Department of Defensiveness, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #123

April 12, 2011 Arthur Tebbel 1 Comment

Hey everyone,

I’m abroad this week.  More than that I’ve spent five of my last eight days travelling.  My brain is mush.  I won’t be answering a letter this week.  Instead I will be answering the question I have been asked the most while I’ve been on vacation, “From the outside it looks like America is going down the tubes, does it feel like that from the inside?”

I’ve found myself running out of delicate answers to that question.  The temptation now is to shrug my shoulders and say, “yes, but what’s the alternative?”  It’s far too late for me to be born Chinese and I’m pretty sure I’ll be dead before the average Chinese is doing better than the average American.  I say that not because I’m necessarily convinced it’s such a far flung point in the future but that the incident that precipitates it is likely to lead to a lot of dead Americans.  The point is it won’t be my problem.

Not that I think we’re going anywhere but down the tubes.  One of the most basic principles in macroeconomics is that in a recession you cut taxes and increase spending (during good times you do the reverse).  Here we are in the midst of the biggest recession in my life and we have one side psychotically obsessed with cutting spending and another that, in the absence of any real direction, seems to have acquiesced on the spending cuts but wants to accompany them with raising the tax rates at the top.

The problem is they’re both letting themselves worry about deficits.  Deficits don’t actually matter.  You can run them up during bad times as long as you pay them down when things get better.  Deficits matter least for America as long as the dollar is the vehicle currency.  Of course deficit spending during a recession is supposed to pay for things that actually get the economy running and not for three wars halfway across the planet.  This would probably be a great time to actually build infrastructure.  Shit, build anything.

But I’m not moving to Europe.  As nice as it would be to have better healthcare and less religion in government (to say nothing about the wonder of European cities) I can’t get over the actual benefits of being American.  Those benefits all connect to what will soon be our top export, pop culture.  With the exception of some BBC content and The King’s Speech the best TV and movies on the planet are being produced in America.  What we don’t produce we have access to sooner and easier than people in other countries do.  I might end up bankrupt due to a health cost but at least I’ll be able to watch Community on my way out.  That’ll have to be good enough.