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VDH: The Reckoning
I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options.......we either must tax all of us (there are not enough of those evil they who make between $200-500K or even enough of the noble generous rich who make over $10 million a year and think Obama should increase inheritance taxes so that their children get only $1 billion instead of $2, while the hardware store owners kids sell the business) in insidious ways; OR simply cut government expenditures elsewhere to pay the annual interest payments, OR print money and screw the Chinese, European, etc. , debtors, inflating our way out via the late 1970s. Sorry, there are no other real alternatives. The only mystery? How the choice of payment is rhetoricized in the hope and change mode. So it is with foreign policy as well. Obamas make-over will have positive short-term effects, as he reminds the world ad nauseam that he is black, sorta, kinda from a Muslim family, and the son of an African who is more like the world than he like most Americans-and not George Bush and not a thieving capitalist and not a warmongering imperialist and not (fill in the blanks). (My favorite Cairo line was the apology on Gitmo where inmates have laptops and Mediterranean food, spoken to millions whose societies kill and maim tens of thousands in Gulags on a yearly basis.) He hits against human nature. Most of you readers-in business, law, the professions-dont continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., Glad you got that job, Home Depot-we at Lowes didnt really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons; it was my fault here at Goldman Sachs that I didnt match your better offer at Credit Suisse; I grew up working for the Royals, and can empathize why you Yankees dont like us; its time we at Citibank apologized to Chase for our past cutthroat competition; we are just too arrogant over here at Delta and wanted to let you guys at United know that.) The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isnt really up to the arena anymore, lets move in on its Western region, etc. Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things. In short, Obama reminds me a little of myselfat 26.... Obama will come to his senses with his Bush did it, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his we are all victims of racism sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live. A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed. Posted by: Mike 2009-06-07 |
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