If I were a Republican congressman today….

[Warning... severe political cynicism follows...]

If I were a Republican congressman today…. I would do just what House Republicans did, and vote against the economic stimulus plan.  I would do so because of a cold political calculation that bets on one thing:  no matter what happens, or doesn’t happen, this economy is going down the tubes, so the only thing left to do is to engineer who gets the blame.  Let’s see how this works logically, with those givens.

The best thing that could happen from the point of view of the minority party is for the package as a whole to pass, with the loyal opposition in lock-step against it, so that when the economy fails, the blame can fall squarely on the Democrats.  However:

The worst thing that could happen from the same point of view is for their own opposition to succeed and the package to fail, because then the blame would fall just as surely on the obstructionists who got in the way of the only attempt on the table to do something big, dramatic, and immediately to try to forestall the now even-more-inevitable collapse.

So, there you have it.  A policy based on an expectation of failure.  Somebody tell me why I’m wrong here.

The Real Problem

At the present moment in historical time, the United States government, and both political parties, are seeking, with a kind of quiet desperation, ways to shore up the financial system of Wall Street, and with it the national and even the global economy.  The bailouts, recent and contemplated, stagger the imagination in their scope.   The problem?  Overwhelming debt based on risky corporate decisions, compounded by an alphabet soup of derivatives, swaps, and other schemes that make Enron’s in-house deceptions look like children messing with play money.  The government is now taking on responsibility for huge amounts of debt, and everyone is talking about how much of this is going to become a liability for the taxpayer.

It’s time to talk about the one issue that no one is mentioning.

The best leadership (and the worst) is always by example.  The United States Government has set a terrible example, and the markets have followed:  it has put itself in increasing levels of debt, with no plan in place to repay the creditors. The guiding fiscal philosophy articulated by Vice President Richard B. Cheney that “deficits don’t matter” has been applied by large institutions, and unfortunately by many smaller entities including households, to their own situations. It’s that simple.

Until we do the hard thing that was done in the waning years of the Bush I presidency, and come up with a bipartisan plan to balance the budget (even if it violates someone’s sacred “read my lips” pledge), and go further and return to the action of the Clinton administration (in cooperation with a Republican congress) by coming up with a workable and working plan to begin in the present tense the task of paying down the national  debt, all we have done is kicked this ball further down the field, and the next thing you know it will be the U. S. Treasury that people will be talking about with comforting (?) words like “too big to fail.”

When the Bush II tax cuts were put in place, enough members of Congress recognized this fact that there had to be promises for some of those giveaways to the wealthiest among us (call it income redistribution) to expire beginning in 2010, or some of those who voted to thus eliminate the surplus (remember surpluses?) would never have signed on.  Thus, any call to “make those tax cuts permanent” represents a deliberate breach of promise, and a betrayal of the trust of the American people, because no one can show how, with such an action, the debt will ever be repaid.

Until the United States gets its fiscal house in order, and enacts policies like we had in the 1990s, when there was prosperity, low interest rates, surplus budgets and no threat to Social Security in the process, global financial markets will be understandably and justifiably nervous.   This is the reality that will face the next President of the United States, and the incoming Congress.   Somebody is going to have to show some real spine.

The House of Cards

Far be it from me to say I told you so, but….

Destroying the New Deal

In History, Integrity, News, Social and Politics on February 14, 2008 at 1:15 pmFrom the “heard it here first” dept…. the following comments were first posted online in February 2002. It is re-posted here at a time when the latest budget proposal has been unveiled, showing with more clarity than ever the nature of the agenda outlined here.

What we are seeing is the re-enactment, or perhaps a dress-rehearsal for the re-enactment, of the financial disaster which led to what Herbert Hoover tried to dismiss as a mild “depression” on an otherwise healthy economic chart…. giving us the famous term that defined a generation and its struggles.  Unmentioned in this rant of mine, but integral to the program it describes was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the major accomplishment of Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, when he was chair of the Senate Banking Committee.   Whenever you heard politicians in the last twenty years talk about “fixing” or “updating” legislation that “has been in place since the 1930s”, remember why that legislation was put in place in the 1930s….. to prevent a reoccurrence of what happened in the aftermath of 1929.