McCain’s hard-hitting, no-bullshit response when asked if we’re in a recession*: “I would imagine that technically there’s some question amongst economists about that.”
Huh?
He then goes on to acknowledge that “Americans are hurting… badly,” but we are truly living in a bizarro world when you’re not allowed to say the word “recession**” even after it’s clear that we’re in one. Or when you tell yourself you’re not allowed to say it, at least.
Of course, he’s not afraid to explain the cause of the recession***: our Democratic congress! Because, see, it’s the “out-of-control” spending that’s the problem. Except that every time I go to a news website, it’s a war spending bill that’s being approved. And McCain loves this yummy war.
Consider this a bite of morning snark.
_____________
* A fairy just died.
** Stalin just rose from the dead, surrounded by forty crows with glowing red eyes.
*** The Earth just sucked me into its gaping maw.
{ 24 comments }
The nerd in me feels compelled that purist economists will usually refrain from calling a recession a recession until there are two quarters in a row where the economy does not grow (that’s the standard definition of a recession). So, yeah, a lot of the more stuffy economists will not say we’re in a recession quite yet.
But given that McCain is NOT an economist, and actually MOCKED economists for their disapproval of the gas tax holiday, this is pretty silly and ridiculous.
Smithers: Sir, bad news from accounting: the economy’s hit us pretty hard.
Burns: Heh, tough times, huh? I’ve lived through twelve recessions, eight panics, and five years of McKinleynomics. I’ll survive this.
Ugh, that should have read “the nerd in me feels compelled to point out that…” Oops, too many econ courses, not enough grammar.
well, yeah what do you expect? He’s insane and needs help.
If he wins, our country is getting even more shiteous.
Fun! haha
Eh…well, not that I ever like to agree with McCain. Ever. But technically he is right. We are not in a recession. A recession is two or more quarters of zero or negative growth. We haven’t had that yet. NBER has a slightly different definition, but so far they haven’t made a determination of recession yet. A few states are in a recession, but the country as a whole is not. We may be soon…but not quite yet.
Now I’m going to go vomit a little.
Doesn’t faze me too much as I’ve learned to never expect very much from politicians. I wonder if it is because he realizes we’re in a deep mess and does not want to set himself up too much as the dude to clean up up ASAP if in the unfortunate event he wins.
Hmm…Yummy Wars candy bars. Has great marketing potential….though the actual product may have painful….even fatal side-effects….just ask your average Japanese imperial militarist, Nazi, British trustees of the “Honorable” East India Company, etc. Heck, even the late Showa Emperor had to undergo the harsh McArthurian diet for relief.
Dear me. Those crows have my most sincere sympathies. As for the newly arisen Stalin…if he is somehow in need of gainful employment, there may be many welcoming higher-ed and restaurant service positions in need of his esteemed talents at my undergraduate alma mater. Bonuses provided if he is able to refer Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Kim, and yes….even Trotsky as well. ;)
@exholt you may jest…Bonuses provided if he is able to refer Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Kim, and yes….even Trotsky as well. ;
But perhaps this is evidence that capitalism is not in the best interest of the majority of the people of this planet.
True, but the Communist patriarchs above along with 20th/21st century history and firsthand experiences of a branch of my family living under one of their regimes also shows that Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoism is not necessarily any better…and in the case of many immigrants who lived in such regimes such as a branch of my family….much worse.
Moreover, I recall from a few poli-sci classes on Marxist Theory and Stalinism that what Stalin did and Mao later emulated was effectively “State Capitalism” where the Communist Party leadership was the management with the rest of the population enslaved to fulfill their assigned quotas in the 5 year economic plans created and enforced by their respective country’s Communist Party bureaucrats.
The fact that the senior Communist Party Leadership in such regimes often had extravagant lifestyles compared with the general population that I cannot help, but think that all the “revolutions” really did was replace one tyrannical ruling elite with another more totalitarian one.
@exholt…I am not claiming that communism that was practiced was indeed communism. In fact Stalin and Mao are extreme departures from Marx. Just as the capitalism that we practice is not pure capitalism, it is tinged with a small degree of socialism. The point of my commentary is not that capitalism as practiced by Mao, or Stalin are wonderful options but that the emancipation of the proletariat as theorized by Marx is a legitimate alternative to the corrupt system in which we live.
One big beef I’ve had with Marx’s theory of emancipating the proletariat is that the “intermediate step” of “dictatorship of the proletariat” on the way to Communist utopia means that there is no effective safeguards or accountability checks on the self-proclaimed vanguards of the revolution/representatives of the working/peasant classes. What often ends up happening is those “representatives” find their positions of power to be so comfortable and a self-esteem enhancer that they tend to attempt to make such arrangements permanent as the new ruling elite unless something compelling forces them to reform….and/or out of power altogether.
Personally, I think he was a useful social historian/sociologist for the conditions that existed in 19th/20th century Europe and the US. However, his theories were problematic not only in the critical flaw I mentioned above, but also in his deeply flawed analysis of non-Western societies such as China which was not only incorrect, but quite Orientalist in its depiction of Imperial Chinese society as a monolithic immutable “feudalistic” society….a depiction that most China scholars I know have criticized…especially with more recent scholarship over the last several decades.
I also have problems with the way he and subsequent Marxists/Maoists have a Eurocentric orientation when they attempt to shoehorn concepts from medieval Europe such as “feudalism” onto China when such conditions, if we take the classical European definition, did not apply in Imperial China which has been with few exceptions, a centralized bureaucratic agrarian state from the Qin dynasty in 221 BC to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Moreover, contrary to medieval practices, with very few exceptions…land was freely bought and sold without anything resembling medieval restrictions and tenant farmers had more agency with their landlords and were not tied to the land in the same way as serfs in medieval Europe were.
Well, if my Spencer is correct, plenty of chinese communist leadership loved to shoehorn “feudalism” into every antagonist concept.
Renee…First of all, read Das Kapitol and then read The Communist Manifesto. Or read summaries. It’s a pretty good way to get a quick grasp of just where Marx has a great utility in *describing* economic systems, and just how he went off the deep end very quickly in extension. At a fundemental level, Marxism is based on Hegelist concept of dialects, and everything is related to a very binary/trinary/whatever sorta taoist framework. It fundementally just does not have a good grasp of feedback systems and other systemic effects and the theory is inherently heirarchal, such that it is reliant on a “vanguard” of some sort to make it all work. A very hero sort of thing, with a delusion that freedom is something one could just “give” to anyone else.
I’m a fan of anarchism, especially since various forms of anarchism have actually worked for very short amount of time, and the literature is much more healthily diverse.
This is not to say that I’m not extremely grateful to Communism. The reason I am here, in a comfortable home, educated, and taken for face value much of the time, is with no small contribution from the American Communist Party, and a very large contribution to the Soviet Union and the Cold War that made overt white supremacy untenable for great powers conflicts.
/me hums the internationale…
the technical definition is a sticking point for me too. If we are not techinally in a recession why choose to use that word if we are not in the very definition of it? Is it because of the power of the word? Is there a different word to be used?
Which is one manifestation of the Chinese Communist leadership’s ignorance of substantial swaths of Chinese history….though the blame for that can be shared between their need to view everything from a Maoist lens and the widely variable education CCP leadership received. Some like Zhou Enlai and Mao had some university education while others had spotty formative education due to life circumstances like Deng Xiaoping who studied in various French middle schools while working labor jobs in various French factories.
In short, it is a mix of ignorance and political expediency which causes them to do this….and end up making a Eurocentric derived interpretation of their own society to become state orthodoxy.
Shah8,
So long as you are not dressed as a PLA/Communist soldier charging at me with a Kalashnikov in an attempt to “liberate” me, it is all cool. ;)
Speaking of the Internationale, that tune was quite popular with those of my parents’ generation. In fact, I have the Chinese rock version covered by Tang Dynasty on my media player right now. It was used as a protest song by the Tienanmen protesters in 1989. As a result, there were measures taken to discourage the “subversive” uses of such patriotic songs not too long after the massacre.
The connotation of the word recession has come unstuck from its definition. There’s no way for politicians to pander safely on this point, since the wingnuts will jump up and down on anybody for failing to acknowledge that the GDP hasn’t fallen in even one quarter, yet, and everybody else will jump up and down on anybody who seems to be soft-soaping an obviously weak economy.
Ah, okay, I was confused on the definition.
But still – if we’re not technically in one yet, why the hemming and hawing? Why not just say that while acknowledging that we’re in trouble?
“Why not just say that while acknowledging that we’re in trouble?”
I think this is a problem of politics not economics.
Honestly, the sky is not falling. It is highly unlikely that we are about to enter into another “Great Depression.” The world is not coming to an end and people in the developed world are not going to starve to death.
We have a narrative going around now that the economy is tremendously bad and may not recover. It’s a cloud of irrational pessimism that rivals the cloud of irrational optimism we had a few short years ago.
I’m an ardent dem and intend to campaign hard for Obama, BUT he is using this narrative to build political support. And I’m not a fan of that tactic.
Can he do things that will help people immediately to blunt the edge of this particular economic crisis? Yes. Will he be able to do things that will prevent a deepening of the current economic crisis? Maybe.
Will he be able to prevent the long term slow down of the economies of the developing world, the thing that has economists concerned? Probably not. Doing so requires significant investment in future innovation, because it’s innovation that keeps our economy chugging when we should be slowing. And I don’t see that sort of economic planning anywhere in his platform.
Kristen,
Its not so much another Great Depression that we have to be worried about, but something rather more like Japan in the 1990’s – a long period of stagnation or slightly negative growth, not a drastic collapse.
John,
Certainly, but stagnation is where all “developed” economies end up if they are unable to continue innovating, i.e., finding new ways to grow. We will recover from this downturn with slow 1 to 3 percent growth. It will suck. Income inequality will probably grow and the most vulnerable will suffer. This is what developed economies that are mainly unregulated look like.
But none of the discussions about how “bad” our economy is actually address that specific point. Instead we are only talking about how to lessen this economic crisis and blunt its effects on the most vulnerable. Clearly those are very important priorities and ones I support whole-heartedly…but if the “crisis” everyone is concerned with is the one facing us in the next 3 quarters…then I don’t see the reason for all the histrionics. I don’t like using people’s financial fears to prompt them to vote in certain ways.
Kristen, I’m among those who think that we are in *very* deep compost. I am curious to ask, though, what sort of indications would you require for someone, say, me, to convince you that the deep compost camp is correct?
I don’t know what to say about such an overgeneralized statement. Though the scale may not be to the level seen in many developing countries, there ARE people in the developed world…including the US who are starving due to poverty and/or suffering from health problems/natural disasters out of one’s control.
Even growing up in the supposed economic heyday of the Reagan 80’s, I recall seeing a lot of homeless adults and children in my working-class NYC urban neighborhood who obviously hadn’t eaten in a while due to poverty and/or suffering from various health problems.
It may not impact the upper/upper-middle classes a lot, but plenty of middle and working-class/poor Japanese ended up homeless and destitute as a result of being tossed out of work and being unable to keep up their rental/mortgage payments. In fact, I recalled several Japanese news articles which mentioned the phenomenon of “homeless neighborhoods” where homeless Japanese congregated in makeshift homes and attempted to make the best of a horrid economic situation.
Just because the economic stagnation does not seem as cataclysmic as the Great Depression does not mean it does not have a serious economic impact….especially on the least socio-economically privileged and most vulnerable members of their society.
Shah,
An unemployment rate above 10%, inflation at or above 8%, GDP under -1%…you know things that signal a weakness in the economy rather than the down of a business cycle.
@shah First of all, read Das Kapitol and then read The Communist Manifesto. Or read summaries. It’s a pretty good way to get a quick grasp of just where Marx has a great utility in *describing* economic systems, and just how he went off the deep end very quickly in extension.
Do not assume that because I have different reading of the texts in question than you do that I have not read them…If you have a point to make do it without assuming a lack of knowledge on my part. I don’t take silencing, or a sense of superiority from anyone.
He’s… right, though. Recession is a technical term, the economy has to be a certain amount of down for a certain amount of time. It’s not synonymous with “times is tough”.
I do not mean to be silencing or to exhibit superiority. I don’t, as a rule, assume that people would necessarily know what I’m talking about when I get into the more geeky stuff. I did think I could have worded that better after I hit post, and I wondered when I’d hear back from you. The offending passage was meant to be in the enthusiast tone, as in “if one reads x, then reads y, then…”, but I did realize that it sounded like I thought you hadn’t read them, when it was more like “here’s my take if you read…”.
Although, really, the idea that Das Kapitol can be hard to read (I have read only bits and pieces of it myself!), and the fact that so many people spout off about Marxism without knowing what the heck they’re talking about was definitly lurking in my mind, and that may have twisted my pen, so to speak.
The Communist Manifesto is so much easier to read, and I think that’s a shame since it does not have nearly the value of the thick book. Exholt’s thoughts definitely took me back to *my* college days, when I, as a young biology undergrad, started spouting stuff about Marxism I didn’t understand but a philosophy major took me under his wings, and mostly set me straight about Marxism.
Comments on this entry are closed.