The Republican party is going out of its way to talk about Small Town Values and using good old fashioned common sense to run the country, and by extension the world. Hooray for the red, white, and blue!
There’s only one problem: the policies and politics they promote don’t work in the world that you and I live in. They’re out of touch with the reality of today’s America.
For example, they’ve gone out of their way to make sure that Wall Street isn’t regulated, because the wondrous (invisible!) hand of the market does a way better job of managing the banking industry than stupid old incompetent government is. Their Treasury and Fed and SEC have declared open season on weak banks, letting them fail because of all the risky decisions that the banking executives made. Sounds OK until you realize that the banks that handled 80% of the mortgages in the US are now gone. Kaput. Ka-blooey. Now owned either by the US government (that is to say, the taxpayer) or foreigners. All because the Republicans abdicated their responsibility to regulate, to truly govern. In the words of Jim Kramer, the CNBC “Mad Money” guy, the government has now declared arson to be legal, and every hedge fund in the world knows it. Say goodbye to Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch, and probably WaMu. (Six days after I wrote this post, the SEC put a temporary ban on the short-selling I was referring to here. Nice to see the scope of my influence 
)
The problem is, the Republicans are using all the economic creativity of Hoover, in an era when billions of dollars move markets in milliseconds. Ever since Ron Reagan said, “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem,” Republican administrations have been going out of their way to make sure that the government is incompetent by cutting budgets that actually matter and purging talent from the EPA to the FBI to the FTC to the State Department to the CIA to the Department of Justice. The complex, ugly world we live in requires government that is competent — and not just for anti-terrorism.
In another example of Republican virtue, they’re putting up Sarah Palin as the Carol Merrill for 2008’s Presidential Let’s Make a Deal. She’s a small town good ol’ boy from Alaska. A state where Republicanism really works. And I’ll give it to them, it does work there. Why? Because it’s not part of the America that you and I live in. No immigration or race problems. Budgetary surplusses year after year. No manufacturing job losses. No homelessness problems. Very low taxation. How does it all work? Let’s take a closer look:
- No immigration problems because Alaska doesn’t have a major port or a border with poverty. No foreigners means lower cost schools because everyone speaks English. No worries about equal opportunity or reverse racism because everybody’s white. Like in Iowa in the 1950s. Cool. But you and I don’t live in a country like that.
- Budgetary surplus because (1) the state doesn’t provide that much in the way of services, and (2) WE in the lower 48 pay all their taxes for them, in the form of gasoline purchases. How many other states in the US have so much money they pay their citizens to live there? Zero. You and I live in states with chronic budgetary problems. Ironically, part of our state deficits goes to pay for Alaska’s surplus (the state of California buys $M of oil products every month).
- No manufacturing job losses because (tada!) there is essentially no manufacturing in Alaska. They’re way ahead of the rest of us on this one. They don’t have any farming either, so they don’t need any tariffs of pesky state agencies. They don’t have to worry about balance of payments problems with China either because of the Miracle Cure-All: oil. So, Alaskans don’t feel any of the pain of economic swings that you and I do in the lower 48.
- No homelessness problems because you die if you’re homeless there. Now there’s Good Old Fashioined Republican values! Nobody destitute moves from Santa Monica to Anchorage, it’s the other way around. Republican nirvana: export the homeless to warmer states. Gee, this is sounding easier and easier to govern. Hell, I could be governor of a state with less population than San Francisco.
- Very low taxation. This goes double for Sarah’s home town of Wasilla. They had zero property tax, and they funded the whole city out of a 2% sales tax. This is again Republican nirvana, because there’s no tax on wealth (god forbid!) AND because most of that 2% sales tax is paid for by people who DON’T live in the town. How did they make this miracle happen? They designed the sales tax to hit all the stuff that’s sold in the town’s Big-Box stores (WalMart, BestBuy, Costco, etc.), where the purchases are mainly by out-of-towners. So the classic Republican solution — straight out of Homer Simpson — have your taxes paid for by Somebody Else!
To be brutally honest, the Dems don’t have the most realistic policies either. And the contest to see which candidate has the *least* relevant experience is taking on So You Think You Can Dance proportions.
But Wise UP! Don’t fall for the simple, lilly-white solutions offered by the Republicans — they just don’t cut it for today’s problems and the messy world we really live in.
