A Diversionary Crisis, Part Two

I remember Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," a former Republican congressman, saying that during George W. Bush's term in office, Republicans "spent money like drunken sailors." I'm sure he took some heat for that comment from both Republicans and drunken sailors. I like Joe Scarborough, and while I don't always agree with him, I respect him. Unlike some Republicans, he doesn't suffer from the "George W. who?" question, as some GOP members do, in an effort to distance themselves from the Bush presidency, and from the responsibility for some, not all, of the problems we are now facing. Democrats also have their fingers in part of the run up to the collapse in 2008, just not quite as much.

Shortly after Barack Obama took office, Republican members of Congress, much diminished in numbers by the results of the previous two elections, were able, with the help of President Obama, to turn one of their negatives, "debt," into one of their selling points. The President's push for health care, while admirable, but also inadequate in several ways, gave Republicans a chance for a comeback,** and they took the ball and ran with it. The President's poll numbers tumbled; likewise for Democrats in Congress. The GOP began to emphasize "debt," and while the Congressional Budget Office* said the new health care law would not add debt, but even possibly reduce government debt, the public remained skeptical. After being pilloried for "spending like drunken sailors," Republicans decided to regain the issue of fighting government debt. The "Tea Party" movement, largely centered in the GOP, held rallies around the country with supporters waving tea bags and carrying signs denouncing Obama and Democrats as spendthrifts, as well as some...ah... other names. The Republicans made headway in turning the debt issue back in their favor, and some Americans seemed to suffer from collective amnesia about the "Republicans spending like drunken sailors." Incredibly the Republicans were able to sort of hit the "reset" button, and the tremendous government debt was laid at the feet of President Obama, in spite of the previous eight years of Republican rule, with two wars unpaid for, homeland security unpaid for, tax cuts (largely favoring the very rich) unpaid for, and a Medicare prescription drug benefit unpaid for. Lost in all of this, both Obama's health care reform and the GOP's debt targeting, was the economy and JOBS! I don't know of a reputable economist who doesn't essentially say, "You can't cut the debt big time, until people have jobs and the economy is back on firmer footing." With unemployment hovering around 9% for quite some time, jobless people collect benefits, and they are not paying taxes. It's a double whammy!

* Interestingly, one of the things Republicans "claimed" they didn't like in the Democrats' health care reform, the insurance exchange, they now champion in Paul Ryan's Medicare proposal. On the other hand, Democrats liked the idea when they proposed it, but now scoff at Ryan's use of it. You don't think.....nah....politics has something to do with this, do you? Nah, couldn't be.

** The Congressional Budget Office, also known by its initials "CBO," is a non-partisan office that crunches and analyses numbers for Congress.

WORD HISTORY:
Control-This is another compound word, so I will deal each part separately. "Cont" traces back to Indo European "kom/ghem," which had the idea of "beside, near, together." This then gave Indo European "kom-tr(a)," with the notion of "together" being expanded to mean, "opposite;" that is, if you and I are standing together, we are opposite of one another. This gave Latin "contra," but now more with the meaning "opposite one another, as in opponents; against, a counter to something else," as in, "The defense "countered" the other team's quarterback by rushing him." The "rol" part traces back to Indo European "ret(h)," which meant "run, roll." A variant form, "rot-a," with a long "o" sound, gave Latin "rota," with the meaning "wheel." This then gave Latin "rotula" and then "rotulus," meaning "small wheel." "Contra" and "rotulus" were then combined into "contrarotulus," which was a small wheel used to check one account against another in times long ago, as it had duplicate account information on it to "counter, check, verify" the other set of information by simply rotating the wheel (yes, "rotate" is from "rota"), rather than having to look back and forth over other methods of record keeping, like parchment. Old French inherited a form of the word from Latin as "contrerole." The Norman dialect of French took the term as "contreroller" to England where it was borrowed into English in the late 1200s or early 1300s as "conterolle," and a verb form "controllen," meaning "to validate, to verify, to check for authenticity, to regulate." The development of the further meaning "have power over" is easy to understand. German too borrowed the word, as "kontrollieren," with essentially the same meaning, but perhaps with more emphasis on the "to check, to evaluate," meaning. German also has a form of "rota," which is "Rad," which means "wheel," and some sources say it came from a Germanic source tracing back to Indo European, others say it was borrowed form Latin, and still others leave the ultimate origin as unknown. I'm inclined to believe German got the word from Latin, as it is not common in the other Germanic languages, including English, even more especially, Old English, a time when the vocabularies of the various Germanic dialects were much closer.

Paying The Piper-Part Three-Drowning In Debt

It's obvious the economy is not growing fast enough to bring down unemployment significantly. In this modern age where we expect things to happen in seconds, if not fractions of a second, by the click of our "mouse," the slowly recovering economy has us exasperated. For regular readers, remember, I told you, we didn't get into this mess quickly and we won't get out of it quickly. No question about it, the federal deficit would improve a great deal if more people were working, but we now face a situation predicted to some extent by the "true" conservatives of times past, as opposed to the "phony" conservatives of more recent decades, who used one side of their mouths to spout conservative slogans to get votes, and the other side of their mouths to vote "YES," or at least to offer support, for a lot of spending with no way to pay for it. Saying "read my lips...no new taxes" may sound good in an election campaign, but it is irresponsible to govern that way, and the man who uttered those famous words, George Bush, Senior, had the courage to abandon nonsense when he heard it, even though he was the man who said them.* The courage of his convictions (he raised taxes) cost him a second term, but he deserves credit for his policy and it helped the country during the 1990s, by eventually helping to balance the federal budget (along with Clinton policy and the Republican Congress).**

Anyway, have we learned anything from our near death experience of the last few years? (I'd better be careful saying that, since we've come out of the coma, but we're still in intensive care.) Do we want to hit the "RESET" button and try to build an economy based on real production and things that really create national wealth, or do we want to keep trying to make the fast buck, live for today, and say "the hell with tomorrow?" If we hit the button, it won't be easy, and it certainly won't be painless, but at present, I don't see how we can continue as we have for decades.

The politicians of both political parties helped create this mess, and I'm sure they really didn't mean for things to turn out this way, and I really do mean that, even for the ones I disagree with so much. Not only did they use the national credit card to run up government debt (and keep themselves in office, and for you "conservatives," that includes Reagan!), they often encouraged us to pull out our own plastic and buy anything and everything our little hearts wanted; after all, this was America, and we could have the things people in other lands couldn't afford. It turns out, we couldn't afford many of them either. We came to believe that we needed every new little gadget that came out or every new cable channel for our home entertainment. While we partied on and splurged on such things, the rest of the world wasn't standing still, or sitting still watching cable TV (ah, excuse me while I change channels....okay, I'm back). The very heart of the country, our industrial base, was eroding, and with the help of the "free marketers" and "free traders," who knows how many jobs went overseas? And they weren't only manufacturing jobs that went elsewhere, but even service jobs. Have you tried calling your internet service provider for help with a problem? If so, chances are you reached a customer service person overseas, not in America.

As to our collective (all of us put together) private debts (mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, etc), not government debt, which is a separate issue, in the post World War Two era we owed about 25% of our total annual income (again, collectively, that is). The last figures I saw, which were for 2007, showed that we now collectively owe nearly 150% of our annual income. Put simply, that means, on a personal basis, if you make a hundred bucks, you owe a hundred and fifty bucks in debt. Now, no question, many loans are spread out over many years, but it just shows how much we've put on the cuff. Credit has gotten into our national psyche and it's not good. Just credit card debt alone is staggering, with ( 2007 numbers) almost every household owing between $10,500 and $11,000 (total credit card debt divided by total households).

There seems to be a good sign, however, as Americans have lessened credit card use in the last couple of years (although I'm sure some of that is also due to the state of the economy) and Americans are paying down debt, and actually trying to save some money.** This will undoubtedly keep the economy on the slow side, and like drug addicts, we are going to have to be weaned off of private credit to pump up the economy, as that's what's been keeping us going for several decades now, CREDIT, both private and government.**** (A Word History is below the notes)

*During the fight for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, George Bush called Ronald Reagan's economic proposals "voodoo economics," saying further that if Reagan were elected and his plans put into effect, that we'd be in "deep voodoo!"

** I don't want to laud any of these people too much (Bush, Sr., Clinton or Republicans), because they turned around and did a lot of economic damage to the country in other ways. (See other articles in this series, "Paying The Piper")

*** Statistics can be deceiving at times, and while we're told that Americans are saving more, I have a suspicion that much of that number is from the wealthiest Americans, not Elmer and Louise down the street, although I'm sure some average Americans are saving too, but so many are just getting by, if that.

**** We're undoubtedly going to have to run government deficits for quite some time, and again, both parties are essentially advocating this, but in different ways. The Democrats have wanted to stimulate the economy by a mixture of tax cuts and "spending" on various projects (too spread out in time, in my opinion), and Republicans want tax cuts. Republicans have bashed the current Dems for deficits, as if tax cuts don't cause deficits; they do, and conveniently forgetting their own budgetary irresponsibility prior to Obama's election.

WORD HISTORY:
Debt-This word goes back to the Indo European root "ghabh/ghebh," which meant "give or receive." One of Old Latin's offshoots (after a fairly complicated process that I won't get into) was the noun "debitum," which meant "that which is owed," which then was passed on to Old French (a Latin-based language) as "dete," and later "dette." English got the word from French as "dette" in the 1200s, but under the influence of the Latin spelling, with a "b," of related words, such as "debit," gradually changed the spelling, although the "b" is silent.