Guest View: Resident tries to discredit Obama critic

Thank you, Free Lance, for printing a wide range of views,
including the regrettably half-baked economic theories and
inaccurate historical accounts of your recidivist guest columnist,
Mr. Marvin Jones. I won’t suggest, as someone commenting in
your
”
e-dition
”
did
 in response to another of his monthly columns, that he
”
crawl back under his rock.
”
I respectfully prefer that Mr. Jones stay out in the sunlight –
because his no doubt well-intended ideas won’t stand the light of
day.
By Tom Lantz

Thank you, Free Lance, for printing a wide range of views, including the regrettably half-baked economic theories and inaccurate historical accounts of your recidivist guest columnist, Mr. Marvin Jones. I won’t suggest, as someone commenting in your “e-dition” did in response to another of his monthly columns, that he “crawl back under his rock.” I respectfully prefer that Mr. Jones stay out in the sunlight – because his no doubt well-intended ideas won’t stand the light of day.

I “minored” in macroeconomics in college and taught it briefly at, appropriately in this case, the high school where Ferris Bueller famously took the “day off” from his economics class. The teacher, played in that movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” by conservative-economist-in-real-life Ben Stein, tried in vain to teach the drooling students the lessons of the Republican missteps that caused the great Depression.

I have to respectfully disagree with Mr. Jones’s unique economic theories and misremembered American history. Instead, I agree with Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics a year ago, that if the federal government slams on the spending brakes now, while local governments are slashing payrolls, the American economy could go into a disastrous skid. Check out Professor Krugman’s website for a real lesson in macroeconomics.

Such distorted “neoconservative” economic theories as Mr. Jones’s led the Bush administration to reverse the benefits of the Clinton administration’s “longest sustained economic recovery in history”. That Democratic administration listened to the economic experts and created a record tens of millions of jobs. It turned the nearly-300-billion-dollar-a-year deficits of Bush’s father into 300-billion-dollar-a-year surpluses that started to pay off the national debt. Then “Bush 43,” another free-spending “neoconservative Republican”, gave away the store with a trillion-dollar military misadventure and huge tax-giveaways to his multi-millionaire and billionaire backers who, unlike the middle-class recipients of the Obama tax cuts who spend our tax savings in the U.S., often pumped their tax windfalls into skyrocketing foreign stock and commodities markets. Remember the meteoric rise in the price of oil?

Reagan ironically said he “would accuse the DEMOCRATS of spending like drunken sailors – but that would be unfair to the sailors!” Is it any wonder so many “true conservatives,” who believe in fiscal responsibility and moderate, reasonable regulation of business, so Wall Street stops being a “Communist casino” for “too big to fail” banks and insurance companies to gamble with the taxpayers’ money, are leaving the now-“neoconservative” Republican Party?

In eight years of “Bush 43’s Great Digression,” he shredded the Clinton surpluses and doubled the national debt that it took the prior 42 presidents over 200 years to pile up, while our enormous job growth from the Clinton years flatlined. President Obama didn’t just inherit a mere mild recession such as President Kennedy did from the Republican President “Eisenhoover” slamming on the economic brakes again. Our economic roller-coaster skidded and nearly went off the tracks – the worst economic event since the Great Depression Roosevelt inherited from Republican Herbert Hoover on March 4, 1933. Even the Free Lance’s youngest readers know enough not to buy Mr. Jones’s description of the mess President Obama inherited as a routine “recession.”

Noble Prize winner Krugman agrees with accepted economic doctrine that the recession of 1937 was caused by President Roosevelt balancing the 1936 budget prematurely, before the economy had fully recovered. When Roosevelt reluctantly returned to deficit spending to stimulate the economy until it could get back on its feet, it gradually improved until December 7, 1941. Mr. Jones ignores the fact that it was the federal government that then spent us to complete economic recovery in World War II.

Like a legitimate economist, a historian has to provide some evidence for his conclusions. Mr. Jones’s bare allegations that President Obama, whom the coal industry displays as its ally in its “clean coal” ads, wants to shut down that industry, and that he “demonizes” the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to which he’s been trying to give 40 million new customers, are evidence-free.

Also evidence-free is his claim that making the huge “casino-banks” pay a small fee to pay the taxpayers back for bailing them out (while the U.S. let quite a few smaller banks fail) will keep them from lending “to industry for job creation.” In fact, those underregulated, “too big to fail” banks and insurance companies are back to their old irresponsible ways, and are not lending sufficiently to small businesses as it is – though small businesses create most of the jobs in this country. Strangely, Mr. Jones doesn’t seem to think that Wall Street rewarding its own misconduct with a record 30 billion dollars in bonuses, (over half-a-million dollars per employee on top of inflated salaries this year), after bringing our economy to the brink of disaster, deprives it of money to lend “to industry for job creation.”

As for saving the American auto industry, Mr. Jones, it was your ideological allies, the right-wing congressmen from the Southern states, where foreign automakers like Volkswagen, B.M.W. and Toyota have plants and are major political players, who fought the hardest against rescuing OUR industry and its network of American suppliers – and millions of American jobs. It was Detroit’s V-8 engines rolling off the assembly line into (e.g., Sherman) tanks, trucks, etc., that saved our republic in World War II. What are we supposed to do the next time we’re dragged into a major war? Sell our enemies shaky mortgage-backed securities and bankrupt THEIR economies???

Dear Editor: I take it back; Mr. Jones’s economic and historical theories printed in your fine paper aren’t half-baked. With all due respect, as Benjamin Braddock said in “The Graduate” they’re “COMPLETELY – baked.” Thank you for providing the space to discredit them. I only regret that it takes longer to disprove a point if you resort to using EVIDENCE.

Tom Lantz is a Hollister resident.