The Problem:
The tale below is just an illustration of what’s wrong with this country right now. It’s a tale of greed, the kind that is tearing America apart. Fortunately all the parties are rich so it isn’t the usual tale of the rich stepping on the poor but it’s still illustrative.
A short time ago, Charles Cohen, the owner of a building across the street from Macy’s sued his tenants for renovating the building – at his own expense. You think I’m making this up but I’m not. After his tenants Peter & Anthony Malkin spent $81 million bucks on a building Cohen owns, this greedy pig sues them for doing it without his permission.
What is the avaricious Mr. Cohen’s motive? He wants more. He was perfectly happy when he leased the building in 1963, but real estate prices have gone up and even with the current drop in prices they will probably rise again before the lease is up in 2077. So, Cohen, not satisfied with just making a profit, decides that he will make a killing by suing the tenant for improving his building.
He probably doesn’t think he will really be able to evict the Malkins, he just wants to use this suit as leverage in order to get them to sign a new lease at a higher rate.
It’s not like Cohen is losing money on his building. All he has to do is collect his rent and smile but being a greedy pig that isn’t enough for him.
Right now, being rich in America just isn’t good enough. Right now 1% of the population makes 90% of the money and they still want more. That imbalance is bad, very bad for the country. One thing that has made this country great, that has separated it from the rest of the world, has been the emergence of a powerful middle-class.
We didn’t always have a powerful middle-class in this country. After the civil war, when the industrial revolution took hold, the country was made up of mostly very rich or very poor people and just a tiny middle class, mostly tradesmen and professionals. That changed after WWII when, partly through the efforts of unions, compensation rose to levels where workers could actually enjoy some of the rewards of their labor. I have always been ambivalent about unions, but it is undeniable that they were a major force in the creation of the American middle-class. Like everyone else, they got greedy, overstepped their bounds, forced contracts that have turned out to be the ruination of the companies that signed them, and now they have become the whipping boys of the Far Right.
Since the 1990’s, the middle-class, the group that was the realization of the American dream, has been slowly disappearing and we have been returning to the too rich/too poor equation.
You can be too rich. There is really only so much a person can reasonably spend and still maintain a modicum of human values, especially in a world where there is so much suffering and deprivation. Men like Bill Gates realize this and are giving away much of their vast fortunes. Maybe it would be even better for the country to share those charitable efforts with their own employees and those who still have the entrepreneurial spirit. They could do this by using some of the money they are already giving away to help build our educational foundation and to invest in job creation and infrastructure, something that seems to have no appeal to Wall Street or the banking industry.
What to Do & What Not to Do
Most economists agree on a couple of basic points that are not politically motivated or part of the debate.
1- The country has to grow its economy 2.5% per year just to keep up with rising productivity and population growth, thereby keeping unemployment from rising.
2- It takes two points of growth to shave one point off unemployment. I won’t go into the reasons for this anomaly but it’s true.
3- That means that even at 4.5% growth, which most experts consider a boom, we will only shave 1% off unemployment per year. At that rate it would take at least six years to get back to 6%, which is generally considered the base for unemployment.
So what do we do? Even at the best estimates that rate of revitalization is too slow to be acceptable so we’re back to the same old problem, immediate work for the unemployed and education for the emerging work force.
The majority of Republicans favor a plan that is based on reducing taxes and cutting spending to reduce the deficit. The fact that these goals are virtually exclusive of each other, seems to mean nothing to a self-serving rabble of congressmen, whose stated goal is to seek re-election even before they have begun to govern.
There is no argument that there is plenty of waste in our national budget but first we have to be honest about the parameters of that budget. The Republicans claim that Obama has added a trillion dollars to our deficit in his first year in office. The fact of the matter is that the deficit did go up about a trillion dollars but let’s look at how. It started with those two wars that Bush created. Remember them? For some strange and still unexplained reason, their cost has never appeared on the deficit side of the budget ledger. I guess they just didn’t notice it. For the first time in the history of man, a war was fought at no cost at all. Miraculous! No wonder they’re always babbling about God. How else could this have happened?
Obama looked at the wars and decided that somewhere the costs had to be accounted for, and so he actually put the figures on the books, adding about a trillion bucks to the deficit. Yes it happened on the first year of his watch, but what kind of idiot thinks he was responsible for it? See, that’s how Republican economics work; lies and incompetence. Yes you can reduce the deficit but you can’t do that, reduce taxes on the rich and avoid cutting entitlements. Yes you can get on the road to full employment but you can’t do it if you reduce the deficit because getting on the road to full employment involves programs that cost money and that money will have to come from the government because our greedy military industrial complex is too busy dumping its money into hedge funds and foreign banks to bother to invest in research & development or bricks & mortar.
I understand the Republicans natural repulsion with the debt (even though they created it). I feel the same way. You get nothing for the interest you pay on money borrowed and the government can’t even deduct it. In normal times I would be 100% behind the reduction of debt but these aren’t normal times. We have almost 10% unemployment and a big chunk of the unemployed come from the construction trades. We also have a huge problem with decaying or unrealized infrastructure. The country is literally falling apart, mainly because, in the 70 or so years since most of our roads, bridges, tunnels, sewers and reservoirs were built we have ignored the necessity of maintenance. Well, guys, it has definitely hit the fan. Our infrastructure is a disgrace.
We need those new bridges, tunnels, sewers, etc., plus high speed rail, expanded broadband, revitalized ports and most of all expanded and renovated airports including the transition from radar based to GPS based air traffic control functions. I’m speaking here about infrastructure our country needs so that our businesses can continue to compete in a world marketplace. Most of this work is in the area of construction, the area that has been hardest hit by the recession. It’s a perfect fit, but it needs money. It needs a new WPA and it needs it yesterday.
But it’s not just immediate jobs, it’s also about taking the lead for the future and we are never going to do that with the educational system we have now. Some headway has been made but not nearly enough and I’m not just speaking about student education, I’m also speaking about adult education, because with proper retraining we can ready our present and future work forces for the challenges of this century and the next.
In order to get this done Obama and the Democrats will have to withstand a concerted effort by the Republicans and the Tea Party to force an agenda that has no logical basis, no upside for the country and disaster for the presently unemployed who are desperately looking for jobs. Their only plan seems to be to get in the way of practical solutions and block Obama with their goal being to get some hack elected in 2012.
In the first year of the Obama administration the Right screamed bloody murder that Obama was forcing through a healthcare bill when he should be working exclusively to create jobs. Now those same Republicans are wasting our time and money with symbolic attacks on that same healthcare bill instead of using their efforts to help create the jobs they were wailing about two years ago. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
The Republicans are demanding a reduction of the deficit but can’t name a single sensible program they will cut, and have put all their efforts behind the retention of the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1% in the country. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
The Republicans are fighting to repeal new regulations aimed at eliminating many of the Wall Street and Investment Banking abuses that led to the economic crash, even while they are hauling in millions of dollars from lobbyists for those same Wall Street and banking interests. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
If the Republicans really want to help the country out of the economic doldrums and turn unemployment around, it is time they stopped lying to the American people and started thinking of the country instead of just their own pocketbooks.