Suicidal Tendencies

This post is a bit of a departure from the majority of my other posts. This is about suicide.

In the past two days, I've heard two very disturbing stories involving suicide.

In the first one, a prominent banking lawyer at an international law firm was found dead at the foot of a 150' cliff, with his daughter's teddy bear perched at the top of the cliff, hours after allegations of "inappropriate behavior" at his law firm's Christmas party.

In the second one, I just learned that a family friend killed himself in the past week.

These are both truly devastating stories. I understand that everyone has his/her demons in this world; I have struggled with depression myself. However, to anyone reading this, please remember that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Life gets better. I feel as though I am living proof of that.

So, in closing, and I say this with as much sincerity as I have, if you feel alone and are thinking of ending your life . . . you're not alone; don't. Comment here. Call me. Let's go get a beer or a coffee and be friends. Come have dinner with me or sing songs or do anything except kill yourself.

I know that many people have stated these things much more eloquently than me. Nonetheless, if you are feeling alone, you're not. You have friends and people who care about you, even if you barely ever hear from them. You have impacted people's lives and you matter.

Back at It

During the Obama years, I was continually scolded by my Republican friends who would say that "Bush is gone" and "the current economy is Obama's responsibility." "If Obama didn't want to be in charge, he shouldn't have run."

Generally, these scoldings would come after I point out such inconvenient truths as:

• W, not Obama or Clinton, was president on 9/11
• W inherited a budget surplus and left trillion dollar deficits to his successor
• W's successor was Obama . . . he had trillion dollar deficits on his first day in office

I also thought that it was the worst idea imaginable to demand austerity during a recession. 

Did we learn nothing from the Great Depression? 

I argue with my "conservative" (i.e. "Republican") friends all the time about what ended the Great Depression. I insist it was a combination of the New Deal and WWII; my Republican friends refuse to credit FDR or government with success, ever insist that it was solely WWII. 

Whether I'm right or they are, however, it is clear that it was government spending that brought this country out of the Great Depression. With that in mind, I was incredulous that they would then demand that the government cut, not increase, spending during a recession. I could go on and on about Keynesian theory, but I'll save that for another day.

Today, I want to talk about bad faith, cynical argumentation. I always want to impute good faith to my counterparts in any argument, particularly one about our great nation. However, when I saw profligate spending and tax cutting for 8 years, from 2001 - 2009, a HUGE recession in early 2009, and subsequent demands to cut spending thereafter, I couldn't help but question the good faith of the demands for spending cuts. 

If only there was a way for me to figure out whether the concerns over deficits were sincere or not. I wonder what would happen if the people who were demanding that spending be cut during a recession (i.e. 2009-2013 or so) were given full power during a fairly strong economy (say, in 2016 or so). Would they cut spending, raise taxes, and close the spending deficit?  

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 20 years, I think you know the answer to that:

the real test came after 2016. A complete cynic might have expected economists who denounced budget deficits and easy money under a Democrat to suddenly reverse position under a Republican president.

And that total cynic would have been exactly right. After years of hysteria about the evils of debt, establishment Republican economists enthusiastically endorsed a budget-busting tax cut. After denouncing easy-money policies when unemployment was sky-high, some echoed Trump’s demands for low interest rates with unemployment under 4 percent — and the rest remained conspicuously silent.

Huh. Well, you  know what they say: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I think the real problem, for at least a generation, is that now nobody will take anyone's deficit concerns seriously.

Where's the tea party? Either it was a reaction to a black president and its participants are now walking around in red "Make America Great Again" hats or they have disappeared from the political scene, fully aware that their ideals have been sold out.

SINO (Shutdown In Name Only)

Am I supposed to care about the latest (3rd in 2018, for the record) "shutdown" of the U.S. Government? Is all of this drama and blame game supposed to change my mind about substantive policy in this country?

I don't . . . and it doesn't.

For starters, the only reason I care about the "shutdown" is that it pisses me off that a bunch of politicians decide they want to have confrontational tactics to please their base; when such tactics result in real people being laid off; when such tactics underscore an already incessant notion that "public servants" are not admirable figures striving to better our society but instead "beaurocrats" to be derided, degraded, and discarded.

I think that if our politicians want to have a temper tantrum and shut down the government, then this "partial" shit has to stop. STOP making it convenient to throw a monkey wrench in the works. If we're shutting down the government, then lets shut it down. Stop sending SS checks. Stop making medicare payments. Stop paying the military (except those on active duty in a combat zone). Stop the customs office. Stop immigration services. Stop oversight of ports. These are easy.

I think the question is how far we want to go with this mechanism.

Do we shut down law enforcement? Do we stop the overnight lending at the fed?

Do we shut down courts?

What about prisons?

Anyway, I don't have all of those answers, but I adamantly believe that "shutdowns" should actually SHUT DOWN the government, at least in the main.

As to the second part of my initial inquiry: does this change my mind one iota with respect to domestic policy? Resoundingly not! I don't take philosophical guidance from bumper stickers and intellectual toddlers. To convince me to change my mind on substantive matters, one must show a measure of maturity and understanding of the issue before I engage in any sort of debate on the merits.