The Shell Game

At the county fairs of my youth there were guys who invited you to play the shell game (also on the streets in cities and anywhere else). They would place a pea under a shell move the shells rapidly around and then asked you to guess which shell had the pea under it. We suckers who played the game generally lost. It reminded me of the Ed Asner video piece I have on this web site where he says, speaking for big business etc., “look over there” as a means of misdirecting our focus so we don’t see the real issues that are taking place. People fell for it at the country fairs, the city streets and still are.

The big shell game I see taking place right now is about the national debt. Republicans during the election kept trying to scare the public with the fear of trillion dollar deficits while Obama and the Democrats talked about jobs and living wages. We know who won the election, significantly.

But the debate still goes on as we approach the so-called fiscal cliff. It is a shell game, a red herring. This is not to minimize the problem of the deficit but to put it into proper perspective. Along with these red herrings is the talk about reducing entitlements. Both of these ideas would lead to worsening job markets, increase the problems of the middle class, and crush those in poverty.

If you want to decrease the deficit you have to grow the economy especially the middle class. Students of history know when the middle class is strong the economy is at its strongest and then you have the ability to pay down debt (not that politicians always do that, but it is the time for it.)

The European economy fell for this shell game concentrating on paying down debt to the detriment of the economies; we don’t want to follow in their footsteps; it didn’t work.

So Obama and Boehner debate and I worry that Obama will give away too much in terms of entitlements in the spirit of compromise and thus endanger our potential growth.

We need to go back to tried and true economic theory that worked in the past: demand side economics or Keynesian economics. James K. Galbraith wrote this month, “Our current situation, the financial sector makes its money by destroying not by building.” He points to larger issues in our economy. The distribution of wealth in our economy is a scandal, but our economic processes are even more scandalous yet seem to remain under the radar.

If we are going to build this country again we need to return the policies that made us a great nation, to the times Tom Brokaw calls “the great generation.” A time when the country was more unified (okay, wars help us do that; but this is akin to a war now.) We need to worry about public services and that is what the populace wants according to every poll I read. We want better schools to be competitive in the world. We need to care for the environment and the alternate energy again to be competitive and also just to survive; it is the right things to do. We need to make sure the advanced education is available to everyone as it was in my youth, and not just limited to the wealthy or plunge students into crushing debt. We badly need to get health care under control. We have plenty of models around the world that show us how better quality and less expensive systems work and we should learn from them.

Galbraith talks about the need to come to terms as to whether we are going to embrace the core institutions and values of the New Deal and the Great Society that worked that provided all those things or to continue down the slippery slope of supply side economics that has created our current mess.

We need to provide security for folk in retirement years and for those who are in trouble because of misfortune. Medicare needs to have competitive bids for medicine not protection for pharmaceutical companies; that’s nuts. Insurance companies need to be on short reins working for the public good not just the bottom dollar profits of the share holders.

Reagan began the attacks on those core values and unfortunately the power of wealth has manipulated the government and played the shell game well with the public. We need to regulate companies not deregulate them as we have learned they just take advantage of others as they fight for a bigger and bigger share of the economic pie; and their managers make outlandish salaries and get absurd perks.

The jobs of the future will be primarily service jobs as we don’t make much anymore. Thus it is in our self interest to pay those who work in the service industries well to stimulate the entire economy. Yes, that means supporting unions again. We need to shore up our public retirement programs as we have learned companies have shown irresponsibility in safeguarding their own pension plans. Experience has taught us that governments run better insurance programs than private ones do which hand out huge salaries and perks and insure only those that will make them the most money.

More than ever we need to keep our eye on the pea and not be fooled my all the misdirection that is taking place in our society and our economy. Our country needs stability not a shell game or we’ll all be conned.