Frankly, we are getting pretty sick of the economy. Hold on. Let's rephrase that. We are getting sick of hearing about the economy; the relentless drumbeat of numbers, the debates over bailouts and stimuli, and if the government should fund research into bees. It's all very taxing, no pun intended.On a gut level, the whole stimulus-bailout idea just seems dumb to us. It's counterintuitive to think a nation with too much debt could solve it's problems with more spending. But maybe taxing the future to finance the present is one of those ideas it takes an intellectual to understand.
To us, the idea that government "has to do something" seems silly. Left alone, absent any big money from Washington DC, the economy will eventually grow again. That's what economies do. At least, they always have.
Economies grow because human beings want goods and services. People who provide the goods and services that others find valuable will prosper, hence creating a demand for more goods and services. Voila! The magic of free markets. It began at the dawn of human history and will continue whether or not the Federal Government helps people weather-strip their homes.
Congress and Obama could have done nothing; no big infusion of tax dollars borrowed from posterity, no bailouts for Wall Street and Detroit. The government could just spend a few hundred billion on improving unemployment benefits and health care -- for people at the bottom who really need it, and let the invisible hand take care of the rest. If a company fails because it makes a bad product, oh well. Time to make a better product. If a bank goes bust from bad loans, that's life. Someone will eventually buy those "toxic" assets and make a killing.
Yeah, we know. Laissez-faire economics is out of style. Even Wall Street lions get welfare since the market crashed. So now that it looks like the stimulous will happen, can we at least dial down the "End of Days" rhetoric? Anyone who reads blogs or watches TV news is familiar with the Apocalyptic style. In a culture where one must shout to be heard, every problem is a crisis and every crisis becomes a disaster; whether it's turmoil in Iceland, air quality in California or whatever chunk of the sky happens to be falling that day.
No one even uses the word "recession" anymore. It's too tame. Now we hear only "meltdown," "disaster" and (you knew this was coming) "another Great Depression." Martin Wolf, a columnist for the normally staid Financial Times, warns of "apocalypse." Even the President is getting into it. Last week, stumping for the stimulus, Obama warned Americans the crisis could become a "national catastrophe" and there's danger that "our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse."
Really. Ever? If we don't pass this particular bill, America will never, ever recover? If taxpayers don't spend a half-billion dollars to renovate the Department of Agriculture, the Republic will fall into irrevocable decline and be cast upon the dustbin of history? Seriously? Whatever happened to the optimistic Obama that we loved on the campaign trial?
The stimulus bill has good stuff in it, but it isn't helpful for the President of the United States to suggest that the nation can't survive without it. No matter how necessary Obama believes the stimulus to be, his more important role is to be a calming influence in tumultuous times. He should comfort, motivate and inspire, not threaten a "catastrophe" if he doesn't get his way.
The Israeli elections are over. Kind of. Anyone who thinks we need more political parties in the US needs only to look at the confusion in Israel. Tzipi Livni's centrist Kadima party won the most Knesset seats, with 28, to the Likud party's 27. But neither scored near the 61 seats needed for a majority, so Russian immigrant Avigdor Lieberman, whose right-wing party appears to have won 15 seats, may end up deciding who wins.
Whoever takes power, it is always nice when a Middle Eastern country has a free, open, nonviolent election. There's really only two countries in the region that do; Israel and Iraq. So how does the international media report the story? The BBC says "Arab press despair as Israel votes." The Telegraph UK says "Peace is the big loser in the Israeli election," and Time Magazine avows "Israel Election Dashes Hopes for Peace." Yeah, well, maybe. But it also dashed hopes for peace when the Palestinians voted for Hamas. You would think a party that provoked a such crushing invasion would suffer next time at the polls. Probabaly not.
There is debate all over the web about the future of newspapers. All sorts of new and old media theorists are scrambling to think of ways to "save" the industry with micro-payment systems on the iTunes model or endowing newspapers as public trusts, like museums, supported a combination of grants and private donations. Ugh.
Look, here is the problem with newspapers. The papers themselves, the hard copies, cost too much to make and move. The regular newspaper subscriber isn't only paying for writers and editors to gather and organize information. Much of the cost is putting that information on paper with ink, then distributing that to thousands of doorsteps. That's not a that cost consumers are willing to bear when they can get the same information faster, for free, on a website. Add the environmental impact of printing and distributing and the consumer has one more reason to say no. While there will always be market for information, the market for a fleet of truck drivers is gone and not coming back -- just like the monopoly big city newspapers once had on classifieds.
Ultimately the debate will not be decided by what newspapers do or don't do, but by technology. Just as Apple showed that people will pay for music if you make it easy, they could do the same for the written word. Imagine a hyper-thin, flexible video screen that can download for a fee, on the iTunes model, while delivering an experience as aesthetically pleasing as paper. Call it the "iRead." Sony is working on a flexible screen as our a few other companies. But it's still five years away. Maybe three.
