Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, May 10, 2010 9:33:56 PM
Europe finalizes a deal to bail out Greece, which everybody knew had to be done. This greases the skids for Portugal and any other countries that, as Maggie Thatcher put it, haven't "run out of other people's money" yet. All this was greeted by kudos from stock markets everywhere, but the big instability is still... us. The little kids on the playground can be stupid, as long as the goliath remains something to depend on. We have had our debt problems here for decades, but we seem to be attempting to take that act a few orders of magnitude towards the abyss. Europe, meanwhile, is a hopeless mess. They have constant double digit unemployment, astronomical taxation and incredibly bloated numbers of government employees who get paid better than the private sector, retire earlier and have pensions that everybody else envies. We are doing our best here to emulate that, and we seem to be ignoring the walls Europe is smacking into now.
Unemployment here is creeping closer to 10%, and the news media consistently has that as a second paragraph item behind the job growth spurt that came along with it. Because of the ideological divide that we are engulfed in, Obama running for re-election with unemployment hanging at 10% will not be the campaign killer that it would have been twenty years ago, but it will make it a lot harder to reach the swing voters that allowed him to dominate 2008.
Anybody who tells you that the Tea Party is a non-partisan entity is talking through their hat. Their successful efforts to end the career of Senator Bennett in Utah, along with a similar play soon in Kentucky, should make it clear that they are a subgroup of the Republican Party. The anger that they show will not end up in 2010 as an anti-incumbent wave. It will be a job killer for Democrats (at least until they can find new employment on K Street). If the GOP does not close ranks with the Tea people (and not vice versa), there may be threats of a third party candidate for President next year. But GOP Chairman Mike Steele's recent housecleaning of the financial end of the party shows he hears them well.
While the bulk of the 2008 stimulus package has not been spent yet (in fact, it was set up to be a 2010 campaign boost for the Democrats), the release of said funds becomes more visible and less popular as time goes by. For the last year, cash strapped states and municipalities that can't print their own money like the Feds have been using whatever they could get from Washington to stave off the belt tightening that should have started in 2008. The next year will be one of privation and sacrifice for many States and some of the larger cities. Being that the public employee base is largely a Democrat support group, this speaks to the disaster that is coming for one of our two parties this fall.
Whether 2012 follows the same line is up to Obama. Clinton infuriated many of his supporters by subordinating his political agenda to the state of the economy and his short term political approval ratings. Obama seems to be above all this. Adversity won't make a narcissist look in the mirror, but it may force Barrack to look into it differently. It will be interesting to see how he reacts, going into this holiday season.
One last thought on our yellow brick road to Europe: the axiom I grew up with was that public sector employment was a pay sacrifice and more headaches than the private sector, but there was a more concrete end in sight with pension after twenty years. Now, the average federal employee averages nearly twice what the private sector does, and the public sector is about the only place where you can consistently find a pension in your future. And I am helping fund all this, thanks ever so much.
Finally, anybody who thinks the cultural bickering is going to abate any time soon had better find a quiet place. And leave the TV off. Even South Park is now a current events lodestone. There's not many places to hide any more. Please try and get used to it. It is all happening for a good reason.