It is once again high noon in Washington D.C., where the real target ends up not being Gary Cooper and Ian MacDonald, but the American public. There we are standing idly by while the Republicans and Democrats load their six-shooters full of rhetoric. One cannot help but think that the bullets will never hit their mark, but end up clipping innocent bystanders, foolish enough to look out the window (or live in a house with no doors).
Ironically, both sides profess to speak on our behalf. The Republicans have artfully called any revenue generating ideas as a “tax hike”. The Democrats have argued against cuts to the social programs. I’ve got to admire that in this case both parties are scaring the crap out of the same demographic (the middle class).
In order for me to fully understand the context of these debates, I have to translate them to my life and what I’ve experience in the great Democratic experiment. When Obama says that the costly government stimulus act saved jobs, I know empirically that is the truth. I had to lay off people due to the financial meltdown. And I would have had to lay off more people if things had gotten any worse: Good people, who worked hard and established credibility in their field. It was an agonizing, sleep depriving process. But when after TARP and the Bailouts helped the anemic Stock Market tick up a point or two….I knew I had a good chance of keeping those people and saving their jobs.
To expand my understanding of this deficit debt/ceiling opera I try to put it into the context of everyday, middle-class house finances. I consider programs like Medicaid, Teacher Salaries, Policeman salaries, etc necessary items, like the Electricity bill, the Food bill, phone/cable/internet bill and so on.
And I think; “Well, if I was unable to pay these things, I could take the very hard route and go without.”
But electricity, food, etc are pretty essential. I would have to raise more money to pay for them, perhaps get another job. In this analogy a new job for the country would be innovation and new technologies in this country. And while we have some of that, so far it is only yielding the equivalent of…a paper-route let’s say. Not quite enough to cover these essential core expenses.
So how else can I raise money? Am I giving away money? For example, let’s say that I took on a renter a few years back; let’s call him Chevron. He was having a hard time, so I gave him a temporary break on the rent. We agreed that he could 60% until he got back on his feet.
Now that I think about it. He’s doing alright. There’s a new Mercedes parked in his parking spot…and I think he’s put on an addition to his room. In fact he is making more money now then in his entire career history. I am proud of him. He really turned things around. So, I am sure he will understand that I now need to charge him the full rent, so I can pay for the lights and keep food in the fridge. Right? It only seems fair.
Now that I think about it. He’s doing alright. There’s a new Mercedes parked in his parking spot…and I think he’s put on an addition to his room. In fact he is making more money now then in his entire career history. I am proud of him. He really turned things around. So, I am sure he will understand that I now need to charge him the full rent, so I can pay for the lights and keep food in the fridge. Right? It only seems fair.
Pretend we have another renter that is a little more of a problem. His name is “Top one-hundredth of one percent” (or at least that’s what Mother Jones calls him.) Let’s just call him Todd. Todd is kind of a jerk. A decade ago he complained that rents we’re too high and that we didn’t need the money. He was right; we had a surplus at the time, so we gave him a break. Now there is no surplus, but he has the gall to tell us that if we raise the rent back to normal prices, he isn’t going to hire anyone to clean the yard and fix the windows he has broken. He is holding us over a barrell because if the house looks bad, it continues to lose value. He calls raising the rent a “job-killer”.
Funny thing is he hasn’t hired anyone to fix the broken windows so far, with the cheap rent and all (Todd is a devious son of a bitch, broken windows allow him to pay less of the air conditioning bill) I asked an economist friend of mine about this inconsistency and he indicated that in the last 30 years there is no proof that raising the rent on Todd has ever resulted in a repairman, house cleaner, investments in workforce of anykind. We should doubt the circular logic of this veiled threat.
This simplified analogy seems pretty straightforward to me (but I’ve been eating a steady diet of migraine meds. Talking dust bunnies seem straightforward to me).
Boiling it down, if one (whether a person or a country) cannot afford the basic necessities, you have cut back on the things you do not need. I get that, and it seems the Federal government and many state governments have done that. If you still find yourself short “scratch”, you look for another job. And if that is not available, you have to stop giving away money.
Now you could sell drugs to raise cash, and certainly our government has had success with that when funding anticommunist in Central America. But then you fall in with a less then desirable crowd. Really, it‘s no fun hanging around people in the illegal drug trade. They’re always nervous and twitchy. And sometimes downright mean. At least that’s what I gather from watching The Wire.
