Obama's Katrina

Arianna Huffington wonders if unemployment will be Obama's Katrina.

Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House.

The vacuous slogans of Hope and Change from the Obama campaign are revealing themselves right now. Has Hope or Change created jobs? Has it sorted out Afghanistan? Has it created a better healthcare system or pose any reasonable shot at doing so? Can we reasonably say the economy is back on track? Can we reasonably say there seems to be a plan to get the country back on track? Can we reasonably say there is a philosophy or overall approach to getting the country back on track?

What we have instead is a grab bag of compromises, superficial attempts for "everyone to get along", random decisions that do not seem rooted in a philosophical approach or outlook, and big displays of overcompensation that are out-of-sync with the realities on the ground.

We have beer summits and cash for clunkers and extended unemployment benefits a half-hearted stimulus, a half-hearted commitment to Afghanistan, and a ridiculous and overly ambitious healthcare debate.

JOBS. While the Obama administration is talking about Healthcare, Economic Recovery, and boasting about how the stimulus and bank bail out worked, people are out of work and don't know when or how jobs are coming back. We keep hearing about stimulus this, stimulus that, and it sounds to me like the check is in the mail. The stimulus was designed to bring back jobs. It hasn't. They argue, it has helped saved jobs that might have been otherwise lost. Maybe. Who knows. Many economists think the stimulus wasn't large enough. Others, like myself, am more worried about the massive debt and moral hazard created by the bank bailout. The Obama Administration seems to be toeing the compromise line - not spending big enough to fix it or not being committed enough to lower deficits in order to ride out the storm. I could honestly get behind either choice if were laid out to me and this is why we are doing this and why it's going to work and here are the drawbacks. Instead, I feel like we're getting juked stats and mission accomplished banners. "1 Million Jobs Saved" headlines, meanwhile half of my friends can't find work and the other half are worried about losing their jobs which they're already overqualified for.

AFGHANISTAN. He committed on the campaign to fighting there because it was the "good" war and created a nice (but false) narrative split between Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't know what the Obama Administration actually thinks about this issue. I know their "position," but I don't know what they actually feel in their gut. I don't get the sense he believes in winning the war the same way Bush believed in winning Iraq. I know people on the left criticize the very notion of winning and believe it impossible and irrelevant and unadult. I don't know...I guess I'm just old fashioned in that I think that if we start something, we ought to finish it or if the situation has changed or we learned more, figure out our interests and either cut our losses, continue the status quo, or just take some sort of position. I mean, from what I can tell, Obama is just following Bush's policies exactly except now he's bending over the generals and going to make a half-hearted commitment to Afghanistan with more troops to say he tried with the intention of pulling out in a couple of years regardless of what happens. To borrow from Chris Rock, it's sort of like the guy who goes out to the club, feebly asks one girl to dance, gets rejected, and then gives up and goes to the titty bar.

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN. In the words of Zabotka in season 2 of the Wire, "we used to be a country that made things, now we just have our hands in the other guys pocket." We need to stop juking the stats and start making things again. It is the only road to real recovery - both financial and spiritual. Because the spirit of Americans right now is in dangerous, dangerous territory. We are down and don't see the fix. And the fix isn't in jigging the unemployment numbers to make them look better. It isn't falsely propping up housing prices again or borrowing against the future to pay for more entitlement programs. It can't be. Wealth does not come from inflated housing prices or tech stock booms. Real wealth comes from making stuff that is useful selling it to people. I don't see why everyone thinks various pyramid schemes are going to work. I know Healthcare costs are expensive. But how does it make sense that we are going to pay for this stuff with a government mandated program to cover the uninsured? How is the answer to rising healthcare costs expanding healthcare coverage? We already know Medicare has a 30 billion dollar unfunded liability. That means, we don't have the money to pay for it. And sure, Medicare is good for some people. If the government just gave me a million bucks to be paid back later by someone else, it would be good for me. No doubt. But don't pretend it makes any sense or is sustainable.

All of this would be change no one wants to believe in. Everyone just wants entitlements, easy money to cover their risk, and to be taken care of by someone else. We've all got our hands in each other's pockets and it's all turning American life into a game of hustlers and spinsters and phonys and beggars. And these people are the easiest to please.