There are times when I wonder whether a newspaper columnist has taken leave of his or her senses, I have gone off the rails, or both. Reading this sober (I guess) observation from Roger Cohen is one of them:
The United States, like some heavyweight who’s taken one punch too many, is still groggy from the money fever of gutted pension funds, toxic securities and lunatic leverage. My sense is the world, like Merrill Lynch, was about three nanoseconds from complete meltdown.
That’s been averted. But Americans are in a different mental place. They’re paying down debt. They’re not hiring. They’ve gotten reacquainted with risk. They’re going to have to survive without Gourmet magazine.
The cabin in the woods is looking good after the era of the starter mansion. America hates scaling back. Its nature, hard-wired to the new frontier, is alien to retraction. But that’s the zeitgeist President Barack Obama has inherited. The challenge he faces is how to manage reduced expectations.
There are so many things wrong with that passage that I barely know where to begin. Rather than managing “reduced expectations” the present administration is laboring with all its might to return to the status quo ante. I see no signs of a move towards austerity or President Obama’s attempts to reconcile Americans to that prospect.
Could it be in the massive bail-outs given to banks which have done little to resolve the problems of banks but which I suspect have been much appreciated by bankers? Could it be in the federalization of GM and Chrysler? Lots of austerity there. The $797 billion stimulus package enacted into law this spring?
Generally, I believe you’ve got to suit your means to your ends. If the means are manifestly not suited to the ends, it makes me suspect that some other objective is intended and in this case it’s not managing reduced expectations.
If the latest salvo in the political battle over what to do in Afghanistan is that we must scale back our efforts for austerity reasons, why must that be the only area that demands austerity?
Instead of austerity, how about sanity. It’s a very old game to claim to be making the hard choices by minor cutbacks (soon restored) to highly visible programs but never, ever taking the time to actually find what’s the bottom priority and cutting it. As voters we could, but have not demanded that politicians take the budget of the position they seek to be (re)elected to and rate it by 1st cut to last cut. Once a norm is established that everybody does that, austerity logically goes first to the bottom priorities which are cut entirely, then to the bottom of the more important priorities which face cutbacks.
We desperately need a priority map for public spending at all levels so that we can make reasonable cuts. If we were to demand that of our politicians, we would get it. We aren’t demanding it.
You miss the point Dave. Evidently, Cohen wants us (the little people) to be autere so Government can spend money like a drunken sailor on leave. (My apologies to drunken sailors for bringing them into this.)
How those two things are connected is a mystery known only to Cohen himself.
As President Carter found out, appealing to austerity is generally not a wise political move.
Afghanistan is a little bit different because 99%+ of Americans feel no impact from it. The burden is on a small number of of people and/or future generations.
Yep. Keep the zombie banks alive and hope things get better, pump lots of money into the economy and hope things get better, try to prop up the housing market and hope things get better.
Of course not and two reasons why: 2010 and 2012. He doesn’t want to lose Congress, either house, or even too many seats, especially the Senate. And he’d like to serve a second term. So, instead of doing the right thing, he does the easy thing.
I’m laughing at everyone who “voted for change”.