Re: OT: The Fear Merchants

PatTX wrote:
There I was, yesterday, listening to Ed Wallace (http://www.insideautomotive.com/) on his Saturday morning car show. Ed had just finished reporting that car sales for the last weekend in March had gone 'way up, giving the industry a welcome boost. He said it was because people are beginning to come out of their fearful posture and that the economy would recover faster once people did so. The "gloom and doom" caller started in on the Republican talking points of President Obama spending more money and having a bigger budget, and Ed told him that what brought the US out of the "Great Depression" was the government spending on WWII (among other things). He stated that the amount of government spending on the war was greater than the budget President Obama is proposing.

After ruminating a bit, it became clear to me that the RNC has sent out the word to all of their talk show minions to "spread fear" because this is the best way to keep the economy bad. If people will go into a shell and not spend any money, the economy will take longer to rebound. I didn't understand why Glenn Beck was talking of "revolution" or Sean Hannity was bleating about "fascism" and Rush Limpballs was broadcasting the fear of "radical socialism" until this. Now it all becomes clear: they are trying with the scare talk to keep the economy down! It seems to me that such a plan borders on being unpatriotic to the nth degree as they are willing to wreck the economy simply to gain political points.

Something to think about....

Pat in TX



While I agree that talk show pundits are entirely self-serving, I can't go so far as to say that fears of government over-reaching are entirely fabricated. Our current debt servicing is 16% of the federal budget, deficit spending can't go on forever without dire consequences. That said, there's an obvious difference in investment vs. spending. If done wisely (a big "if"), the deficit can both bolster a shaky economy and leave us better off for future challenges. Deficit spending in this crisis seems necessary, while the Bush era deficits seem in retrospect like an experiment based on far less sound economic theory.

National health care, for instance, will certainly lead to some rationing and reduction of choice (as did the current HMO mechanism). The real issue is the inevitability of change, looming health care costs are worse (by a large factor) than looming deficits.

Expansion of government is as inevitable as globalization, like it or not, the toothpaste won't go back in the tube. That doesn't mean there aren't choices -- good ways & not so good ways to cope with the inevitable.

While greed abounded in the last decades, I believe that many (even liberals) sincerely believed that unfettered capitalism could achieve miracles. In some ways it did. The irony is that the biggest success stories (e.g. China) came from a mix of capitalism and oppressive government. Rational people don't have to be economic or political science geniuses to see that there are ways to go forward to prosperity without social inequality or overbearing governments. Our experiment with de-regulated markets is over. We've belly flopped in energy, S&L and investment banking. Economies around the world have suffered under cycles of bursting bubbles and speculative capital flows. Time to try something new.

Debate is fine, but purely ideological firewalling may have tragic consequences. The real risk is that we do nothing. History has put us on the sharp part of so many hockey stick curves simultaneously. As Franklin said: "We must all hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately"
.

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