Economic Arteriosclerosis, Tim Russert and the Ropespinner Prophecy

The late Tim Russert was maxed out on live media news casting. He shared the rich working life immersed in the homo mongering existential networking of the 4th estate foisting evolving hegemonic rule  over the masses for profit. Rush Limbaugh is the bet noir of that broadcast media. He is the wayward son of a Judge that seized the day disdaining college to be a sports broadcaster here and now. Rush Limbaugh has evolved to become the fanfare for the common man- the sensitive analyst of radio market-share that knows his radio audience is largely uneducated like himself. Limbaugh champions the underdogs of the fly over South Beach heartland of the U.S.A. This essay is not about Rush Limbaugh. Instead it is about Economic Arteriosclerosis, Tim Russert and the Ropespinner Prophecy (I put that it capitals because it ought to be the title of this piece).

The Ropespinner Conspiracy was a fine forward looking fiction novel published in 1987 about the intentional Soviet subversion of the U.S.A. through a devious plan to bring capitalism to wild, crazy, unsupportable economic policy. That sounds like what actually developed in the Clinton years of deregulation. Michael Thomas sets the goal of the Ropespinner Conspiracy to create a 1929 style economic meltdown. Maybe he was inspired by the Reagan era supply-side economics of Arthur Laffer, I can't say. Thomas, the author, does quote novel prize winning economist James Tobin statement of uneasiness with the direction of evolving economics made in a 1984 speech.

James Tobin said, "I confess to an uneasy Physiocratic suspicion” “that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity." and "For this reason perhaps, high technology has so far yielded disappointing results in economy-wide productivity. I fear that, as Keynes saw even in his day, the advantages of the liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments come at the cost of facilitating nth degree speculation which is short sighted and inefficient."

Tobin's sense of the drift of the U.S. economy seems prescient-well at least right on the money. If the 2008 financial meltdown wasn't the main event, it was at least of prequel of the economic leveler waiting out there with the shape of U.S. economic policy and federal blindness to its failure of leadership.

Rush Limbaugh sells the politics to his largely non-college educated audience that they want, and that means promoting the Hispanics Ted Cruz and Mark Rubio because there are a lot of uneducated Hispanic Americans he could bring into the fold. Nothing is wrong with that, yet promoting politicians for demographic reasons produces as bad of results as promoting surgeons or airline pilots for race reasons that aren't terribly competent. The MahaRushie isn't as anti-intellectual as the Khymer Rouge of course though he shares in a way a desire to take politics back to the year zero. For Rush that means rolling back environmental and economic theory back to the year zero with Fred Flintstone lassez fair capitalism. People in that era didn't know any better. 

 Senator Cruz's baby-mama dropped him in Canada, and that's not the Canadian River country of North Texas where Will Rogers worked as a cowboy for a while. Advancing foreign-born Senator Cruz as a Presidential candidate further wrenches the Republican Party and the interests of the common man. The border is the only line of control keeping the world of zombies looking to eat American interests at bay. To let just one into the Presidency risks letting the world of zombies take control.

The President and the elites of Boston and Washington D.C. do seem to be in terminal condition on economic leadership. Hardening of economic theory arteries has brought the policy of no-change brinkmanship for dialectically opposite reasons to pump the same political poison through the arteries and veins of the nation with decreasing results. We would expect the cardiac arrest to occur as unexpected as one might expect. Tim Russert looked too-heavy and perhaps living on a diet of bacon bits, butter and sour cream on his baked potatoes along with thick juicy steaks and double frappe cappuccinos con leche. A nice guy but someone neglected to tell him that the fast lane can be dangerous-even Pete Maravich ran to death with his heart bursting on a basketball court. When the nation's economic heart bursts because of sustainably bad debt generating economic policy it will be more than one individual that suffers.

The diminishing returns of increasing public debt are interest payments on the debt that will soon enough be approaching a trillion dollars and the higher interest rates the government must pay for loans. In a low inflation environment that bites. If inflation develops though the costs to consumers rise. Seventeen trillion of debt on the way to 20 trillion before President Obama passes the buck to the next guy will be biting youth of today for a long time. It should require just some simple common sense to stop the economic bleeding with emergency economic policy, yet that will need to wait until a responsible adult with intellect occupies the White House.

It will be necessary to cut spending, increase taxes, halt illegal immigration and develop reform of capitalism and government simultaneously. Those are tasks larger that F.D.R. could have accomplished. Incidentally the F.D.R. couldn't get elected today if he were running.  He just wasn't Hollywood enough-especially with the handicap.