eThoughts : Politics, Voting, and Economics

There is a political saying that people vote their pocket books. While that statement seems true, the problem is the timeframe—immediate pocket books or long-term, or both? Mostly immediate it looks like. That’s not wisdom, that’s just plain preadolescent—no offense to preadolescents.

Boom or bust, bears or bulls, inflation or recession and robust or economic depression are the scary bookends of our economic life. What we need in our current economic crisis, our politicians tell us, is an economic stimulus package. Give people more money and they’ll spend it, thus getting the economy rolling again. And an economy that isn’t rolling is stuck and stuck hurts everyone.

First, giving people a few hundred dollars, of the money that’s already been taken from them to begin with, is not enough to be a stimulus. Yep, it’s a lot of money when totaled as a federal budget item, but it’s not enough for an individual or a family to buy much nowadays. Robert J. Samuelson, in a January 21, 2008 Newsweek article called it “Lollipop Economics 101.” His tag captures the real essence of the “stimulus” package nicely—I can’t do better than that.

Second, what in the world is wrong with a bit of a recession or of a bit of inflation? Okay, I’m no economist, but I’m thinking that we might take a note from nature—waves are pretty abundant and waves tend to have peaks and valleys. Okay, don’t like that? How about seasons, nature has those as well. But we think economics should be above all of those rhythms? Look, sometimes it’s time to spend and sometimes it’s time to not spend so much. The same goes with savings. Why do we frame the trough of economic cycles with such boogeyman terms such as inflation or recession? Oh yeah, we’ve had a depression, and a really bad one in the 1930s. And how did that happen? Was it because of economic greed followed by economic fear? Yep. Did that just happen again, this time with the subprime housing loans? Yep.

Okay, let’s not call it a recession, let’s call it a correction. As I said a while back about energy, we’ve always got it, we just need to know what kind we’ve got—in economic terms, expansion or contraction energy? And let’s not call it inflation, let’s call it price growth. What difference does it make if a car costs $30K as long as we’re earning what it takes to buy what we need and keep up with its needs (possessions own us, we don’t own them). What we might want to avoid is an economic depression or runaway inflation or any economic situation where few people have the monetary means to purchase or otherwise obtain (without thievery) their basic needs. That’s an official problem—and the proper economic bookends of our concerns.

But, political experience seems to indicate that without good guys and bad guys, good times and bad times, a politician’s life would just be in ordinary service to the good of the people. What glory is in that? But just to be perfectly clear, behind every idiotic politician is a cornucopia of even more idiotic voters. So, while we’re complaining about Washington or any other political locale or policy, let’s try taking a long, hard look at who voted the knuckleheads into office to begin with. And while we’re at that, let’s try remembering that experience is important, but let’s vote for wisdom first—it’s long past time.