Matt Ulman

I’ve had this post as a draft for a few weeks, just never had the time to finish it, but now something’s come up that makes me want to finish:

Lost Decade Looming?

Krugman talks about the commentary masquerading as news, and it makes me wonder: I don’t really have a lot of faith in the media, so I assume that commentary masquerading as news is generally just the regurgitation of talking points.  And what if the ‘deficit / inflation hawks’ are intentionally setting us up for a longer recession, one that hopefully lasts until 2012.  It’s a scary concept, this politicization of economics, and not in the traditional way.  Economics is politics at nearly every level and certainly the macro, but the idea that one side would intentionally misread the current economy in order to gain politically at the cost of the macroeconomy… that really frightens me.  Maybe I’m naive but I didn’t think we were there, and I hope we’re not.

Which brings me to the post from a few weeks ago, prompted by this headline at the Huffington Post, the link to which I can no longer find:

Dems Have Fractious Meeting On Bank Reform, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes

I’m not a big reader of the HuffPo, or any of the political theater blogs, but sometimes a guy needs a break from whatever.  This pattern, Dems Have Fractious Meeting On X, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes seems like a fools game.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone who pays attention to these things, but I can’t believe the Democrats are still falling for stuff like this. I mean, the fact is that the Republicans don’t want reform to succeed – they want (at the very least, see above) a costly political failure. Collaborating with them only means that X, whatever X is, is more likely to fail.

I had this idea a while ago, that in order to be a part of ‘something’, and especially to be in charge of ‘something’ you have to believe, at least on some level, that that ‘something’ should exist. It’s not the Secretary of Education’s job to decide if the Department of Education should exist, it’s their job to lead it.  The SEC fell down because the people running it didn’t believe in its mission. I understand that this rule can’t hold 100% or else we’ll end up with bloat evident even to the left, but there’s something to be said for the general idea.

How will more regulation, especially more watered down regulation, help that?