This Record Doesn't Have a B-Side

When you were a kid, everyone had that friend who always messed things up. Maybe you were friends because of geographic proximity, or because your parents knew one another, or maybe you had limited options, but this friend wasn’t particularly great to have around. You’d invite them over and they’d get you in trouble, or break your stuff, and yet you would invite them over again and again, and get more of your toys broken. It was a vicious cycle and you felt trapped in it, and it almost never occured to stop letting that kid play with your toys.

We find ourselves in the midst of a global recession, one that any good economist (and plenty of lay-people like myself) saw coming a mile away. The last 8 years saw the coporate class raiding the cabinet, stretching every dollar, squeezing every profit, borrowing on borrowed money. The most outlandish, implausible, counter-intuitive economic theories were tested in the hopes of creating some sort of engine of capital, where profits constantly rose and everyone became a billionaire, without ever having to come back down to Earth. Clearly as we’ve seen, and as the last election has confirmed, those theories have failed. They are false.

Cutting taxes doesn’t automatically spur economic growth. Cutting regulations won’t free up the martketplace to police itself. Wealth, does not in fact, trickle down. What we saw time and again was that the only real motivation in an unregulated market is to make the maximum short-term profit. If cutting jobs meant slightly higher profit margins, then it was done, even if it did limit longterm growth and undercut the customer base. If slightly more money could be made by using toxic chemicals, with only a slight chance that you’d ever have to pay out money in court, then it was done. What we are left with now, though, are companies drowning in debt, without the adaptibility or the talent to pull themselves out of it, stuck in a cycle of overpaying executives while reducing output. Perhaps the market will sort itself out, but the thing that people don’t mention is that while the market is sorting itself out, millions of people will lose their jobs, companies will collapse, and years will go by.

That’s why Government steps in. It is not the place of the Government to control the economy or the lives of it’s people, but to boost the economy when it can and ease the burden when it falters. This is precisely the reason that we need a stimulus package. Presently, our economy is not running at capacity, and the options are to either give it a jump or let it continue to wind down. What this means is that where consumers aren’t spending, and companies are losing money, the Government needs to temporarily make up the difference, so that we can continue to run at full speed.

Here’s where it is win-win for us, though. Stimulus spending needs to have tangible results, it has to provide real jobs and funds here in the United States in the present. That means that we can put people to work building schools, repairing bridges, and doing scientific research. For now, they continue to get paid instead of going unemployed which also means that they will continue to go out and spend money at other business - good for everybody. It also means that when we come out on the other side of this recession, we’ll have greater infrastructure which will make it easier to do business. There will be fewer delays on highways for shipping, better educated workers coming out of the public school system, and production technologies that are more advanced and cheaper. How can we go wrong?

By inviting over our bad friends who break our toys. The Republican Party, the party that has cut regulations, made it easier to speculate and operate on imaginary earnings, the party that has allowed the wages of the majority of Americans to decline so that they can’t afford to buy things and allowed debt to climb, that has let the rich get richer and take their wealth overseas while the government has paid the price...that party which created such an obvious mess of the nation’s affairs that they were voted out of power in both the Legislative and Executive branches, they are continuing to peddle the same out wares they’ve been peddling for more than a decade. We gave them power and resources and they broke the economy, and now they are asking us to continue to play with our toys. It’s time that we ask them to go home.

Obstructionism is not an ideology, and we need to stop pretending that the Republican ideas are a valid counterpoint in any discussion. They have no ideas, except to do more of what got us into this trouble in hopes the it could mean one more day of bonuses or lower taxes, even if it only digs us deeper into a hole. This economy is bad for them too, and yet they are willing to take a little more money now even if it means that there will be far less money to be made in the future. The Democrats want to create jobs, now, by putting people to work on projects that need to be done and have needed to be done for a long time. The Republicans want to cut taxes, hoping that with the marginal money you save you’ll suddenly open a small business and buy a sports car. The Democrats want to improve our infrastructure to make us more efficient and make our daily lives easier and less expensive. The Republicans want to cut taxes, something that would give the Governement less money at a time when it has trillions of dollars of debt to pay off to foreign creditors and several wars to fight for billions of dollars a day. The Democrats want to improve educational opportunities and stimluate new industries to grow here in the United States, injecting our nation with new capital. The Republicans want to cut taxes, so that education, government grants, public works projects, and regulation will also have to be cut.

Why are we pretending that they can be part of the solution, that we should have to make compromises or listen to their tired ideas? On the news, they act like these two strategies are equal and simply different ways to solve a problem. That is false. One way may solve the problem, and even if it doesn’t will improve infrastructure and provide jobs for a while. The other way will put us further into debt without providing tangible relief to most people, and will only prolong this recession. I know it, the 60 percent of the American people who dissapprove of how the Republican party has handled this crisis know it, and it’s time that we acknowledge it. If the Republicans can’t stop making a mess, then we should stop inviting them to the party.