Real Time with Bill Maher, 18 Jan 2019: Solving consequences

Before you can solve a problem, you have to distinguish between cause and consequence. Many of our economic problems are consequences of a cause we ignore. To solve problems that are consequences, you have to figure out what's causing them, consider the cause to be the real problem, and solve the real problem.


Third Party Presidential Candidates I remember, and how they did:

Source: https://www.infoplease.com/timelines/third-parties

As the graph shows, Perot did remarkably well in the 1992 election, running against Bill Clinton and George H W Bush. Infoplease says "It was the best showing of a candidate from a minor party since 1927."


I didn't vote for Perot, but I did find him interesting. He focused on the economy. He sort of forced the issue for the other candidates. That was a good thing. (That's not to say Perot's solution was right.)

I bought his 1992 book United We Stand: How We Can Take Back Our Country. Still have that book. Here are the opening words of Chapter One:

In June, 117,000 more Americans were thrown out of work. While we were putting the finishing touches on this book in July, eight companies announced they were shedding 23,000 jobs. Those were just the announced layoffs.

The Federal debt is now $4 trillion. That's $4,000,000,000,000. Our political leaders will add over $330 billion to that debt in 1992 alone.

We add about $1 billion in new debt every 24 hours.

Does anyone think the present recession just fell out of the sky?

I love the way Perot gets from debt to recession by magic. And, you know, many voters probably agreed with him that the Federal debt causes recession. What really gets me, though, is that Perot offers no argument at all: no logical explanation for how the Federal debt might possibly cause recession.

Far as I can tell, the analysis comes down to this:

1. Debt is bad.
2. The Federal debt is big and bad.
3. We have a recession.
4. The Federal debt must have caused the recession.

But that was in 1992. These days, the analysis runs more like this:

1. Government is bad
2. The Federal government is big and bad.
3. These days we have lots of problems.
4. The Federal government must have caused them.

That is sorry logic and a flawed conclusion.

There is, however, another explanation, an alternative to the "must have caused it" line of reasoning. That alternative is this: It's the government's fault, because the government is supposed to take care of these things.

This explanation I can almost buy. Our Declaration of Independence tells the world that we have an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, that is, to the pursuit of wealth. And the U.S. Constitution, in part, promotes the general welfare, that is, the general well-being of the American people. The U.S. government is supposed to create and maintain an environment, an economic environment in which these things can and do happen. Clearly, the government has lost its way.

In a sense, then, a powerful sense, it is the government's fault that our economy has gone bad. The government is not doing its job. If the economy goes bad, by definition it is the government's fault.

Still, this does not mean that the Federal debt is what made the economy go bad. Reducing the debt is not obviously the solution that fixes the problem. And as voters learn that reducing the Federal debt does not solve the problem, they seem to be moving toward a more simplistic solution: reducing the government itself. For people who hold such a view, every government shutdown is a victory.

Grover Norquist has said "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." But it is only a small step from wanting to be able to "drown government in a bathtub" to wanting to do it.

But getting rid of government is a political move. I much prefer to have an economic solution because the problem, as I see it, is an economic problem. Granted, when we run out of economic solutions to try, there will be nothing left but the political solution.

But the fact that none of the solutions we've tried so far has worked, doesn't mean that no solution will work. That's why I keep saying we have to go back and re-think the problem.

 
When it comes to economics, voter logic is no better today than it was when Perot was running. You can see it in Real Time with Bill Maher S17 E1 (18 Jan 2019) when Maher says:

I don't really think there is a great need for new ideas because we've been around the same problems for decades. So we know what the ideas are. It's the political will to put them into play.

and John Kasich replies

I don't disagree with that.

I do. I disagree with Maher. His view is that "we've been around the same problems for decades" but we still haven't solved them, so we must not be trying hard enough. (If that's how people think, no wonder they hate the government!)

Maher sees no possibility that the solutions don't work because the solutions are wrong.

My view is that we misunderstand the economy. We don't know what the underlying problem is, so we're not trying to solve it. We're trying to solve the consequences of that problem without understanding that they are consequences, and without wondering what they might be consequences of.

Bill Maher's view -- we need to try harder -- is a commitment to failure. Maher is unwilling to re-evaluate things. He is unwilling to consider changing our problem-solving strategy. He only wants to try harder. He wants to continue using a strategy that has not worked in 45 years, and just try harder.

The trouble with Maher's approach to solving economic problems is that it is open-ended: As long as the problem is not solved, his solution is only to try harder. Maybe that sounds good. To a point, I'll grant you, it is good. But if the problem you're trying to solve is not the real problem -- if is a consequence of the real problem -- you will never solve that problem. Because you can't solve consequences.


The real problem, the underlying problem, is not the Federal debt, but all the rest of the debt. Or the Federal debt and all the rest of the debt. But then, the Federal debt is a consequence of all the rest.

Remember all the noise about Obama's massive budget deficits? And now, Trump's? Their government deficits came after the rest of the debt caused a financial crisis. The increase in Federal debt was a consequence of the prior increase of debt other than Federal. That other debt, that's the real problem. The big increase in the Federal debt, that's the consequence.

The same has been true since the mid-1970s when economic growth slowed (because of private debt) and the government started increasing its debt (to solve the problem of slow growth). Only briefly in the latter 1990s was there any relief, a decade after private debt growth slowed in the latter 1980s.

Growing the Federal debt was a solution to the problem of slow growth: a solution that did not work.

These days, reducing the Federal debt is seen as the solution. But it, too, is a solution that does not work.

Hey, I could be wrong about the underlying problem. I'm not, but I could be. But I'm definitely not wrong about this: If our solutions have not solved the problem after all this time, then surely we need to re-think the problem.