And so the United States and its developed economy counterparts face an unfamiliar crisis of unrecognized dimensions and potentially endless proportions. Politicians and respective electorates focus on taxes or healthcare when the ultimate demon is a lack of global demand and the international competitiveness to thrive. The solution for more jobs is seen as a simple quick step of extending the Bush tax cuts or incenting small businesses to hire additional workers, or in the case of Euroland, shoring up government balance sheets with emergency funding. It is not. These policies only temporarily bolster consumption while failing to address the fundamental problem of developed economies: Job growth is moving inexorably to developing economies because they are more competitive.[1]With a corporate tax rate that is the second highest in the world, if memory serves me, the Dems push for (other) higher taxes as though the most important goal is to wring a few more bucks out of “the rich.”
We writhe at the thought that Big Oil profits from the sale of, choke, gasoline but don’t blink an eye at the huge tax bite in the cost of gasoline. We are dangerously dependent on foreign sources of oil, not a little of it in enemy hands, but positively weep with joy at the mere thought of useless “green” energy subsidies and rend our garments at the thought of embracing that hideous demon, nuclear power. With oil’s outstanding safety record involving deep-water drilling the president nonetheless flew to Grandstand City over the BP boo boo and, so far as I know, Chinese oilmen are drilling away somewhere off of Key West and Cuba while federal bureaucrats beaver away at safety standards for riskless drilling.
With Muslims intent on dominating the entire world we have an earnest debate on Muslims’ right to build yet another center of subversion and a deliberate national insult at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
The president’s and Congress’s completely unnecessary expenditure of enormous political capital on skewering us with socialized medicine was at the expense of serious efforts to increase our global competitiveness and hence create jobs.
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It’s an ironclad Hollywood convention. When an actor gets in a good lick on some pursuing thug or monster he drops the crowbar in hand and flees like a dumb ass instead of finishing the job while the finishing’s possible. We’ve walked away from not a few 38th Parallels in place and MAJ Nicholsons bleeding to death from an assassin’s bullet in East Germany. Can we ever act like we mean business when our vital interests are threatened or do we always have to order out for more hankies?
Here’s an entertaining video of what happens when we intently focus on one thing.[2] I don’t think the proposition is debatable that we are fascinated with the trivial, the insubstantial, the facile, the glib, the surface, the temporary, and whether or not someone is “offended” by any words spaken anywhere in the land -- like, oh, "niggardly" or "black hole." So let’s say for argument’s sake that the video is emblematic of a focus on the trivial. That other thing in there? I say let’s call it “impending catastrophic loss of American strategic advantages” or “Islamic lawfare and subversion in America” or "Louis Farrakhanism" or "Chicago fascination with sedition" or “abandonment of the Constitution” or "epidemic illegitimacy and underclass pathology" or "unopposed third world invasion" or “dangerous growth of federal government power.”
Yes. Let’s call it one of those. Do we see any one of those “things” abroad in the land? Those non-trivial things?
Notes
[1] "Allentown." By William H. Gross, Pimco, 12/10.
[2] This experiment “has become one of the best-known experiments in psychology” according to Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons of the Visual Cognition Lab, U. of Illinois.
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