Going All In

A few memes popping frequently upon the airwaves the past few days. One of them is “overloading the circuits”. This refers to the Obama administration moving quickly on policy matters which emanated from his campaign promises and which obstructionists argue have nothing to do with improving the economy. Of course, the obstructionists are on the right and they work hard to stop all forward motion on economic matters, particularly since the measures will end up having an effect on the pocketbooks of the folks at the top of the income pyramid.

The biggie is health care, an item addressed by every single modern economy in the world, and some not so modern, except for ours. I’m not going to address the merits or not of such a program right now, but rather the concept of trying to accomplish so many things apparently all at once.

Nothing about any proposed policy is new. Everything has been on the agenda for years, in the case of health care, 60 years (keep in mind Germany has had national health care since the 1870s). The issues have been discussed and debated; it’s just a matter of formalizing most of it at this point and getting it to the floors of congress for an up or down vote. Overloading the circuits means the opposition won’t have enough time to parse through the documents to find the stupid little crap they always find to go on the media outlets foaming at the mouth about how irresponsible the democrats are being, blah blah blah.

The democrats are right to go for everything now while the energy is there to do it. The GOP argues to wait for the economy to stabilize. Two outcomes are possible if that is allowed to happen. First, things can stabilize in which case any further moves will be made to look like a threat to stability so they shouldn’t be taken, or; second, things don’t stabilize in which case further moves shouldn’t be made because they will make things worse (and anyway, more effort must be made directly on the problems at hand rather than side issues).

So go ahead and overload the circuits. If those (Republicur) folks in Congress can’t keep up at this point, it’s just another example of their governing inadequacy. Years of inertia can be overcome if they want. They don’t want. They spent the entirety of their time in power trying to kill the beast and now that it’s nearly dead we are trying to revive the carcass. My friend Barry has made it clear that it’s possible to do more than one thing at a time. Dedicated readers here will note I said a long time ago not to play poker with this guy. He’s going all in. He can still be nice about it but I’m glad we have cute little grandma Nancy to bust out the rolling pin and flatten ‘em to get things cooked. Ah metaphors!!!