"Get Your Act Together!"
One of the great perks to being in a hotel is the high quality reading one receives, for free. Like USA Today. This morning, they have solved the global panic. It's very easy, you see: All we need is for "leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to get their acts together."
Well, there you have it. The world economy is like a teen who has been sleeping in late and cutting classes, and the editors of USA Today are his mom.
The difficulty is that the editors are vary vague about how this act needs to be gotten together, and with good reason: The people who know the most about macroeconomics express vastly diverse views about what needs to be done. We have a clearly sick patient, for whom some doctors are prescribing much more medicine and others going cold turkey off of all medicine. The editors of USA Today basically prescribe splitting the difference: deficit reduction and stimulus. Of course, this sort of wobbling inconsistently between different objectives is exactly how policy has been proceeding! So, politicians, get serious, by continuing exactly as you have done.
This is how the editorial writers put on a "serious person" costume without any need to do any serious thinking.
Well, there you have it. The world economy is like a teen who has been sleeping in late and cutting classes, and the editors of USA Today are his mom.
The difficulty is that the editors are vary vague about how this act needs to be gotten together, and with good reason: The people who know the most about macroeconomics express vastly diverse views about what needs to be done. We have a clearly sick patient, for whom some doctors are prescribing much more medicine and others going cold turkey off of all medicine. The editors of USA Today basically prescribe splitting the difference: deficit reduction and stimulus. Of course, this sort of wobbling inconsistently between different objectives is exactly how policy has been proceeding! So, politicians, get serious, by continuing exactly as you have done.
This is how the editorial writers put on a "serious person" costume without any need to do any serious thinking.
I see people on news site comments who are simultaneously angry about lack of government spending response to recession and lack of deficit reduction policies.
ReplyDeleteReally, I was paying attention to the usernames, and I noticed that the same user who was complaining and lecturing about US $14 trillion deficit in one topic was complaining about Obama's deficit reduction "surrender" in another topic.
People are stupid.
Now I see where commenters get it from. The worst are the ones that begin"
ReplyDelete"Folks, ..."
What follows is invariably glib and riddled with inconsistencies as you all have pointed out.
The other thing that drives me crazy is an automatic imputation of the motive "they want to destroy the country" to an opponent as if that were the intended goal of the Tea Party or progressives etc. The Atlantic and Salon used to be enjoyable reads but now ...