Over the last few weeks I've been hearing nothing but pessimism everywhere.
Pessimism from the left. Pessimism from the right. Pessimism from inside the Beltway and from the grassroots.
It's unwarranted. It really is time to buy America, not sell.
Fact is the “problems” we think we have aren't problems at all.
Take the deficit. What drives it? The biggest drivers are the Bush tax cuts and the fact we have yet to pay for the wars of the last decade. So end the Bush tax cuts and charge a “war surtax” on oil of, say, $10/barrel until the wars are paid for.
You have just cut the debt in half.
Plus, the oil tax provides a huge incentive for renewable energy, especially the kind you get from efficiency. You just created jobs in insulation, you created a bigger market for higher-mileage cars, and you put a premium on houses that are close to jobs. That's growth, in all the sectors where we most need growth.
Instead, Washington offers us the option of throwing momma from the train or bankruptcy. It's a false choice. Medicare is much cheaper than any private health care. If you do want to raise the retirement age, for any reason, let those forced to work buy into Medicare, at cost. They'll save money, a lot of it, and maybe we'll get the message that mission-driven health care really is the cheaper kind.
Want to know why companies aren't hiring? It's because they're sitting on trillions of dollars in cash. Why are they sitting on the cash? Because they can. So how about a little inflation, so cash costs money to hold? Or just tax corporate cash, and fix the tax code so past profits are repatriated.
As inflation rises, by the way, the debt also gets cheaper. The effective price of the debt goes down. Inflate too much and interest rates will make it unsustainable, but a little inflation is a good thing.
These are really easy, straightforward things a sane government could do. The problem is not a big deal.
What is a big deal is the market price of energy. Each time we start to grow, oil prices rise, and then we stop growing. We do need to break that link. Renewable energy of all sorts will break it, in time, but we have a choice, again, between making the time longer, making it shorter, or just letting nature take its course.
If we were smart we would make it shorter. We would look at what high-cost economic rivals like Germany are doing on energy and see what we can copy there. Easy. More white Americans have German ancestry than any other kind. You have to figure some of that vaunted American ingenuity came from there.
The biggest problem Americans have right now is our attitude. We're so busy tearing at each others' throat that we're not doing anything about our real problems.
And who does that benefit? Just the people who are causing our problems, the oil barons and the coal barons and any other cavemen, here and abroad, who has reserves in the ground and want those reserves to continually gain in value without their having to do anything.
The problem isn't on our right, and it isn't on our left. It's right in front of us. It's on that gas pump, it's in that utility bill, it's in the lazy habits that keep us paying more than we need out of sheer laziness. Those are the chains holding us down.
Tear them off. It's amazing how good you'll feel afterward.
