Recently in Economy Category

This is the Los Angeles Conundrum: What makes this place an exciting and open and progressive place to live is what makes it so poorly run. It's pretty much a regional distillation of the California Conundrum.

Many regions of the US demonstrate a greater combination of civic-mindedness and community cohesion than LA. Think of, say, Cincinnati. Yet those regions typically foster less innovation, less of the progressive spirit that fuels creativity and cultural and economic growth. LA people are independent spirits and less willing to see themselves as personally invested in the identity of their larger community. That's why they left places like Cincinnati.

The damaging irony is that, because LA and California people are more progressive than citizens of most other states, we have a tendency during salad days to come up with costly utopian programs and stifling utopian regulations that compromise our competitiveness over the long haul. So Jonathan's right: our giving up some "non-essential" service now may teach us a thing or two about what's really essential.

I know, I know, it's only liberals who are uncouth. Still, this shows something about the temper(s) of our times.

A few nights ago, Jon Stewart had the best reaction to the prospect of Democrats losing their 60-seat uber-majority in the Senate, wondering aloud why the Democrats worry that they won't get anything done with a mere 59-seat. As Stewart noted, George W. Bush generally had a far smaller majority and was still able to do pretty much "whatever the bleep he wanted."

If the public -- even the liberal public of "Taxachussetts" -- won't punish politicians for defying President Obama's agenda, then Democrats need to take stock of their situation and adjust their agenda accordingly. Bush was able to get his way because the opposition party feared defying him. If the opposition, or even Democratic moderate Blue Dogs, don't fear defying Obama, he needs to sit down and decide whether this is a communication problem or a simple disconnect with the public.

Personally, I've said many times in the past year or two that I'm a recovering libertarian, more willing to recognize that we need a dynamic balance of private and public efforts. I'm a bit surprised and disappointed that Obama can't seem to convince the American public of that, which has led to the propagation of tea-party propaganda about a new socialist era.

Many Americans were surprised to him in a role like this, as the President of our great nation. You see, he was young, and black. Yet he had a certain steady charisma about him. And a sense of integrity.

Tonight, I saw him on television, as he talked plain talk to Americans, helping them make sense of our challenging times. He mentioned that this great recession may make us great again, spurring us to revalue that which matters most in life. He gave hope to his listeners.

How sad, though, that this was an Allstate commercial featuring this guy. I hoped to see Obama playing more of this role as the Preacher-in-Chief, yet he hasn't warmed to that role.

"Anyone can take people where they already want to go," said the pundit Jonathan Alter many years ago. "True leaders can take people where only their better selves are willing to tread." If Obama is to change the tone in Washington, he will have to make an effort here. He may have had a better first year if he spent more time pointing his fellow countrymen to a better place rather than jumping in so quickly into the partisan fray.

The '00s were the Decade of American Anxiety. Or, perhaps, the Decade of Denial.

This decade began with the popping of the tech bubble in the spring of 2000. Experts had been in denial about the economic laws of physics, claiming the Internet had created a business model in which profits or even income were irrelevant measures of success. Now reality, and anxiety, set in. Temporarily.

9/11 exposed how America wasn't immune to the chaotic effects of the very globalization we had unleashed on the rest of the planet. Yet the result of our awakened anxiety represented still more denial, believing as we did that a whack-a-mole foreign policy would make the rest of the world pay us proper tribute.

Meanwhile, we replaced the techiest bubble with the lowest-tech bubble, surmising that land can't disappear into the air the way bandwidth does. But again we denied the laws of physics, believing that economic productivity had less to do with building new things and more to do with refinancing our homes -- for a handsome profit -- every twenty minutes.

An economic panic nine years into the decade should have signaled that it's time to come to grips with our many hangovers. But once we became somewhat stable, it became time not for serious discussions about the nation we seek to be, but for tea parties and ridiculous mouth-to-ears combat. This hysterical form of pseudo-dialogue represents both our anxiety and our continuing denial that we must grow up.

Denial and anxiety, they placed their stamp on our decade -- and we have postponed resolution of such matters till the next decade. Stay tuned... as if we had a choice.

I agree with Jonathan that not enough has changed in how we "do business," as it were.

I believe that Obama and Bernanke and others have helped us avoid the economic collapse that the best experts feared early this year. No one really knew where the worst downward spiral in eight decades would end.

To shift the metaphors, the overly obese patient was saved from the life-threatening heart attack. But I do suspect a return to gluttony, or at least an insufficient resolve to tighten that belt or that lap band.

Here, I'm disappointed in Obama. He had the opportunity to use his bully pulpit not just for Nobel-Prize winning discussions of international reconciliation, but for even more important discussions of what it means to be an American who produces more than he or she consumes. He had a chance to point an anxious nation -- especially receptive younger people who don't tar him as a Marxist African -- toward a higher set of values than mass consumerism. He missed his chance, and may have only forestalled the heart attack that kills.

Riding the DASH to work last week, I looked at all the buses crowded at a stop light, and an important realization struck me: You and I are being robbed by our government, so that thousands and thousands of buses and trains around our nation can deliver people like, well, me to various destinations.

This is quite unfair. I don't ride the bus that much. Why should I subsidize other people who are too lazy and too unproductive to ride the bus as infrequently as me? Why should these freeloaders expect me to help get them to work? It's also unfair in that public transit also incentivizes many middle-class and wealthy people, who should know better and who can afford real cars, to ride city lines instead.

It's socialism, of course. And I was shocked to find that public transit is a $70 billion swindle, just in terms of federal dollars alone.

Why? We all know that the government can't do anything right. I say, dismantle the nation's public transit and subway systems. If it's so important, let the free market rise up and tackle it in a more efficient way.

[Sarcasm off.]

Public transit is a shared investment. It leads to results that we couldn't get on our own, or through purely private enterprise. So when we discuss something new like healthcare, let's get away from the anti-socialism demagoguery and think more in terms of what former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in words inscribed on the outside of the IRS headquarters in Washington, DC: "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." The issue then should be how best to invest those taxes, not how we can grandstand against any and all public investment.

Jonathan asks whether we want a political hack who has sold him or herself over a long political career or a self-financing egomaniac.

Diversity is the in-thing in a progressive state such as California. And if you ask me, we need a diversity of political hacks and self-financing egomaniacs in state elections.

But what we really need are people who will moderate a grown-up discussion about what we can reasonably expect of ourselves as a state. Why do we keep making the same mistakes as voters? Why can't we spot leaders who are truly committed to fiscal sanity? Is it because we're not committed to it? Are we willing to make hard trade-offs?

Californians have always tended to be pioneers. But pioneers tend to lack the civic spirit found in other great regions. Indeed, studies show that areas that are strong in civic spirit and volunteerism are busts in economic innovation -- and vice versa. Californians aren't interested in civic investment or social cohesion to the extent other world regions are.

And yet the progressive side of the California spirit also creates some costly burdens, and some naive ones, that erode our greatest asset -- our famed competitiveness. Elected officials, hacks or self-financed egomaniacs alike, are powerless to cure this. Maybe we need a Teacher-in-Chief to help us grow up. That's not far from the role that I hoped Obama would play for the nation as a whole after our latest economic binge resulted in The Great Hangover.

I think the folks at Fox n' Friends will say that a non-partisan study of the economy and the stimulus is only non-partisan if it confirms what they want to believe.

For the record, the $1.6 trillion projected deficit terrifies me, and we'll need greater maturity out of our populace than we've currently got to make the tough choices.

The previous administration crashed the nation's Trans Am into a ditch. Obama, at considerable expense, has gotten it started again. He deserves credit for that, in the face of those who acted as though the engine was going to pop to life on its own (remember that last December we seriously believed we were entering a Second Depression).

But now the bill for the repairs is coming due, and we need more than partisan posturing. We need Dems to cut back on social services and pandering to lobbies, Republicans to cut back on wars and low-tax fantasies that don't work as advertised, and all Americans to realize that our credit addiction needs to be dealt with at the national and individual level.

The good news for Obama is that a major, longtime world leader has rebuked conservatives who've been complaining that their president is a crazy foreign socialist intent on destroying America.

The bad news is that his defender is this guy....