The Dumb Trap

There’s a lot of talk out there today about whether Rick Perry is dumb or not. After all, the guy got Cs and Ds in college, ignores science, and doesn’t seem to care about learning anything new. All of this is not only beside the point—it’s a classical fool’s trap. Why? Because in politics we’re not measuring IQ points, SAT scores, US News college rankings, arugula consumption or any other effete virtue. We’re measuring votes and popularity.

We’re measuring how people feel about a candidate. On election day, no matter how we arrive at the polls, we all ask the same questions. “Do I like the guy?” “Do I trust him?” “Does what he says make sense to me?” Our differences are in how we arrive at the desire to vote for one person over another, or whether to vote at all. Some of us ask things like, “Is he rational?” or “Is he a good critical thinker?” and others ask, “Does he share my values?” or “Will he stand up for people like me?” All of these are good questions, but different people will prioritize them differently. A successful candidate will answer them all to the satisfaction of the majority.

I don’t want a dummy in office. I also don’t want someone who’s callous, craven or capricious. I don’t want a sanctimonious moralizer for president, but I also don’t want a Mr. Spock technocrat. But if we just write a candidate off as dumb, we cede all authority to analyze whether we share his values or challenge is ideas and actions. We give him a massive inborn advantage, absolving him of responsibility and freeing him to gladhand and dazzle the very people with the most to lose by his policies, all because he seems to respect people like them and speaks in ways that make sense.

Too often I hear people say, “he appeals to idiots,” putting aside the fact that those “idiots” all have the same rights and privileges as we do as citizens of this country, that they have real grievances, are entitled to their opinions, and ultimately will vote for one person over another. I don’t care if they’re idiots, and even if I did, shouldn’t it be easier, not harder, to convince them we’re right? How smart is my side if we can’t even talk to people in ways that make sense to them? How can you be so interested in improving the lot of the average working guy and not start with at least a modicum of respect.

The things I have make me privileged, but I know it’s not easy to make ends meet on a high school education, or to come up poor in a rust belt town. More important, I know people don’t want to hear it from me. Luckily, it’s not about me, where I was born, or what I know. George W Bush proved that. So did Obama. It’s in how I communicate. People want some inspiration, some sense of optimism, some basic humanity, some way to identify with a stranger.

A little empathy and humility is often so well-received that it’s shocking that the ivory tower set hasn’t figured it out yet. Even after Reagan and Bush, these brilliant professors scratch their heads in puzzlement, searching the literature for answers when all they need to do is look in the mirror.

American government is designed to give a powerful voice to people outside of the rarefied cosmopolitan settings that typically govern other countries. People at the rural margins have much more power in the American system than anywhere else in the world. The Senate assures that Wyoming has the same vote as New York in one branch of government. The Electoral College means we elect presidents largely by winner-takes-all measures of state delegates, rather than by national popular vote. Culturally, we have no history of noblesse oblige, and no old world class structure.  We will not be governed by our “betters.” More than anywhere else, if you want to win in American politics you must be of the people, and not just for the people.

Meanwhile, cultural snobbery is real. People of my background are all guilty of it, and it’s getting worse. Every disparaging comment about how “the white trash,” or “flyover country” is ignorant or immoral only widens the divide between us as Americans with a common fate. There’s something wrong when people care about a stranger’s employment prospects or insurance status but resent who they are individuals who are into QVC or NASCAR.

Like it or not, this is your country. If you want to make it a better place for people to live, you must first be able to actually talk to them. For all his weaknesses as a candidate, Rick Perry is really, really good at that. It’s time to step up our game. Way, way past time, actually.

A Hypersonic Glider? Really?!

Let's review.

First, the big geopolitical picture. We're bogged down in two-and-a-half major asymmetrical wars and perhaps a half dozen minor ones against medieval-to-mid-century forces located in caves and patches of desert across the Arabic-speaking world. The last major army to pose any threat to us disbanded twenty years ago, and all comers are either blockaded or don't bother with all the blood and treasure when there is money to be made selling us stuff.

Second, the local political picture. We're bogged down in nasty asymmetrical fight over how this country spends money. On the table right now are trillions in cuts to discretionary spending, military spending, and mandatory spending on things like Medicare and Social Security. We are seriously looking at cutting old people's health care and retirement plans, education funds, underfunding infrastructure, and putting military cost savings on personnel and their families instead of the big, influential companies that sell us pointless, expensive stuff like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that is projected to cost literally a trillion dollars to operate over 30 years.

Third, the tactical-strategic picture. I'm no military expert, but I'm pretty good at Risk. One thing I know is that if you have massive forces all over the world, you can respond to threats quickly and decisively. It means that, as long as you don't stretch yourself out too thin, you've won the Game of World Domination. We have bases and troop presence all over the world. Between Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Djbouti, Oman, and dozens of others, we have the world covered.

In comes the Hypersonic Glider. The plan for this military investment is to be able to strike anywhere in the world from the Continental United States within an hour. It's an unmanned plane capable of achieving Mach 20 outside of the atmosphere, and plunging with great accuracy into any unwitting target on Earth.  As far as I can tell, this has been a goal of ours since the Khrushchev Administration. As of yesterday, its latest iteration disintegrated at high velocity twice in tests. Maybe it's trying to tell us something.

Here's why this bugs me.

Getting stuff into orbit has become fairly routine and affordable. Objects in orbit travel at Mach 25 (25 percent faster than Mach 20), can stay there for years, and can de-orbited into the Lap of the Enemy on fairly short notice. If you want to get fancy about it, the military has successfully launched the X-37, a fully-automated launch vehicle that can stay in orbit for 270 days with significant adjustments to its location, carry a payload that can fit in its roughly 1x2 meter cargo hold, and return to Earth in one piece. It takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth at Mach 25. Why not make the X-37 a little bigger, and launch 4 or 8 of them, each with a few choice missiles on board, ready to rain down hellfire via ballistic trajectory on a half-hours' notice?

Don't like orbit? Well, we have bases all over the world and subsonic-to-supersonic cruise missiles ready to deliver 1500kg of horror on very short notice. We have 20 B-2 bombers that can go over 6000 nautical miles at just under Mach 1 carrying almost 50,000 kg at a time. Back of the envelope calculation: Bahrain Navy Base to Kabul, Afghanistan: 2000 km, or about 2 hours away on a B-2. One end of Afghanistan to the other is about 1200km. Oh, and we have had patrols flying the country end-to-end all the time for 10 years.

The whole point: Why on Earth do we need to be able to launch something from the Continental US to anywhere in the world within an hour? What does this get us that we don't already have already, or can't develop by modifying other experimental designs? Is there anyone with some sway over the Pentagon who is both skeptical and influential?

We need to cut the crap.

What marginal security to the American public does, say, $685 billion in military spending buy? How does that stack up to our cold war high of about $350 billion in today's dollars?

How about a modest cut of $100 billion a year from defense, like what's already been suggested and vetted? Imagine all the other things that $100 billion per year could buy.

How does our military budget compare to the $4 billion in international aid we spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010? Or the roughly $20 billion in aid worldwide? Or domestic education, where our federal investment totals about $70 billion a year? Or 1/8 of the roughly $800 billion in debt payments we'll owe annually in ten years?

Who's running this show anyway?

The Recession: A Different Way Out

Economies and ecosystems have a lot in common. Within certain bounds, both are self-correcting of their excesses and deficiencies, but there is a limit. After all, if all the mosquitoes disappeared from the jungle tomorrow, what would the frogs and spiders eat? The answer is that they wouldn’t, same as if all the home equity that was people’s cashflow disappeared.  

Why should a badly damaged economy spiral into control, and but never out of control? Is it not possible that past a certain threshold, we’re all toast? From what I read, these were common musings in the 1930s. One thing we learned then is that in the ecology of the economy, there are three big players. Buyers, sellers, and the government. If one is ill, then another can pick up the slack until they get better. The problem is that of the three moving parts of an economy, the sellers have been left out of this obligation. Why is it always up to consumers or the government to fix things?

By now everyone agrees that we’re not in your father’s recession. It’s more like your grandfather’s, or maybe your great-grandfather’s. Even with today’s competing political realities, nobody denies that there aren’t enough jobs, and therefore, not enough people with paychecks clamoring to buy what the world sells. As far as that goes, we are all Keynesians now. Where we differ is in the policy solutions to how to create demand.

Theory A: The government gives the sellers of things more money and fewer rules on how they spend it, and this will make buyers buy things.  The implication here is that sellers of things are waiting for their tax rates to come down before hiring a couple million Americans to make something that nobody is buying.

Theory B: The sellers of things have cash, and should be taxed by the government to create jobs for buyerswho will then be in a better position to buy things. If the politics are such that we can’t raise the money, then we should borrow it, because our credit is good, if nothing else, and in the long run we’re all dead anyway.  

There has to be another way of looking at things.

I know, I know, Theories A and B are highly reductive policy proposals generated out of competing moralities, global context, class struggles, and constituent groups, but that’s not the point here. The point is that both theories want to get more cash flowing through the system, by monkeying with the ecology between government, buyers and sellers. But the bigger point is that today there is no demand, and thus no reason to sell stuff.

But there is still cash, lots of it in fact. Companies have been sitting on cash reserves for years, waiting for a perfect time to make profitable investments. The problem is if everybody waits, then that perfect time never arrives. With a clear lack of demand, and no reason for any one company to take the risk of a big investment in this economy, who’s hiring? There’s a clear lack of will for more deficit spending; that someone isn’t the government, but that’s all right. Why does it have to be? To sum up:

• Because of past needs, personal, and political decisions, both everyday people and the government are in debt up to their eyeballs.
• Because people have lots of debt and not enough cash from their jobs, it’s a bad time to be selling things.
• Because it’s a bad time to be selling things, the sellers aren’t hiring.
• Because the sellers aren't hiring, it's a bad time to be selling things.
• The government doesn’t have or won’t spend the money to change this.
• The sellers of things have the money but don’t want to spend it, and nobody is making them.

Am I missing something?

Someone’s going to get coerced, and as the little guy, I’m tired of being the one. I’m tired of being told to buy stuff, even as I don’t get paid more. I’m tired of credit card offers trading personal debt for a decent wage. I’m tired of my spending being the basis of the economy when nobody wants to actually pay me.

Make other people spend their money for a change. The government’s spent all of theirs to the point of huge debt. Consumers have spent all of theirs to the point of huge debt. Only one group is left with any money—the sellers of things. Why bother with exhausted governments and consumers when this crucial piece of the puzzle is sitting pretty?

How about leveraging a little government cash for a whole lot of private infrastructure spending (aka the Infrastructure Bank bill)? Why not insist that cash reserves be spent on certain activities that are highly conducive to wage growth? How about making taxing reserves beyond a certain point, supplying small business insurance, or even having a global summit of the Fortune 500 companies and come up with some sort of pact?

In the end, I don’t really know what to do. I leave it to the policy wonks to find a way to induce companies to spend, but ultimately it will take a new way of thinking about the roles of each of the creatures in our economic ecosystem. I don't care who gets the credit, but something has to change.

A Political Episode of 24

Hey Democrats: Relax. The clock was ticking. A nuclear default drew ever closer and you were caught in the middle of a zero-sum economic hijacking by zealots. But you came out with a trillion dollars in defense cuts, no cuts to the social programs you like, and tax increases with decent political cover; either out of the debt commission, or the expiration of Bush’s before this president’s term expires. Taking a principled stand at the eleventh hour would have been the equivalent of taking down the airplane you’re on so the terrorists don’t hit the White House. People might call you a hero, but you’d be dead. Instead, the plane landed. To be glib, a few hapless passengers were killed, but this terrorist cell was neutralized. It’s ugly. Nobody is happy. There will be grief and lots of coulda-shoulda-woulda vacillation, but disaster was averted. Take a week off and prepare for the next episode.

Besides, “winning” in this situation would have meant a Democratic president with an underserved reputation as a spendthrift having successfully lobbied for tax increases. A tax increase is not a winning argument. Balancing the budget is. Changing the subject to jobs is. Standing up for some principles is. Even during the hostage situation, insurgents layed in wait, ready to label this president as a money-wasting, tax-increasing, arugula-loving commie. A rhetorical timebomb ticked away under Washington, muffled by the din in the Capitol. That bomb is now (somewhat) defused. We all wanted to win, but win what exactly? I'm happy with the damage averted. It's our pride that was wounded. 

Politics aside, the policy isn’t that bad. Look at what’s happened when other countries faced this predicament. Austerity panics such as this often lead to far more dramatic policy, and a long line of wreckage from Latin America to Japan. The $22 billion that is slated for removal from the FY ’12 budget is likely to have less than a 0.15 percent negative impact on America’s GDP. Stimulus it isn’t. Neither is it the sort of austerity that Britain’s tax increases and spending cuts now impose on its citizens in the name of thrift.   

You may think that the politics of giving into the terrorists’ demands were bad. Imagine if that ticking bomb hadn’t been defused. Imagine the radioactive mess of a Democratic tax increase on top of all the other poor economic news. I can live with the substance. I only wish they’d come out swinging harder in tone and rhetoric. There are other zealots ready for the next salvo, now emboldened by having had their demands met, at least in public perception. Above the policy details, people want to know that their leaders are ready to stand up for them. I don’t get a good feeling out of this deal, but I don’t see how I would have if tax increases were a part of it. And feelings matter. It’s the message that failed.

Hey Democrats: Learn from this. Consider the root causes of this terrorism. Here, like there, we should look at ourselves. Sometimes I get the feeling that Democrats gaze into our heartland like naïve Marines who see only wild-eyed illiterate Taliban “bad guys,” rather than a troubled mass of humanity who are mostly trying to get by without the use of Kalashnikovs and RPGs; an overstretched, shell-shocked, and frustrated people who depend on the news and views of whoever chooses to lead them. All they need to do is learn the language and bring relief, but somehow this is lost on them.

The 2010 election cycle represented a true failure of imagination on the part of the Left, a real squandered opportunity. Instead of writing the Tea Party off as dumb rednecks, they could have seen them as voters, as families struggling to get by like everyone else. It’s not the GREs or the New York Times Crossword. It’s politics. More important, it’s people. Sure, many of them would never go along with a progressive view, but I am positive that some would if it actually was presented to them in plain language. Instead, progressives look like a highly sophisticated foreign force that is hell-bent on destroying people’s way of life. Progressives should sit down with the leaders of our heartland. They should shut up, listen, nod respectfully, and drink the tea when it’s served. Then they should make their offer.

It's been a decade of chaos for America, and what is the progressive position? I sure as hell know the conservative one-- it's shouted five times daily from every minaret in town. But what is its alternative? Like the unending wars we fight beyond our borders, we also pay a high price for domestic myopia. $2.1 trillion to be precise.