Adam Nagourney's political memo in the NY Times today notes that "Focus on Economy Poses Problems for Candidates." This is worth thinking about, both for what it says and what it doesn't say about the difficulties in any straight talk about the economy and taxes in the American election cycle. No wonder politicians seem to fail us in thinking long-term--it is because we Americans generally have no patience with any answer other than the one we think we want to hear, and because we denigrate long-term thinking in exchange for appealing sound bites. And that usually means we only accept political talk about tax cuts, even if we didn't think we needed a tax cut before the political talk started.
Here's what Nagourney noted. McCain faces problems because he has admitted that he doesn't know much about economics and because he seems to be adopting Bush policies wholesale--at the least on the question of tax cuts and trade policy. Obama faces problems because his "more ambitious responses ... would be paid for in part by tax increases, always a risky proposition." (emphasis added).
One thing is clear--the US economy is not sailing along on a great day, but facing rough seas. That is especially true for the vast majority of ordinary Americans who earn a salary or an hourly wage, have very little in terms of capital assets other than their homes, and have seen almost no gains in wages over the last 8 years while watching home values plummet. There are many factors at work--globalization, financial speculation (especially by the big financial institutions), Big Oil's effectiveness in stifling prudent moves to diversify our energy use in order to magnify Big Oil's profits (and that includes the diversion of trying to have people believe that offshore drilling will in any way relieve their pain at the gas pump, which it won't--high gas prices are here to stay, because many countries other than us have insatiable demands and we simply don't have enough in our own borders to be self sufficient), and many other factors.
But what does it mean when it is considered a "political problem", rather than a candidate weakness, that a presidential candidate is ignorant about the economy. It seems we just label away the problem by considering it something that has to be dealt with through attacks and ads rather than talking about the substantive issues. Or if we similarly treat a candidate's frankness as folly because it will lose "working class voters", when saying that programs that a vast majority of Americans support, such as decent health care for all, will cost money and must be paid for in some way other than continued borrowing from China and other foreign powers.
It would be nice if one result of this election cycle is a more honest discussion of candidate platforms, particularly on the issues of tax and spending policies. The media should do their homework more thoroughly and be prepared to ask in-depth questions about taxes--both tax cuts and tax increases, and the tradeoffs between tax cuts and losses of federal revenues. They need to ask long-term questions, and they need to ask pointed questions. Remember how Bush stood on a platform with a four-person family and said that the "average tax cut" under the 2001 bill would be about $1800? The media let that go, instead of pointing out the obvious--that "averages" of multibillionaires and those making $7000 a year are meaningless. This time around, the media needs to do a better job, so that politicians who do want to think about long-term solutions to various problems can actually talk in those terms without having their feet knocked out from under them.
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