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Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 11:50PM
- From The Washington Post, October 1, 2008
“33% of people believe we are currently in a depression.”
- From The Goddamn USA Today, September 29, 2008
This really chaps my ass.
I am so unbelievably sick of news outlets using polls as news. I am actually sick of polls altogether. Can we get a poll of how many people are incensed by polls? I can’t be alone here.
In regards to the first quote from The Post, I don’t know who I hate more: the people who answered this question or the people who wrote it. I want to know how many people answered the question with a string of expletives directed at the ill-advised belief that the man-on-the-street is newsworthy and informed. I want to know why I am never polled so that I can answer questions as such. I want to know why there is a question as to which party is to be held “more responsible for [the bill’s] failure” when we actually know quite specifically the names and the affiliation of the 228 people who are *at fault*. And what heinous crime have they committed? Their jobs.
(Before we move on, and speaking of doing their jobs, did anyone notice the one “Not Voting” vote? It was this guy, Rep. Gerald Weller [R-IL], who, we are told, had some other stuff going on with his family. Obviously the guy is pretty busy since he didn’t even have time to shave before he took the headshot picture for his website. This look works well for him though, as his congressional career pretty much fits the mold of the archetypically-shifty politician in an action movie. Rep. Weller is not running again, a situation which usually sees lawmakers come down with a case of senioritis. But family is always a priority, and I hope that Rep. Weller’s family is safe and sound. That said, when a vote of this magnitude comes around, there are only a few acceptable excuses for missing it that involve family. One of them is, “Grendel was eating my family.”)
Besides the brash disregard of any respect for our system of government by using the idea of blame in this question, how can you fault the minority party that had their current presidential candidate, and their seated president, publicly back the bill? A straight party-line “yea” vote by the Dems would have passed the bill. Not that this is an excuse to hold the Democrats “more responsible for its failure” either (just typing that is making me sick). The 140 Dems who voted “yea” may have voted for a government-intervening, bureaucracy-creating bill that their party is supposedly known for, but they sided with an extremely unpopular president on an historically unparalleled spending bill. The ones who voted against it voted against this administration, which is usually what their party conscience wants them to do.
If you want to blame people, pick any twelve congressmen out who voted against the bill, regardless of party, and blame them. That is what influence-wielding yea voters on the floor of Congress are doing right now in an attempt to make sure the Senate version (which now includes some very important provisions for lifting import taxes on wooden arrow materials) passes the House on Friday.
In truth, Monday's vote was probably one of the most bi-partisan votes this government has ever seen that did not involve military action. There is constant lip-service given to bi-partisan support, and crossing the aisle, and listening to your constituents, and thoughtful lawmaking, and reigning in government spending. But now that the House is backing all that like gangbusters, it is apparently feeding a spiraling crisis. I would bet that this vote represented a lot of cases where Mr Smith went to Washington, gave an impassioned speech that he believed in, and voted in earnest with his conscience. Now all those Mr Smiths, Democrat and Republican, are being vilified by a mightily unbiased and extremely powerful press for doing exactly what they were sent to DC to do.
Doesn’t Mr Smith realize that now is the time to follow, not lead?
As for the second poll, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I do not make The McPaper a regular feature in my news diet. I happened to go into the far stall in the men’s room on Monday, and the “Money ‘n’ Numbers ‘n’ Stuff” section was hanging over the handicapped access bar. This line was a pull-quote in big, bold letters below the fold. That’s how I found it. Don’t get me wrong; I will read articles from The USA Today that I may come across through the natural wave of research, net-surfing or otherwise (“otherwise” in this case being the can at work). As the title character proclaims in the movie Henry Fool, “I refuse to discriminate between modes of knowing”. But if ranked in order of personal preference, The USA Today is well down the list of places to originate said research. It is somewhere in the neighborhood of national polls.
This second quote is an excellent example of why parents fear peer pressure. In short, your peers are idiots. Individually, we the people can be bright and enriching in our own way, but as a group we humans are a thick herd. The question behind this quote feeds into the need to define history as it happens by asking America what it collectively thinks all the time (one of the most annoying developments of the hypermedia age). It seems that The USA Today has forgotten that there are a whole host of people who study macroeconomic data whose opinions are much more qualified to be adorned with a pull quote. Why do we under-fund public education and then ask America what it thinks about economics? America thought that President Bush’s first term in office was reason enough for him to have a second. Haven’t we had enough of America’s thought process for a while?
This past Monday, shortly after representatives in our Legislature rejected the Save the Puppies and Bake Apple Pie Bill (HR 3997), The New York Times Editorial Page had quite a lot to say about the vote. They described the source of their ire, in no mean terms, as those good-for-nothing ne’er-do-wells (uh—but just the Republican ones) that voted against the bill. They blamed House Republicans for voting “less in analysis or principle than in political posturing and ideological rigidity”. This seems like an odd stance considering the 95 House Democrats that voted against the bill as well. Why were they not blamed for reckless political endangerment or some such lunatic insult?
A party-line vote is political posturing, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is ideological rigidity (God bless him), but a collection of 228 nay votes is neither of these. It is simply a bill that should not be a law because, for many valid and capricious reasons alike, the people’s representatives rejected it. Sorry, that’s our system. If we are going to hope that our government saves us, we damn well better believe in the process it follows.
The New York Times wants us to find and hate at least twelve—and at most 228—Congressmen (preferably Republicans) who are just a touch nervous about using tax dollars to back a government-run penny-stock portfolio. The opinion of The Colorful Lady here seems to spring more from passion than reason. This financial problem has a great deal to do with a dangerous mixture of abundant credit and haste, and now many of our leaders want to calm the problem with the same ingredients, but this time with a government chef (and not just a government sous-chef like before). I think I’d be nervous about that, too. (Oh wait—I actually am nervous about it.) Despite Bush becoming the biggest government spending Republican by a mile, there are still some GOP-ers that feel the party should be about financial responsibility. There is also a solid contingent of Blue Dog Democrats, about twenty in the last vote (joined by many sympathizers), that believe throwing good money after bad as fast as governmentally possible might not be the best solution either.
Oh yeah, there’s also a few hundred of the country’s respected economists who also think we might not want to react to panic with government-sponsored panic. Maybe they’re ivory-tower brainiacs, but the New York Times isn’t exactly the voice of the common man either.
I guess the line between ideological rigidity and cautious contemplation is pretty blurry.
Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post thinks that Americans, by and large, don’t really understand the situation. I tend to agree. He also blames the ignorant masses for… everything, seeing their lack of understanding on level with political wrangling and corporate indignance as the crux of the financial crisis. That may be going a bit too far.
“The basic problem here is that too many people don't understand the seriousness of the situation.
Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system.
Politicians worry less about preventing a financial meltdown than about ideology, partisan posturing and teaching people a lesson. Financiers have yet to own up publicly to their own greed, arrogance and incompetence. And leaders of foreign governments still think that this is an American problem and that they have no need to mount similar rescue efforts in their own countries.”
Well, that was some widely-encompassing revilement that somehow omitted the fear-mongering press, wasn’t it?
Do you think the average, middle-American voter who is in his 40s and has a regular job that he's held for 10 years and will likely hold for another 10 gives a damn about credit swaps and foreign currency devaluation and inter-bank borrowing? He's got his own house that he can handle the payments on, his own car that is well within his means, he's not retiring for 20 years, he contributes to his 401(k), files his taxes every year, and he saves some money in a credit union. This is the great and stable middle-class that we need as the backbone of our economy and hold aloft as the necessary base in our finance system full of acids. Every day for the past 20 years, Fox news has been telling this guy that the sky is falling, and every morning he lives to commute another day. Now Mr Pearlstein is wondering why these cave-dwellers have no idea how important all this is.
Actually, Mr Pearlstein, I’m willing to bet that there is a pretty strong plurality of people who have a decent idea about what is going on and still don’t care to inject their tax dollars into the problem. If the rich get poorer and the poor cant find work, Mr Middle-America’s net income is probably still going to be about 70% of his paycheck (if he’s lucky). In very real terms, he sees $700 Billion as a lot of money, and he doesn’t understand why it should be invested in dangerously devalued assets. The problem may be much more complex than that, but if it is, then the solution is recklessly simple.
Mr Middle-America thinks that the people who got us into this mess are ignorant as well, Mr Pearlstein, and he doesn’t understand why he is being asked to hand over more money to a government that has proven to be too venturesome so they can invest in securities that have proven to be too risky.
This is a goliath of a correction going on right now, and there are people suffering who were not part of the problem. It may be extremely harsh and prolonged, and we may have not hit the bottom yet, but it is a return in kind from the massive and unstable bubble we were fostering. We relished in the excess of an overvalued market (a few of them, actually), and now we are returning to earth with all the implied and actual consequences. As harsh as that is, and as scary as those prospects are, the underlying belief is one of the few things you can be assured of right now. Coming out of this with government help is likely, and in many ways is an imperfect solution that a majority of the House will resign itself to eventually after enough riders have been attached (effectively spending much more money and making everything worse), but rushing the issue is the worst solution of all. We were smart enough not to rush the issue when the amendment was three pages long and basically amounted to a shopping spree for Secretary Paulson. Haste under different terms is not the safe alternative.
The problem is, moving this “solution” forward at any time with any speed will not solve anything. We are hoping that if we cast blame correctly, and jigger the system just a little bit more, we will at least push further collapse far enough out to get our money back. Then some other people will actually have to deal with the problem.
Debt? We don't have a debt problem. We can quit any time we want to.
Maybe some of us will make it out in the black, but some of us invariably won’t. We have been hitting the snooze alarm on fiscal responsibility for years; in fact, decades. Putting off a chance to allow natural regulation does exactly that: it puts it off. Natural regulation of a system will sneak in no matter how often we the idiots try to box it out (See Germany 1923, USA 1970s, Argentina… ever). I hate to sound like a fatalist, but eventually we will have to pay for our excess. This is no longer just about overpriced houses, or foreclosures, or overpriced exotic securities, or under-priced risk, or unnaturally low inflation, or the Fed, or the SEC, or about any one particular sector or asset class. It is about all those things. This is not a sector collapse. This is market fallout.
Here’s the good news: the United States, better than any country, could weather the storm. It’s got a 220-year-old system of representative government, and a currency that has, more or less, been one of the globe's favorite sons for the past 50 years. But right now we are taking that security for granted. On Friday our government will likely agree to inject $700 Billion into a collapsing market when we have a budget deficit of $400+ Billion in 2008 and a national debt of $10 Trillion. This plan is so dangerous you would think it would be partnered with an immediate and thorough plan for massive spending cuts.
It isn’t.
That is not a rescue plan. That is a belief that the people can trick the system into not fixing itself. That is a belief that the dollar is not only strong, it is invulnerable.
It isn’t.
You know how your dad promised to make sloppy joes at some point really soon, so all week you kept thinking about how awesome Sloppy Joe Day was going to be? Well, let’s say your mom found out that the meat he was going to use to make the sloppy joes was contaminated with mad cow. She tells your dad, but your dad decides that he already promised the sloppy joes, and he doesn’t want you to have a tantrum or go hungry, so he’ll just add a side of ham to your portion and hope that you don’t get sick. If there’s a problem later, he’s pretty sure some doctor can help you out... probably.
Enjoy your sloppy joes on Friday, everyone. I hope they don't kill us.
Reader Comments (1)
I have to object to the generic reference to these securities as complex or exotic. MBS, CMO, CDO, and the like may be relatively less well known, but analytically they are far from complex. Just because you can quote the price of GE, a global, massively diversified company that makes everything from jet engines to washing machines doesn't mean the price was arrived at easily. I'll take a discrete pool of relatively homogenous assets with a defined repayment structure any day. And I'll certainly take them at 50% on the dollar. People don't make money in the markets by being slow.