Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Obama’s Other Huge Task

By

Cross-posty: This also appears at Marry in Massachusetts.

The huge 1984 win for Ronald Reagan — 525 electoral votes and 58.5% of the popular tally — spoke loudly for that befuddled version of hope. Borrow, borrow, borrow…spend, spend, spend… Then somehow, through trickle down economics, an endless growth spiral, and unlimited natural resources in the rest of the world, all will be swell. Smile, Ronnie, Smile.

Is the lotus-flower attraction of that wispy fantasy so enticing that we'll breath it deeply in four or even two years? The idea that Lucy or the nation can write infinite checks and stay solvent has recurred at least since Reagan.

For all its shortcomings, the Clinton years saw a return to fiscal responsibility that balanced the budget. Yet, as soon as the Republicans returned to power, the waft of the lotus put us to sleep again — following promises not to raise taxes, the wildly mis-titled fiscally conservative GOP borrowed to spend trillions of dollars that did not create jobs or wealth for the public. This was no NRA or WPA.

Despite the consistent and incontrovertible evidence that trickle-down economics and tax cuts for the wealthy don't, won't and can't work, Americans like the fantasy. So what will they do with even a tiny bit of sunshine?

Assume as I do that an Obama administration and a chastened and desperate Congress will redirect our economy successfully, at least starting in the right direction. Then, how strong is the drug of irresponsibility after these disasters? Will American voters fall back into an economic and political stupor?

Clearly, even a well-supported Obama cannot undo the damage in one or two terms. Given that, his secondary goal should be to create the structure to guide the next decade or two or more of Presidents and Congresses. It has been so painful as well as dull-witted to pretend that we can live like Bohemian students with rich parents, at play so long as there is a trust fund.

Look at any map of the electoral votes for President to see the sad implication of demography. It is really a tale of cities v. sticks. The most rural and the poorest, who like to call themselves the real Americans, the heartland and the salt of the earth, stuck with the fantasy. Those on farms and in factories, along with the working poor outside urban areas, are most harmed by the lotus spell that has so shifted real and absolute income upward. Still, they wanted to dream some more.

Yet the popular-vote spread was surprisingly high. At 6% down, McCain wasn't close. Obama's margin was the third highest of modern times, following the first Bush's 8% and the huge Reagan 18% in 1984. This time at least, Americans in toto (lotus reference intended) could not find the ray of sunshine in the failed Republican schemes.

As the Obama White House does not have a Department of Reality, the Democratic Party should create its equivalent immediately. In the next mid-term and following Presidential elections and those afterward, the wisdom and will of the nation will have crucial tests. If we forget the brutal lessons that enabled the Obama victory, I fear for the country even more than recently.

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Comments

  1. … worried about health care expenses.

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    p>Ezra:

    The following chart tracks the budget deficit as it’s projected to grow over the next 50 years. The blue line — that’s the one shooting up — is what we expect our deficit to actually look like. Those other lines, the one’s going down (and down means no budget deficit, but instead a surplus), show what would happen if our health spending were equivalent to that of other rich nations like Japan, Germany, and Canada. The difference is stark:

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    p>And its not the ‘entitlement’ programs that are bankrupting us, it’s a structural deficiency in our overall health care system that results in ever-rising costs.

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    p>More Ezra:

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    p>

    Then there is Medicare. Medicare is a trickier problem. Because it’s not the problem: The American health care system is. As Henry Aaron, the centrist Brookings health care expert has testified, our fiscal threats “derive entirely from projected increases in national health care spending, not from problems peculiar to government health care or entitlement spending.” As such, “materially slowing the growth of Medicare and Medicaid apart from general health system reform is impossible.” In other words: Raising the eligibility age or cutting benefits does not solve the problem. It does not solve the problem for the private sector, of course, but it does not solve the problem for the public sector, either. The problem is driven by rapid growth in health care costs. If you do not arrest that growth — in both the public and private sectors — and you instead raise the eligibility age for Medicare, you will just have to do it again. And again. And again.

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    p>In other words… the Concord Coalition approach isn’t going to help.  What’s required is structural reform.  The kind of reform that is likely to be very disruptive and costly in the short term.  But if we don’t invest, we’ll be looking at the complete collapse of confidence in treasuries.

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    p>Honestly, if he did absolutely nothing with his mandate but fix this one issue, he still will have done a great service to our country for countless generations to come.

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