Is Obama Taking On Too Much?

This is a pretty simple topic, really. As always, it doesn’t pay to get so distracted by the details that you can’t see the Big Picture. Seeing the Big Picture is the primary element of the Change We Need. Once you see the Big Picture, you begin to understand why a lot of the smaller quibbles are either beside the point or downright destructive to our getting where we need to be.

Is our president taking on too much?

Imagine this situation: Our Hero Jim has been handed a pickup truck and told he can make a fine living delivering groceries. There’s only one problem. The truck is completely worn out. The motor is broken down, the tires have not only gone bald but have blown out, the muffler has rusted off, and the gas tank is completely empty.

So what should Jim do? He reasoned that in order to deliver any groceries he’s going to need to get the truck repaired, so he went to his friend Bill, the out-of-work mechanic, and asked him to do the work for him on credit. Jim pointed out that he had a good job working for a good company, and all he needed was to get the truck running in order to start raking in the paychecks. He’d be able to pay Bill off in no time.

Well, Bill said, things aren’t as easy as all that. Sure, he’d love to fix the truck. Nothing would please him more. But even though fixing Jim’s truck is the only job possibility he’s got right now, still, it would be taking a risk. What if Jim lost his job later? What if people stopped ordering groceries?

But you won’t have any income at all, yourself, if you don’t fix the truck, Jim argued. Isn’t it work the risk?

All right, Bill said. I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll fix the motor, but I won’t fix the tires or the muffler or give you any gas until you’ve earned enough money to pay off the motor repairs.

It was a fair compromise. Bill only had to spend half as much time working before he could sit back and wait to get paid. Unfortunately, since only part of the truck was repaired, Jim wasn’t able to go to work, he lost his job, and Bill not only did half the job, he didn’t get paid for any of it.

When I look at the attitude of the U.S. Legislature to the Obama Administration’s requests for support, I get the same feeling, only I’m a little more frustrated because I’m personally involved. First, the senators and representatives reluctantly approve the Stimulus Package, quibbling over some of its details. Then they balk at the budget. Their arguments seem to center around the notion that since we spent a lot on the Stimulus, we now have to economize on everything else. This is kind of like taking some money out of your pocket with your left hand, then putting it back into your pocket with your right hand, and claiming that you’ve accomplished something.

What they don’t seem to get is that just because it costs money to repair things, that doesn’t mean that you save money by putting off the repairs. It also costs money to try to operate with tools and machinery that are broken.

The US health care system is broken, and costs billions more to operate than it should. Obama wants to fix it. But the legislators say that fixing it will be expensive, so let’s waste a lot of money now and spend the money to fix it later, when the economy has recovered. Unfortunately, they ignore the fact that it is much harder for the economy to recover when it is staggering under the burden of a broken and inefficient and extravagantly expensive health care system.

Obama understands that the Economy is not simply a group of factories that are either making goods or not. It is not simply a group of banks and other financial enterprises that are either loaning money or not. It is the Whole Ball of Wax. If you want the Economy to operate efficiently enough to get us out of this mess, YOU HAVE TO FIX THE WHOLE THING, OR THE WHOLE THING WON’T WORK.

By refusing to fix the whole thing at once, the legislature (and the part of the public they frighten into following them) will make sure that the recovery fails to be robust. And as a result, the deficits we face will not fall, because the GDP will not be high enough to generate the revenues that could beat those deficits down. And then the legislators will say, after having prevented the recovery, See? We told you it wouldn’t work. Isn’t it lucky that we didn’t let you spend any more money?

No, it isn’t lucky. It will be the failure to spend the money to improve our Health Care system and our Energy system and our other basic services that will be responsible for dragging the recovery out over years and years instead of enabling it to take effect quickly, allowing us to move on to further improvements.