Asking Congress To Walk And Chew Gum At The Same Time

I'm still thinking about the aftermath to Paul Krugman's recent appearance on MORNING JOE.  After he left the set, Joe spent the rest of the day and a good deal of time on subsequent days misrepresenting what Krugman said and then excoriating him for it.  Joe ranted and raved that Krugman didn't think we should worry about the deficit right now.  Instead, we should infuse the economy with more government money in order to create more jobs.

Actually, Krugman said a lot more than that, but Joe either didn't hear him, or conveniently didn't mention Krugman's main point because it was inconvenient to the conservative argument.  What Krugman really said was that in the best of all possible worlds we should be able to create jobs and by doing so help alleviate a good portion of our deficit problem.  Unfortunately, Krugman pointed out, we don't live in the best of all possible worlds.  Our Congress as it currently exists doesn't have the will, the intelligence, the creativity, or the courage to do those two things at the same time, and since they don't, we need to tackle job growth right now and save the deficit stuff till later when employment is better.

How do you argue with that.  Joe and all his conservative friends are convinced that if we cut away at the budget and drive down the deficit, jobs and a booming economy will follow.  The problem with that thinking is that it has never worked before.  NEVER.  We had a preview of what massive cuts will do to the economy last month.  Defense spending was cut something like 22% in the last run-up to the debt cap brouhaha and the result was an economy that shrunk during the last quarter.  The next quarter--this quarter--will be effected by the end of payroll tax holidays and I'll bet you a lot that the economy will suffer again.

Joe always talks about how it is the President's responsibility to deal with these people in Congress just like Clinton and Reagan and Bush I and Bush II(kinda) did.  But today even Joe came close to admitting that NO ONE, not even his hopelessly romantic image of Reagan, could deal with the likes of Lindsay Graham, John McCain, and House Tea Partiers.

So here's the thing.  Obama will have to do what all second term presidents do and go after things a little at a time.  If he puts his name on anything big, Republicans will block just on principle.  There ain't gonna be any grand bargains.

Since nothing good is going to happen around here for the foreseeable future, I think I'll dream a little.  Here is a partial list of the things I think our country would be smart to do if we just had the political will to do them.

*The US has the worst power grid in the developed world.  Witness the embarrassing power outage at the Super Bowl.  Our internet connections are slower and more tenuous.  Conservatives point to Germany as being the shining light of reason in the European Union.  One of the reasons Germany is doing better than its sister and brother nations is that it invested the necessary capital to create a power grid that is the envy of the rest of the world.  Business people tell me that business is all about reducing friction.  It seems to me that an investment in a decent power grid by the central government would reduce a lot of  friction and end up saving us money.  Do you think Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and company would be interested in spending that kind of dough?  Fat chance.

*The Hurricane Sandy bailout stands at around $60 billion and climbing.  Does anyone seriously believe that Sandy's assault on the east coast was an anomaly and will likely not happen again?  Please!  Most climate experts--you know, the ones who actually believe in empirical evidence--say we can expect Sandy sized storms every couple of years!  Years ago when Finland suffered from almost yearly disasters to its coast, they spent billions of dollars building sea walls around vulnerable areas.  Finland hasn't had a Sandy sized disaster since, thus saving money.  It seems to me that we have two choices.  Choice one is to fork over $60 billion every couple of years to rebuild the Jersey shore.  Choice two is to invest in some major infrastructure right now.  It will, just like the power grid proposal, create a whole shit load of jobs.  This seems like a no brainer to me, but if Obama suggested something specific like that, what would be the reaction of Fox News and the blogosphere?  They would laugh at the notion of Climate Change and be horrified at the thought of government spending on that level.  Under the expression "Penny Wise and Pound Foolish" in the dictionary of phrases, there should be a group picture of the Republican Caucus and anyone else who thinks our biggest problem is the deficit.

*Right now in this country to drive over or under 40% of our bridges is to put your life at risk.  That's how many bridges are listed as below code!  You could be like your conservative friends and laugh at those of us who worry about such things, but the scores of people on that main bridge in the Twin Cities weren't laughing when it collapsed a few years ago.  Which do you think would cost more money, making the necessary repairs on that  bridge before it collapsed, or paying for its complete reconstruction coupled with the economic cost of shutting down a major artery, plus the cost of settling all the law suits that surely followed?  Dwight Eisenhower's greatest legacy wasn't his generalship in the European Theater of Operations, it was his visionary insistence that we build an interstate highway system.   Isn't it obvious that the interstate highway system continues to pay dividends.  It was a costly, but wise investment.  How many jobs would a national campaign to repair our highway infrastructure create?  Do you think such a vision could be ramrodded through Congress today?

*Our mass transportation is a joke compared to the rest of the developed world.  How can conservatives obsess over American Exceptionalism at the same time they refuse to spend the money we need to remain exceptional.  We need high speed trains connecting our cities.  There is a train from DC to New York and all points in between.  It takes forever and costs as much as taking a plane.  That is crazy!  It seems to me that you should be able to climb onto a high speed train in DC and get off at NYC 90 minutes later.  The fact that we have no such facility is shameful.  Again, if we invested in a system of  high speed trains, wouldn't that create jobs and wouldn't it further grease the wheels of our economy.

I'm just an English teacher; I'm not an economist.  But it seems to me that these proposals make a lot of sense.  What am I missing?