Bob Hebert takes the American beast by the nape of the neck, growls heartily and shakes it up. He has obviously had his fill of the American economic mess that he says we've created by our stupidity.
We must live with the reality that money moves at the speed of light around the globe and production of goods will go to stable places where the costs are lower. His 'thinking globalization through ' suggests we can control it. We cannot.
"...We were stupid in so many ways. We shipped American jobs overseas by the millions and came up with the fiction that this was a good deal for just about everybody. We could have and should have taken the time and made the effort to think globalization through, to be smarter about it and craft ways to cushion its more harmful effects and to share its benefits more equitably..."
It's true that our leaders have failed us, but we get the leaders we deserve as we jaunt about the credit countryside believing (wrongly) that we can have it all. Hebert's right that living beyond reason in crushing debt is as stupid for a country as it is for a person.
I was reading as our Vermont Socialist Senator Sanders waxed eloquently about how spending nearly a trillion dollars in the next two years on various forms of infrastructure would put people to work and restore our economy. Surely the trillion will do that for those years, but what happens after the next two years? Will those jobs be gone or will we need to pony up yet another trillion that we don't have to keep stimulating? Why is no one talking about the long term...defined as far beyond the next election.
Relying on tax revenues, mandated wealth transfer, and massive long term debt to stimulate the American economy for the long term is a fool's errand. Instead we should be living within our means and encouraging private sector investment and businesses with reasonable labor costs. We need real engineering of businesses, products and services, not financial engineering built on a house of cards.
Perhaps there's a leader, not a pandering politician, somewhere who can convince us of that sober truth.
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