Our Chick-fil-A economy
What happens when Americans start thinking about economic policy the same way they do gay marriage or abortion?
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/03/our_chick_fil_a_economy/
Man am I getting liberal in my old age! Reading this article and its comments on the Prosperity Economics manifesto had me nodding along like a robot:
…Let’s embrace the philosophy that says shared prosperity for all offers the best path to vigorous economic growth. Let’s pump money directly into infrastructure and higher education, job training and scientific research. Let’s give unions a hand instead of the iron boot and tighten regulations on the banks instead of loosen them. Most difficult of all — in order to pay for all these bold initiatives, let’s raise taxes from their historic lows instead of cutting them even further.
The core of this article is all about the absence of any sort of evidence-based decision making. In the ‘good old days’ when we had government officials that actually represented the _population_ rather than just some hyper partisan Gerrymandered slice, it seemed fairly routine for politicians to evaluate what actually worked (or authorize experiments in absence of data) and then get behind what the evidence pointed out. Today, of course, the idea of anyone in the US making decisions based on actual _evidence_ is enough to cause side splitting laughter (as a way to cover up the tears of depression in many cases)…
But consensus is no longer a workable proposition in contemporary politics. We can blame the Voting Rights Act for turning the South Republican, or we can note Roe v. Wade for energizing an entire generation of hard-right religiously flavored conservative activists, or we can target ’60s-era hippie enlightenment for spreading the trippy idea that the earth is a fragile organism threatened by human activities, but one thing’s for sure, partisan realignment has made compromise and coalition virtually impossible. And one of the byproducts of this realignment is that positions on economic policy have now become as immovable as one’s position on abortion. Economists might look at the data, but most people don’t. Politics has become little more than a vehicle for cultural warfare — something vividly demonstrated by the post 2010 antics of Tea Party Republicans in the House, who used the budget process to go after not just healthcare or overall spending, but Planned Parenthood and the EPA and NPR. There’s no sense that Congress’ job is to solve problems by coming together in a compromise deal that responds to the necessities of the day — it’s all about scoring points that advance one side or the other’s ideological agenda.
I am almost motivated to read the manifesto, but I just can’t develop the enthusiasm necessary to get past the activation energy because I am so certain it is a meaningless waste of resources.
