Dangerous Words

I've said it before, but it is worth saying again. It seems, with rhetoric heating up on both sides of this election (and I'll admit that there are probably vastly more than two sides), defaulting to a label instead of addressing the real issues is the sign of a person’s weakness, not his/her strength. Here are some of the words and phrases that have particularly bothered me:

Socialism – Sounds menacing. Grrrr. You can tell if you are a socialist easily. You are a follower of Karl Marx. You want to redistribute the wealth. You want to impose restrictions on commerce. You believe in stuff like: “If you want to be perfect, sell what you own. Give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure…” We can't have government shifting wealth from one group and giving it to another!!! We should have one tax rate for everyone! The Federal Emergency Management Agency is wrong; let fire and flood victims fend for themselves! Let children pay for their own educations! Social security makes us lazy. We don't need the Food and Drug Administration – companies that put out tainted milk products will be eliminated by the marketplace; we don't need rules. Polluters are creating jobs; regulating their smokestacks will cause unemployment. Derivatives and subprime mortgages are just fine, because a few can get rich on the corpses of many – it’s a free market (and it will adjust). Oh, the above quote, for Bible readers, is Matthew 19:21.

Free Market – Two words in there. “Free” suggesting that rules are bad. And “market” which tells you that a willing buyer and seller will establish what is right. If produce is tainted, after a few folks die of food poisoning, the marketplace will put the seller out of business, assuming he or she stuck around for the after-effects. If a factory stinks up the water and makes the air unbreathable, that will so alienate consumers that they won't buy the products… so we'll move the factory outside of town where they can't see it.

Countries with Lower Taxes Create Jobs – Ireland is the example folks like to use most often. They lowered taxes, created subsidies to get businesses to relocate, and they postured the appearance of success… for a decade and a half! The October 7, 2008 finfacts.com observed: “For a number of years Ireland , with only 1% of Europe's population, attracted up to 25% of all US greenfield [non-polluting]industrial investment in our continent.” Then, it began to unravel. Without sustained subsidies (oh my, is that socialism?), the business models did not work. Unemployment began to creep up in 2007, and the return-on-investment numbers were not so rosy.

But Irish unemployment numbers, long touted as the “lowest in Europe,” were understated, new job creation was overstated – the government “cooked the books”… until it all collapsed, and finfacts.com goes on: “The dramatic events in Dublin, early on Tuesday, September 30th, when the Irish Government agreed to issue a State guarantee, with a value in the range of €400 - €500 billion, underwriting the Irish banking system, tolled the death knell of the Celtic Tiger and definitively brought down the curtain on the remarkable 15-year period of economic growth in Ireland. While some advances will endure as the fairytale ends, the debunking of the myths that have become ingrained during the period and the exposure of the reality of foundations built on quicksand…”

Investors ran; U.S. investment capital, much from hedge funds, retreated back to the U.S. , literally in days after the financial collapse… the U.S. ? With those higher taxes? Why would they do that?

Outsourcing your opinion to a label is doing yourself a profound disservice. In a modern complex world, simple labels don't really seem to describe anything that would really matter anymore. Time for a vocabulary update! Life ain’t that simple!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Obsession versus Caution

Cuts at the bureau

On September 11, 2001, America was viciously attacked by a terrorist group. We know the results. My heart remains heavy at the memory, one etched horribly in our minds forever. We shifted our priorities after that day, even creating a whole new federal bureaucracy – Homeland Security – instead of trying to perform a ground-up reconstruction of the agencies we already had, like the Department of Justice, National Security Agency, etc. Pushed “emergency operations” like FEMA into that lumbering morass, and the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina showed us the consequences of that move. Federal bureaucracies had a new player to fight for turf. Government efficiency plunged, and we still have miles to go.

The government continued to spend money, a new and expensive war effort, shifting its agencies and budgets away from the mundane problems of America , deregulating the economy, deficits ballooned, and people began to believe that the American Dream should follow the example of their federal government, borrow and spend today and worry about the consequences “later.”

Money flowed into federal efforts, but in the name of “hey, we're doing something to reign in spending,” the government under-funded repairing infrastructure, scientific research (a job-creating initiative), elevating our school children to higher global standards so they could earn enough some day to pay off their parents’ borrowings, and cut some pretty basic protections out of the heart of some our most necessary and prestigious federal agencies.

I was reading the New York Times this morning (among many news sources), and I thought the above graph (from the Times) and the information below might hit home for my readers – as thousands of financial misconduct and fraud cases, even before this meltdown, some in the many millions of dollars, escaped investigation and prosecution because most of our assets were deployed on the “war on terrorism.” Could Al Qaeda have inflicted as much damage to America as we did by our own financial irresponsibility and a failure properly to deploy our resources?

The Times: “Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.

“According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I. data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.”

There’s not much more to say. The answers are that obvious.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.