If I were asked to give the main reason behind America’s current stagnation (where by current I mean the last few decades), I would cite this attitude. We are all becoming reform freeloaders. We call for change, but we want that change to be from others. While this is true in the tax reform discussion or the “balanced budget” discussion as a whole, this attitude also permeates every …
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Robert Anson Heinlein via Rules for My Unborn Son…
Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren’t “wrong”, they’re just limited. The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and “report both sides” reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are …
This is an excellent piece from Paul Krugman that essentially states the obvious:
This isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters.
He rightfully points out that GDP growth means nothing at this point. Whether GDP is at +2% or -2% does not matter because our unemployment numbers are not coming down. We need jobs, not “productivity.”
I’d like to add that many of his proposed ideas are (obviously) smart, but they are all short-term strategies. We can toy with interest rates and change perceptions on inflation, but at the …
