Hard Times Inaugural Post

Everyone should have a blog...???

I'm not even sure if everyone should be able to vote but I should be able to... so I shall blog bitches...

TV a couple of nights ago was great... The President addressed the nation and answered questions from reporters for an hour or so in the White House. Reporters, in their endless search for the perfect, most jarring question, grilled Obama on his newly proposed budget. Questions beginning with the words"Isn't it true that your budget..." and, "Why did it take so long for you to..." were hitting Obama from every press seat in the room. To each question, Obama put forth an earnest attempt at comprehensively answering, but, each response made me question more and more if there is anything that can be done to preserve America's collective faith in our first black Commander in Chief. I decided to look into what the major factors affecting presidential approval ratings are... I found the following (and much more but, hey), "Economic hardship dramatically decreases presidential approval rating, because the president is considered the leader of America, and if we are in dire straits economically, obviously he or she has lead us there. Prolonged wars also decrease presidential approval because people don't like having their sons/daughters/husbands/wives far away from them for long periods of time. Also, it creates the image that we aren't as mighty as we like to think, and if we aren't mighty, it's because our leader isn't mighty, and therefore we don't like him."

Obviously there are some flaws in this logic, right? For one thing... the notion that the president is responsible for the current state of the economy ignores the fact that we don't live in Cuba, or Gabon, or Libya where leaders like Castro, Bongo, and Qadaffi have always been the president... there is a sort of discontinuum of responsibility here... but, we live in a society poisoned by the experience of having once had such easy access to gratification. We truly are as we so often are pegged an instant gratification society. The same ills that brought us to this terrible place: easy access to credit, a supercharged economy inflated to the point of near and eventual bust, false economic prosperity, and the greed at the heart of all of it, have conditioned America to be unreceptive to slow but steady change for the better. Even if that is the only way improvement is possible. So, if things don't MAGICALLY get better, Obama's kind of screwed. And there is no way to lead that won't have it's negative externalities... everything in the economy seems to be a compromise. You tell people things are better than they are, and they expect better results than you can deliver. Then you become the president who cried wolf come election time. You tell people things are as they are: really shitty; then things get worse because our economy has self esteem issues; it is so dependent upon its self-perception that you can't turn the light on in the bathroom. And everyone knows that MAGIC doesn't really exist. Even "Magic" Johnson proved susceptible to reality when he announced he was HIV positive and became the face of the AIDS epidemic. So, Obama's prescription for our ailing economy is, semi-ironically, fixing the health care system. I think it's clear that it's going to take a very strong PR campaign explaining exactly how this is going to help us in the future and why we aren't seeing immediate economic improvement... or goodbye to those high approval ratings. It would be awful to imagine that the condition the Bush administration left America made it impossible for next president to have any chance at a second term. But, that might be the case.

Later that night, a PBS documentary aired that laid out America's budget deficit history... The documentary made a number of interesting points. The first important point was that the Republican love affair with the hollow policies of low tax rates, tax cuts and overall fiscal unruliness typified by George Bush, Sr.'s famous words, "I repeat, no more taxes," has been the bane of America's fiscal existence. Another thing the documentary laid bear for me was that while Bush Sr.'s legacy is not entirely positive... he was intelligent and realistic enough about the American economic situation created by his heavy military spending agenda and his extensive tax cuts to renege on his campaign promises. (This is only admirable RELATIVE to his retarded son.) This was not politically popular (add maintenance of an honest political image to the list of factors affecting presidential approval ratings) and cost him a second term. But it put America in a position where it could be saved by a couple years of fiscal discipline; years that Clinton was able to bring us. "When the sins of our fathers visit us we do not have to play host," but Bush, Jr. couldn't resist. W. learned all the wrong lessons from his father's experience. People don't like to be taxed, duh... people like government spending programs that give them stuff, duh... people don't like it when you tell them you're not going to raise taxes but you do anyways... duh. W. seemed to govern with these lessons echoing in his head as he signed spending bill after spending bill and promoted tax cuts year after year. As a result, what Obama has inherited is much worse than what Clinton had to deal with... much deeper... and much scarier. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the coming years so nobody knows what all should be done to fix our economy. But America needs to be taxed more in order to build government revenues... that is clear. And, despite Obama's bold statements during the presidential campaign suggesting that Americans would have to "pitch in" to fix the economy, Obama's plan, at least as it has been publicly described, is cowardly about taxes. If it is not currently possible to increase taxes and maintain a level of consumer spending that won't seriously threaten American businesses then we, of course, should not increase taxes... YET. But, ultimately taxation is necessary in order to pay off our national debt and regain ownership of our economy. Obama's plan is, understandably, focused on fixing the leading drag on the American economy, the health care system. This is undoubtedly necessary. But other necessities have not been addressed by Obama... particularly the necessity to request of Americans to pitch in more. Obama needs to stop being so damn sheepish about tax raises... Bush Jr.'s fear of the political ramifications of paying as we go and telling it like it is are exactly why we're in this situation. The "plan" is understandably shy about asking an increasingly economically depressed work force to contribute at all. But just cause we can understand it doesn't mean it's right or okay or acceptable. We simply have to be asked for more of what we have, and we have to give it... more more more. If not, someday soon, America as we know it may no longer be.

I'm an American whose mother is Bahamian... my mother's nation will be underwater by as early as the year 2050 due to a global warming phenomenon that has been caused, largely, by my paternal nation. I would hate for my country to experience a fate of figurative equivalence to my mother's... (ellipsis)