YOU can’t watch the circus that America calls its budget process without suspecting it plays some role in the country's fiscal mess. Congress for the first time has failed to send a budget resolution to the floor, its continuing resolution is about to expire, as are a bunch of tax cuts, and there’s a battle looming over raising the debt ceiling. This does not look like rational fiscal policy.
Think about this for a minute. The US is the largest economy in the world. And we have not sent a budget to the floor. That's beyond reckless; that's suicidal. And yet, here we are, waiting for god knows what shoe to drop as the process grinds forward.
Last week, I made this comment about US political parties:
the Democrats can't lead at all -- they want everybody to get along -- and don't want to hear basic economic information when it runs counter to their narrative, the Republicans have walked away from logic and fact and the Tea Party could care less about mere competence.
Let me rephrase that. Everyone in Washington -- without exception -- is completely worthless. Please, for the love of God, could you please grow-up and act like adults?
7 comments:
Oh, c'mon, bonddad, you know better. This is why teenagers rebel; it's when children realize the only difference between children and adults is that the latter have more power and are better at lying to get what they want. Very difficult to get trust back when your facade has been figured out.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that the Republicans are basically taking the entire economy hostage. This is what they said they'd do, for weeks.
Surely you've met people trying to get away with the absurd. I have literally seen fortysomething managers throw temper tantrums in meeting rooms. I'm using the word "literally" correctly here. The guy was literally screaming and pounding his fists.
These people are everywhere. And the reason they're elected is because they're very, very good at getting what they want, everything else be damned. The question is what kind of society America wants to cultivate, and the only way to discourage tantrums is to not reward them. But we do. As a result, the selfish, the childish and the insane "grown-ups" have become very powerful politically. I have no idea how to stop it because it's what the people want. Everyone talks about how they hate litigation lawyers but they'll also freely admit if they needed one they'd want the guy who'd slit his own mother's throat to win a case. What does that do to those who believe in decency?
Oh, people talk about fiscal discipline but it's the same old Nash equilibrium -- I want everyone else to sacrifice. First party to shrink Social Security or the Dept. of Defense would be kept out of office the next dozen elections until the Boomers all die of old age.
America is no longer a coherent society anymore. The culture is largely anarchist -- what do you think the teabagger movement is, libertarian?? They only accept the existence of government as a vague principle to avoid be laughed off the floor!
The reason why politics in D.C. looks so ugly is because it's a mirror.
Patience, young butterfly:
Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing... after they have exhausted all other possibilities.
-- Winston Churchill
Source:
http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2313
I will now answer collectively on behalf of Washington:
NO! NO NO NO NO!! *STOMPS FEET* WAAAAHHHHH!!!!
*sigh*
I have to say the reaction to the deficit commission report is proving this in spades. Overall it reads as being pretty reasonable. I would argue for higher levels of taxation and less austerity, but the basic concept seems pretty sound. But of course it will never ever pass in any way shape or form.
Instead what will happen is there will be a back and forth as the right presses for lower taxes and the left presses for higher spending and we will get nothing that equates to real fiscal discipline. Furthermore, the right will attach the whole thing to Obama and say it's nothing but tax increases.
I am a short term pessimist and a long term optimist. I firmly believe that we'll get our shit together when we absolutely have to, but that we are going to wait as long as possible (and pay a hefty price for that delay).
Jimdotz -
Churchill's comment is a favorite of mine, but I have to insist there's a fallacy in it. A nation is not like an individual. Short of the rare complete collapse, it will outlive its own mistakes.
Women's suffrage was the right thing to do, but we sure took a LONG time to do it. We didn't "exhaust possibilities", it was always on the table with no other options than status quo and it still took until 1920 to do it. Which was far too late for many generations of American women who died without ever casting a ballot.
America is perfectly capable of continuing down the wrong path. It's also perfectly capable of destroying itself. Not that I believe the U.S. will collapse in the near future (I'm not a sky-is-falling sort); that's not my point. Rather, assuming the future will take care of itself is a dangerous form of fatalism. It's foolish to assume a nation will persevere on no other grounds than it merely has, so far -- as if the mighty efforts of those who fought to preserve it are to be taken for granted. Total collapse is rare, but it happens. It happens to EVERY nation. And when it does, you don't have to look far to find rampant, criminally negligent complacency.
As a former candidate for Congress and (in New Hampshire, on the 2008 ballot) President, I got to listen to a lot of people. I shall offer the suggestion that one of our difficulties is that Americans do not want to believe that what happened to other people can happen to us. My Grandfather's WW1 pension vanished at the end of WW1, along with the country (Austria-Hungary) in which he had lived. The former Soviet Union appeared to be an indestructible monolith until one truly fine year it became the *former* Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Having said that, the phrase "US Fiscal Policy" appears to be an oxymoron.
At some point, people may come to agree with your re-phrase. At that point, as somewhat happened in 1850, you way see a truly transforming set of elections, in which at the end there are almost no incumbents left standing, and perhaps a new set of political parties with serious plans to replace, not merely amend, the Constitution.
George Phillies-
I actually look closely at the history of the Roman Empire. Now, I know I must be VERY careful here, because this is the starting point of every doom-and-gloom prediction since America rose from its infancy. Also, one can find any number of ideologically convenient parallels in two complicated histories. But if separating ideology from history is impossible, one could say the same of economics.
It's debatable that the Roman Empire "collapsed" at all; it took centuries for it to shrink and fully half of it sort of just "recombined". But it did decline, so let's consider the trends historians tracked to monitor the decline. Military service went from a basic civic duty to a bloated bureaucracy employing mercenaries. The U.S. is a partisan republic whereas the Roman Empire was a monarchy, but the latter's decline is marked by ineffective central government compromised by special interests it couldn't sate. An economic model once considered sacrosanct was proven unsustainable on the scale of centuries because of unbalanced resource flow and uncontrolled exploitation. Based on archaeological evidence, local investment in infrastructure seriously declined. The big missing pieces are knock-out punches famine and plague, thank god, but we're in an era where manual labor isn't as much of a factor in shaping nations anymore. Economic growth is, and it's easy to determine the recipe for disaster: When an economy's needs outpace its growth, per-capita overhead costs inflate. For example, a town's garbage collection costs are a function of households, not residents. Fewer incomes in a recession mean less taxes, but the collectors still have to travel the same distance. The poor town now has a budget crisis and it's no one's fault. Guess what: That happened to Rome, too. Our entitlement programs were sustainable when they were first implemented. The economic dynamics changed. They're not sustainable anymore, and that's neither party's fault -- but they are being held responsible for it.
To reiterate, the Roman Empire didn't really collapse, and moral decay is an ideological red herring -- as if B.C. Romans weren't corrupt! However, due to political imbalance leading to unresolved critical issues, it was dramatically altered forever. Some people were actually better off; to some it was a disaster. It's a case of who benefits. Similarly, America will only exist as long as the majority of citizens are better off for it existing. I don't see that happening anytime soon, but America can certainly experience another makeover.
An interesting set of comparisons, one I had not considered, though the Romans are seen with such distant vision that one must worry a bit about comparisons. Indeed, one can make a case that while western central government faded, civilization did not, the period after the Roman empire vanished being innovative (mould plow, windmill, clothes buttons, ship design) but without the capital for huge civic works processes.
The moral decay argument -- which you are not making, just referring to -- seems absolutely backwards: The licentious, orgy-loving Romans were the real expanders, while their prudish successors were much less fortunate in the long run. By that comparison, the collapse of Victorian prudery, and the literal return of (neo)paganism might be taken to be leading indicators of an American Renaissance. One could also make a case that the parts of our country that are most socially tolerant are the centers of economic growth, and those that are most socially conservative tend to lag behind, in the absence (see Utah) of an extremely strong emphasis on the importance of education, specially for women.
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