One and Done? – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com

Yes, the President would have been wise to throw the game in 2008, but we would have had Hillary in his place. She was lick spittle to Bush his entire Presidency, and she would have made most of the same dumb moves. The simple fact of the matter is that we don’t live in a democracy or even a Republic, and much as we like to think voting matters, it merely preserves the illusion that we are anything but a dictatorship, run by a consensus of money men. Sometimes they like to turn up the heat, sometimes they like to let off steam to keep the boiler from blowing up. In 2008 they let off steam, in 2010 they turned up the heat.

If I were Obama, I would use the occasion to tell the people the truth. I would not give Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech. I would not point the finger back at Bush. What I would say is that for the last thirty years we tried a great experiment designed to rescue the economy from an untenable situation. It was one that most people believed in, and it did appear to work. But the reason it worked was simple and coincidental.

It was the dawning of a new industry that totally changed the world and resulted in unprecedented economic growth. Those changes had been coming for a long time, but they reached a critical mass with the release of the first PCs. The PC made workers more productive, but they didn’t get paid accordingly, because of the other changes made by the Reagan Revolution. Those changes enabled their bosses to reap for themselves the results of improved productivity. The great experiment we undertook, “the rising tide that would lift all boats,” lifted only those with long anchor chains. Many of those boats have sunk, and most of them are swamped.

It is time for a new experiment, a demand side revolution. It is time to put more money in the pockets of American workers, to allow them to reap the benefits of their own improved productivity, to pay their debts, and build some savings. It should not be such a shocking concept, it is how bankers are rewarded, after all, even when their short term bets prove to be long term losers. 

The other thing that is needed is something to replace the PC as the driver of economic growth. What that is, is not yet visible, but it’s certain to be under development in some genius’s garage. Whatever it is, it needs to be encouraged and supported by a forward looking administration, one that aims to claim the future, not reclaim the gilded age.

via One and Done? – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com.