Over the past months, we've seen a fascinating phenomenon. The public mood has detached form the economic cycle. In normal times, economic recoveries produce psychological recoveries. At least at the moment, that seems not to be happening. There are structural problems in the economy as growth slows and middle-class incomes stagnate. There are structural problems in the welfare state as baby boomers spend lavishly on themselves and impose horrendous costs on future generations. As these problems have gone unaddressed, Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless, and defensive.
Great writing but a very scary conclusion. If any organization or human endeavor loses faith, then getting out of the gutter becomes an almost impossible task. Faith feeds hope and hope feeds hard work and innovation since there is a belief that there can be a better way, regardless of what human endeavor we are discussing. A current example here in the Tampa Bay area is our NHL team, the Lightning.
The Lightning have been less than stellar over the past few years, playing mostly drab, uninspired hockey. However, last night, they just won their second playoff series of this hockey season, sweeping the Washington Capitals, four games to none. The Capitals were the number one seed coming into the series while the Lightning was the fifth seed. The Capitals had been in the playoffs the past several seasons while the Lightning had not. The Capitals have one of the most elite players in the Game while the Lightning have only very good players.
Nonetheless, with faith that they could overcome the higher seeded, more star studded team, that faith led to hope which led to hard work and innovation which led to a series sweep. Without faith in themselves and their leaders, this does not happen.
Unfortunately, but probably accurately, Mr. Brooks is not finding a lot of faith around the country today. Why not? Consider just some random things that are currently going on:
- The first time unemployment claims jumped significantly today, an unexpected event. Every week, we still have over 400,000 Americans who have lost their jobs and have to apply for unemployment benefits. Tough to have faith when you do not have a job.
- The nation's Federal government debt situation is currently out of control. The Federal government, and by proxy, all Americans, are now well over $14 TRILLION in debt. It was announced today that Joe Biden had the first meeting of his deficit reduction effort today.
This is about six months after the President's year long Debt reduction Commission published their extensive findings which were immediately ignored by Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. Now all of a sudden, we are expecting six people in Washington, meeting for the first time today and led by someone who slept through part of the President's recent speech on the debt problem, to fix a problem in a few weeks that has been decades in the making. Tough to have faith in this chaotic and simplistic approach to problem solving.
- An April 27, 2011 article from the Associated Press talked about how there are more than 100 levees across the country that the Federal government has classified as unfit for use. These levees, while most were originally constructed to protect farmland, over time now protect towns and communities. For example, one such dangerous levee in Missouri protects the town of Poplar Bluff, home to 17,000 people.
If the government is right, than there are over a hundred communities and areas that are in a dangerous predicament, existing below substandard levees holding back tons of water. Makes you wonder: given the trillions of dollars we have paid to all levels of government over the years, wouldn't you think that some of that tax money could have been used to fix about 100 levees? Tough to have faith when you have a leaky levee over your head.
- An Associated Press article from March 17, 2011 discussed how many states are facing such dire economic conditions that they are thinking of canceling political primary elections in the future. Now, I applaud state government for trying to be efficient with limited tax dollars and looking to run an efficient budget. However, it is a little disheartening when the political class and the various levels of government that the politicians run cannot execute a traditional and vital part of democracy, primary elections. Tough to have faith when your voting right is possibly endangered by budget cuts.
- Even when an event happens far away, it adds to the lost of faith. Consider Detroit, a metro area that used to be the nation's fourth largest city. A metro area that at one point in time was the home of over two million people. A metro area whose population has plunged to only about 700,000 people, the same amount of people that lived there in 1910 or so, a time when there were for fewer people in the country as a whole. A metro area that is now smaller than the cities of Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana. A metro area that has such widespread desolation that some are talking about turning it back into a farming community.
No one wants to see something like that happen anywhere in the country for fear that it could happen to their community. Tough to have faith in the face of such despair and when a mayor of another major metro area, NYC Mayor M. Bloomberg has the hairbrained scheme of forcing immigrants to live and work their as a solution to the population loss.
- An article in the May, 2011 issue of the AARP magazine profiled the town of Vallejo, California. Vallejo has the distinction of being the largest city in the state of California to file for bankruptcy, indicating that the Detroit situation is not contained in Detroit. Vallejo was the first state capital, is only 25 miles from San Francisco, and for 150 years was the location for one of the Navy's most important shipyards.
However, now, it has had to reduce city employees including police and fire, and many city services as the multiple factors of ever increasing pension and health care costs (unfunded liabilities of $195 million) collide with the decreasing property and sales tax revenue (down over 20% since 2008). Tough to have faith when an established, once thriving community such as Vallejo is driven into the ground as a result of the political class not being able to plan, manage and execute a budget process.
- Many years sooner than expected, the Social Security has run a cash deficit this year, sending out more money than it collected in payroll taxes. Tough to have faith when a large portion of your retirement revenue is running short of funds.
- While we have all applauded and been thrilled by the Bin Laden situation, I was struck by the President's words that night when he addressed the nation for the first time after the operation was successfully completed. Within a six sentence sequence in his speech, the President stated the following phrases:
- "I directed."
- "I was briefed."
- "I met repeatedly."
- "I determined"
- "At my direction."
Random events and circumstances, all contributing to the the feeling of pessimism, helplessness, and lack of faith that Mr. Brooks talks about. Defective infrastructure, lack of leadership, faulty budgeting, too much debt, the coming insolvency of government programs such as Social Security, etc., the list of unaddressed problems is wide and diverse.
However, all is not lost, if you use the Lightning as a ray of hope. The Lightning this season had a new owner, a new general manager, and a new coach. In other words, they changed out their leadership structure for a new set of leaders that re-instilled those faith, hope, hard work, and innovation traits back into the team. They could not change out the players so they changed out the leaders.
The same cleaning process needs to happen within our political processes. As laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," such steps as instituting term limits, holding Congressional committee members accountable for their committees' responsibilities, instituting various ethics steps to ensure high leadership standards, and removing the cancer of campaign donations from the election process would allow us to change out our sitting politicians.
We can not change out our citizens (the players), although I would bet some politicians would like to, so let's change out our leaders like the Lightning did. If we have lost faith in our current management team, what do we have to lose by changing the processes that put them into their seats originally. Time to stop feeling anxious, pessimistic, anxious, helpless, and defensive, time to have faith and hope.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect
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