“This is so psychological”: Our Economy Needs the Couch with Dr. Tinkerbell
Monday morning on NPR saw Cokie Roberts and Steve Inskeep ruminating (hand-wringing?) over the state of the economy and, more pointedly, the lack of jobs.
Aside from the predictable attempt by Ms. Roberts to say that polls display no confidence in both Democrats and Republicans alike, she went on to say “…if people have no confidence in the economy, obviously they don’t buy stuff because they worry that they’re going to run out of cash, they need to hold onto money. It means businesses contract or stay the same, as we saw in the last jobs report. Then it makes recovery much tougher. This is so psychological.”
Yes, Ms. Roberts, psychology has a large part in all human endeavors, especially economic decisions. But then she went on to say “I went to see Peter Pan for the again – and you know, it’s clap if you believe in Tinkerbell. Well, that’s kind of where we are with the economy. We all sort of need to clap to get it going a lot.”
As Ms. Roberts is generally a Liberal voice which means this is the attitude of the Democrats in the campaign next year, then the Republicans are in much better position for next year’s election, and the country is in far worse shape in the interim, than we all thought.
Expect her Carteresque lamentation of the average American to begin to reverberate throughout all Democrat and Liberal precincts.
For those who may have forgotten, on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave a nationally-televised address in which he identified what he believed to be a “crisis of confidence” among the American people. He went on to state “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. . . It is a crisis of confidence…..too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption…..”
Sound familiar? It should. President Obama has been subliminally, when not explicitly, humbling our national spirit with such insinuations since inaugurated.
What President Carter, Cokie Roberts, and the rest of the liberal Democrats don’t want to accept is that the psychology of a nation is very much dependent on the actions, or more appropriately, inactions, of government: specifically, how much does government restrain, or not restrain, the economy through taxes and regulation? This is not Tinkerbell hand-clapping or Dorothy heel-clicking.
Should Mr. Obama choose the futile course of blaming the American Public for his failures, he will have no doubt emulated a player in the transformational Reagan story he has much admired: that of the man Reagan defeated, Jimmy Carter.
-I.M. Windee
