Parbuckle Policy?

For those of you buried in your debt debacle, government shutdown, defund Obamacare bunker allow me to offer you an insight into effective activity: the parbuckling of the Costa Concordia. What a success. The operation to re-float the stricken cruise ship went without a hitch. It was the most complex and largest effort of its kind ever undertaken, costing around $800 million so far – more than the worth of the ship when it was in good shape – and occupied a motley crew of 500 engineers, salvage experts, divers, and ten biologists. The latter being there to oversee environmental concerns.

I had no clue what parbuckling was up until now, but clearly its a careful, well thought through, and cooperative effort, with the goal being the ultimate shunting off for scrap of the 114,000 gross tonnage monster stuck on the rocks just off a little Italian island. The statistics alone are awesome. Thirty thousand tons of steel were used in the operation. Huge sponsons were attached to the exposed side of the ship and then fifty-six chains, each fifty-eight meters in length and weighing about twenty-six tons, were used to winch the ship off the rocks so that seawater  could flood into the sponsons and act as a weight to pull it upright. Once accomplished, those same sponsons were then filled completely so that they weighed the ship down and settled it thirty meters deep onto a one hundred and fifty meter long platform atop an artificial seabed made up of sixteen thousand tons of fill. There the ship will sit throughout the winter while it is fitted and fixed enough to be floated and hauled away to the scrapyard.

Phew. well done everyone involved.

Now maybe we can employ a similar process to overhaul US economic policy.

Perhaps we can winch it upright and off the rocks. Let’s face it: policy has been stuck aground for a very long time. We have made no progress, but the damage has accumulated steadily as the natural course of the economy has corroded and scarred it deeply. Eventually, if we are very lucky, we could even tow our policy off to the scrapyard and build ourselves a shiny new one.

Well, I can dream. Parbuckling is much more interesting than economics on two fronts.

One is the tired and fruitless quasi debate within the economics profession itself. After years of crisis nothing substantial has changed, nor is there much prospect of change. The same players say the same things. Chastise each other the same way. And generally display a total disregard for the social damage they managed to inflict with their false theories. Not that anyone is admitting to falsehood. Economics has creaked to a halt. It hit the rocks sometime ago – I would argue about seventy years ago, but that’s just me – and since then has devolved into a massive game of he-said she-said mudslinging, fact avoidance, and dyspeptic repetition of increasingly politicized nostrums. I don’t think we should dignify the edifice it has become with the moniker of “theory” any more. It has been exposed as a set of opinions of varying complexity and varying degrees of irrelevance. That there is an economist to fit any political idea no matter how half baked or extreme tells you all you need to know about how “scientific” economics is. The profession, such as it is, needs a good parbuckling, but won’t get it from within the safety of academia where path dependence dominates and prevents concerted action.

The second is the continued anti-social rantings of the Republican party. It would be nice to have some serious right of center ideas being floated to spark sensible discussion about policy. Other, of course, than the ones that the Democrats float so that they can have a debate amongst themselves. Right now we do not have a loyal opposition. By that I mean we don’t have a right of center party responsible enough to compromise sufficiently to keep the wheels moving whilst expressing an alternative view. The modern Republicans cannot bring themselves to compromise on some topics while oppose on others. So they simply oppose. And thus grind everything to a halt.

I always get criticized for blaming everything on the Republicans. Why, I am asked, is it not reasonable to blame the Democrats and/or Obama for not compromising too? I can only shudder at the blindness implied by the question.

Blindness to the extraordinary right wing shift in America over the last four decades. The entire economic debate takes place on territory once thought of as right wing. Now it is considered centrist. The total triumph of right wing ideas back in the early 1980’s and cemented into place in the 1990’s even when a Democrat was in the White House, has left us a false sense of balance. There cannot be two sides to a discussion when all we are talking about are variations on a right wing theme. Or, put another way, how can the Democrats compromise when they have already conceded the big talking points? Asking them for more is asking for total capitulation of any long held loyalty to their core values. The shame is that some feel obliged to do that. Obama being one.

No one is fighting for the working family. Somewhere it became accepted that stagnant wages were not a political issue. Or that to speak of inequality was to be rude and offensive to those who have been lucky in life and  made a pot load of money. Or that unemployment of 6% to 7% was “normal”. Or that the salaries and bonuses of the elite – not just CEO’s but the entire corps of professionals that litter the top layers of  wage earning – were justified by their “contribution”. Whatever that is. And a contribution that hasn’t noticeably altered our economic competitiveness much if at all. Along the way it also became acceptable for banks to syphon off capital for their own use – aka gambling – rather than lending into the real economy. It also became normal for our corporations to be rewarded for undermining wages here by shipping jobs abroad. It became usual to discuss the impending doom of our social programs despite the lack of evidence that they were, in fact, doomed. And it became perfectly reasonable to funnel mountains of cash into our elections and thus corrupt democracy and hand control to the very rich.

Of course no one is fighting for the working family. They don’t count. Our elite is solving the problems that affect the elite. It isn’t leading the nation.

And this is why the entire impasse nowadays is so intractable. In economic terms, we have ended up as a right wing country far from the old centrist 1950’s and 1960’s. We will shift back, but right now there’s no room anymore to compromise from the left without giving up entirely on the concept of working families, middle class and other bedrock concepts of those centrist years.

The right has a similar problem, although as the active agent they are responsible for the next move. Having deregulated, favored profits, handed over power to big business, demeaned social programs, denounced government, undermined unions, and overseen the stagnation of wages, they have produced the modern economy. It is built in their image, whether they like or admit it or not. And it is stuck. Their trajectory is to go further to the right into extreme and uncharted territory. They criticize those of their own who falter at the prospect of this. They call them not conservative enough. They have had a forty year run of policy success, albeit sometimes from Democratic sources – Clinton is culpable for much financial deregulation. They have won the big battles and used up their old ideas. Any further victories have to come from ideas further afield. This implies a total break with the past. However good it may have been.

The point is that the right no longer about those bedrock concepts. It is obsessed with its idealist and ideologically extreme vision for America. In order to fulfill the goals of its more extreme members it has to careen along and undo all the post-war consensus. It has to plunge us back into the late 1800’s. That group of extremists is large enough to pull the entire Republican party along. It is not mainstream. It is not centrist. And it cannot abide compromise. Which is why it resorts to hostage style tactics when faced with opposition or failure. It cannot come back from the brink without admitting defeat and setting in motion a move back to the center. That would imply undoing some of the policy victories of the Reagan era – admitting that Obamacare is a good program is an obvious example. So it cannot admit that it lost the last election. It cannot countenance the onset of Obamacare, and it is willing to employ scorched earth or destructive tactics to force itself on the rest of us. It has nowhere to run.

So our economic policy is stuck on the rocks like the Costa Concordia, slowly rotting away, a hulk looming over what could otherwise be a pleasant and wealth making recovery.

It needs parbuckling. It needs salvage. But until the extremist stranglehold is broken the engineers cannot get to work.

Oh, and its only a couple of weeks until the debt ceiling crisis.

Back to the bunker.

 

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