I feel guilty in not upholding my turf here at EconoSpeak; I should be issuing thunderbolts about the debt ceiling negotiations, the sagging economy, the slo-mo Eurozone meltdown, and similar perils. But I can’t seem to do it. The whole bloody mess is just too stupid.
The US economy is clearly floundering, and elementary macroeconomics says we need fiscal stimulus, yet both Obama and the Republicans are debating how to strangle the public sector in order to raise a debt limit that makes no sense in the first place. Eurozone politicians crow over their success in imposing yet another austerity-cum-bailout package on Greece, one that no independent economic observer, much less the financial markets, have the slightest faith in. (As if rounding up the rating agencies and sending them to some Euro-Guantanamo will keep peripheral sovereign rates from marching ever upward.)
There are lots of interesting, complex issues in political economy. None of that matters now: the world is in the hands of politicians governed by expediency calculations whose time horizon can be measured in weeks. As far as I can tell, the gross illogic of their policies is simply beside the point.
It's not illogical. Economies are simply being run in the interest of the rentier class. We subscribed to that when we bailed them out.
ReplyDeleteYou Peter, and TMMblog are both correct in your observations. I but I believe tt is as it is because of the lack of FREE education; a lack of emphasis on shared responsibility in our FREE k12 system. I stopped my formal education at grade 11 and joined the US Navy because of a horrible home life. This should not be misunderstood. We were not poor. The idea of going to college made me want to puke. But there was never any economics or government courses in school and very little history built around what the "founders" were trying to do when they created this operation we call the United States. I refuse to accept the proposition that I was too immature to understand the concepts of civilization at that age. To put this off until we get to the bought and paid for universities is an invitation to the disaster we have. The voters, by and large, never attend college. Those that do will learn from people who are bought by the rentier class. Some will survive this rentier indoctrination and remain viable, but they are few in number. A majoritarian government cannot be expected to function properly when the majority of the voters are economically and historically ignorant.
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