Amity Shlaes, in the Post, says that Phil Gramm was right: we are a nation of whiners. There is no recession. It’s all in our minds. Suck it up, America!
Economists define recession statistically, so in the world of economic stastistics it’s possible to say “there is no recession” with a straight face because the GDP has apparently not shrunk for two consecutive quarters.
But most Americans think “recession” means hard times. With painful food and energy inflation, significant declines in the housing market, tight credit and a financial system that keeps finding new ways to break, it takes more than guts to step in front of a turned-on microphone and say that times are not hard. It takes sheer stupidity, which I think defines Gramm’s statement last week.
What I find interesting about the treatment of Gramm by the right is that the conservatives seem to have forgotten how they used to view politicians who told Americans that the fault lay in their minds. Jimmy Carter’s famous speech in 1979, during the last huge energy crisis, told voters that there was a crisis of spirit, and that they were part of the problem: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” However right Carter was about a lot of what he said, it was a political misstep that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House — and that right-wingers have mercilessly mocked for three decades.
But now, it’s one of their own who has pointed a finger of blame at the general population — and suddenly, the conservative media is willing to give him some slack.
Watching the right squirm around on this one is sheer fun. Still, truthfully, we would be a lot better off if less media time were devoted to Gramm’s relatively trivial gaffe than to the painful fact that McCain’s chief economic adviser was one of the central figures behind the broad deregulation of the financial industry in the late ’90s — a deregulation that led directly to the multiple failures of the credit and mortgage markets that have been so ruinous over the last two years.
I would love to see a Democratic ad that simply explained this to voters, and said, “If you liked what’s been happening lately in real estate and on Wall Street, Phil Gramm is your man, and he’s shaping John McCain’s policy.”
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