I’ll start with three broad truths: a) the economic recession sucks; 1) the political climate sucks; and 3) the recovery effort, from what we can tell, sort of sucks. But how bad does it suck? We aren’t sure.
A lot of Americans are angry right now, and the vast majority of that anger is directed at the federal government. I’m not just talking about tea partiers, birthers, and neo-McCarthyists who see the imminent threat of socialism, Marxism, and totalitarianism (all of which, they fail to realize, are different, albeit cloesly related, things) in every one of President Obama’s legislative proposals (a brief interlude: can we say President Obama and not “Barack” or “Obama” or “the Barackster? I spent 8 years referring to President Bush as just that out of respect for the office. This isn’t your hip high school social studies teacher). American are angry because they fear that the United States has totally bungled the recovery effort. We had a $787 billion dollar stimulus package, with another multi-billion dollar jobs package on the way, regular citizens have no idea if their tax dollars are going to work or not. China recovered, Germany recovered, even the British aren’t doing so bad anymore. People are mad because the economy isn’t getting better, and they have no idea whether this spending is even helping at all.
If you’re like Time’s Joe Klein (the inspiration behind this post), the problem is simple: Americans are too dumb to thrive. Unfortunately for Klein, Americans don’t like being called stupid: it smacks of elitism, which NOBODY appreciates, and summons visions of President Obama’s “clinging to guns and religion” gaffe from the 2008 campaign.
However, there’s a point to be taken from Klein’s snootiness. All too often, voters go to the polls without a solid understanding of the economic and social ills facing out country; they prefer to vote based on “who they’d rather have a beer with” (poor Mitt Romney) or who their peers are voting for. Some civic education in high school that teaches students the inner workings of the federal government, the Constitution, and the American economy (and I do NOT mean the basic American history classes we all have to take) would be welcome. I’m not agreeing with Klein that Americans are stupid: I’m agreeing with the idea that regular citizens with everyday concerns do not have the time to become an expert on American politics. It’s tedious, complex, and all-too often EXTREMELY boring (there’s nothing sexy about the Congressional Budget Office and the other thousand federal agencies trying to tackle the clusterfuck that is our economy).
When it comes to economic issues, this is certainly true. Very few people understand what the hell a liquidity trap is or how capital markets work, nor do they want to hear their government tell them “they just don’t understand” and then explain in an impossible manner. Even deficit spending, the single biggest silver bullet to the Great Depression, seems dubious now. Hence, most people get outraged over Obama’s spending freeze, stimulus packages that inherently add to the deficit, and other aspects of the recovery effort without really understanding WHY these measures are going forward I the first place. A lack of understanding produces uncertainty, uncertainty produces fear, and fear is the fuel for batshit-crazy TV pundits and talking heads like Glenn Beck.
To summarize: people are angry because they don’t know what the hell is going on with the economy, and they’re angry at the federal government for doing a horrible job explaining how our tax dollars are supposedly helping. We need things explained to us in a way we can understand. We don’t need Reagan-esq supply and demand charts…
Sexy supply and demand charts Ronald...but wtf is stagflation?
… and we don’t need President Obama to explain how the stimulus works at the State of the Union. We need a basic understanding of the fundamentally opposed views on how to save the economy. We need to know: why do recessions happen, and what should the federal government do to get us back on track? Of course, there are opposing views, but how do we understand their intricacies outside the context of an econ textbook or cable news name-calling?
In short, we need more videos like this:
