Memo to Washington: America still matters
Budget talks in Washington have reached an impasse, with the two sides dug in and not budging. I can’t comment on the respective merits of the Republican and Democratic positions
But I do want to poke a little at one of the ideas that I think is framing the debate, and the public’s perception of it. That idea is that America has already pretty much gone to hell.
Depending on who you ask, ours is a debt-ravaged, divided land filled with underachieving slackers, illegal immigrants and poor people who can’t get decent healthcare.
The Chinese are more productive and competitive than we are. The Europeans are more civilized and more fair. And what about those Canadians? Why can’t we be that nice?
A lot of us have accepted that classic French joke that America is the first society to proceed from barbarism to decadence without any intervening period of civilization.
Even America-first conservatives have taken to looking overseas for their role-models, idolizing Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, adopting the ideas of the Austrian School of economists, and embracing the theories of Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand.
This gloomy attitude, deepened by the recession, surely colors the current debt negotiations in Washington DC.
A lot of politicians appear convinced that we have nothing to lose. America is on the brink, or maybe already in the toilet. If we’re a third world nation, why not act like one?
If that means defaulting on our debt and pitching the planet into economic chaos, so what? If Greece can do it, why can’t we?
The tragic joke of all this is that none of it is true.
For one thing, America’s problems — real as they are — are currently being faced by every nation on earth. Countries from Europe to Asia to South America are all trying to figure out how to bring their national budgets back into line.
They are all struggling with decaying infrastructure, with complicated questions of immigration, of civil liberties, and economic fairness.
These struggles are serious, to be sure, but they’re nothing compared with the crises that America has overcome in the past.
It’s also worth pointing out that America remains the world’s absolute, unquestioned sole superpower. And I’m not talking here about military might.
Walk the streets of any European city and you will see the vast majority of people talking on and using handheld devices built by American companies, generally Apple or Motorola.
You will see bookstores filled with American authors and cineplexes filled with American movies. Roads are busy with American cars.
When I lived in Europe in the 1980s, it was controversial when a McDonald’s or Disney tried to move into a nation’s cultural space. Now, for better or worse, Big Macs, Colonel Sanders and Mickey Mouse are hard-wired into global culture.
People across the planet get their coffee at Starbucks, their information from Google, and their social fix from Facebook.
Europe’s pop music, its clothing styles and even its graffiti are dominated by American influences.
It may also surprise you that America is still the world’s leading manufacturing nation, with an economy far more diverse and stable than that of China or Germany or Japan.
Yes, it’s true that America is in a rough, ugly patch. Unemployment seems stuck around 9 percent. Some regions, and some groups — African Americans in particular — are in really dire straits.
But when I go shopping or to a restaurant, I see crowds of people out and about. The streets are bustling. Entrepreneurs are opening new businesses, investing, moving forward.
Finally, it’s clearly not true that politicians can’t work together to resolve this kind of train wreck.
New York state — once written off as ungovernable — has faced down its own budget nightmare with a Democratic governor, a Democratic Assembly and a Republican state Senate.
We haven’t defaulted, we haven’t seen a government shut-down and we haven’t seen the quality of life implode.
But if the Federal government defaults on our debt and pitches the economy into a tailspin, all that might change.
America’s century may truly and finally end, not because another nation transcended us, but because a handful of short-sighted politicians in Washington turned out the lights.
So as we slouch toward the August 2nd deadline, here’s my message to Congress and the White House:
For the next few days, put aside your labels — progressive, tea party, whatever — and remember that you are charged through your oath to the Constitution with the sacred task of governing the greatest nation on earth.
Tags: politics
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Oh, I forgot to respond to the “peaceful” bit. Jared Lee Loughner.
I know many of you wont find any political connection between Loughner and the current budget negotiations. All I have to say to that is: “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”
I suppose if I called Hitler a Nazi somebody would accuse me of being uncivil.
Bret from a previous post:
“Could you point me to a White Pride Parade that receives public support Brian? When is White History Month celebrated? Is the a white version of Jet or Ebony on your local news stand? If I have a sticker of a raised white fist on my car, like the raised black fist of the Panthers or the raised red fist of the Warriors Society/AIM, which one is more acceptable? Why should either be? Maybe I’m just not getting the point across. Being accepting of “multi-culturalism” is a farce unless you accept ALL cultures. For instance, I think it’s a complete travesty that people generally only view anything Confederate as a slavery related issue. That’s a pretty simplistic view of a very complex,tragic and important part of our history. See the “Stars and Bars” and it’s “Ooo! A RACIST!”. And if you point out the complexity of the issue, that the people who died were brave Americans fighting for what they believed in (whether you agree with them or not), that you disrespect the dead, you’re scoffed at or the issue is ignored. You don’t have to be a Nazi anti-Semite to pay homage to the bravery of their soldiers or, as you said, to go get trashed at Oktoberfest. Take the good from each culture and celebrate it is what I’m saying. That’s what we’re basically told regarding Islam or in celebrating any cultures history. We don’t ever mention black and Arab slave trading for instance, out of the question! So can’t we do the same for the majority culture here?”
Am I the only one disturbed by the sort of white-victimization rhetoric here? Where does this sort of idea come from? Did Bret come up with all of this on his own? Or is there something else at work? Where was the hue and cry against this insidious hate speech at arms length?
sorry for the delay. there’s so much that i’m not sure where to begin.
but i guess let’s start with bret. i’ve been trying to make the point recently to everyone else that bret is simply not credible. everyone should understand that everything he says is suspect. i should again note that it’s very, very far from true that everything he says is wrong, but enough of it is really cracked out that you just shouldn’t trust any of it. and i would personally go further and say that i think he’s a fine representative of tea partiers everywhere, but in fairness, that’s a bolder claim than one is ever really going to have evidence for, and i don’t want to get myself too sidetracked.
as far as i can tell, bret is really upset about two things in this thread. one of them is that khl compared tea partiers to breivik, in that both are “[c]razy like they will turn themselves inside out to believe that the obvious truth is a lie.” i agree with bret that this comparison is out-of-bounds. it’s certainly good that khl qualified the comparison as s/he did, but it’s not enough, imho. even if you carefully stipulate the scope of your comparison, when you compare two things, you always end up implicitly the comparing the totality of both sides. breivik is a mass murderer. that’s going to get wrapped into any comparison you make to him. and that’s why comparing tea partiers to him is beyond the pale.
the other thing that bret seems to be really upset about is, almost unbelievably, that i said “and indeed more debt could be put to excellent use by mobilizing idle resources.” i mean, right, the horror!
i don’t know what to call bret’s reaction to this besides completely flying off the handle. instead of showing a little humility and waiting for me to elaborate — and he’s the one to call me arrogant! — he conjures up a completely twisted conservative fantasy of what i think (asset seizure!). and then he finds his make believe fantasy so offensive that he claims i’ve taken a “low shot.” and then, based only on his make believe fantasy, he accuses me (along with khl) of writing “vile trash” and asks to have all his comments deleted from the site! well now! this from a chap who once accused liberals of celebrating things like drowning (a la chappaquiddick; i would link but all comments to older posts seem to have been deleted). all i did was say something about mobilizing idle resources.
and that’s not all. the real kicker comes in the recent “stable loonie” thread (where the two of us had been continuing to go at it), where bret abruptly cuts off our discussion with:
the “other thread” is the thread you’re reading now. i’ve put in the asterisks for decency. have a look at the original if you want. if you’re like me you’ll have to google what the asterisks stand for, but it’s not what passes for polite language and you might want to be careful about who else can see your screen. now, i’m not personally one who’s bothered by salty language at all. but i do think that’s a surprising tack to take for someone who not so long ago complained about my own use of (much milder) “veiled profanity.”
so let me just say to bret, this is crackpot, fever dream stuff. the kind of stuff that should completely discredit you in the eyes of everyone.
by using debt to mobilize idle resources, i mean, essentially, more stimulus! that’s it. just standard, textbook economics. our economy is suffering from a big shortfall in demand. as a result there’s a big gap between what the economy is capable of producing, and what it’s actually producing. thus we have a lot of idle resources — unemployed workers, factories operating below capacity, things like that. to boost the economy, i think the government should borrow money and spend it on useful things. things like infrastructure projects, for example. the construction sector of the economy has been especially hard hit by the recession. lots of unemployed construction workers, lots of equipment not being fully used. government-funded infrastructure projects would be really helpful there!
so that’s all i mean by mobilizing idle resources. it’s a completely anodyne statement, 100% within the confines of standard economics. when demand in the economy collapses, i think the government should step in to fill the gap.
bret took what i wrote and completely perverted it into a right-wing fever dream involving asset seizures from companies with surplus money. his version doesn’t remotely comport with what i think. it’s nothing but bret’s imaginationland as a substitute for reality. and based on this huge mistake he’s made, he’s said some pretty unpleasant stuff about me and told me to, well… go look it up.
exactly the same thing (absent the personal attacks and profanity from bret) happened in the recent thread about same sex marriage. david made a completely anodyne request for sources about the first day of same sex marriage in nys, a patently newsworthy story. but after passing through bret’s warped filter, that became a highly biased statement in favor of same sex marriage. totally ludicrous! again, bret’s imaginationland as a substitute for reality.
no one should pay him any credibility at all. what you get from him is his imaginationland.
bret likes to call me arrogant, but as i demonstrated in the “stable loonie” thread, i have no problem apologizing when i’m wrong. you certainly owe me an apology for your outrageous behavior, bret. nothing i’ve said comes anywhere close to justifying the kind of reaction you’ve had. if you have any integrity at all, then apologize. if you have any remaining decency, then apologize.
bret also asked about interest rates in light of qe1 and qe2. good question! the point of the fed’s quantitative easing program was to hold down long-term interest rates as a way to stimulate the economy. read about it here. qe1 ran from december 14, 2008 to march 30, 2010. qe2 ran from november 1, 2010 to june 30 of this year. here’s a graph of the interest rate on 10-year treasuries since january 1, 2008. can you see from the graph where the qe’s started and stopped? can you see where they’re holding down the rate? neither can i.
Hermit: “you always end up implicitly the comparing the totality of both sides. breivik is a mass murderer. that’s going to get wrapped into any comparison you make to him. and that’s why comparing tea partiers to him is beyond the pale.”
I understand the objection. I understand that it offends people. Frankly, I believe there are times people SHOULD be offended. I don’t believe that the Tea Party people are evil. As I have said here often before, I agree with their outrage at much of what has happened in this country. I know people who identify themselves as Tea Partiers and I like them, mostly.
I committed the sin of being impolite. Sometimes I’m that way. I make no apology. I have made apologies on this blog for giving offense before but in this case I directed no personal offense at any particular person. I will not apologize for an ugly truth.
I remember history and I can see what is happening. If you see small evil happening around you, you must speak up or evil grows. Evil has been growing in the Tea Party movement for a while now. One of the legs of the stool of the Tea Party is veiled racism. Another is anti-Islamic bigotry. It is an ugliness that every good and decent person associated with the movement should publicly disavow. I am not the one whispering evil, I am the one loudly pointing it out.
Oh, and I love you Hermit. Though you may spurn me.
On this whole subject, a great piece from NPR More Than a Game contributor Charles Pierce:
http://www.esquire.com/features/homegrown-terrorism-us-0811
One of many money quotes:
“Politicians used to say that they would bring America back, or that they would restore America to its former greatness, or wrap their policies in some such fluffy rhetorical excelsior. Today, though, it is perfectly acceptable to intimate, as Bachmann does, and as those hundreds of people at the congressional town meetings said outright, that America is not here anymore. That someone has stolen it away. America is no longer a political commonwealth of shared ideas that its citizens can restore. It is objectified, something tangible, something that a stranger has broken in and stolen. And if that’s the case, why be surprised when someone tries to take “our country back” the way you might confront a midnight prowler in the living room?”
don’t worry knuck, i still love you too. and let’s not forget that bret is a guy who once called al sharpton, jesse jackson, and spike lee part of the “black version of the kkk.” and when it was pointed out that that’s not a very good or fair comparison, he refused to back down one bit. the fact that jesse jackson marched peacefully from selma to montgomery, while kkk members murdered a woman supporting the marchers, makes no difference to him. maybe i need to think about it harder, but on the surface i can’t see how someone who holds those kinds of views has any business complaining about what you said about breivik.
just so there’s no doubt, i stand by my view that knuck’s comparison to breivik and bret’s comparison to the kkk are both out-of-bounds. but i do appreciate knuck’s efforts at tempering what s/he said. and his/her larger point, about standing up strongly to the various strains of perniciousness in the tea party (i wouldn’t use the word “evil”), is very welcome.
Knuck, HT….you are only adding to Bret’s sense of personal victimization. I’ve been asking one question for about 15 years. Why are Republicans/Conservatives so angry? Even when they hold the Presidency and both houses of Congress….they are angry. I’ve never really understood the root cause of all that anger. What exactly do they want?
Okay HT you have convinced me. I apologize to all for the comparison to Breivik.
In fact I should have compared their craziness to Bush/Cheney who insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when it was not true; to George Bush when John Kerry insisted that the Iraq War would cost us $400 Billion and Bush scoffed that it wouldn’t cost anywhere near that much; or to the whole Bush administration when they insisted that water-boarding isn’t torture.
I should not have compared the Tea Party to a person who so recently committed such a heinous crime. It showed insensitivity to the dead and to their families. Also, I would like to note that my deceased grandfather was an immigrant from Norway as a child. He was a patriotic American but also a proud Norwegian and a hater of Vidkun Quisling.