Tonight, though, I would like to offer you a drink from a bottle at the very back of my shelf, one covered with dusts and cobwebs from lack of use. That bottle contains hope.
Hope is dangerous, of course. Frustrated hope is an easy cause of self pity, and anger at the world. I would submit, though, that hope is a dish best served cold (unlike revenge: served cold it is a crime of calculation and hate, rather than passion). You can think about the world, and see reasons things could work out, without passionately attaching yourself to them.
What I will submit to you are some observations which permit one, if so inclined, to view the reelection of Obama as a blessing.
First, we need to understand Romney was not going to balance the budget. Paul Ryan, who is considered by all far to the right of Romney, doesn’t do so until 2040 in his plan, which has already been labeled “right wing social engineering” by Newt Gingrich, and of course much worse by the Left.
Romney was VERY unlikely to have been able to repeal Obamacare with a Democrat-controlled Senate, but he would have been demonized for the effort. He would have been accused of being at war with the poor, and even the middle class. And people would have been stupid enough to believe these attacks.
Had Romney been elected, companies would have started hiring immediately. Because Obama was reelected, they have started laying off. We consider the first outcome good, and the second bad, but is this really the case? Superficially, of course, having a lower unemployment rate is better than having a higher rate.
But the reality is that the largest challenge we face, that of staying solvent in an ocean of accelerating debt accumulation, would not have been affected in any meaningful way by Romney’s election. On the surface things would have been better. People like me would have been happy, and felt better about things.
In the long run, though, it would have delayed the reckoning that MUST happen if we are to have a future. What I would submit is that whatever gets us to national awareness of the crisis we ALL face–those on food stamps, and those living in mansions on the hill–is more desirable. I think we can get to that reckoning faster under Obama, and a lot of Democrats in Congress.
What we will see over the next year is a gradual decline in our standard of living. I don’t think banks will be lending enough to turn Bernanke’s QE3 to actual inflation, but many companies will be battening down the hatches in the knowledge that Obamacare is coming, along with taxes, and regulations nobody understands, and which will be implemented by bureaucrats in fully unpredictable ways, and likely in uneven ways. This will lead to steady increases in unemployment.
In the last year we have seen growth since companies wanted to grow, and were waiting because they feared Obama, but finally just said “screw it”, and started hiring. Those companies will likely gradually shed many, but likely not all, of those jobs.
In 2016, after 2 years of more or less full implementation of Obamacare, insurance rates will continue to be very high, and much higher than they were before the law was passed, a burden that will be felt most by the middle class. Tax rates will be much higher too; and yet, borrowing will be astronomical. We may borrow $3 trillion ON the books to fund the increases in Medicaid and the subsidies to be paid for those not on Medicaid.
All of the misery that this will cause cannot be blamed on Republicans. In this election, many people believed Obama, that he had credibility when it came to job creation, that Romney would favor the rich, that Obama was the champion of the middle class, etc. All of these were lies.
If Republicans are intelligent, they will begin creating advertising campaigns NOW to start putting the idea out there that you can’t borrow your way to prosperity. You can’t borrow forever and not wind up in disaster. You can’t get enough money out of the rich to fund EVERYTHING. I actually think cartoons targeted at kids would be useful, and very simple presentations for adults.
The ONLY winning strategy, the ONLY way out of this without going the Argentina route, is to develop generalized public awareness of our problems. People pay attention when they are hurting, not when they are comfortable. Obviously, things would have been better if they had paid attention before this unnecessary decline in our economic well-being, but they didn’t, and they didn’t because of a well orchestrated propaganda campaign by the Left. The Right–and I just realized that I should not call this group “Republicans” any more–needs to create an informational campaign that is far reaching. We should be visiting schools and talking with teachers to help them understand our world view, and the actual problems our nation faces. EVERYONE faces the same problems: it is just that some are facing them honestly, and some will be blind-sided because of their chosen ignorance.
We should be doing outreach to black leaders, and helping them understand how Republican ideas on job creation–lower taxes, reduced regulation, and in my view programs facilitated by the government like Kiva, in which the suburban middle class donates money to urban business start-ups, in exchange for tax relief, possibly even in the form of credits–would help their communities more than Democrat ideas.
Fear is darkness. It is a useful, even necessary emotion, but you can’t live that way. We must always tell ourselves the truth, but there is a point where you just have to say “sufficient unto the day is the evil therein.”
Practically, there is little most of us can do over the next years. Unemployment will go up. We will have to deal with that. Our insurance rates will go up. We will have to deal with that. Healthcare will start to get worse. What took one week will take three weeks. But they have survived not too badly in Canada and elsewhere. It is not as good, and this solution will not truly correct any of the defects in the system, but we will have to deal with it.
In the end, a bit of inconvenience and pain is, as often as not, a useful tonic for all sorts of ailments, notably self pity. What will happen need not have happened, but it will.
And in the end, we can hope–I truly believe this–that America might wake up. In the story I just posted, he complained about the inability of the cashier to make change in her head. But the truth is that that same cashier, if he had dropped his wallet on the way out, probably would have run after him to return it. If he had a flat tire, she would have called AAA for him.
And in general the only hate crimes tolerated any more are leftist attacks on conservatives, and those are mainly verbal.
We have Islamists to fear, of course, and many other things. But “a life lived in fear is a life half lived.”
This is our chance to become braver, more cheerful, more positive.
Have at it.