Enough Politicized Economic Kabuki
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The GOP is marketing retro. Again. Color me shocked. Tim Pawlenty has strategery for the GOP: dress up old, tired hackery in shiny accessories:
“The Republican Party is going to have to adhere to its principles, because they are foundational and they are important. But they need to be presented in a hopeful, optimistic, up-tempo, modern, practical way, and that’s not what we have been doing recently,” Mr. Pawlenty said.
“We’ve become too petty and angry in many aspects,” he said. “That’s unappealing to swing voters.”
Oh sure, dress up the same old crap in buttons and bows. (YouTube) That’ll fly.
Missing from this? Reality: the American public at large isn’t swallowing the trickle up economic socialism (or "conservative philosophy") any longer. Nor does being trickled on from the middle class (or "non-yacht-owning classes") downward hold any allure.
No amount of jazz hands and sparkly costumes makes "screw you, I got mine" palatable.
I’m especially fond of the "attack social security and medicare" crowd, proposing a series of cuts to programs they’ve been trying to dismantle since FDR’s day. Because that’s never been tried before. Let’s be honest: that kabuki is shopworn.
And their numbers don’t add up:
Social Security’s accounts are actually near long-term balance. The Congressional Budget Office puts the 75-year shortfall at only about one-third of 1 percent of projected gross domestic product….
The decent cure for Medicare’s cost inflation lies in comprehensive universal health insurance so that the entire system is more efficient and less prone to inflation. You don’t hear many budget hawks supporting that brand of reform.
If you really want to get back to basics, might I suggest trying something that has proven to actually work?
The deficit hawks’ story also contends that we are sacrificing our children’s future by too much (deficit) spending on the elderly. In fact, today’s young adults are already falling out of the middle class because of the high costs of the investments we don’t adequately finance socially — child care, college tuition and health insurance. But fiscal conservatives seldom call for increased investment in the young. Today’s young, of course, will be tomorrow’s retirees, and they will need social insurance, too.
The overall bottom line? The economy we bequeath to our children has everything to do with getting growth back on track and almost nothing to do with imagined future deficits.
History provides a parallel. At the end of World War II, the public debt was about 120 percent of GDP — about three times today’s ratio. Yet the heavily indebted wartime economy stimulated a quarter-century postwar boom — because all that debt went to recapitalize American industry, advance science and technology, retrain our unemployed and put them to work.
How about we look at the long-term instead of trying yet another kabuki game wherein the object is to discredit government to prove your outmoded ideological pet point of the day? Swing voters don’t want new slogans, they want competence, courage and some can do action on their needs.
Things are bad enough as it is. Enough economic kabuki.
Hi Christy and Puppies. Good one!
Does Pawlenty know, there’s a perfectly acceptable word in the language, fundamental, which might serve as well as his preferred concoction, “foundational”.
Nah. Don’t tell ‘em. That’s how we know they’re pugs. Syllables to the max when in full battle dress, heh.