Election Year Stockholm Syndrome

There are certain truths that escape understanding even in plain view; for instance, if one digs a hole deep enough, climbing out may be difficult.  Certainly, it will be much more difficult, and a longer process still, than climbing out of a shallower hole.  Makes sense, right?

So let’s apply that to our economic situation.  In past recessions, say since the 1930s, we've been climbing out of holes somewhat shallower than that of the Great Recession from which we are currently struggling to extract ourselves.  Other recoveries (to which this one is unfavorably compared) have been much more robust and far shorter in duration.  Does this surprise anyone?  Apparently, it does.

When there is no public money left, when we are deeply in debt, when interest rates are already at historic lows, when credit markets are inaccessible, when public payrolls are bloated, and when most Americans (who decry the government’s poor management of its finances) have little to no savings of their own, even after the good times when they should have been socking it away, and finally, when they bought homes for which they paid far too much that are now worth considerably less… well, one can easily see the challenges involved in engineering a traditionally robust recovery.  It’s got a snowball's chance of making it across the river Styx.

This was the Frankenstorm of recessions, the Sandy of slowdowns.  We can at least agree on that.

Of all the myths perpetuated this election cycle (and there are many, even on the blue side), this idea that we should have snapped our fingers and been out of the woods in a year or two is just the stupidest farce we've witnessed here.   And yes, the president set an unrealistic expectation four years ago.  Thinking people knew it was optimistic.  But what is most dispiriting is that at least 47% of Americans seem to have bought the idea and are genuinely upset about it.  They should look in the mirror.  Even George W. Bush didn't create this mess alone.  Let’s stop blaming Obama for the hole we dug together.  And let’s be smart enough to recognize that we've got a painful climb out of our collective mess, regardless of who occupies the White House in January.

What this really comes down to is the Congress; if they don’t mend their fences, enact a Simpson-Bowles-esque solution, and get control of healthcare entitlements, all of the campaign trail rhetoric in the world won’t pull us out of the downward spiral.  Don’t count on a GOP-led congress to make the tough choices: as the numbers show, red states are net beneficiaries of the federal dollars they lambaste.  It’s the blue states, in grim irony, that fund the red ones, and are net contributors to the budget.  How exasperating that they are under withering fire from the very populace they feed.  Do we honestly believe congressional representatives will willingly cut funding from their own states?  And as I've written before, I’m less concerned about a Romney presidency than with the right-wing congressional fringe and corporate profit centers to whom they’ll be inextricably beholden.  I fear we won’t get Governor Romney, but President Koch. 

Our voting this time around is regrettably for who will do the least damage, and to give congress a chance to come up with some compromise solution.  There is a part of me that actually suspects that if Romney wins, these GOP tea-soaked obstructionists will suddenly find it in their hearts to cross the aisle and back off of some of their brinkmanship, as they have so many times stated that the party’s number one goal is to defeat Obama.  If they are to be believed, then perhaps we have some hope should Tuesday break that direction.  But we should all recognize however that this is like paying the ransom, and trusting your hostage will be delivered alive and unharmed.  It’s sympathy for our captors.  Our national embrace of the very congressional elements complicit in our current economic quicksand is a massive and bizarre case of Stockholm syndrome.

Happy voting tomorrow.

JB's Top 10 Reasons It's No Fun To Be A Moderate

I'm a moderate Republican, a member of an orphaned cadre which no longer has a voice in American politics.  The GOP and my more conservative friends label me a turncoat liberal.  Yet the Democratic party's chronic largess makes me uncertain of its ability to make real progress fast enough; they are, however, giving it a shot, tackling out-of-control programs such that we may at least have a mechanism to contain the mess.  Conversely, the Republican party's engineering of the last decade's deficits and excesses (which they now suddenly decry) doesn't inspire me to place much faith in them, either.  

Four years ago I could not fathom voting for any ticket containing Governor Sarah Palin, and for the below reasons, I'll likely vote Democratic once again.  I don't relish it.  In short, the GOP of today has managed to convince the American people that what they see... isn't really what they see... and I can't get past it.  They've succeeded remarkably well in:

1) Painting a president who bailed out and saved the American auto and banking industries as anti-business, while openly pillorying him for doing it.

2) Dismissing 47% of Americans as lazy and non-taxpaying when a sizable chunk of that very group actually comprises the conservative base and will, bewilderingly, be voting GOP this fall.

3) Professing to be deficit and spending hawks while having directly helped to create most of the deficits we now face through two wars, tax cuts, and healthcare spending.  All unfunded, however justified.

4) Persuading people they're actually worse off now than when the economy was in unrestrained free-fall, credit markets were completely frozen, stocks were half their current value heading downward, home values were collapsing, and we were shedding millions of jobs each month.  Few of us seem to remember these events.  

5) Establishing the conventional wisdom that while we've been relentlessly cutting taxes, reducing personal and public savings, and deregulating for the past 30 years, that if we just double down on those same policies, a complete turnaround of our economic situation will suddenly spring into being, and the debt to be paid for the excesses of those decades will simply vanish in the span of an election cycle.

6) Construing the GOP as the party of the family, while continually fighting the rights of a minority of loving couples to establish community-building, tax-paying households and families. 

7) Presenting the right as champion of children, education, and technological progress, while proclaiming evolution a theory "from the fiery pits of hell", and telling Americans it's "snobbish" for the president to want everyone to have a chance to go to college... and (ironically) accusing the Democrats of class warfare.

8) Convincing Americans that the president is a Kenyan Marxist Muslim Fascist (still trying to wrap my head around this one) who secretly hates America, and that we are only an hour away from jack-booted federally-imposed marshal law.  Seriously.  There's enough of this travelling around the internet with the help of otherwise level-headed people I know, love, and respect as to beggar belief.  I'm not seeing this same level of vitriol from my friends over on the left.

9) Successfully substituting faith & emotions for details and policies.  The very campaign slogan of "Believe in America", among too many other statements, slogans, Fox News pieces, and emailed stories and pictures to count, perpetuates the notion that if you don't vote GOP, then you don't believe in America, you hate Jesus, eschew apple pie, and would just as soon sit on your ass and take a government handout.  No matter how I choose to vote, I find that patently false, mean-spirited, short-sighted, and divisive.

10) Obscuring the fact that unfunded liabilities - healthcare spending to be precise - is our number one issue and driver of public debt.  All of the discussions of Big Bird and eliminating cabinet agencies are minuscule rounding errors on our budget and hardly merit discussion given the enormity and immediacy of this real Medicaid problem.  Bringing healthcare under control must be our number one priority - we cannot simply ignore it.  As Governor Romney rightly said, "We don't just let people sit in their apartment and have a heart attack and die; we send an ambulance and bring them to the emergency room and give them care regardless of their ability to pay."  So, we do in fact have socialized medicine, whether we want to call it that or not, and as long as healthcare spending remains on its present course without management, allowing patients to spiral downward outside the system (creating uncontrolled risk), we will plunge further into debt.

I recognize that this list above is focused on complaints, not solutions - but that's another topic deserving its own space.  To be clear, I am far less concerned about Governor Romney becoming president than I am about the shrill extremists that will unfortunately and invariably follow with him.  He's an intelligent, good man who would very likely seek to lead us on a prudent course.  The GOP as a party, however, has over the last 20 years or so become increasingly beset by fundamentalist, right-wing fringe elements with whom neither reason nor compromise can be achieved, and they wear their obstructionist badge proudly.  How can a government run by such people function effectively?  All one need do is look at the U.S. House of Representatives today; it is not operating as our founders envisioned, nor is it what created the American prosperity of the twentieth century.  By contrast, the real Romney (his record tells us) is much more moderate and pragmatic than he and his campaign staff would have us believe... just as Obama's centrist policies and actions have shown him to be as well, seemingly against all popular recognition.  My faith in the American people's ability to grasp a necessary degree of nuance or complexity of issue and argument - both of which color and shape the real world - is greatly shaken by this race.