I’m not feeling very hopeful today, on the anniversary of 9/11, so I’m going to try to turn that around.
I love people who are into thinking about “how did we get here,” and especially when it’s from an unexpected source, like Craig Finn’s lyrics from the Hold Steady song “Positive Jam”: 
:
“Woke up in the 20s. There were flappers and fruits in white suits. It was right before the crash. We got thrashed throughout the 30s. Queuing up for soup in scabby sores. And they sent us off to war….The 80s almost killed me let’s not recall them quite so fondly….In the 90s we were wired and well connected. Put it all down on technology and lost everything we invested.”
He ends with, “We’re gonna start it with a positive jam. Hold steady.”
This hits me where I’m at every day. Our country has so many resources, so much technology, so much innovation, and everybody’s supposedly more connected. At the same time, the Era of Me is preeminent. (See this Wired feature on Julia Allison, who is at least Internet famous purely because of her knack for self-promotion. Curiously, no mention of whether all of her blogs and publicity stunts actually financially support her, but am guessing they do.)
The assumption is that anyone can make it if you just keep working at it, that you’re responsible for this on your own, and if you don’t make it, the problem is you. Except that the facts of the macroeconomic picture, throughout our country’s history, often say otherwise. We play by the rules, we buy in, and sometimes we really get creamed.
So here’s food for thought on where we’re going in 2009, from another how-did-we-get-here source.
From the NY Times Magazine’s recent piece on Obama and economics:
“For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. All told, Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing.
McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.”
The article goes on to point out that Obama’s tax increases on the top 0.1 percent “would not even come close to erasing their gains” they’ve made over the past few decades due to the tax cuts under George Bush. Obama seems to me to understand that we’re not going back to the super-high income tax rates on the most wealthy of the ’70s, but that a correction is badly needed. And that more of us keeping our own money would also help the economy.
My sister told me about a friend of hers who is a teacher, who had her class sit in a circle and play a game. The ones who went first got to make the rules. The kids whose turn was next believed they could catch up. The kids who went last quickly saw there was no way to win the game, and either checked out or started to try to sabotage it.
I think we’re already seeing, with the continuing fallout from the housing crisis, what happens when the game is so badly rigged.
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Tags: Hold Steady · McCain · Obama2 Comments
I agree with your conclusion that government is rigged, and that people are starting to “check out” (cool analogy). I also agree that the upper class has received more than their share of the pie lately and less of its cost.
However, we need to be careful in thinking of tax cuts as the answer. The term “tax cuts” sounds like the Dire Straits’ “money for nothing”. But of course they aren’t free. If so-called tax cuts aren’t accompanied by spending cuts, then the cost of government isn’t being reduced, we’re just not paying the full bill. We’re buying a Rolex and paying for a Timex; the next generation gets to pay the difference, even though they didn’t spend the money.
And when politicians claim tax cuts stimulate the economy to make up the shortfall, that’s just putting a fig leaf of respectability on an obscene proposal. Every time taxes have been cut without spending cuts, the deficit has bloated.
Reduced taxes would be nice in the short term, but remember that they aren’t money for nothing. The long term fix is regulating how corporate officers outsource jobs, import cheap labor and otherwise squeeze the payroll for the average worker to pad their own bonuses. The long term fix for the US economy is good jobs at decent wages.
Thanks for the great comment, Todd. I agree, and it’s a shame that a lot of what passes for economic debate revolves around just this issue, without putting it in a larger context. The article I cited goes into much more depth on some of the points you mention. However, who gets which tax cuts, and how (for example, Obama would cut the payroll tax, something that hasn’t been cut in decades and that matters more to a lot of Americans’ budgets than the income tax) is still a very powerful tool — one that the wealthy have realized for a long time. As is, like you point out, who gets tapped (or doesn’t) to make up the difference. Anyway, I’m hopeful that in 2009 we can start geting back to much saner policies.