants down involving overdraft charges, government stepped in and did as little as they could there as well. Even with the tiny movement made by government on the people’s behalf, the banks managed to get huge lobbying to soften the changes, and even now are working on reversing some of the impact they have “suffered” as a result of government forcing them to be less greedy and more upfront about their attempts to screw over their customers.

But what it really comes down to is the question of whether or not the common person in America really cares enough to pay attention to what’s happening. President Obama and the minions of government are trying very hard to convince the rest of the country that the budget impasse is important. The media is starting to make comments about how much the debt really “costs” each person and how much in debt EACH person is as a result of the debt ceiling we are currently living under. But what none of them have been capable of doing is convincing the average American that he or she really should care. Oh, they’re trying to make that argument, but it’s falling flat. Let me explain why, using simple logic that the average American is using.

Let’s call me Citizen A. The government tells me that my current debt (as a result of the deficit) is $70,000 (just for the sake of using an arbitrary number because the real number is just that, a number). My first thought is that as a citizen of this republic, I should be concerned, but in reality, I’m more concerned about the $150,000 student loan debt I’ve incurred trying to get a college education, my $350 monthly car payment, and my $500-1000 monthly rent bill I have to pay. Adding in a whole bunch of other expensese I probably have to pay a month, Citizen A really doesn’t care one iota about the personal $70,000 that is part of my slice of the deficit because to be honest, it’s not really my debt. I don’t see it that way. That $150,000 I owe in student loans is my debt, but it’s going to take a lot of rhetoric, a lot of speeches and quite possibly an overweight FBI agent in a bad suit with a crowbar to convince me that the government’s deficit is in fact, MY deficit. Citizen A doesn’t feel a connection to that debt. In fact, he thinks the government squandered that money, and that it’s really the debt of people who work for the government. That, in fact, it’s THEIR debt, not his.

Now, as a rational individual with a bit of education, I understand it shouldn’t be this way, but game theoretics are involved here, and when it comes to payoffs, the average citizen feels just like Citizen A. We don’t feel the debt is ours. It belongs to the government that for years has treated the “people’s” money as its own. When we took away the draft, made voting voluntary, and made presidential state of the union addresses optional television programming, we eliminated the ties between government and Citizen A. People see our government as an entity that exists because it has to exist, but as none of us fought to create this republic, very few of us actually have served to defend it, and most of us are oblivious to what this republic does on a daily basis, it’s very difficult to sell the supposition that government and people are tied to each other.

So, I ask: Are we seeing the end of days, or is this just another hiccup in the usual way things happen? And if it’s the latter, then how do you get people to care enough so that it doesn’t end up becoming the former by eventual default?

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.

This Just In! Duane’s 2011 Spending Plan Extension Has Been Approved!

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brucoe 

(Brucoe, the one independent member of Duane’s government. He is still undecided on the budget.) 

Today, after a marathon session involving his partisan stuffed animals, Duane Gundrum has declared that he has come to an agreement to continue his spending plans for the next few weeks. Up until this time, his conservative stuffed animals, led by Scruffy the Bear, were holding out for more cuts in collections from his job at the Piggly Wiggly Convenient Store. However, after promising that Duane would cut back on discretionary spending, specifically Root Beer flavored Laffy Taffy candy bars, the conservative bloc decided it would fund Duane for a short period before he would have to reexamine his finances again.

Liberal leader Elmer the bean bag frog pointed out that Duane has been making numerous sacrifices this year by avoiding payments of his electricity bill, his cell phone bill and normal expenditures of necessary pornography at the Double Juggs Adult Bookstore. In Elmer’s words: “Duane has been suffering greatly during this period of downturn, and thus, we couldn’t see any other areas in which he could cut,” even though conservatives claimed that there were areas of spending that could be curtailed, such as iPhone apps, “special” massages at the controversial Madame Wong’s Swedish Massage Parlour, and random purchases of Twinkies and Ho-Hos.

elmo darth 

(Liberal representative Elmo during a particulary tense negotiation session with the conservative whip.) 

Members of both parties recognize that without a dedicated budget agreed upon by all members, Duane will continue to barely function economically and further discretionary spending may suffer as a result. There has even been a fear of insolvency with gas purchasing and difficult to cancel Netflix memberships.

This is the third time since both parties could not come up with a budget that Duane has been forced to push a spending plan into the new fiscal year. It is hoped that a consensus can be reached by the Stuffed Animal Lobby that is influencing finances in Duane’s government. We will keep you informed of further developments.

In other news, girls still don’t want to date Duane. We go to Angela in Grand Rapids for more on this continuing story…..

women 

(A random selection of women willing to go on the record as “not interested in dating Duane”.)

Reflections on Life in General

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I spent a few hours this weekend paying bills. You know, the usual, where you sit down with your check book and write out checks for all of the bills that have been building up over the last few weeks. The kind that build up not because you can’t afford to pay them, but just because you don’t want to take the time to pay them. I find myself doing that a lot, and have even paid some bills really late because I just didn’t feel like filling out the paper work that is required to fill out in order to pay a simple gas bill. I really hate  paying bills, and no matter how many times I pay it, that feeling just doesn’t change.

For me, it feels like my life has very little meaning when it comes down to it, because when I’m sitting there with a handful of utility and credit card bills, one starts to feel that there’s really little purpose in life other than paying bills to people who don’t provide anything for me other than little nuances that one needs to endure in order to live somewhat comfortably. I pay a gas bill because I don’t want to freeze, and sometimes I like to cook food without having to rub two sticks together and hope that millions of years of evolution don’t put me back a couple of thousands years to where I’m still required to provide my own fire. I pay an electricity bill so that I can watch TV, turn on the lights, run the microwave (avoiding that rubbing sticks together thing), fire up my computer to write this blog, and other things that come from Ben Franklin’s kite discovery a couple of centuries ago. I pay my rent bill so I don’t get kicked out on my behind and actually have a stuff to put my, to put what George Carlin eloquently referred to as, “stuff”. I pay my car payment so I can avoid having to take the bus to work, and then I get to pay my insurance bill so that I’m legally allowed to drive my car on the road. Add in credit card bills and other little nuanced payments here and there, and honestly, I’m paying a lot of money to maintain a very low level of existence.

But what’s the meaning of it all? I mean, why continue to pay all of this money to entities that don’t care one iota about me in any way just so one can continue to survive? Throughout history, reflective souls have constantly asked the inward-looking questions of “why am I here?” and each generation seems to have one or two philosophers that think they have it all figured out, yet why is it that we still keep having to ask this question? I mean, we can read all sorts of philosophers and think we have it all figured out, but I get the impression that no one has ever really figured it out, because we still have to keep asking the questions. But we don’t seem to come up with any real answers.

I remember a colleague and I once joked in political science that we were challenging the paradigm Americanist belief that all representatives do what they do in order to be re-elected. We posited that perhaps the rationale behind congressional representatives was a little simpler, that maybe they did what they did in office, and to achieve office, because they were interested in dating. In other words: Attracting a potential mate. Sure, those of us in the discipline laughed at us, and we chalked it up as a joke, but if you think about it, there’s probably something there. If you look at it from a basic biological necessity, most people tend to do the things they do in order to perpetuate the species. Men fluff their feathers in hopes of attracting a mate, so why couldn’t it be seen that in the end congressional representatives do everything they do in hopes of perpetuating their species as a biological necessity? Sure, getting elected, or re-elected, may appear to be the end goal, but what if it’s really just a step in a biological direction? I honestly think that scientists aren’t all that interested in examining such issues with sincerity because then it would present all sorts of dilemmas that they don’t want to deal with, especially if the base values of a politician are narrowed down to simple reproductive functions.

Which brings me back to my original question of “why are we here?”. I mean, is that all there is? Are we here specifically just for reproducing, and thus, all of our mannerisms and manifestations mean nothing but achieving survival through offspring? I’d really hate to think that life is as simple as that, and the bigger picture is really nothing more than just the continuation of the species.  Wouldn’t that be truly sad to discover that after all of this evolution we’re no different, or better, than a snail slug? What a joke that would be if our achievement of sentience means absolutely nothing but an ability to acknowledge that we really don’t have a purpose in the first place.

All of this discussion makes it really difficult to conclude without at least mentioning the concept of religion because when it comes to this type of conversation, there’s always this tendency to try to find answers through a “higher” meaning. Having been brought up in the methodist sense of spirituality, I often find it interesting that there are people who can so easily surrender to the idea that it’s all just a part of a religious purpose, that there’s no need to think any deeper than that. In a Penrose sort of way, it’s hard not to be able to acknowledge the possibility of something deeper than basic humanity, but at the same time it’s so difficult to accept that we have managed to figure it all out because someone in an earlier age, with less ability to understand the bigger picture, had it all figured out and wrote it down in a book for the rest of us to follow, especially when the book is so damn confusing, is interpreted so many different ways (often leading to war, subjugation and hatred), and no two copies of “the book” are believed to be any more valid than any other. And then the followers of those books do such horrific deeds and offer up such hatred towards other people, all in the name of doing the right thing.

Anyway, I’m starting to ramble now, so I’ll leave it at that for now.