2008 was a pivotal year. The biggest story was the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first African-American president. Probably the second biggest was the perfect storm of preventable disasters in housing, finance, debt and employment that can all be summed up as "the economy."
But beyond this, 2008 was the year when theories based on the make-believe of wishful thinking met reality. As usually happens in such cases, reality won.
Here is a list of 2008's lessons meted out by the school of how the world really works. The lessons leave a number of shattered illusions in their train. May we be wise enough to learn from past mistakes.
1. You can't cut taxes in a recession and balance a budget, It's been tried three times. It has never worked.
2. You can't cut taxes and balance a budget when you're fighting two wars. No one's ever been foolish enough to even consider that before, let alone actually do it.
3. Cutting taxes for the rich does not help the poor. Not under Reagan. Not under Bush I. Not under Bush II. That was never the purpose, just the fig leaf. Watch and learn.
4. Lending to people without the income to repay based on the expectation of asset appreciation invites a banking crash. What happened in 1929 with stocks happened in 2008 with real estate.
5. Voluntary and self-regulation are oxymorons, especially where large sums of money are concerned.
6. Torturing people is not only wrong; it works against us, raising hordes of dedicated enemies. Read our own intelligence estimates and military reports.
7. Global warming is real, and getting worse.
8. Prosperity built on borrowed money comes to an end, sooner or later. If you live beyond your means there will be a reckoning.
9. Personal integrity matters. Think of Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Elliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Bernie Madoff and Rod Blagojevich.
10. When working people's income stagnates or goes down, so do profits. That's what happens when demand goes down. Reference 1933.
11. Americans do not always fall for attack politics based on smears and name-calling. Not this time.
12. The majority of women cannot be counted on to vote for a woman candidate if that candidate does not have the best answers they need for the issues they face.
13. White Americans will vote for a minority candidate for president. 2008 shows they will do so when that candidate is the one seriously showing an unvarnished appreciation of what the nation's problems are and if the candidate actually seems intent on solving them rather than spewing the same old ideological drivel that caused the problems in the first place.
4 comments:
I really like your list. May I suggest another, this one got a lot of us...
14. The "buy and hold" investment strategy is dead. Blue chips are not so forever... should be changed to "buy and homework."
Yearly Review, if I may...(from Harpers)
The United States marked the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. Over four million Iraqis had fled the country or been internally displaced, and the total cost of the war, currently about $650 billion, was expected to rise to $2 trillion over the next five years. Oil rose above $147 a barrel, and Abu Dhabi bought New York City’s Chrysler Building for $800 million. Somali pirates stole a Saudi supertanker. President George W. Bush announced that North Korea was no longer a state sponsor of terrorism. The CIA expanded its covert operations in Iran. Bozo the Clown died, as did Jesse Helms, William F. Buckley Jr., Paul Newman, Heath Ledger, Indonesian dictator Suharto, comedian George Carlin, didgeridoo master Alan Dargin, and, at age 110, Louis de Cazenave of the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, one of the last two living French veterans of World War I. “War,” he once explained, “is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify.” Ariel Sharon was still alive, and Israel bombed Gaza in retaliation for ongoing rocket attacks. Tom Jones insured his chest hair for $7 million.
Australian police tasered a ram. France banned TV shows for babies. Pope Benedict XVI toured the United States, and the Vatican released a list of seven “social” sins–including littering, genetic tampering, and creating poverty–to complement the seven cardinal vices. The World Health Organization announced that virtually untreatable drug-resistant tuberculosis could now be found in 45 countries. Japanese men began to wear bras. The cost of rice increased by 30 percent, and food riots broke out in 30 countries. The United Nations expected the number of starving people in the world to rise to 950 million. North Korean hunger scientists announced a new noodle. In an expanding thousand-square-mile low-oxygen zone growing along the coast of Oregon and Washington, every fish, crab, and sea worm was dead. A 7.9-magnitude earthquake centered in China’s Sichuan Province left tens of thousands of people dead and millions homeless. The Summer Olympics were held in Beijing, heralded on television by fake, computer-generated fireworks. Structures built for the 2004 Athens Olympics were falling into ruin. A man in Swansea, Wales, died from eating too much fairycake, and an elderly German woman filed a lawsuit against a hospital in Bavaria after she went in for a leg operation and was instead given a new anus. Paddington Bear turned 50; both the cubicle and the assassination of Martin Luther King turned 40; Viagra turned 10. One in 100 American adults was behind bars...
...peace, john
John R.: You sure got that right!
John: What an awesome list. Interesting and amusing. What is fairycake and why are Japanese men wearing bras? :-)
"1. You can't cut taxes in a recession and balance a budget, It's been tried three times. It has never worked."
That fits perfectly into Albert Einsteins definition of "insanity."
Post a Comment