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It’s become a staple of The Daily Show lately. A Democratic Congressman works down the list of talking points by Republicans on the Health Care bill and compares it to the “Big Lie” of Joseph Göbbels and the Nazis. Jon Stewart pokes at the hyperbole, saying, “You don’t have to go there. There’s already a perfectly good word for liars … liars”. But this is far from the only example of excessive use of superlatives.
It’s become a total epidemic that threatens to end life as we know it!
When is no decision actually a policy? In government it’s often the default position, a deliberate plan to stay the course and keep things the way they are. Bureaucracy has a tendency to be conservative, punting whenever it can and allowing things to stay as they are. But in a time of great change or even crisis, is this acceptable? Increasingly there are signs that Minnesota has become a state mired by diffuse responsibility and an inability for the government to respond to the situation at hand in a way that is effective.
No action can be very dangerous. But there is increasing evidence that it is become a serious problem – and I doubt that Minnesota is alone.
In the warm-up before the State of the Union address, the sides are digging in. A strong focus on debt appears to be the main point of contention, with Obama proposing investments that will pull the US out of its funk and the opposition apparently finding a religious fervor in the size of our debt.
About to get lost, once again, in the big story out of Washington are hundreds of smaller stories across the US of debt running out of control at the State and Local level. Smaller investments made one highway at a time, one transit line, one park, one new factory or housing development paid with tax increment financing are starting to dominate our crisis. And they get very little attention.
Who is to blame for the Depression that we find ourselves in? Some bloggers blame the economic stimulus program of Obama, despite it starting before he became President. Others like to point to Bush, on whose watch the big downturn started. Neither of these pat answers sounds all that great when you think about how much influence a President has on the economy, however. Does a nation this big really turn so quickly?
A little bit of analysis shows that if you have to blame policies from Washington, the best place to go is back a full generation – to Ronald Reagan. There are two distinct inflection points in both National Debt and Balance of Trade – what Democrats like Mike Dukkakis used to call the “Twin Deficits” – that clearly point to policy changes from that time.
A shocking act of political violence has turned our politics in on itself. The attempted murder of a Congresswoman who had endured many threats and survived a number of frightening situations begs to have made sense of it. The gunman appears to be nothing more than a lone nut acting out his own mental illness, but that doesn’t change the pressure placed on our politics by tough, violent talk over the last several years. What can we possibly make of it?
A step back is essential when something like this happens. I’d like to do my part to make sense of what is often called “senseless”.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 