There was something haunting in what he said. It wasn`t so much his statements about the sacrifices that Americans will have to make over the next decade, or about the need to forgo tax cuts in a time of budgetary crisis.
It was his offhand comment, delivered with a sigh of resignation, that his ideas for long-term revival of the U.S. economy couldn`t get anybody elected and, in fact, might get any incumbent dumb enough to propose them promptly un-elected.
Just who he is doesn`t matter so much, but you might have guessed he`s an economist who takes a dim view of the American political process and what it has delivered the country in the past few years.
He sees in this current hour a great moment of danger for the U.S. economy. There might well be a massive middle-class tax cut, and a trumped-up health insurance ”cure,” in the form of tax credits to help people buy medical coverage, emerging from this White House and Congress.
This short-term package of deficit enlargement will overwhelm, in a negative way, any long-term measures that are proposed. After a year or so of bounceback, the economy will fall back into its depressing pattern of subpar growth or even decline. Or so he fears.
He is not alone in his pathological distrust of our political system`s ability to cure anything. In a commentary sent to his clients the other day, one of his economist colleagues, David Hale, of Kemper Financial Services in Chicago, headlined it: ”Will an election year produce a decade of bad public policy?”
With state-controlled economies falling left and right, Hale said there`s a definite need for a new international policy to re-integrate 3 million people back into the global economic system. Yet, in the U.S., he said, the mood is similar to the environment that prevailed after the disastrous Treaty of Versailles in 1918.
Bush`s ill-advised trip to Japan, wherein he attempted to blame our recession on the Japanese, seemed to confirm this point of view and further turned economists against the prevailing winds in Washington.
To put it quite bluntly, economists have lost faith in democracy as practiced in the world`s largest economy and, arguably, the last remaining superpower. They are skeptical that this country`s political system can do anything but put all of us deeper into the economic mire.
It wasn`t always like this. During those amazing years of growth after World War II, politicians and economists worked hand in hand to expand the standard of living of Americans and to remove from their lives the painful booms and busts.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, their interests and instincts began to diverge. Economists with a long-term view saw their message and their proposals distorted in the extreme by politicians with a short-term view. The disastrous experiment with supply-side economics (actually nothing more than deficit spending on a grand scale) clinched their disenchantment with American democracy.
If they had their way, I suppose, they would turn the country over
(temporarily, of course) to an economic czar with the power to make the hard but necessary steps to get us out of this mess sooner than we might if left to our devices.
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Actually, there is more precedent for this kind of approach than you might think. The Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency, has total control over monetary policy. Congress prefers it this way because it doesn`t want to get blamed when interest rates must go up in response to the need to fight inflation.
But I don`t think the politicians here are about to yield control over the budgetary purse strings anytime soon, despite the dark fears of economists about how they`ll muck up things again. So here`s a compromise: Let Bush appoint a panel of distinguished economists who would evaluate the plan emerging from Congress and then take their advice whether it`s in the nation`s long-term economic interest.
Ordinary blokes share much of the same nervousness about the impact of the upcoming economic package as the professional economists. Several years of tough times have made them more concerned about the economy`s long-term health, and the lack of savings and investment in America.
Most of us have little faith in the economic engineering skills of Congress either, and we know that this new plan is so crucial that it could drive economic policy until well past the year 2000.
So as the bill proceeds and as the presidential election charges forth, the American people should ask a new question about themselves-not whether they are currently better off than they were four years ago. We all know the answer to that. That`s short-term thinking, something politicians want us to do. People should ask the question they`ve never really asked before, a question that would put politicians to a rigorous test.
The new question should be this: Will you be better off four years from now?