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Mort Zuckerman on our “long misery.”
Six years ago, when the global financial crisis first broke, few realized how close we were to a catastrophic collapse of the world order we’d known for six decades. We escaped anarchy by the skin of our teeth. When the Great Recession exerted its grip, we knew we were in for some hard times. We had been through them before: good times, bad times, and then more good times. Yes, that’s how it would be.
But it hasn’t worked out that way at all. Where there was hope, there is now despair. Where there was conviction, there is now cynicism. Where there was community, there is now division. We don’t feel we are inaugurating a new beginning this month so much as enduring the continuation of what we might reasonably call The Long Misery. …
… Only 1 in 5 Americans is basically content with our government. No matter which party has the ascendancy, we are burdened by a dysfunctional government. For years we have spent like a big-government country but taxed like a small-government one; as the population ages, our entitlement programs, particularly pensions and healthcare, are gradually bankrupting us. As Harvard’s Joseph Nye once noted, the country “lacks the will, not the wallet.” Today, the problem of the “wallet” has become as pressing as willpower. Why do we continue to tolerate budgets that underestimate spending while overestimating revenue?
Thus it is that a country long celebrated for optimism amid adversity is having trouble finding the spirit that saw it through past times that were, in fact, much more threatening. The broad sense of unease is due to the fact that we have so mismanaged our finances we have become an “enfeebled” international player. As Henry Kissinger puts it, “The United States cannot afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a half … only self-delusion can keep us from admitting our decline to ourselves.”
The Long Misery is marked by a cultural and an economic crisis. Here’s one symptom: In the 1990s, California spent twice as much on its universities as on its prisons. Today it spends almost twice as much on prisons as on its universities. We face a significant decline in family cohesion, with about one third of American children being raised by a single parent, a condition that all too often has deleterious effects on their academic achievements, social skills, and character formation. We have many teachers who are unable to meet the challenge of educating our children to the appropriate level. One third of all of our doctoral students are foreigners, yet remarkably, once they earn their advanced degrees we escort them to the border to go and join our biggest competitors. We ignore the benefits of immigrant talent and the experience of Silicon Valley, where over half the science and engineering workforce is foreign-born and where 1 in 4 engineering and technology companies—firms that have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs—have at least one immigrant founder.
Relayed in Ping Fu’s new book Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds is a classic example of how we have got our priorities wrong. In the ’80s, when Ping arrived as a young refugee from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she had no money and only three words of English. She worked her way through college, eventually discovered a talent for creating computer software, and cofounded Geomagic, maker of an innovative 3-D system for designing products. Today we lose people like Ping every day. …
Jennifer Rubin noticed the president is clueless about how to create growth. This from a press question of Jay Carney.
… But it was worse than that really. There was also this exchange:
Q Could it have been possible to craft a recovery that would have benefited the middle class more than the investors, more than Wall Street?
MR. CARNEY: I’m not an economist, Wendell, and what I can tell you is that having been there — working then for the Vice President — the efforts to move forward on the Recovery Act as it was, which included, in part because of insistence by Republicans, a third of the Recovery Act — a much unnoted fact — tax cuts, for example — and some of the other actions the President took in order to try to gain bipartisan support. I guess the point I’m saying is the idea that we would have somehow garnered more support in Congress for something different is a misreading of history.
The answer is nearly unintelligible, but I think the president’s flack is saying that because we didn’t get Son of Stimulus, the middle class is falling further behind. But the stimulus really didn’t create the jobs it was supposed to, and Son of Stimulus (e.g. hiring 100,000 teachers) wasn’t really going to do much of anything. As for the president’s decision to “cut” taxes, I must have missed his insistence on extending the payroll tax break this year. And no, preventing the middle class from getting a tax hike this year is not a tax cut. So what the heck is he talking about?
It is a little frightful, to be honest, how baffled the White House is when it comes to private job creation, investment and growth. Whatever the problem, Obama’s answer is always spend and tax more. But the answer to job growth is not more government spending and tax hikes. So naturally, they are stumped over there. …
The president was interviewed by The New Republic and from that, Nile Gardiner learned we’re going to more of the same.
… There is nothing in this interview that suggests the president is in any way serious about reining in federal spending, introducing entitlement reform, or rolling back the frontiers of the government. For a country with more than $16 trillion of debt, this is a catastrophic approach. It is very clear from this interview that President Obama sees his re-election as a mandate to continue the very policies that will eventually bankrupt the country unless they are reversed, regardless of huge opposition on Capitol Hill. It chimes closely with the president’s second inaugural address last week, which offered absolutely no olive branches to the nearly 61 million Americans who voted for his opponent in November.
Significantly, a major Gallup poll released on Inauguration Day showed that most Americans don’t feel positive about the direction their country is taking:
U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term at a time when Americans are as negative about the state of the country and its prospects going forward as they have been in more than three decades. Fewer than four in 10 Americans (39%) rate the current status of the U.S. at the positive end of a zero to 10 scale. This is about the same as in 2010, but it is fewer than have said so at any point since 1979.
… The challenges President Obama faces as he begins his second term in office are evident from the fact that less than four in 10 Americans rate the nation’s current situation on the positive end of a zero to 10 scale and that slightly less than half project that the state of the nation will be positive in five years. Both of these assessments are among the more negative Gallup has measured since the Eisenhower administration. The bright side for the Obama administration is that the current low assessments leave much room for improvement.
The Gallup poll should be a wake-up call for the White House. For this is a presidency that badly needs a dose of humility, and a fundamental reassessment of its failing policies. Barack Obama’s imperial tone is badly out of tune with the pessimistic mood of the country, and does not augur well for the next four years. As the latest RealClear Politics polling average shows, just 36 percent of Americans believe the country is moving in the right direction, while 56 percent think it is on the wrong track. This is hardly a vote of confidence in the direction the president is taking, one that points to continuing economic decline, a growing culture of dependency, and the relentless rise of big government.
David Harsanyi writes on the bailouts that never end.
What’s worse? The existence of a government “pay czar” who dictates the salary of private-sector citizens or the corporate welfare queens who complain about having to deal with a “pay czar” after being rescued with taxpayer funds?
Fortunately, we don’t have to choose.
As it turns out, executives at companies that took the biggest bailouts — A.I.G., GM. and Ally Financial Inc. — had little to worry about as many of them enjoyed “excessive” compensation according to a report by the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Executives “continue to rake in Treasury-approved multimillion-dollar pay packages that often exceed guidelines,” was what Special Inspector General Christy Romero’s office found.
This, even though Treasury officials were monitoring executive pay and had the authority to limit those packages if they felt like it. This, even though, President Obama made a huge populist stink over A.I.G. bonuses in the past:
I want to comment on the news about executive bonuses at A.I.G. This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed. Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?
It always seemed that the president’s sensibilities were more hurt by the idea of big bonuses rather than the idea of taxpayer-funded big bonuses. After all, these pay scales never made sense. First, some of us have a philosophical problem with allowing government to interfere with the private sector every time Washington scares us with tales of doom.
But besides that, though the president knows a thing or two about credit downgrades and liquidity crises, he’s in no position to understand who at A.I.G. or G.M. deserves a bonus or why. …
Turning our attention to the SuperBowl, Jeff Schultz from AJC says one person is persona non grata in New Orleans.
If Atlanta is the city too busy to hate, New Orleans must be the sparks-still-flying-off-the-head city too obsessed to forget.
Seriously, if you were Roger Goodell this week, would you trust anything that comes out of the restaurant’s kitchen? Would something in the gumbo cause you to look sideways? Are you sure that’s crawfish?
“If he’s driving down the street, he better be in one of those Pope-mobiles,” said Laura Bridson, chief beerkeeper at Coop’s Place on Decatur St. “We’re kind of a grudge-holding town.”
New Orleans is a city built on the hospitality industry. That remains the case for almost everybody this week except for the commissioner of the NFL, whose picture can be found plastered on the doors and windows outside of several restaurants and watering holes – like “Wanted” posters.
“Do not serve this man,” the poster reads. …