Leading an Economic Recovery – Not Hardly

President Obama is going to give a jobs speech to Congress at some point next week once our elected officials can find a way to stop screwing around with politics before country. I suspect that a major part of the speech will include a proposal to undertake a number of infrastructure initiatives. Given the uncompromising fixed-position driven decision process in vogue in politics today, there will an immediate insistence that before any spending can be agreed to that budget cuts will have to be identified before it could even be considered. So we will see more of the pre-election political posturing and posing that takes precedence over serving the nation’s interests. I am not sure that it will really matter how our politicians finally decide to reach an agreement or impasse, but I am sure of one thing. Not one politician from either party will have done any creative thinking about what the government should do that is any different than what has been tried and attempted in the past. Not one will have demonstrated that they have an idea or a vision that isn’t just another run of the mill version of their party’s standard mantra.

Is it because there aren’t any new or creative approaches to stimulating jobs in the US?

No it’s just that our legislative and executive branches are either incapable or incompetent at developing new ideas and insights into how to affect change in the economy to the benefit of the citizens. When the economy is hurting the country, it is the government that is in the best position to take actions to reduce the harm done and advance the time-frame of a recovery. Economists often cite various actions taken by governments in the past that have either hindered and prolonged a recession or have created a rapid and sustainable recovery. The problem for many economists is that they can’t necessarily identify what will work for the situation that the US is currently in versus what has worked/not worked in previous and different conditions.

Is the reason no politician has presented a new idea of a plan to recovery and job growth because they are following the party’s ideology of what will work; and they can’t find anything insufficient in those views?

Well if this is the reason; then besides being morons, they are relegating their responsibility to the party, they are accepting a following mentality not a leadership mentality, and they are demonstrating their poor judgment and lack of initiative on behalf of their constituents and country.

Now no one would expect every elected politician to be capable of conceiving or working to have a vision developed for aiding the US economy; but not one politician is also hard to understand. Even if only one politician from each state had some aptitude for leading then we should see fifty plans. If one out of a hundred politicians were capable of this challenge then there should be at least five or six proposals. But there are none! Are we back to the ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ vision of leadership? If you meet with 500 people from your state do you think that not one of them might have a good idea for helping the economy recover?  If you picked ten people that you believe are smarter than you, to you think none of them would have an approach to do something that is not the simple, bland and uninspired same-old/same-old things that our best and brightest political leaders are presenting today?

The public is unsure that things will improve. What they lack is leadership; and we have seen no leadership in government, no leadership in our parties, no leadership in our businesses, and no leadership in our society. So we will arrive at the destination that non-leaders can get you to.