The Tea Party, Our Galtian Overlords And The Market

Gee, I wonder if this might be a problem?

So, the Tea Party/GOP/Randian Supergeniuses have all been forcing the conversation to be about the national debt.  Why?  Because the markets demanded it!

Well, we now know that was a lot of organic, bovine-originating fertilizer.

THE problem, the single biggest problem, has always been the weak employment situation.  Demand can eventually be self-creating.  But the Obama economic team underestimated the length and depth of the recession.  I think it's true that they could have gotten no more stimulus through congress in 2009, but they could have prioritized a job program in 2010 before the election.  And they are guilty of acquiescing to the focus on debt rather than employment.

But it wasn't the Obama administration that nearly forced the country into default in order to slash spending.  It wasn't the Obama administration that spent January through June working hard to end funding for Planned Parenthood rather than create a jobs program.

Today's unemployment report was "meh" rather than "WTF!", so maybe some confidence returns to the markets.  Maybe.

Recessions caused by a financial crisis tend to be lingering and painful.  But they do end.  The painful depression under Martin Van Buren - caused by the killing of the Bank of the United States and the specie circular - lasted almost 6 years without ANY attempt at government stimulus, but it did end.  The various depressions of the Gilded Age did end eventually without government action.

This is Hayek's position, essentially.  Keynes's response is that "in the long run we're all dead" and we should work to ameliorate economic hard times.

But just as Nixon famously said, "I'm a Keynesian now" in response to his economic hard times, Washington (and by association Obama) has said, "I'm an Austrian now".

That has to change.

I see no way to actually get a jobs program through this House.  But Obama needs to start talking about a new CCC or a new WPA.  He needs to talk about directly hiring Americans to do jobs that need doing: cleaning brown sites, fixing roads and bridges, creating a modern power grid.  He needs to make the House GOP become the obstacle to this.

It worked for Harry Truman, and Obama has more latent reservoirs of goodwill and charisma than Harry Truman ever did.

Obama had the perfect temperament for 2008 - calm, measured, unifying.  Unlike Clinton he came with no personal baggage.  He was a tabula rasa.  That was the secret of his success and his curse.

He has to be more combative this time around, and it doesn't wear well on him.  Luckily, Mitt Romney is not a great standard bearer in a weak economy.  His hedge fund is a prime example of the downsize and outsource school of American economics.  And the lunatic fringe candidates of Bachmann and Perry seem doomed by their association with the Tea Party.

But Obama needs to (and I can't recall how many times I've written this) find that inner populist, that inner Harry Truman.  He needs to unleash the Krakken the whupass on the Tea Party for obstructing a jobs program.

I think one reason he hasn't is because he doesn't want to spook the markets with negative talk.

Well, the markets are spooked by the data.  He doesn't need to hold back anymore.  Say, "Things are bad, and I have a plan to put a million Americans to work in a new CCC."  And then when the GOP blocks it, they are the bad guys.

I don't understand why this is hard to see.