Both sides now

They're still counting votes in Georgia, but CNN seems to think things will soon be settled.

I think the only thing that gets settled is: Most people get more convinced that things will get worse, one way or the other.

Politics is the problem. No, not politics: People being politicized is the problem, because now everyone thinks our troubles have political roots. 

Our problems appear to be political because we have taken sides that we didn't need to take on political issues that didn't even need to come up.

Our problems, at root, are economic. You have to peel the onion pretty far down to see it, because things have been getting worse for such a long time. But the original problem, which still waits to be solved, is economic in nature. Economic growth is slow and has been slowing since Paul Volcker ran the Fed or maybe since the mid-1970s. Or maybe since the mid-1960s or before; a long-term problem in any case, impacting people for two generations and counting.

When economic growth is slow, jobs are harder to come by. Income is harder to come by. There is greater incentive for crime and corruption. Unresolved, the problem gets worse.

I remember Newt Gingrich, in To Renew America, hypothesized a world of better economic growth, and wrote:

In this world of merely 1 percent higher growth, the Social Security Trust Fund never runs out of money for as far as the current model can look into the future.

That, from the 1990s when Social Security was a big issue. Add one percent to the average growth rate, and the problem would be solved. The same is more or less true today: More jobs, more income, less need for "government interference" (or "government help" if you prefer) in the economy. Less need for that kind of help makes the "secondary" problems (arising as consequences of the initial problem) easier to solve. Smaller problems, less interference, less objection to the interference, less partisanship, more cooperation. It all works together.

Less need for Obamacare, for example. Doesn't "less need for it" help solve that problem? They came up with Obamacare because people couldn't afford health care. (We call it a "health care" problem. It is mostly an affordability problem.) But getting the government to pay for health care (or forcing us to  pay) doesn't solve the problem of rising cost.

If there is a cost problem, the solution is to find and fix the cause of that problem, not to get someone else to pay the rising cost. Besides, there is a good argument to be made that throwing money at a problem makes the problem more expensive.

If you threw money at me, I'd take it. That's how it works.

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The initial problem? The rising cost of finance, perhaps as long ago as the 1950s. The rising cost of finance, embodied in our growing reliance on credit, created cost-push pressure. Cost pressure creates inflation, or slows growth, or both. The more we fight inflation, the greater the slowing of growth. Eventually, the slowing takes on a life of its own and inflation doesn't even try anymore. And here we are today.

Did I leave anything out?