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Jewish World Review May 5, 2005 / 26 Nissan, 5765 I Love the Obvious By Michael Long
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I could barely find a parking place at the mall yesterday. And it was in the middle of the afternoon, weeks removed from any gift-giving holiday. Yet the place was packed.
And therein lies a lesson about politics and the value of common sense.
The crowded, middle-of-the-day mall parking lot says to me that consumers are spending. Therefore they are confident, probably not in scary debt, mostly employed, and prosperous enough to afford to have at least some members of the family age 16 and older not employed nine-to-five.
A little common sense goes a long way. Documented behavior is a far more reliable indicator of economic health than any statistic. Take a look at your checkbook. Consider your pay stub. Check out the lines for summer concerts. And, like I do, see how crowded the malls and Wal-Mart are. That's where the immediate education on this topic can be found.
The range of normal for most statistics is so broad that the numbers get used to support pretty much every position. For instance, real disposable income for the month of March was unchanged from April.
Republican conclusion: Americans' income is holding steady. Yea for President Bush!
Democratic conclusion: Americans' income is stagnant. President Bush can't do anything right.
What it really means… Well, search me. Who knows? But what's obvious? I don't get a raise every month, so if income is holding steady then this statistic is probably okay news. But do not doubt that there is a pundit / economist / partisan / fatalist out there who has already written a thousand words about why this news is somewhere between apocalyptic and clinically depressing.
Philosophers and scientists like to work from first principles— the simplest basis of truth in any subject. So let's go back to first principles.
Take social security. Checks that go out to retirees today are repackaged paychecks from workers working today. The per-person cost of social security is, roughly, the amount of money going to those retirees divided by the number of workers there are to pay the bill. The number of retirees is growing quickly while the number of workers is not— that's the result of the Baby Boom. Therefore, the per-taxpayer cost of social security is going up.
Want to bring it down? Lower benefits, raise the retirement age, or hike taxes. Take your pick— that's all there is.
So there really is a serious problem with social security, contrary to recent Democratic amnesia that they used to say the same thing.
How about liberal media bias? The left says there is no such thing, but let's take a look.
Nearly every major editorial page in America opposed the attack to depose Saddam Hussein. The news pages featured prominent stories questioning the motives of the administration. President Bush was portrayed as in "a rush to war," though he sought counsel and support from the United Nations, Congress, and the governments of the world for well over a year—and a dozen years after Saddam was ordered to destroy his weapons of mass destruction yet refused to produce their remains.
There's more. Polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of reporters are self-described liberals. The volume of coverage for mistakes at Abu Ghraib overwhelmed reports of Saddam's decades of torture of his own citizens, his rape of the environment, the race-based murders he ordered, his quashing of the most basic human rights, his financial support for terrorists— and the list goes on.
So the media do have a liberal slant— unless you believe America is the world's chief exporter of oppression, in which case I do see how a story documenting the damage of Middle Eastern fascism can look like a conservative plot to landmine the road to utopia.
Whatever problems we have would be solved quicker if both sides accepted a range of obvious truths: American healthcare is wildly expensive but our quality of life is amazingly good. The poor here live better than the middle class in many other countries. When your enemies understand that you will kill them, they are less likely to fly airplanes into your buildings. And if people check out at the grocery store with bottled water they could get from the tap for free—water still more expensive than our $2.50 a gallon gasoline—then, as I noted where this essay began, the economy can't be all that bad.
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WR contributor Michael Long is a a director of the White House Writers Group. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Los Angeles Times Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate |
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