Does a Tree That Fall In the Forest…
There is the old question that asks does a tree that falls in the forest make a sound if no one is there. However fascinating that question may be, there is a similar, and much more relevant version: Is a problem that goes unreported really a problem?
President Obama’s inexperience is already showing as he has pretty much lost control of his first major effort in less than two weeks. As a result there currently seems to be two, perhaps three leaders of the country. In addition to President Obama, Speaker Pelosi is exercising total control over the House, completely locking Republicans out of any say the process. As a result the bi-partisan position on the stimulus bill was the opposition, as all Republicans and 11 Democrats voted against it. As details of the stimulus package became known, public support dropped. And it is left to the Senate and Harry Reid to try and regain some control over Obama’s first signature issue.
What is clear from this episode is that the country can expect a large lurch to the left. The so-called stimulus bill crafted by Pelosi was really little more that a mixture of old-fashioned political payoffs, standard issue political pork, and an attempt to expand government into even more areas. Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said about this crisis, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” It seems Speaker Pelosi took those words to heart, as she seems to see the crisis not as a problem to be solved, but as an opportunity to reward political allies and massively redefine government.
I would not be as concerned about the move to the left if those pushing it had some concept of what they were doing. Instead they seem to be blindly following their ideology. It is not as if their policies have never been tried. They have been tried repeatedly and have failed every time. But this brings me back to the question I asked at the start: Is a problem that goes unreported really a problem? It would seem that for Pelosi and others pushing the country to the left, the answer is clearly that problems that are not reported are problems that can be ignored.
For example, while California was once the land of Reagan, it is now solidly in control of the left, whose policies drove the state into a fiscal crisis that resulted in the recall of their governor. They replaced the liberal Democrat with a liberal Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they left the liberals in control of the state legislature. The result: California is facing a $41 billion budget deficit, what Time magazine called : The Great California Fiscal Earthquake.
Nor is this just an exception. Michigan is another example of a state solidly in liberal hands for years, and has the financial problems to prove it. Likewise, one could look at the cities, dominated by liberal policies. Or just consider the following two facts: 1) The Northeast is solidly liberal. 2) People have been fleeing the Northeast. The correlation between liberal policies and these problems is clear. But it is a correlation that liberals, including those who dominate the major news media, refuse to see, and thus it goes unreported.
Instead they focus on Republicans as the cause. A perfect example of this being the current financial crisis. It is clear that at the root of current problems was bad housing loans and the housing bubble that resulted. At the center of the bad housing loans were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which were pushing them. It is also clear that the reason that Fannie and Freddie were pushing these loans is because of government policies passed initially under Carter and then expanded under Clinton. In fact Fannie and Freddie were lead by former Clinton administration officials. Finally, the Bush administration, while they may not have seen the size of the problem, did see that there was a problem with these loans and attempted to regulate Fannie and Freddie many times, but each time they were blocked by the Democrats. So it was liberal policies that forced the banks to make the loans that were at the core of the problem, while the Bush administration tried to avoid it.
But liberals do not see this, Bush was president, Bush gets the blame, end of story. And normally there is always some Republican somewhere who can be blamed. The last time the Democrats were in complete control of the Government such that there was no Republican to blame, was following the 1992 election. They messed things up so badly in two years that Republicans won control of the Congress for the first time since the early fifties. The time previous to that was in the late 1970s under Carter, which gave us the combination of high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, and gas lines. The time before that was under Johnson, who did not even attempt reelection.
It would seem that since the problems of liberalism are not reported, they are forgotten, and so every 10-15 years we must suffer through at least two years of democratic rule. The massive spending that is now almost certain to come will have an economic impact whether it is clearly reported or not. With the help of a willing press, Democrats will be able to effectively blame the current problems on Bush, but as time goes on and things get worse, this will become less effective as people will understandably be more focused on fixing the problem than affixing blame.
