The economic malaise that has put voters in such a foul mood against Washington incumbents was supposed to be over by now — at least in the minds of the tea party’s minions and GOP establishment that has latched onto their myopic anger. But it is not, and all the trends suggest that it won’t be over for years. The hole dug by the Great Recession is simply too big to fill by a slow recovery of, say, 2 percent growth.
Economists now widely believe that it may take eight to 10 years to regain lost housing and retirement fund values; to work out the excess of housing and commercial buildings; to grow jobs, wages and businesses significantly; and to spur tax revenue enough for government at all levels to meet public needs and reduce public debt.
The harsh irony is that the resulting anger and skepticism fueled by that malaise is now focused on the Democratic leadership that kept the Great Recession of 2008-09 from tipping into Great Depression II. That has generated an illogical momentum against the Democratic majority in Washington that is stuck with the bill for the Wall Street bubble party, and the crash, that preceded the Obama administration.
“Crazy spending” came before
Take the popular chant that the federal deficit has now climbed over $13 trillion and “this crazy spending has to stop.” For starters, statistical federal debt records that any citizen can confirm through Internet research shows that the lion’s share of that debt was built by Republican presidents since 1981 — Reagan, Bush I and Bush II.
George W. Bush trashed the rare Clinton surpluses, then doubled the debt from less than $6 trillion to over $12 trillion. He also left several more trillion in debt in the pipeline from his unnecessary war in Iraq, and his squandering of the early opportunity to finish the job in Afghanistan.
Yet the Obama administration is now being pilloried for keeping Bush’s Troubled Relief Asset Plan and making TARP work (it will very soon be almost fully repaid.) Obama is also blamed for a stimulus plan that gave states a three-year adjustment period to trim costs, that saved or created 1.5 million jobs, and that accomplished significant infrastructure improvements — enough so that many states that said they wouldn’t take stimulus money quickly lapped up all their grants to do infrastructure work and keep public colleges, health centers and state government departments adequately staffed.
One local example: EPB will finish installing its nation-leading direct-to-home fiber-optic system this year — more than three years sooner than originally anticipated — because it received a stimulus (Recovery Act) grant that allowed it to hire enough workers to do the job. Its new “smart grid” will coincide with TVA’s new time-of-use rate system, which is designed to shift significant customer power use off-peak, and save the TVA system and ratepayers a lot of money that would have been spent on more expensive peak-hour electricity purchased from other utilities.
Angry tea partiers argue that the federal government should not have lent money to sustain the car industry — which has now begun to pay back its loans and has added 76,000 jobs — and that it should have let our nation’s biggest banks, and state governments as well, slide down the tube. But that would have been illogical, irrational and permanently destructive of jobs, institutions and agencies that are essential to the national economy.
Simply put, it would have been stupid — an act of deliberately dealing our economy a second crippling blow, and spreading the virulent economic chaos that was so prevalent in 2008, when 500,000, 600,000, even 700,000 jobs were being lost monthly and markets were panicked.
A truly destructive agenda
The angry right would have voters believe that it would have been good to throw vast new numbers of people out of work, to further cripple financial markets and key institutions, to further reduce consumer spending, to further destabilize the housing market, and to further sabotage our economic recovery. All that also would have further raised public costs — and debt — for unemployment, public health care, temporary housing.
To argue now that the Obama administration, which inherited a federal budget annual deficit of nearly $1.3 trillion, and a federal debt of over $12 trillion, along with two credit-card wars, has not actually reversed the trends and stabilized the country is to ignore real-time facts. His watered-down health insurance reform, as well, holds vital improvements in coverage for ordinary families in a time when our employer-based health insurance system is rapidly collapsing among small and mid-sized companies.
The tenuous recovery, now termed “the New Normal,” isn’t what most Americans had hoped for. But it is certainly better than the utter wreckage that today’s right-wing extremists pretend they would have preferred. Voters who believe otherwise would not want to experience the difference.