“Saturday Night Live” once televised a piece speculating that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would have ignored Albert Einstein when Einstein warned FDR that the Nazis were stockpiling uranium. (Evidently, Einstein wrote, to build a futuristic bomb.)
Would FDR really have just ignored Einstein’s warning?
Yes, “SNL” concluded. If Einstein had had big boobs.
Big boobs didn’t keep Der Governator, Arnie Schwarzenegger, from winning his “Total Recall” election. But, like our old student Ferris Bueller’s economics classmates, Congressional Republicans are ignoring America’s Nobel Prize-winning economists’ warnings that their economy-stunting “voodoo economics” – such as their April Fool’s Day “continuing budget resolution” – will blow up in our kids’ faces.
Dr. Ben Bernanke is a Republican who ran the economics department at Princeton University, home to Einstein and to one of those Nobel Prize-winning economists. Bernanke was a George W. Bush economic adviser. He wishes “W” had taken his advice.
As Bush-appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Bernanke testified before Congress that its March 1st 10-year budget “sequester” will stunt America’s economic growth and cost us 750,000 jobs this year alone. And that by blindly cutting the meat as well as the fat, the sequester, the April Fool’s Day continuing budget resolution and Congress’s other budgetary nuclear hand grenades are drawing the same austerity roadmap that has driven Europe back into recession and worsened its debt crisis.
Lack of good job experience is already stunting the growth of tomorrow’s work force. And without good jobs, students’ unpaid loan debt just ballooned past total American credit card debt. The economists warn that student debt could be the next Bush mortgage debt Bubble to explode.
36 percent of student loans are over 90 days in default. If our kids were houses, they’d be facing foreclosure. The Republican plan to double student loan interest won’t help. A George Will-type-famous-columnist-wannabe might never graduate from “streaking” through George’s home town. (Which once tied for #1 in the Associated Press National Streakers Poll.)
Expect more of the same voodoo economics for the next ten years. Because only about two out of three 2008 voters showed up in 2010.
The resulting nationwide Tea Party state legislature landslide and the census created a nationwide gerrymandered jigsaw puzzle of House of Representatives districts. And a shrink-government-till-it-fits-in-our-reproductive-plumbing-where-it-belongs House majority. Even though Democratic House candidates won over a million more votes than Republicans.
So the Do Nothing Congress will keep doing nothing. Last term’s House majority wasted time and $50 million voting futilely 33 times to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.
As Romney was fond of saying, today’s 7.69% unemployment figure only shows half of Bush’s Not So Great Depression’s real unemployment rate. Because it counts part-timers and Ph.D.-packing baristas @ Starbucks as employed. And doesn’t measure salaries losing ground to inflation or being cut by unpaid furloughs – though the boss expects the same amount of work out of you.
And the new jobs don’t pay as well. Median income has dropped 10% since the Bush Crash. Americans who lost $80,000-a-year jobs are taking $8.00-an-hour jobs. A quarter of new jobs pay below the federal poverty level.
Which is why almost 50 million Americans live in poverty and struggle to starch-stretch four or five bucks a day in food stamps. Like starving a child, stunting present economic growth stunts future growth. Slashing investment in research and development, education and getting-goods-to-market “infrastructure” are “false economies.”
One good piece of news is that 69% of telecommuters report having the money to shop online while they’re “on the clock.” And house prices and car sales are recovering after five years of clunker-driving “pent-up consumer demand.”
But in every recovery from the recessions of the last 33 years, public employment – teachers, cops, road maintenance workers – grew by millions. Despite President Obama’s being labeled unfairly as a “black socialist”, federal, state and local government employment has shrunk drastically during Obama’s economic recovery.
Those Nobel Prize-winning economists say that if public employment grew under the “colored socialist president” as it did during our recession-recoveries under the conservative but free-spending Republican presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush, unemployment would be a tolerable 6%.
And they say income inequality is the biggest roadblock to economic growth. The top 1% pockets 93% of yearly increases in income.
Despite stock market-pleasing record overseas profits of multinational corporations, businesses are misering $4 trillion of un-invested American mattress-cash. Corporate managers and economists agree there’s not enough “consumer demand” to risk hiring more American workers. Who happen to be consumers.
It’s a vicious cycle. Laying off teachers, pothole repair-people and President Clinton’s 100,000 new cops makes that demand-cycle worse, not better.
The Republican congressmen blowing up America’s economy with their budgetary nuclear hand grenades can’t be faulted for not being Einsteins. But, as they might say on Saturday Night Live, “When will they stop acting like ‘big boobs’”?
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister.
