Being Fair and Balanced

One of my favorite classroom memories happened in a fourth hour AP class years ago. This was during a fairly tumultuous political year and, of course, the kids in AP were well versed in current events. In the Fall, King Soopers grocery workers went on strike and started picketing all the stores, including the one on Green Mountain. I had one brilliant little girl who wore her heart on her sleeve and was constantly crying over some social outrage or another. She was something of a drama queen. One would think that the King Soopers picketing would have hit her where she lived and she would be out there on the line during her free hours. Not quite. One day she walked into class a little early with a King Soopers bakery bag in hand. Everyone there stifled a gasp. "I cried when I crossed the picket line, but the fresh croissants at King Soopers are so much better than anything at Albertsons," she explained.

"God, I envy you," said one of the resident raving liberals in the room. "You get to believe anything you want."

I feel the same way about conservative pundits, professional or armchair. They are just so sure of their opinions and they say them so loudly and they are so derisive of any dissent. They are impossible to argue with.

It would be like calling up Rush to disagree with his latest wacko theory. Since he doesn't value facts or logic or science and, worse yet, since he can hang up any time he wants, you wouldn't have a prayer. I suppose you could enlist some third party to come and act as a judge, but that decision would just be brushed off as so much liberal or conservative spin, depending on your point of view.

This will be surprising to a few people who have been in my classroom, but by conservative standards I'm something of a wimp when it comes political certainties. I'm smart and well read, but when someone fights back loudly enough, I begin to doubt myself. I mean maybe I need to consider this different point of view more carefully. So I go back and read some more and end up reaffirming my opinion until the next loud disagreement. And then the cycle starts all over again. It is damn difficult to figure out the truth.

For instance, I have always accepted as TRUTH that among the primary causes of our economic malaise is the fact that we don't manufacture the stuff we use. In the 50's the USA manufactured 95% of what it consumed. Now, with manufacturing sent overseas in pursuit of ever higher profit margins, we are losing jobs that are not likely to be replaced. We need to get manufacturing to come back home.

But that TRUTH ain't really true. It is just the way it was been spun to me my people like Paul Krugman. The truth of the matter, according to last month's Atlantic and Christina Romer's essay in the Sunday New York Times, is that the US is still the largest manufacturer in the world, even though too many of those jobs have been automated. We no longer produce 95% of what we physically consume, but innovations, financial legerdemain, ideas, media, all these ephemeral things are also consumed and generate at least as much GDP as building cars and washing machines or sewing together designer jeans.

It is also not TRUE to go the conservative route and simply ignore the situation by saying it was ever thus, by waiting for some invisible hand to come and make everything turn out all right.

The thing is I don't know what the answer to this dilemma is. Neither does that ranting conservative radio personality, or the Fox News republican next door.

Another example is the controversy over the Citizen's United decision. The Left decries the decision as an assault on the democratic process. Citizen's United will let people like the Koch Brothers buy the election by spending billions on negative ads.

On the other hand, SuperPacs are ostensibly nothing more that a group of like minded citizens joining their resources in order to compete with big money in supporting their causes.

I suspect that moneyed interests like the Koch brothers are using this ruling to bastardize its intent, but the issue is more nuanced than either Bill O'Reilly or Rachel Maddow would have me believe.

You would think we would have all rejoiced last week at the news that our economy added approximately 260,000 jobs last month, but no. Mouthpieces from both the Left and Right quickly went to work to undermine any chance this country might have a reasoned discussion about something.

At a stump speech, Romney scolded Obama for presuming to take credit for the good news. He reminded us that we have gone for 36 straight months with joblessness at around 10% (that, as opposed to the good news, is Obama's fault). Furthermore, the increase in jobs was a result of the ingenuity and never-say-die attitude of the American worker and not due to any of Obama's "Failed Policies." (It is a Republican speaking point never to use the expression "Obama's Policies" without inserting "Failed.")

Well duh! I remember Obama saying much the same words whenever he managed to wring more job making stimulus out of a Republican brick wall.

But I can also spin it toward the Left by saying that the job gains in the last two months are larger than the net job gains in the entire eight years of Bush. Speaking as a journalism teacher, that is an accurate statement, but it is not the truth.

My spin revolves around the idea of net growth. Any job growth in the first seven years of Bush's administration (and those job numbers, as opposed to the 300,000 a month during the last years of the Clinton Administration, are paltry) was more than wiped out during the start of the recession in 2008. The net result is that the Bush years gained almost zero jobs.

But that is an unfair characterization of the situation. It is absurd to think that President Bush and his policies are solely responsible for the recession, just like it is absurd to blame Obama for the sluggish rebound. Things happen and no matter how grandiose the promises, there isn't much anyone can do to stop them.

I still believe it is possible to ascertain the truth. I'm just not sure if it is worth the effort.

The Sputnik Moment

Two recent articles, one by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker and the other by Andrew Hacker in The New York Review of Books, cite Alexander Hamilton's urgings for a central government to do what is necessary to encourage the innovations of "ingenious and valuable workmen in different arts and trades" as support for their analyses of our current financial and employment picture. Hamilton, technically an illegal immigrant in his own right, pointed out the benefit our country would accrue "to open every possible avenue to emigration from abroad."

The thrust of Surowiecki's essay, "Sputnikonomics," is that, in spite of the cries coming from all sides to cut spending, we should be actively investing in research and development at a much higher rate than is our current practice. In fact, Surowiecki explains that the investments Obama's State of the Union Address called for in infrastructure, technology, and education are not just added on stimulus spending, but in fact a supply-side plan. Ronald Reagan would be proud. Increasing the pace of innovation and making workers more efficient improves our long-term growth rate by increasing supply.

Cost cutters will say we can't afford to spend money on anything. We can't afford not to. History tells us that spending on research and development (R&D) potentially creates more value than it costs. The creation of the interstate highway system under Eisenhower has returned an estimated 35% of the initial investment annually. The actual Sputnik moment spurred R&D that has changed the way the world works: GPS, microchips, the internet, satellites.

One of the reasons that we are in this financial malaise is that as our investments in R&D have shrunk (currently at only 60% of their 1960's level as adjusted for cost of living), our long term growth rate has slowed and with that so has our competitiveness.

The current climate of credit default swaps, stock holder pressure, and the unadulterated lust for profit has made private sector investment in R&D focused almost exclusively on the development side. One of the main reasons for this is that private companies don't like seeing their research creating "spillover benefits" that allow other companies to reap SOME of the profit that results from their innovation. For example, other companies are getting rich selling apps for the iPhone and iPad. That's the whole problem. So called "spillover benefits", while not necessarily helpful to Apple, are a huge benefit to the economy as a whole. Current business models don't seem to take much stock in benefiting the economy (read: society) as a whole.

Therefore we have the cancelling in mid project of a tunnel under the Hudson River. The "spillover benefits" would be huge: Less congestion, employment of thousands of construction workers, the little businesses that will crop up on both sides of the river, etc. But the recent election says that people are not in the mood to think long term. They would rather "eat their seed corn" and stick their money under an ideological mattress.

Hacker's essay, "Where Will We Find the Jobs," looks at the root of most of the electorate's outrage, the lack of job production. He makes a case for increasing our investment in education, but also stresses the changes that are currently besetting education.

He makes the rather tired point that the times they are a changing and we must change along with them. People have to rethink their educational goals. There will have to be some retraining. Colleges and universities need to rethink their approaches to vocational training.

And he tells us all sorts of disturbing facts: Even though the majority of growing careers of the future say they require college degrees, they really don't; even though everyone (read: high school counselors) say if you don't have math skills you won't be able to compete in the new technological age, that simply isn't true; the United States no longer reproduces itself and therefore relies on immigration to sustain the population; nonnative workers comprise 16% of the labor force; twenty-six per cent of U.S. physicians are foreign born; twenty-eight per cent of U.S. Ph.D.'s are also foreign born; and the list goes on.

In a nutshell, the fact is that by 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our country will suffer from a labor shortage. Partly from lack of proper training, but also from the fact that our work force will be smaller as the Baby Boomers all go off to retirement. To fill that gap we need to graduate tons more people. To do that we will have to invest tons more money in education. Short of that, the innovation that has always fueled and sustained our economic engine will go someplace else, some place like India, or China.

Contrary to what the Tea Party types would like you to believe (They've probably seen Dave too many times.) balancing the federal budget isn't the same as sitting around the kitchen table to figure out the household finances. That's the difference between micro- and macro-economics.