ABSURD IS THE WORD

Consider the absurdity of the fiscal cliff and sequestration. Not to mention the unfathomable debt. A CEO, CFO and board that put a corporation in similar, complete jeopardy would have faced shareholder lawsuits and possible criminal prosecution.

But presidents and congresses over the years have politicked and produced such mismanagement that those now in power cannot even find a way to talk reasonably about a way out with an intentionally self-imposed crisis looming only days away. Citizen stakeholders can only wait and hope the people they put in charge of what has become a funny farm start acting like responsible, ahem, servants of the public trust rather than self-centered rulers.

The basic business of government has become a game for elected players who consider winning more important than the common welfare of the country. Why else would the president, constitutionally barred from a third term, continue campaigning for his way with taxation and spending? Why else would legislators trade barbs over pledges on tax limits? Why else would the senate wonder whether safeguards for minority views should be altered?

Won’t anyone get serious in Washington? What goes on there is so unreasonable as to be ridiculous. 

FREE THE FREE PRESS

Our federal government should not be able to stifle criticism of it and of its officials. That’s the only reason for Freedom of the press being included in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Also, that is the reason for freedom of speech. The other four freedoms in the amendment – religion, exercise of religion, assembly, petition for redress of grievances – are clearly established there to protect citizens from their governors.

Much to our endangerment, government somehow has become to be seen as the source of all good. Government under our system was designed to be a necessary restriction on selfishness. Some societal rules are required for people to live together in peace and justice. Freedom differs from unbridled liberty. Our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms must be protected. Those benefitted have the obligation to defend those freedoms.  

The government obviously will not. When it goes too far, it is the government, not our government.

One segment of the citizenry has a heightened obligation to defend our freedoms by criticizing government gone wrong. That is the press in all its modern iterations. Back when the Constitution was written the printing press was the only up-to-date method of communication, augmented by a postal service that also delivered letters and documents that were literally penned.

Honestly, the press of post-colonial times had no fair and balanced reputation. It was highly partisan and called names that were dirtier than today, albeit sometimes quite literary. Yet apparently, despite the cost of printing, sufficient voices were heard to communicate what was happening in government without undue secrecy.

Skipping ahead to now, newspapers are partisan still but with less vitriol. Unfortunately the partisanship is practiced by underplaying or even ignoring some important governmental indiscretions or malfeasance. Television and radio are divided in the same way, but perhaps with more intensity because of their nature. Print and broadcast and cable are all held back in news coverage by the very cost of news gathering. Internet is coming to the fore and to a great extent is not edited as well as it might be. The latter does benefit from individual initiative, but sometimes with too much exuberance; and it has an inherent advantage of being capable of combing print, sound and moving images. All in all, the cacophony of voices may be too much. Information is difficult to assimilate.  

Regardless of party affiliation or inclination, a citizen and voter has to admit our national government has real and immediate problems in sustaining itself fiscally and in scope.

Washington is bankrupt. Washington has reached into nearly every nook and corner of human experience. Its operatives wish to fix all problems, which it cannot, and its attempts to do so can’t be paid for despite its power to collect money.l

Something has to give. Government has run amuck.

All channels of communication deal with exposition of the problems within and without government. Few citizens are satisfied with what they are hearing and witnessing. Politicians are loath to do anything but talk.

Any solutions proffered, regardless of the source, are attacked even if only tentative or offered as starting points for debate.

News gathering and its dissemination in the halcyon days of journalism – the 1950s, it could be argued – meant that the editorial content was kept separate from the editorial pages and the advertising. That was the ideal; an ideal not always met. Yet, it was the aim. Reporters and news editors gave more than mere recognition to that goal. An argument can be pretty well backed up that in this still young century such an ideal is rarely defended much less accomplished.

As with life itself, in the news business ideals are preached but rarely achieved. A little more effort, a little more dedication, a little more appreciation of the real necessity of a free press might do some good in uncovering and explaining the sins of government and – where they exist – its virtues.

First principles of a free country exist. We must insist they be used. The press in its multiple forms must watch government, the would-be master. Information that is gathered should then be marshaled so that constituents can vote intelligently.

If the people, to whom their government is to answer and to serve, do their job their servants will do theirs.

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS ASTRONOMICAL PROBLEMS

According to the radio, the Affordable Care Act (that’s ObamaCare to the uninitiated) will cost each employer of more than 50 people $1.79 per hour for each employee next year. That explains why major employers are planning on laying off or reducing the hours of workers to make them part-timers. Doing so will keep some of those companies in business.

Do a little simple arithmetic and the enormity of the entrepreneur’s quandary emerges.

Multiplying 40 hours by 52 weeks of work and vacation and the product is 2,080 hours of paid work. Assign an extra $1.79 per hour and the boss has to lay out an additional $3,723.20 a year to overhead for each employee. For each 50 employees, the additional cost of business is $186,160 per year.

That’s 186 thousand dollars that reduces profits. For each 50 employees.

So it does not take a Bill Gates to figure out that a small businessman cutting back one employee to 49 makes a lot of sense. Or cutting the wager earner’s hours to make him or her part time. For the employer with hundreds in his workforce, the problem is just as big. For national firms, the problem is a major expense and concern, maybe even a game changer when competing with rival corporations.

To a government that can’t balance a budget, that can’t pay for its obligations even though it takes in some two and a third trillion dollars a year such problems for those responsible for producing an economy that is supposed to pay for government seem miniscule. The federal government is a multitrillion dollar affair; does a trillion dollar private enterprise even exist?

And isn’t that the summation of the burden our nation must face?

Federal spending was more than three and half trillion in 2011. The deficit was just under one trillion, 300 million dollars.

Our – and that means for each and every man, woman and child in these United States of America – debt is approaching sixteen and a half trillion dollars.

Whoa!

How much is that? All kinds of illustrations are available from people who care. Just look at one way of looking at the enormity of just one trillion. Convert that into time.

Someone has calculated that one trillion seconds – that’s one sixtieth of a minute, 3,600^th of an hour, 86,400^th of a day – equal 31,546 years.

To pay off our national debt at one dollar per second would take more than a half million years (504,736 years for an even $16 trillion).

That can hardly be imagined.

It’s something like trying to fix one’s mind on how close is the nearest star? That star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light years from the sun, which is 93 million miles from the earth. A light year equals 5.88 million miles, so that star is some 25.2 million miles beyond the sun. Thus, the star is 118.2 million miles from earth. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. Well, home calculators don’t have enough display space to do the math. Nonetheless, since a trillion is one million millions it would take more than a trillion seconds to travel that distance at the speed of light, or more than 32 thousand years.

Look at it another way. Total gross national product for the United States in 2011 was just over 15 trillion dollars, which is less than our growing national debt. Each year, the government is adding one-fifteenth of GDP to the debt with such deficits exceeding a trillion dollars.

If the enforcement of ObamaCare is going to convince employers they need to cut back on employees, then they seemed destined to reduce profits. Profits mean taxes. Taxes mean federal and state and local revenue. Less revenue means either more debt or, heaven forfend, less government.

Ruining the economy is not the way to shrink government.

But shrinking government may be the only way to improve the economy.

That is easy to say. But the cost in money and in effort is huge. Huge doesn’t really convey just how immense, enormous, gigantic, gargantuan, humongous a problem lies before the country, its citizens, its seemingly incapable government, the one that got us into this chasm in the first place. Even if policies are adopted that grow the economy can they be good enough to generate enough hope for eventual governmental solvency?

Hope won’t do that. And change has yet to be demonstrated.

ANCIENT TRUTHS BE DAMNED

David Gregory on Meet the Press [11/11/12] had a clip from the new Lincoln movie in which the Lincoln character quotes ancient wisdom about things being equal to other things are equal to each other. The scene depicted the Great Emancipator talking to aides about garnering votes on an anti-slavery issue. Lincoln’s point was that truths – mathematical in this instance – don’t change over time.

Must of the program’s discussion was on the recent election and how Republicans are too hidebound in their conservative beliefs. Panel members, nearly unanimously, agreed that the GOP had to change and embrace the social beliefs of the time. Those currently mean same-sex “marriage,” and by inference contraception and all that go with that, and Latino immigrants and their votes.

No one, including Gregory, noted that the values they want Republicans to abandon are ancient truths, such as the intrinsic value of the family that is based upon the marriage bond between one man and one woman. To the host and panel, conservative Republicans would never again gain enough votes to win without bowing to current mores.

ATTACK EASIER THAN EXPLAINING

Which political ads are more effective, those that attack or those that explain?

Our 2012 presidential campaign provided the answer: attack, attack, attack.

Trouble is, explanation is more helpful to prospective voters; attack ads have but a grain of truth wrapped in a crust of spin and baked in an oven of hot air. But explanation can’t be accomplished in sound bite length or on pithy bumper stickers.

A recent Thomas Sowell column listed a number of issues he says flaunt the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution and the rights of a self-governing people. Among those he cited:

·        The president disregarding the 14^th Amendment and its provision of equal protection under law by waiving the Affordable Care Act for chosen unions and enterprises.

·        Laws passed too quickly to be read by lawmakers much less citizens.

·        Delegation of powers over vast sections of the executive branch to czars not subject to senate confirmation.

·        Military actions referred to the U.N. and the Arab League but not to the Congress.

·        Formation of a consumer agency by the Federal Reserve that can create its own money.

·        Waive or refuse enforcement of laws passed in the past despite an oath of faithfully execute them.

·        Have international treaties under the U.N. govern American citizens without senate approval.

Each of those bullets would take a white paper to explain and to refute, much less convince voters they are cause to support one candidate and reject the one espousing those positions. Take those items and dozens of similar situations and then convert them into short, cogent advertisements that could convert voters to a candidate’s arguments . . . well, there is probably not a political consultant alive who could do that.

So much easier to put into pictures and sound a candidate who is cruel to animals, a bully to his fellow prep schoolmates, wants to see grandmothers die rather than get treatment, halt social security, and is a capitalist pirate to boot. That’s easier than defending the expenditure of trillions in new debt and instituting restraints on liberty.

What is true for political advertising is pretty much true for debates, too. Squeezing in background necessary to make a point within two minutes or so is nearly as difficult. Speeches could be the medium for convincing voters, but in this day of short attention spans only zealots and faithful backers will listen, and absorb.

Candidates, particularly non-incumbents, and their consultants must find appealing and salient digests of their arguments to combat outright, fallacious attacks. In this covetous world, someone who can do that will make millions . . . and help millions of citizens to make wiser choices in the voting booths.

THE ELECTION IS OVER  . . . OR IS IT?

President Obama won reelection by attacking Gov. Romney and ignoring his own record. Somehow, voters went along with that strategy.

Maybe voters acquiesced because they, albeit in smaller numbers, were from the same societal segments as four year previous. Flirting with over-generalization, those voters were liberal, unmarried, young, labor unionists, members of minority groups. Some million or so fewer voters that supported the Republican were married, older and Caucasian. In short, the United States electorate is divided, now more clearly than in the past. Another factor in that division is cultural. The bigger slice tends toward hedonism and the smaller more traditional. Such description might be stark, probably more so than in reality, but nonetheless in the ballpark.

Americans, as is unusual in many parts of the world, accept the election outcome. Now comes the hard part: dealing with the country’s problems, both monetarily and materially.

Deficits and debt remain astronomical and continue to grow. Sandy, the destructive super-storm, has demonstrated how vulnerable is civilization without its bare necessities of food, power, housing, transportation.

Money and life’s basics are intrinsically intertwined. That is just as true for nations as it is for individuals.

We have already seen what the housing bubble did to the national economy when it burst. Without being exhaustive, failure in the energy sector could maim transportation, commerce and manufacturing; failure in banking could cause widespread bartering and eventually hunger. Granted, such extremes are not likely to happen. Yet, policies that weaken elemental business structures can only lead to extremes, if only gradually. Something like the fate of the proverbial frog in a pan of water slowly being brought to boil.  

The just completed 2012 elections can bring more of the same. Or – is this too optimistic? – trigger a sense of urgency in finding a way out of current messes.

January 1 will begin automatic higher taxes and draconian federal spending cuts, especially in the military, that could bring nearly immediate financial calamity. Politicians on both sides are already talking up preventative action on these possibilities. We can only hope.

As for the cultural divide that reared to some visibility as a result on the polling, there is little hope. Those espousing the modern proclivity toward self-satisfaction certainly wish no change. Examples are passage in Maine and Maryland of same-sex marriage referenda. (In California, believe it or not, voters approved health standards for pornographic movie making, thus condoms for actors.) Those trying to keep more traditional norms nearly despair.

Some of the issues are in the courts, such as preservation of religious freedom as is seen under attack from HHS mandates on insurance provision by religion-backed health, charity and educational institutions. But the courts seem to be leaning toward politics more than toward juridical rectitude. Some matters, such as co-habitation, are now generally acceptable. Only older people remember movie star Ingrid Bergman having to leave the country because of an extramarital affair with an Italian director, Roberto Rossellini, or the homosexuality of Rock Hudson revealed after his death. Affairs and “coming out” are topics, not scandals, nowadays.

In sum, this election probably will change little in American life unless politicians stumble into a disaster, accidental or (could it be?) predict