Posted on 06/25/2002 6:54:28 AM PDT by aShepard
The Reality Thing
By PAUL KRUGMAN
You can say this about the Bush administration: where others might see problems, it sees opportunities.
A slump in the economy was an opportunity to push a tax cut that provided very little stimulus in the short run, but will place huge demands on the budget in 2010. An electricity shortage in California was an opportunity to push for drilling in Alaska, which would have produced no electricity and hardly any oil until 2013 or so. An attack by lightly armed terrorist infiltrators was an opportunity to push for lots of heavy weapons and a missile defense system, just in case Al Qaeda makes a frontal assault with tank divisions or fires an ICBM next time.
President George H. W. Bush once confessed that he was somewhat lacking in the "vision thing." His son's advisers don't have that problem: they have a powerful vision for America's future. In that future, we have recently learned, the occupant of the White House will have the right to imprison indefinitely anyone he chooses, including U.S. citizens, without any judicial process or review. But they are rather less interested in the reality thing.
For the distinctive feature of all the programs the administration has pushed in response to real problems is that they do little or nothing to address those problems. Problems are there to be used to pursue the vision. And a problem that won't serve that purpose, whether it's the collapse of confidence in corporate governance or the chaos in the Middle East, is treated as an annoyance to be ignored if possible, or at best addressed with purely cosmetic measures. Clearly, George W. Bush's people believe that real-world problems will solve themselves, or at least won't make the evening news, because by pure coincidence they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.
But real problems, if not dealt with, have a way of festering. In the last few weeks, a whole series of problems seem to have come to a head. Yesterday's speech notwithstanding, Middle East policy is obviously adrift. The dollar and the stock market are plunging, threatening an already shaky economic recovery. Amtrak has been pushed to the edge of shutdown, because it couldn't get the administration's attention. And the federal government itself is about to run out of money, because House Republicans are unwilling to face reality and increase the federal debt limit. (This avoidance thing seems to be contagious.)
So now would be a good time to do what the White House always urges its critics to do
Can you believe this BS. Sounds like he forgot who's recession this is!
Uh? what? I think this guy is using this opportunity as a journalist to preach his own helplessness. The reality is that this man is a hypocrit.
Another term for worshipers of the "blame Bush without condition" crowd.
What's really scary is that with the circulation of the NYT many many sheeple read this crap and believe it as gospel. Really Scary!
"Demands on the budget" translates to "will not let us spend ever-increasing amounts of the people's money on our social programs." This reporter needs to reexamine his core belief that letting people spend the money they earned as they see fit is a policy requiring justification.
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