We are told there are lots of reasons why borrowing $5 trillion in less than three years and federalizing health care have not yet restored prosperity.
The residents of George Orwell’s Oceania daily screamed at the infamous visage of arch-enemy of the people Emmanuel Goldstein. In the same way, almost every week for the last 140, Americans have been reminded just how nefarious and lasting was the work of George W. Bush. Now ensconced somewhere in Texas, Bush, in insidious ways, somehow still blocks our collective recovery.
Wall Street likewise continues to conspire to thwart Americans. “Fat-cat bankers,” “millionaires and billionaires,” people who fly in “corporate jets,” and those who “don’t pay their fair share” and who junket to Las Vegas or jet to the Super Bowl “on the taxpayers’ dime” have all ignored the president’s warnings. Did they not hear that “now is not the time for profit” and “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”?
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There are other guilty parties. The president also reminded us that there are fewer bank-teller jobs because of ATMs. And he added that online ticketing has meant that there is likewise far less employment for travel agents. Such accelerated automation after January 2009 apparently helps explain why unemployment is still over 9 percent.
And if technologically induced instability were not enough, there is the culpable Republican-controlled House. Until November 2010, a considerable Democratic majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate were supposedly allowing the president to make headway. But then, for still poorly understood reasons, the people foolishly voted in a Republican majority in the House. The new Congress that was seated in January stopped the Obama success of the prior 24 months in its tracks. Since then, for the last nine months, the president has had to “fight Congress” in a way he had apparently not had to in his first two years of triumph. “They need to do their job,” the president remarked of the mysterious congressional ennui that started in January of this year.
The president also noticed that sometimes even the gods conspire to derail the expected recovery. In August, in a series of speeches, Mr. Obama outlined the perfect storm that had hit us — a veritable quadrafecta of unexpected bad news. First there was the Arab Spring, which created global uncertainty. Then oil prices spiked and sidetracked the nascent recovery. To top that off, the Japanese tsunami did its share to halt the president’s plans for economic restoration. Nor, he reminded us, should we forget the financial uncertainty in Europe.
Former top Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee best summed up the weird alignment of the stars: “Earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions in the Middle East, financial crisis, and now we even have earthquakes outside of Washington, D.C.” Other administration spokesmen noted the deleterious role of Hurricane Irene, which interrupted the president’s vacation and paralyzed the East Coast. Earlier they had noted the damage done by BP and the seemingly unending oil spill. In other words, if Republicans in Congress and ATMs were not enough, we also had Arabs, Japanese, Europeans, and the angry earth shaker and tidal-wave maker, Poseidon, all in league against this administration.
But Bush, Republicans, foreigners, high tech, and divine retribution do not alone explain the continued economic stagnation. Most recently, a reflective President Obama told us he now thinks our problems are even more existential. We, the American people, he concluded, are also the problem: “The way I think about it is, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.” Apparently, our lackadaisical natures have been eroding even more since 2009, and so they also do their part in preventing us from restoring economic growth.
Note that the president believes that citing such extraneous causes is not blame-gaming. That’s why, not long ago, he warned high-school students that “It’s the easiest thing in the world to start looking around for someone to blame.”
Even if you buy their diagnosis (I think it addresses symptoms and not what actually "caused" the bubble), the New America paper sounds a lot like it is proposing a global governance model and is not even remotely the world I want to live in (yes, I read the paper)- it is the G20, IMF, US Govt. overregulation, and necessarily something akin to the UN on steroids "implementing" changes. The only way any of these things they suggest will happen is if some entity "forces" their solution on everyone and does anyone really believe 1. that it is desirable and 2. that the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease?
The first two require our government to be more totalitarian and the third is to quote, "Global Rebalancing – A New G-20 Commitment to Currency Realignment, Domestic Demand Growth and Reduction of Current Account Surpluses, and IMF and G-20 coordinated recycling of East Asian and Petro-dollar
Surpluses to Support Economic Recovery in Europe and the
Middle East" That "sounds" like a new world government of some sort and the more you look at what he proposes they do, the more it looks like a cure far worse than any "debt overhang" we have today.
It utterly amazes me how liberals can keep trying the same failed solutions. Doesn't matter that in almost 100 years of trying, not once has their prefered solution worked.
This time they assure us, they will get it right. Just trust them with a few trillion more or our dollars and nirvana is surely just around the corner.
Let me summarize the article: the proper response to an endemic failure of national governments is a global government.
Yeah, that's a cure for what ails us!
Here's a quote from the paper:
"Also key will be the establishment of an emergency global demand-stabilization fund to recycle foreign exchange reserves, now held by surplus nations, in a manner that boosts employment in deficit nations."
This is a perfect example, a paradigm as it were, of the socialist impulse. The countries that succeed in the international markets must give up the money they earned so that the losers in the market can survive. It is nothing more than a global transfer payment scheme.
Best of luck getting the Chinese, or the Americans for that matter, to give up their hard earned profits.
I imagine that such a fund would be administered in by the UN. Perhaps they can bring Kofi and Kojo out of retirement. yeah, this could work.
The captcha was intersting: later gator. Recently I read one of Mr Buckley's Blackford Oakes books, "see you later alligator". It was set in Castro's Cuba. At one point the god like Che says: Hasta Luego Cayman.
Global reforms that restore balance to the world economy? Sounds great. Why don't we set up an economic union based in Brussels where we all use a single currency and allow for free trade across borders without tax or tariff.
Control of the executive would rotate among member states and a super parliament would vote on legislation that would ensure balance among the different economies.
Yes, exactly why isn't Europe in oh so much better shape than the U.S.? After all, they applied all the right socialist theories.
We are witnessing the perfect economic storm at the moment. An incompetent, naive, Marxist leaning U.S. president and two years of a statist Congress combined with the inevitable meltdown of the EU. Any one of those two events would have meant a significant worldwide economic challenge, it is our misfortune that they are occurring simultaneously.
Re-read Newton's ninth law of unintended consequences, Mikey.
A wonderful socialist solution to the current housing depression sounds almost too good to be true.
Because it is.
See, we are all working with a monkey on our backs. That monkey--our inability to connect cause and effect--is precisely why one Nobel Prize economist says we absolutely have to do "X", while another, with the same or more laurels, says that if we do "X" we are all doomed.
The same reason why one esteemed historian credits the US government for rescuing us from the great depression, while another claims the depression would have been so much shorter, and barely a blip, if the government had stayed out.
Each one has his theory, and each one has his evidence.
Too bad. Either they are both wrong, or more likely one of them is not just wrong, but hopelessly incompetent. Either way, we're left with uncertainty.
One thing is certain, however. Once we, as a society, step in and shred contract law as it relates to debt, we can expect creditors to retreat, and that's precisely what they are doing right now. It's exactly as if we had jammed a crowbar into the gear on the motor. The motor has stopped.
The really bad news is it's already done, and cannot be undone--at least not anytime soon.
You may not like to hear this, Mikey, but there's more pain ahead, and the best thing we can do is keep working our collective butts off until we climb out of this. We will--but only when the movers of the economy decide to get back in.
A concise compendium of Obamanomics, Mr. Hanson. Hope & Change has been fundamentally transformed to Blame & Deflect. I hope some enterprising presidential candidate might, at some point, explain the reasons for the vague "financial uncertainty" in Europe that keeps popping up on the teleprompter.
"The president and his economic advisers, most of them now departed, really did believe that too little government spending and not enough taxes accounted for the sluggishness."
Why do you believe this, Dr. Hanson? Do you have evidence to this effect. If so, let's have it; the evidence for the inverse position -- i.e., that the Administration would follow this path whether or not it was salutary for the economy -- seems rather strong.
