The American Dream isn't dead. It just needs a little CPR.
Wisconsin spoke loudly on Tuesday about their state's direction. The capitalist incumbent won out over the collectivist challenger. When you beat someone twice, you are doing right things right. Nationwide, we have settled into the idea of Mitt Romney as the republican candidate. Five months remain between now and the general election. The Obama administration says this Wisconsin result is not meaningful. I am absolutely certain they are wrong.
(I promised I wouldn't gloat. I really tried not to. Somehow, though, Read 'Em And Weep [7] has made it onto my playlist about 25 times today. Barry Manilow looks very very gay in the video, but what can one expect from a dude in clown makeup? And while we are mocking people, let's jump on the crying Barrett supporter. The death of democracy as we know it? Whatever, you blubbering idiot [8].)
Now that we see which way the winds are blowing, everyone has some soul-searching to do.
Is ANYONE thinking about the issue of how to return America to prosperity, and restore it to greatness? "Better than everyone else" is not good enough, and never has been. American exceptionalism is what made the world what it is today. Granted, we have stumbled, but we haven't fallen off a cliff. There is hope, and contrary to the assertions of certain "leaders" that we really aren't all that, we really ARE all that.
America needs a new direction, and a new unity, and we will come roaring out of this slump.
Everyone is long on platitudes and broad concepts, but somewhat short on details. So, let us look at where we are now, and how we got there. Then, let us make some bold proposals to right the ship, and sail into a better tomorrow.
We are a nostalgic bunch. We fondly remember the 50s and 60s as a time of prosperity and peace. By the 70s, some cracks began to appear in the Stepford façade, but still, times were good. The 80s saw explosive changes, yet EVERYONE prospered under Reagan Rule, from the executives to the manicurists. The 90s had their bumps, but the dot-com boom that later busted let a whole bunch of grown-ups who weren't gambling with the milk money reap a ton of cash.
Then came the 00s, aka the Naughties, where not so sophisticated investors got into the housing market. The boom went bust, and it was all downhill from there. Combine this with a whole boatload of outsourcing, plus some truly crapper-ific economic policy and a crushing load of unfunded entitlements, and you have America in 2012.
So why can't we have the Halcyon Days of the 50s, 60s, and 70s back? That glorious time when there were plenty of jobs for everyone, and while Dad was bringing home the bacon, Mom stayed home to cook it?
Well, the first and most obvious reason is that life is more expensive now. Think about it. What were a Halcyoner's expenses? Rent, then later a mortgage on a modest home after you had saved up a substantial down payment, electric, gas, water, one vehicle that you drove until the wheels fell off, a phone line that you NEVER used for long distance because it was so flippin' expensive, one television, one radio, and food, mostly prepared from scratch.
And what are the expenses that folks consider "necessities" in this day and age? A second car, a TV in every room, a DVD player, a rockin' stereo, a computer, internet access, cable TV, a cell phone, cheap plentiful long distance calling... Spending habits have changed in other ways as well. When I was a kid, you got a new pair of shoes and a new pair of sneakers every year when you went back to school. You got new winter boots when you outgrew the old ones. You got serviceable "school clothes," that were converted to "play clothes" once they started looking bedraggled. Nowadays, kids have whole WARDROBES of clothing. Considering how fast they grow, does it really make sense for them to have ten of everything? And what the hell is up with $200 athletic shoes? Unless you are a serious athlete, they don't do anything for you that a pair of Chuck Taylors won't.
People also eat meals away from home more than they used to, or order food for take-away or delivery. Those meals they do make at home often involve convenience foods instead of cooking from scratch. Let's face it, a box of Hamburger Helper is more expensive than the sum of its bland over-salted ingredients.
Lots of folks buy coffee at Starbucks instead of making their own. They pay someone else to change their oil, cut their grass, and all that other stuff that they used to do themselves or force upon their indentured servants... er, I mean, kids. Men used to get their hair cut at the barber shop. Now they pay ten times as much because it's a "hair stylist" trimming their locks instead of Rocco The Barber.
For some reason, lots of folks believe their no- or low-skill employment should pay them enough to keep pace with the vastly expanded spending that is required to have all the "stuff" everyone else has. This is not a realistic expectation, a tender subject we shall address in a moment.
All of that "price of life" increase is small potatoes compared to the BIG reason the good old days aren't coming back, though. The reality is that up through the 70s, America was the only game in town when it came to manufacturing. The rest of the world had the snot bombed out of it during World War II, and there just wasn't a whole lot of industrial infrastructure left intact after THAT little dust-up. We also had more warm living bodies. Yeah, we took a population hit, but it was nothing like what a smallish country with a limited amount of cannon fodder going in ended up suffering.
(One of the things I found fascinating when I visited Australia, and later New Zealand, was how many World War I memorials they had. "Where are all the WW II memorials?" I naively inquired. Well, the answer is simple. Whole towns of men died in the first big war, and the next one a scant generation later left them with almost no one to send.)
So, we have been turfed in the manufacturing arena, by countries that we helped rebuild, which really kind of sucks. Greatness, though, is still within our grasp. We need to do two things: Adjust our expectations, and rethink what we want America to be.
By adjust our expectations, I do not mean that we should resign ourselves to settling for less. I mean that folks need to understand that one needs to show up at the party with something besides an outstretched hand. A single mother whose only viable job skill is opening her thighs is pretty much screwed, all puns intended. Sorry, but we cannot afford to help you raise "Julia." Ditto for immigrants from south of the border whose sole employment qualification is stone-age subsistence level farmer. Both of those demographics will take more than they give. By contrast, my Polish immigrant grandparents produced four fine children, all now deceased, whose children and grandchildren have certainly given back far in excess of what any of us absorbed in government largess. What is the Spanish word for "mooch"? Whatever it is, it and its ebonics equivalent definitely apply.
Unions need to adjust their expectations as well. $75 an hour for torquing a nut is so far out of line with reality that it's not even funny. That brings us to a fairly fundamental point. Whole classes of jobs, such as secretary and assembly line grunt, are history. Desktop publishing killed the secretary. Process automation killed the nut-torquer. There is no rewinding that Beta-Max tape.
So, when we are rethinking America, let us not simply accept that large-scale commodities manufacturing is not coming back, but in fact EMBRACE that reality. C'mon, people, do we really want to be manufacturing televisions? It's a filthy industry, there's not a lot of money in it, and we can do SO much better than that. We did the heavy lifting: We invented the doggone things, and virtually all of the technology innovations that have made them better over the years. We did the cool part. Let the little Asian people do the scut work.
Same goes for steel. When I was a kid, there were many mornings that Pittsburgh smelled like a giant egg fart. Who the heck wants to live in a place that smells like an egg fart? Again, let someone else do the commodity crap. Pittsburgh reinvented itself as a high-tech think tank, on the cutting edge of innovations in robotics, computers, and other "geek" stuff. That's full-throttle remaking of a city. (As an aside, Al Bore claims to have invented the internet, but he was nowhere in sight back in the day while we were arguing about pizza and checking the status of the Coke machine. I'm calling BS, Al.)
So where are the jobs going to come from in New America? Let us start with where they are NOT going to come from.
The next time you hear someone say, "America needs high-speed passenger rail like {fill in the blank} has," please do us all a favor and shoot them. Choo choos are not the answer, for several reasons. A big one is that America is, well, huge. Transporting people by rail is enormously inefficient when your land mass takes about three hours to navigate coast to coast by plane, ferfork'ssake. A choo choo is going to be a better option because...?
Exactly. It's not a better option. Passenger trains are cool if you have a lot of time on your hands, and a hankering for a lettuce wedge salad with Roquefort dressing. Other than that, they are worthless. The rail companies were nothing but relieved when they were finally given permission to focus on their profitable business, freight, and forget all about those lettuce-wedge eating warm living bodies.
The next question would be, how is the damned thing even going to get built? The greenies et al would be all over every major rail project like manure on organic arugula. There is no hope of getting the land, getting the government permits, and building the choo choo. Even with a draconian use of eminent domain, there are obstacles upon obstacles making certain that there will never be high-speed rail between northern and southern California, or Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Contrast that to, say, China. Their high-speed rail still isn't profitable, but at least it gets built. Why? Because the government comes in and takes the land, they couldn't give two craps less about the environmental impact, and roughly a week after they decide to build a choo choo, there are 10,000 men on the job site laying track like, um, well... Chinese coolies. It's how we built our railroads. Can't fault them for emulating us.
This is not to say that a eulogy for the railroads is in order. They are very good at carrying freight. Yeah yeah, we all watched White Line Fever and wanted to be truck drivers when we grew up, cuz they were KEWL. 18-wheelers are giant sucking wastes of fuel, and they do thousands of times more damage to our roads than passenger automobiles do. Put the trailers on the rails, and the world will be a better place. Tearing up the local roads is nowhere near as big a deal as tearing up the entire interstate highway system, and the Teamsters probably know that. They are merely looking for job security.
Kiss it goodbye, dudes. We are rethinking America here.
Enough of waxing nostalgic. What, really, is to be done? How do we go about fixing this clusterf***? Well, for starters, let's let the social issues ride for a bit. Yup, you heard me. Focus on the ball (restoring prosperity) and not all those blades of grass in the ballpark. Abortion and gay marriage don't much matter in a place where the currency has the approximate value of toilet paper used after a long night of cheap draft beer and chicken wings with suicide sauce. Once we have fried the big fish, then we can climb to the next level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. My hunch is that people who feel good about themselves and financially secure will discover that they really do think abortion is kind of icky, and a wedding where both the bride and the groom are dudes is just... odd.
Furthermore, let us stop throwing money at "stimulus" programs that don't stimulate anything but disdain for the half-wits who doled out the cash. Spending the country into prosperity is about as likely as group masturbation at the Vatican. That clown-boxing just ain't happening.
Now, let us divide this endeavor up into short-, medium-, and long-term proposals.
How would you like a foolproof plan to put millions of people back to work? Wait no more. Here it is. Anyone with a sound business plan gets a small business loan from the government.
That's it, and yes, it really is that simple. No showing preference for certain demographics, or certain industries. You prepare a business plan, show up, present it, and get a check to start a business.
The beauty of this plan is its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. You don't need a bunch of pencil-pushers deciding if someone is "disenfranchised" enough, or if their proposal is "green" enough, or any of that happy horsepucky. Viable plan = loan. And since it is a government loan, there is no declaring bankruptcy and starting over. You owe it until you die. Current successful business people would be happy to volunteer their time to review the proposals. Every business owner I know, including little ol' me, would be happy to help out, gratis.
If someone wants to open The Purple Store, that sells purple clothing and shoes, purple pens and Post-It® notes, and purple food and drink, and they have put together a plan, they get money. So does the technology entrepreneur, and the butcher, baker, and candle-stick maker. The arithmetic is easy: A $100,000 loan that employs three people including the owner is a much better deal than a half-billion dollar dollar loan that results in hundreds of layoffs and a bunch of jobs going to China, or many billions of dollars to prop up a company that makes an inferior product.
Should the government be in the loan business? No. But if they are going to spend in a profligate manner to jump-start the economy, they will get more bang for their buck from doling out money to entrepreneurs than they got from giving it away to Solyndra and General Motors.
So that's the short-term shot of adrenalin that will goose America's ass and get tomorrow started. What about the medium- and long-term plans?
The medium-range plan is all about getting those displaced nut-torquers and secretaries back to work. When I think about this issue, I think about the Weyerhaeuser TrusJoist plant in Buckhannon, WV. It is, as many manufacturing operations are these days, highly automated. When there was news of a fire at the facility, someone commented on the internet that they wished the whole {bleep}ing thing had burned down, because there were no jobs there for the average dude,
This is true. To work there, you have to be smart and educated. That leaves out most of the 50-something nut-torquers and secretaries. So what the hell do we do with them?
They could get a job at The Purple Store, or at Wal-Mart. There is an acceptance issue at work here, though. The Purple Store and Wal-Mart do not pay well. The day has come when jobs pay pretty much what they are worth. Unless you are REALLY good at something, your choices are Wal-Mart greeter or Miami drug dealer. There's money in vice, and also a long prison stint if you get caught. So you may have to settle for less.
Long term, though, there is hope for anyone who has something on the ball, or is willing to reinvent themselves. Scary thought, huh? Being a nut-torquer is easy. Designing the robots that torque the nuts is hard. Being Mr. Roboto pays more than being Mr. Torque-Nuts, as well it should. The long-term plan needs to involve fixing the education system, and encouraging an interest in science and technology. Those endeavors will set you up for life, unlike a degree in Transgendered Studies.
The other long-term big deal has to do with stabilizing the currency. That can't happen until the Federal Reserve is audited and possibly eliminated. No offense, dudes, but if we don't know what you're doing, we don't know if you are doing any good. It is well past time to close the loop on that particular open-loop feedback system. What is the worst that can happen? The dollar takes a dive on the road to more realistic valuation? Oops, it's already done that, without the benefit of stability and proper valuation.
This is way too long, because I tried to cover so much ground. To somewhat briefly close this pedantic exegesis, I will say this:
Here's a message for Barry and Barrett, and Harry and Nan, and the whole stinking lot of you collectivist nanny-staters: REAL Americans are rejecting you, and your un-American ideals. We are rejecting you like a bad baboon kidney, because we have made our choice. We don't WANT America to be like everyone else. (Statistics back me up on this. 70% of Americans believe we ARE exceptional, and that stealing from Peter to support Paul who can't be arsed to support himself is anathema to the very concept of what it means to be American.)
Let me offer a salient thought. "It's okay if you don't want to soar with the eagles. Just remember you might end up covered with eagle poop." Well, the eagles would like to ask a favor of yu'ins who would rather not fly with us: Don't tether us. Don't shoot at us. Don't poison us. Just let us fly.
Then, the American Dream will be alive and well in perpetuity.
