I have usually enjoyed reading articles by New London’s own Joshua Green, but his column in this morning’s Globe made me wonder if he’s drunk that old inside the beltway Kool-Aid. I’m not taking issue with his main thesis that neither presidential campaign is being terribly specific about their prescriptions to cure the nation’s ills. Rather, it’s with Green’s formulation of those ills.
They would also agree that the election is not a referendum on President Obama but a choice — a “very dramatic choice,” as Mitt Romney told a crowd in Westerville, Ohio, on Wednesday — between two very different governing visions. That choice is all the more important because so many formidable problems await the next president: how to reduce the deficit, reform the tax code, and curb the growth of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, to name just a few. With so much on the line, you might naturally want to know more about these competing visions. Here again the candidates would agree. They’d say, “We’ll get back to you.”
For the most part, this is a list of non-problems. If you heard a bank was offering to loan money to a business at a negative interest rate, would you conclude that the business has a debt problem? Right now people are basically paying the U.S. to hold their money, as it is paying, long term, lower interest than the rate of inflation. Long term we may have a deficit problem, but it’s caused by exploding health care costs, which themselves are caused by massive inefficiencies in our private health care system. Green doesn’t mention that fact; a fact commonly ignored by Beltway insiders. And where, other than in the Beltway, have there been demands for cutting either Social Security or Medicare? As to the former, it has no funding problem that raising the payroll tax cap wouldn’t fix. As to the latter, get health care costs under control, and the problem goes away. There really is no need to make people work until they die or have no health care until they’re 70.
Elsewhere Green speaks approvingly of the Simpson-Bowles commission recommendations. The Beltway refuses to recognize that the commission made no recommendation. What he refers to are the recommendations of Alan Simpson (the federal pension receiving ex-Senator who said Social Security recipients we’re all sucking at the public teat) and Morgan Stanley Director Erskine Bowles; recommendations that never earned the votes to become a commission report. Those recommendations are just what you’d expect from Simpson and Bowles: comfort for the comfortable and more affliction for the afflicted, but with a slightly more human face than the Ryan plan.
And note what’s missing from Green’s list of problems bedeviling the nation: any mention of unemployment or the bleak long term job prospects for so many members of the generation to which Green himself belongs. The list of more fundamental problems is a long one: global warming, hollowing out of our educational system; deterioration of our infrastructure, collapse of the manufacturing sector, “to name just a few”. You know, the problems that affect real Americans, both short term and long term, not the obsessions of the privileged and the Washington insiders. Here’s a quote from Robert Caro’s recent book on LBJ, in which he relates the advice Johnson was given by Eisenhower’s treasury secretary the day after Kennedy was shot:
Anderson told him that the surest way to restore confidence was to cut the budget and reduce the deficit.
My lord, same as it ever was. Why, that could be torn from today’s headlines, and, lamentably, from Green’s column. The advice was not followed, and the nation thrived, at least economically. These issues are, for the most part, used to distract from the real issues-those that truly affect the mass of people, and are used, as they currently are being used with a vengeance in Europe, to make the masses pay for the depredations visited upon them by the elites. They are formulations of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. Remember also, that deficits don’t matter, and haven’t mattered, when Republicans are in office.
Joshua. Come home. Live in New London for a couple of years and regain your perspective.
UPDATE: Josh, if you won’t listen to me, listen to Paul.
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