On April 27, 2012 the Earth-bound Wall Street Journal
published an editorial under the title: “The Growth deficit” and the subtitle:
“The slowest recovery plods along.” I have a few things to say about this editorial
but first, I must confess something to you. I am actually not from this
Universe but am a time traveler. It means I travel through space and also
through time such as the past and the future. This gives me the means to also
travel between parallel Universes. In fact, I just came to this Universe from
one that closely resembles it but for a few exceptions. It is that the
intelligent beings who inhabit one of the planets in that Universe are not
two-legged human beings but four legged dogs. And so, to follow what I am about
to say, you will have to imagine a planet that looks more like Planet of the
Apes than Planet Earth but that is really a Planet of the Dogs.
There is on that planet a country called America where
the dogs are preparing to conduct a presidential election. The campaign is in
full swing, and the big issue is the record of the challenging dog as it stacks
up against the record of the incumbent dog that happens to be the younger of
the two. And so, let me tell you this story before I take up the editorial of
the Earth-bound Wall Street Journal. Because it would have been impossible for
me to go through the full length and width of the nation to gather the relevant
information and give you a comprehensive assessment of the situation there, I have
assembled a sample of the views expressed by the writers who contribute to the
Wall Street Journal of Planet of the Dogs. Here is what they have been saying
lately:
In this election year of the dog, it is worth remembering
what is often said, mainly that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. If this
is true, the implication is that if you have new tricks up your sleeve and
you're looking for someone that can deliver on them, you'll be better off
getting a young dog and teach it the lessons you have in mind than getting an
older dog who may know a few tricks already but cannot learn a new one.
These days, the self-deprecating inhabitants of America
think of the economy as having gone to the dogs, and what they want as a
society is to avoid being reduced to eating hot dog with a piece of bread and
little else, or eating dogs of the tail-wagging kind made into Indonesian stew.
For this reason, they have abandoned the idea of placing their dogs onto the
roof of the car to head to Canada ,
preferring instead to stay at home and make a decision as to who they will vote
for in the upcoming election. They hope that the decision they make will be the
wise one and that it will get them out of the rut very soon. The choice they
have is between a challenging old dog who knows a few tricks from his days in
the field of tricking the populace, and the incumbent young dog that has
learned a few tricks of the trade only recently, has learned them on the job
and has done so before their eyes.
The old dog has on his list of accomplishments a history of
flipping properties whose glory days had come and gone. They added real value
to the American GDP when they produced real goods and real services, but had
little value left in them by the time the old dog and his associates had taken
them over. The latter cut up the properties into pieces and sold them as scrap,
moves that added a bubble-forming phony dollars to the GDP of the nation. And
the dogs paid themselves a handsome amount of real dollars to reward themselves
for their troubles. At one point, the challenging dog had also used his charm
and know-how to trick the government of America
into giving him gobs of money to stage an Olympic event that added little value
to America
but a lot of it to the rest of the world. All in all, that dog spent a lifetime
adding perhaps a billion dollars or so of real and phony dollars to the
American GDP. And he managed in the process to keep a few million real dollars
for himself.
As to the young dog, he came into office at a time when the
administration that preceded him had made a mess of America 's finances. Standing at the
edge of a frightful precipice, the nation was so close to a fall into the abyss
of no return that the existing Secretary of the Treasury literally went down on
his knees and begged the Lady of the House to pass a bill that would allow the
flooding of the market with freshly printed real dollars. The Lady acquiesced
to the request thus saved the phony economy which the Secretary of the Treasure
and his boss had inflicted on the nation of America , something they did on the
advice of the know-nothing devils of ignorance who usually disguise themselves
as the all-knowing gods of enlightenment.
Taking over from an administration of fools shortly after
that, the young dog started to repair every part of the economy that was
damaged by his know-nothing and do-nothing predecessor. He saved the auto
industry that was then and still is the backbone of every modern industrial
economy, and he called on the traditional industries both in the goods making
sectors and the service sectors to return to America , a call that made the
businesses respond affirmatively. Yes, the nation is still staggering from the
blows delivered to it by a previous administration that spent eight years serving
a foreign entity of parasites rather than serve the inhabitants of America . But
what must be well understood by everyone is that building an economy is
something very different from managing an armed conflict. In fact, when it
comes to execution, the two fields are very much the opposites of each other.
The truth is that the top dog in America – also called president --
runs the economy while playing the role of commander-in-chief of the armed
forces. He inherits from his predecessor an economy that is like an ocean-going
massive ship. It takes long to get the ship going in a given direction and just
as long to have it change course. Thus, the mistakes of the predecessor stay
with the new dog for a long time after he takes the helm. By contrast, a military
situation – especially when there is an ongoing conflict – is where the
decisions are made on the spot such as it is described by the proverbial
telephone call which comes to the president at three o'clock in the morning.
What all this means is that a bad economy belongs to the
administration that planned it years ago, while a military success belongs to
the leader who makes the current on-the-spot decisions. The dogs of America
understand these realities and this is why they give credit in foreign matters
to the current administration while attributing the difficulties of the economy
to the previous one. This makes them tolerate an economy that moves forward at
a slow pace, and makes them admire the military operations which are conducted
by the current commander-in-chief who happens to be the incumbent in the
current election season.
Looking at the record of this young dog -- in charge of the
nation for more than three years now -- the electors see the experience not of
someone who spent a lifetime adding a billion or so phony dollars to the GDP of
the nation, but see the experience of someone who spent nearly four years
adding something like 50 trillion dollars of real wealth to the GDP of the
nation. In addition, they see that the old dog made millions in commission for
himself while the young dog made only a couple million in salary and perks for
himself and his young family. They conclude that he has the experience needed
to maintain the nation on the path of recovery he put it on, having saved the nation
from a depression that was staring them in the face.
And so, the Americans now feel that it is better to stick
with the devil they know a great deal about and have seen him do good things
for the nation, than go with the devil they know very little about except that
he wants to make America produce phony wealth by flipping what used to be worth
something but is worthless now. In fact, to create new wealth that is real and
useful -- the sort of wealth that can replace imported goods -- is so alien a concept
to the old dog, he will never learn to do it having spent a lifetime pulling
old tricks while the nation was borrowing from abroad to import what it used to
make but made no more. And all this was happening because he and other dogs
like him had deemed it more advantageous to flip property and make a quick buck
rather than create real wealth by producing real goods and real services. This
would have been the way of true entrepreneurial capitalism, something that the
old dog will never grasp having lived a life of flippant trickeries.
What is at work at this point in time is the reality that
those who are well versed in the art of creating phony wealth are also well
versed in the art of creating phony narratives to impress the electorate;
something they are doing now at full throttle. The phoniest thing you can do
while advertising your narrative being to turn reality upside down, this is
what the spin doctors who are attached to the campaign of the old dog are doing
at this time. They are doing it to snatch the credit from where credit is due
and give it to whom it does not belong. Thus, you see them hard at work trying
to take away the credit that the young dog has earned with the brilliant snap
decisions that he made in military matters. And they try to attribute these
successes to the previous administration; one that sat like pieces of furniture
in the Oval Office wondering why they are here and not somewhere else. In
addition, the spin doctors are trying to shift the blame for the state of the economy
from a previous administration that spent eight years deforming it, onto the
new administration because they say that the young dog has failed to turn
around the ocean going ship with a snap of his finger.
This, my friend, is the story of Planet of the Dogs as told
in the Wall Street Journal of the other Universe. Contrast it with the
editorial in the Earth-bound Wall Street Journal, and you will see that the
Earthlings are neither as smart nor as equitable as the dogs of that other
planet. The bone of contention in the America of Earth as described by the
Journal is this: “The economy has been growing for 11 quarters since the
recession officially ended in mid-2009, and quarterly growth has averaged
2.4%.” And they go on to lament it like this: “That's slower growth than in
every modern expansion and about half the growth rate of all the recoveries
since World War II...” True but this is not the whole story.
What the editors of the Journal have omitted saying is that
since World War II , America America the
advantage it had in the export sectors of the economy. Given the reality of
this “perfect storm,” it must be said that America under its young president
has done very well given the hand that he was dealt.
And this is why it makes no sense that after analyzing the
current situation and having omitted the most crucial part of the argument, the
Wall Street Journal should conclude with this: “President Obama … never
explained why the Reagan recovery that followed policies [he] rejected was so
robust while the current recovery is so anemic.” The fact of the matter is that it is not the job of a sitting president
to explain what a previous president did or compare that with what he is
himself doing at this time.
Such analysis and
comparison would be the job of a journal such as the Wall Street Journal. And
what the editors of this Earth-bound journal should be doing instead is follow
the example of the writers on the Planet of the Dogs and bark their opinions in
a manner that is a little more just and a little more evenhanded.