By ADMIN
NY Times Tom Friedman: More Bills is the Stimulus and Image Rehabilitation America Needs!
It is a shame because here we are as a country scrounging around for a few billion more dollars of stimulus to help our unemployed and small businesses — when the biggest stimulus of all is hiding in plain sight. And that is ending our political paralysis and the pall of uncertainty it is casting over everything from the cost of my health care to the cost of my energy to the way our biggest banks can do business.
Are we really being held back because we don’t know what our health care is going to cost? Because we don’t know the cost of energy? Who is being held back by this. What legislation would change this.
Energy prices have fluctuated for decades. Setting a bill that helps motivate us toward better alternatives would certainly be good for the environment, good for national security, and probably, in the long run (despite constant presumption to the contrary) good for the economy. But it does not necessarily mean we will suddenly know any better what “energy” costs. This is the nature of the market.
Friedman is sometimes perceptive (and at other times, not so much). But his quoted paragraph above seems like pure babble, that otherwise sounds and “appears” clever; something that there is far too much of masquerading as informed commentary these days.
As for the paralysis that Friedman speaks of, paralysis is not necessarily bad, if it keeps bad legislation from being passed. But he blames both sides for this paralysis on the one hand, while calling the Republicans the party of “just say no” on the other.
He also says the two “sides” should meet in the “middle.” Why should the two sides “meet in the middle.” What if the “middle”as defined in this fashion is not right? What if the Republicans are right on some things (though right now, it is hard to see what) and Democrats are right on some others (not much easier to see what). Does “meet in the middle” mean we pass the best bills? Doesn’t articulate the best principles, and reasons why they apply, create the best bills? And is it really a failure to “meet in the middle” that is prohibiting this?
Democrats have a solid majority of the House, 59 of the 100 seats in the Senate, and the support of the White House. If they put together a good bill, couldn’t they also sufficiently show why it is a good bill to the few Democrats or Republicans holding it up? (And if Democrats are so worried about a filibuster, maybe they ought to stop letting themselves be bossed around constantly by the minority party. After all, it’s not like they could stop anything themselves when they were the minority party for most of this decade (with bad ramifications, too.))
If Democrats can not put together a good bill, then there is nothing to pass. If they can put together a good bill, and show why it is, and they are still blocked by a few recalcitrant Democrats and almost the entire Republican Party, then maybe the issue is not one of “two sides not being able” to “come together,” but others negatively paralyzing the system. Others who then lose at the voting booth, if this is 1) the actual case, and 2) once again, effectively shown.
Of course, with Rahm Emanuel, who doesn’t seem to believe in showing anything, leading White House strategy,* it’s up to Democrats in Congress, or the DNC; or maybe once again we will have the “paralysis” that Friedman writes about until Republicans can come back in and start passing things again, just like most of this past decade.
In other words, it comes down to two things, particularly with a significant majority in both houses, and the support of the White House. Putting together a good bill or bills, and effectively showing this, both to the country, and to their fellow Congresspeople: Not, as Friedman says, simply “meeting in the middle” regardless of what the various parties are claiming they want. That leads to more of the same over burdensome special interest favoring legislation that people like Friedman are often complaining about (and often correctly), in the first place.
As for why the rest of the world is starting to view our country as more unstable — the concern driving Friedman’s article — it’s not because we are not passing bills, with possibly the small exception of energy. The reason for the energy exception is that the world knows climate change is a global problem and we are still the leader of the free world, and by far largest per capita contributor to the climate change problem. (A problem that almost half the country seems to have become convinced does not exist, by the way.) And we are not seeming to do much to lead on this issue.
But for the most part, the world is not viewing the U.S. as potentially less stable than normal because of a failure to pass health care or some derivative and market traders favoring cap and Trade system, whereby much of the money that should be going into productive growth and problem redress instead goes into traders pockets;** it is probably because of the massive run up in debt, the recent financial crisis, and all of the heavy rhetoric that continues to emanate out of this country, combined with, perhaps, to some very small degree, what Friedman references; A Congress that can’t seem to get anything done — despite the fact that many think that in general, a Congress not getting anything done is a good thing sometimes.***
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*Emanuel has been routinely credited with orchestrating a masterful Democratic victory in Congress in 2006. There is little conventional wisdom in an America that is currently chock full of erroneous conventional political wisdom, that is as off base as this. It is the equivalent of taking over a football game in the fourth quarter, leading 31-0, and squeaking out a 30-28 victory when the ball sails wide right on a field goal try in the waning seconds. Most people will vehemently disagree with this — particularly those in a media which endlessly parroted this assessment as if unambiguous fact – but that’s the nature of conventional wisdom that has become entrenched as gospel. But in 2006 the Bush administration was becoming very unpopular, concern over Iraq and foreign policy strategy was becoming alarmingly high yet the Bush Administration unfortunately was not up for re-election, and there was more anti – incumbent Congressional fervor than at any point in modern history (only to be outdone, yet again, by 2008 of course), and second term majority parties typically lose almost what the Republicans lost in 2006 under normal circumstances.
**On the flip side of this, a cap and trade system does offer some efficiency advantages. By allowing the market to fully determine how it wants to meet certain targets, more effective measures can be accomplished at less cost to the initial polluter in the first place. But in the long run, all this system is doing is rewarding an inherent right to pollute to certain entities, above which threshold they can not go — or must purchase credits from someone else. If an inherent right to pollute does exist where such pollution is contributing to a potentially alarming (and still underestimated) global problem, then everyone should have the right equally. Yet such a system is fundamentally predicated on the opposite principle — past behavior.
In the long run, simply taxing the processes is more efficient and less costly. (Former Bush economics advisor, Bruce Bartlett, in Forbes, agrees.) Politically unpalatable as this sounds, it is the most efficient and most “market equalizing” approach to leveling the playing field between harmful and nonharmful production processes. There is no reason that a “tax” should be frowned upon until and unless this country has no taxes; which so long as we have government and not anarchy, is a bit far fetched. And of the many taxes that are levied, this would probably be the fairest and by far the most productive. Not only does it raise revenue, it avoids having to simply prohibit behavior that destroys the environmental quality of the world for everyone, which behavior some people might otherwise be willing to pay for — which is everyone’s right, so long as that harm is somehow integrated into the marketplace, and marketplace decisions.
Cap and trade does not accomplish this nearly as efficiently in the long run, but instead creates an entire separate market that has no value in and of itself, other than to avoid this more straightforward approach and the politically unpalatable tax word.
Not that some haven’t tried to use the term anyway, for cap and trade (and, creatively, there is some small truth to it). But then these “some” — in this case ex half term Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, here also argue that the way to getting off of the energy sources that are compromising national security, polluting our environment, and contributing massive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere via the geologically instantaneous release of carbon that took millions of years to accumulate, is “the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!.” And, of course, if there is one thing that is correctly known with certainty in the otherwise uncertain “art” of economics — and what, essentially, compromises “economics 101,” is that of course the answer, completely the opposite of what Palin insisted, does lie in making the behavior we want to move away from, scarcer and more expensive, relative to the behavior that we want to move toward.
Here, something that is not quite as efficient, but that can speed up the process, and add political appeal, is to take the funds derived from discouraging the energy reliance sources and processes that we need to move away from, and using part of it to encourage production and usage of the (cleaner, non finite) energy sources and processes that we need to move toward.
***The most recent incarnation of the health care bill in the Senate, to many — as much as this country probably needs health care reform to reign in rocketing public and private costs, extreme inefficiencies, and to provide better coverage and care for people — serves as an example of precisely this.
