I was reading Peggy Noonan’s column today and I think she nailed it. We are in the middle of good economic news and potentially the end of the recession and no one is excited at all. As she starts off:
The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers. Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008. Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.
The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.
I read the rest of the column and I have to agree that we as a people are getting frustrated and disheartened. I know why I am. I am in the group that disagrees with the people in power and no one is listening to me (which is why I started the blog). The proposed solutions treat me as a child who can’t be responsible while at the same time taking more and more of my money for my “own good” to fund this junk. If Peggy is seeing this also, it is not something simply out here on the fringe.
Yes, I don’t see any of the leaders out there presenting a path to recovery and prosperity. The Democrats with everything going on are more concerned with consolidating power than they are fixing the mess. Regardless what Obama says about how we need to let him clean it up, I have not heard a plan. Lowering emissions and decreasing energy use is not a plan to grow the economy. Offering heathcare to those who don’t have it won’t grow the economy. And spending $787 billion on stimulus over several years is not showing much progress either.
Where is the leadership? Where is the plan to get us back?
I think Peggy says it nicely about our current leaders:
We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.
At some point, children have to grow up. Hopefully, it will be soon enough to make the pain bearable.
- FOP Vermillion