First off, a note. I probably should not have begun this after taking an Ambien this evening. I desperately need a good night’s sleep tonight, but that means this post will probably wander all over the place. Perhaps, I’ll find out if anyone besides me even reads any of my rantings. Oh, well. Onward. Now, don’t get me wrong. The folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the US did something amazing. I think those documents hold up very well more than 230 years later. A friend pointed me at a post the other day that mentioned (correctly) that the right to free speech isn’t granted by the 1st amendment, it is protected by it. I’ll agree to a point (but then my next post will include a pointer to a post about rights and John Calvin who would argue there are no rights), but then that very same post seemed to have problems with the fact that some of us believe that there are other rights that deserve protection. So, let me get right to the point of this post. While they were courageous and perhaps ahead of their time, the men who founded this country were not perfect, they were not saints, and they were not gods. They made mistakes. Remember, to them “all men are created equal” meant all white males who owned land were created equal. Women? Nope. Farmhands? Nope. People of color? Are you insane? Remember, two of our first three Presidents owned slaves and one of them had children by at least one of his slaves (and I still think he was a pretty amazing guy). They were right to make it difficult to change the Constitution. It isn’t something that should be done lightly, but the document isn’t sacred though some would have you believe it is. It took a civil war before men of color were “officially” treated as men and another 100+ years after that before practice even started to match the words on paper (and, in many ways, I think we’re still not there). Women haven’t even had the right to vote for 90 years yet, let alone equal treatment under the law. Is there a “right to privacy” (whatever that means)? Does it even make sense to say something like that in 1776? The founders had no conception of a world of electronic surveillance and warrantless eavesdropping. They couldn’t have been expected to protect a right that was probably obvious to them against a future they couldn’t foresee. That’s in part why the 9th amendment reserves those rights not specifically enumerated “to the people.” In fact, here are the exact words of the 9th amendment. “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Now, there is no question that after seeing the abuses of the government in England, the founders intended the federal government to be fairly weak. Over the years, the general consensus has drifted a little from that original mindset (though there are clearly those out there who want a weak federal government), but many of us believe that there are certain functions best served by government. Going back 100 years, there have been efforts to include healthcare as one of those rights that ought to be protected. Heck, Richard Nixon who sat on some of McCarthy’s hearings, so could hardly be called soft on communism proposed extending Medicare to every citizen in 1974. Unfortunately, for those of us who are concerned about possibly losing our health insurance (or our homes after a loss of health insurance), the Democrats in Congress thought they could get an even better deal in 1976 when surely a Democrat would be elected President. They didn’t seize what was probably the best opportunity presented to date. They were arrogant. If it wasn’t already obvious, I think ultimately, “single payer” is the way to fix healthcare as most other industrialized countries have already concluded, but even the watered down “public option” now seems to not be included in what will come to the Senate floor for debate next week. By the way, in the comments to a blog post that I’ll link to in my next post, it was pointed out that the current healthcare debate is really mostly/entirely about the middle class and the poor. The rich will always be able to afford whatever healthcare they want, why isn’t anyone really talking about that? There are folks who are all up in arms about the size (in $$) of the debt that would be incurred by the proposals to jumpstart the economy and take care of health care, but Nobel Laureate economists point out that it isn’t actual dollar amounts that matter. What matters is what is it as a percentage of GDP (by the way, did you know that the stimulus implemented by the Chinese government was 25% of GDP? the equivalent by the US government would have been in the vicinity of $2 trillion). And there, we’re actually in relatively moderate territory. Yes, by the time all the stimulus and bailouts and getting health care right are done, the deficit could be around 50% of GDP. That sounds large until you consider that it was 120% of GDP at the end of World War II. Many industrialized nations (primarily in Europe) have successfully exited periods where there debt loads were in the 80-90% range. To get out of the economic melt down that started almost exactly 12 months, the federal government became the spender of last resort. Individuals were frightened so they started burying money under the mattress metaphorically (paying down credit card bills and getting by with less). Well, if the consumers aren’t buying, if demand dries up, then the supply side of the equation has to slow down. You can’t build and build and build if there is no one there to buy. So, you cut back production, you lay off some workers, which frightens the consumers even more so they start hoarding. When the demand side of the equation goes to zero, the spender of last resort has to come in to prevent entire industries and segments of society from going back to trying to farm their front yards. The only entity with the ability to do that (in part, because they are allowed to have unbalanced budgets — a federal balanced budget amendment would have caused the events of this past year to devolve into a second great depression –) is the federal government which must come in and spend stimulus money (that it doesn’t have) to buy some of the goods just sitting around rotting and put people to work (some in almost “make work” jobs), but get them working and earning an income again. It is what FDR seemed to have understood and Keynes articulated that led to the early programs of the New Deal. Alas, just as things were starting to pick up steam but had not yet reached self-sustainability, the other party started whining about the debt and FDR gave in and started to cut back. Many of us who have studied it believe the Great Depression could have ended in 1936 or 1937 at the latest, had FDR not given in and started cutting back for fear of the size of the deficits. The result, the improvement slowed and drifted, not quite breaking out of the depression, not really falling further back in. Conveniently (in economic terms if not in terms of world peace), World War II came along less than 3 years later and again we have the government push to build things beyond all proportion and to keep that up from 1941 – 1945 (or 1946). At which point, it was possible to slow down a bit, but we now had so many skilled workers who had brought home a decent wage and they wanted to have a little fun with that. And so, with the economic growth that came out of WWII (including new markets to sell to after we rebuilt them) that incredible 120% of GDP debt that we had in 1945 quickly shrunk as the economy grew and diversified and through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s even with oil shocks and “stagflation” the debt as a percentage of GDP got small. Ah, well, I really need sleep now. Sorry for rambling. Good night.
