Now That The Shoe’s On The Other Foot, by Mike Gold – Brainiac on Banjo #196

November 15, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

Now that the Republicans have chased the evil hoary monster Nancy Pelosi out of the Speaker’s chair and have taken control of the House of Representatives, they’ve got two years to fix everything.

Hey, good luck with that.

The Republicans are in a conundrum. They have been promising smaller government and a massively reduced budget. The problem is, state and federal governments are, combined, the biggest employers in the nation by far. They employ hundreds of thousands of Americans. Government contractors employ hundreds of thousands more.

If you reduce the government budgets you’re going to throw a hell of a lot of people out of work unless you raise taxes. I’d love to see the Republicans propose that. A great many of the 9.6% who are unemployed right now – teachers, construction workers, hospital workers, police – are unemployed due to government cutbacks, mostly at the state level. If the Republicans make good on their promise, unemployment will skyrocket.

The economy was fueled by massive credit, but now people can’t get credit the way they used to. Many more now maintain an extremely careful approach to using their credit. That is true, honest and laudable conservatism. People now buy less because they actually think about how they’re going to pay for it. Sadly, getting off the credit standard mass-murders jobs. This makes recovery go as slow as molasses, and there is nothing any Democrat, any Republican and any independent can do about it.

Of course, the tea baggers are not the only Republicans’ only constituency. There’s also Big Business. Through “globalization” (a faddish cliché) and technology, a great many American jobs have gone to China, India, and elsewhere. 47% of the employees of the top 500 American companies are located overseas.

The Republicans will not do a thing about these jobs. These companies make a fortune exporting jobs and importing products. If they had to pay even WalMart salaries to bring these jobs back to the United States, they would make a hell of a lot less money. That will not inure to the benefit of the Republican Party’s coffers.

Actually, the Republicans are doubly screwed over the job export issue. A lot of innovation jobs have gone overseas because employers are finding smarter people there than they can here. America now runs 57th in science and math education. That’s a major blow to our American ego. We’d have to make a major commitment to our education programs and create truly new initiatives, but the Republicans are opposed to government support of education. A great many have promised to eliminate the Department of Education.

House Republicans cannot spend the next two years as the Party of No. Sure, they’ll propose a lot of asinine laws, many to repeal existing laws. The Republicans have to offer good ideas that have a chance of getting through the Senate, and that requires negotiation, compromise, horse-trading and actually having good ideas. We didn’t hear very many from the Republicans during the campaign.

If the Republicans do engage in politics-as-usual in order to get any part of their agenda done, the tea baggers will feel betrayed. They ran on the promise that they were outsiders, that they weren’t professional politicians. Their mantra was “I’m just like you.” If they compromise on these ideals, they aren’t just like the tea baggers, let alone the rest of us. They are politicians. If they just whine and say they can’t get their agenda passed because the Democrats won’t roll over and play dead just like the Democrats did the past two years, then they will be seen as being as ineffective as the Democrats were the past two years.

I believe the Republicans are going to waste a lot of time with revenge investigations into the Obama administration. This will resurrect the specter of Bill Clinton. Times were pretty damn good under Clinton: an awesome economy, low unemployment, no bullshit unending wars in the Middle East. In fact, I fully expect the Democratic Party to get Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden to swap jobs, thereby bringing the Clinton mystique back to the White House.

Of course, the best thing the Republicans can do in the next presidential campaign is to find a better candidate than Sarah Palin. All they’ve got are a handful of unknown governors, and they’ll have to pick one and have him or her start running against Palin immediately. That will create havoc with many tea baggers, but perhaps they will split off and form a viable third party. That would be very, very good for America. I’d risk getting a few more Tea Baggers into office for the greater good of destroying the two-party racket.

By November 2012, the Republicans will have accomplished nothing for which they can take full credit. The recovery is well underway, but as noted above unemployment will not return to decent levels anytime soon. The Republican Party helped President Obama out of his fix. I love irony.

While performing his weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock and blather radio show on The Point (www.getthepointradio.com) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times), and doing his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants each and every damn day at the same venue, ComicMix.com editor-in-chief Mike Gold resides in perhaps the only state to wind up bluer after the election than before. Weird, ain’t it?