[Bill,
October 31, 2008]
The Obama infomercial
Some thoughts:
1. With a few exceptions, most people interviewed were doing quite well. Some were whining that, essentially, life is difficult. The snack-rationing, for example.
2. A few others were worried about what might happen. Especially the well-dressed, healthy woman in the new SUV.
3. There were three legitimate points made:
* The retired couple where the wife's medical bills forced her husband back to work. However, I should note that here in the U.S., he did retire at age 62, which is a little early. But still, I though medicare and the prescription drug plan took care of this sort of thing. There is a legitimate fear that medical costs will use up all your obtained wealth. I'm not sure of the solution — but it is a legitimate subject of national conversation.
* The gentlemen whose company raided and destroyed his pension. Yeah, something needs to be done about that.
* The people who were worried about jobs' getting shipped overseas. I've only got one cheer for globalization, and I know quite a few people in the IT field who work with lower-paid partners overseas.
4. Obama really had me going when he talked about the United States as a whole, especially the part about how everyone has a grandparent or great-grandparent from overseas, who worked for low wages in a factory, who worked in a coal mine. True in my case. Two grandparents from overseas.
My biggest objection is the undercurrent that things are bad: I think only a spoiled generation which has lost its perspective could possibly thing that things are overall bad in this country, or the past eight years have been some kind of economic disaster. In fact, we had two years to recover from the recession Clinton bequeathed us, four years of terrific economic performance, and two years of slow economic growth that's only now heading into a recession. (Slow economic growth that coincides with the Democrats' taking over Congress.)
Perhaps things are not going as well as possible. There are serious problems. But the idea that we need to abandon our current economic model and bring about sweeping changes to create a European-style social democracy (a model Europe is increasingly looking critically at, by the way), is to assume we have far more to gain than lose.
I don't agree. I think we have far more to lose than gain by these sweeping changes — which is why I'm a conservative.
One last thing: Those who are claiming this economic crisis is caused by deregulation really have it backward. And this is something Obama has said over and over again — that the credit crunch is the failure of Bush's policies. Some people have seen it as the final failure of the Reagan supply-side model. Again, I'd point you to Europe — Bush wasn't the president of Europe, but they're having worse problems over there. They don't suffer from a surfeit of deregulation. What we have is a crisis in the existing system — a reason to fix the problem, not abandon the model.
This reminds a little bit of an ex-girlfriend of mine whose father cheated on her mother and the whole sordid thing came out after 14 years. So she decided that she was going to date women instead of men — because men, you know, can't be trusted to be faithful. Let me know how that works out for you, I said. Sure enough, three years later, she came by with a litany of complaints about dating women. Um, yeah. And that's what happens when you think in generalities and models, instead of identifying specific problems within the existing system and fixing those. Follow?
1. With a few exceptions, most people interviewed were doing quite well. Some were whining that, essentially, life is difficult. The snack-rationing, for example.
2. A few others were worried about what might happen. Especially the well-dressed, healthy woman in the new SUV.
3. There were three legitimate points made:
* The retired couple where the wife's medical bills forced her husband back to work. However, I should note that here in the U.S., he did retire at age 62, which is a little early. But still, I though medicare and the prescription drug plan took care of this sort of thing. There is a legitimate fear that medical costs will use up all your obtained wealth. I'm not sure of the solution — but it is a legitimate subject of national conversation.
* The gentlemen whose company raided and destroyed his pension. Yeah, something needs to be done about that.
* The people who were worried about jobs' getting shipped overseas. I've only got one cheer for globalization, and I know quite a few people in the IT field who work with lower-paid partners overseas.
4. Obama really had me going when he talked about the United States as a whole, especially the part about how everyone has a grandparent or great-grandparent from overseas, who worked for low wages in a factory, who worked in a coal mine. True in my case. Two grandparents from overseas.
My biggest objection is the undercurrent that things are bad: I think only a spoiled generation which has lost its perspective could possibly thing that things are overall bad in this country, or the past eight years have been some kind of economic disaster. In fact, we had two years to recover from the recession Clinton bequeathed us, four years of terrific economic performance, and two years of slow economic growth that's only now heading into a recession. (Slow economic growth that coincides with the Democrats' taking over Congress.)
Perhaps things are not going as well as possible. There are serious problems. But the idea that we need to abandon our current economic model and bring about sweeping changes to create a European-style social democracy (a model Europe is increasingly looking critically at, by the way), is to assume we have far more to gain than lose.
I don't agree. I think we have far more to lose than gain by these sweeping changes — which is why I'm a conservative.
One last thing: Those who are claiming this economic crisis is caused by deregulation really have it backward. And this is something Obama has said over and over again — that the credit crunch is the failure of Bush's policies. Some people have seen it as the final failure of the Reagan supply-side model. Again, I'd point you to Europe — Bush wasn't the president of Europe, but they're having worse problems over there. They don't suffer from a surfeit of deregulation. What we have is a crisis in the existing system — a reason to fix the problem, not abandon the model.
This reminds a little bit of an ex-girlfriend of mine whose father cheated on her mother and the whole sordid thing came out after 14 years. So she decided that she was going to date women instead of men — because men, you know, can't be trusted to be faithful. Let me know how that works out for you, I said. Sure enough, three years later, she came by with a litany of complaints about dating women. Um, yeah. And that's what happens when you think in generalities and models, instead of identifying specific problems within the existing system and fixing those. Follow?