HOLIDAY FEVER

HOLIDAY FEVER

We are in one of those "in-between" periods.

Some of them are annoying.  

Once February ends, I am generally in no mood for the "in like a lion, out like a lamb" daily dreariness of early March.  I can understand why my co-religionists turned St. Patrick's Day on March 17 into an annual debauch.  It was more an expression of frustration at the pace of seasonal change than a window into the soul of the Irish.

There is a different  problem with a languid August.  By then, the heat of the summer just creates lassitude as everyone waits for the fall.  The French take the entire month off.  We can't, of course, lest our vacationing -- along with the last vestiges of our social safety net and the not yet fully implemented vision that is Obamacare -- be vilified as "European style socialism."  But they have it right.

Not much gets done in August.

Unlike that period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Where we are right now. And which is somewhat . . . 

Dizzying.

To begin, and this is where America often begins when it thinks about these things, the period is that one time of the year when commerce --  in particular, "retail" -- is one steroids.  This year, the stampede that is Black Friday began on Thanksgiving itself.  This more or less represents the repeal of the latter, which was initially created by George Washington in 1789 when he proclaimed November 26 as "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God."  

Among those "signal favors," according to Washington's proclamation, was  "the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted".  In other words, Thanksgiving was created -- inter alia, as we lawyers say -- to thank God for . . .

The federal government.

Who would have thunk that!

In any case, our first President's intentions to the side, the day has now pretty much become a national prelude to . . . shopping.  And shop we did this year.  According to the reports, Black Friday (which began shortly after dinner on Thursday), followed by "Shop Small" Saturday and "Cyber" Monday, produced over $62 billion in sales.  $59.1 billion of that spending occurred over the four day weekend, 41% of which was on-line. "Shop Small" Saturday accounted for $5.5 billion in sales and "Cyber" Monday had $1.5 billion, both records.  All sales figures were substantially above last year's figures, and in total, 247 million shoppers either visited stores or shopped on-line.

A little less than three weeks before this shopping spree, Americans went to the the polls to elect their President.  At that time, 127,683,108 of them actually voted.  Three weeks later, 247 million of them went shopping.  In other words, there were about 120 million more "shoppers" than there were voters.  Now, the  "shopper" figure may be plagued by some double counting.  Some people no doubt made more than one purchase over the weekend-plus-Monday's orgy of commerce, and that 247 million number would therefore have to come down to reflect actual individuals.  But still in all, a lot more people shopped after (or on) Thanksgiving than voted on Election Day.

So take that George Washington.

In any case, there are now twenty-six days 'til Christmas.  We used to distinguish between "days to Christmas" and "shopping days to Christmas."  But now, every day is a shopping day.  So the math is less complicated.  During this period, there will be office Christmas parties, relatives who undergo their annual holiday meltdowns, millions of visits to thousands of Santas, talk radio's now annual  claims that liberals are taking "Christ" out of Christmas, and . . . 

Incessant talk about the so-called "fiscal cliff."  

Which is to economics what those old plastic trees were to Christmas.

Entirely artificial.

The fiscal cliff was created by politicians who held raising the debt ceiling hostage to their anti-tax, anti-spending crusade.  They did so in the midst of an anemic recovery that followed a near depression, the only solution to which was a Keynesian stimulus, which they generally oppose.  To raise the ceiling, Congress passed and the President signed a sort of mutual suicide pact -- if some agreement on taxes and spending is not reached by December 31, the tax rates on January 1 will return to the Clinton era rates (39% at the high end, as opposed to today's 35%) and there will be big cuts in both domestic and defense spending.  The combined effect is predicted to be a drop in annual economic growth of about 1-2% over the next two years and, potentially, a new recession.

The "fiscal cliff" is artificial for two reasons -- one metaphorical, the other real.  As a metaphor, the notion is just false.  It suggests that the fall off in growth (the "cliff," as it were) will somehow be the fault as much of those who refuse to reduce the deficit (the liberals) as it will of those who refuse to increase taxes on the wealthy (the conservatives).  But it won't be.  The loss in growth -- and this is where the artificiality becomes real --  will be a function entirely of the austerity the suicide pact enforces.  If taxes on middle incomers (but not the super-wealthy) go up and spending goes down, that is austerity and that is what kills growth and creates a new recession.  If taxes on middle incomers do not rise and the spending cuts are targeted, you do not decrease growth; at the same time, you nominally lower the deficit by improving the government's balance sheet on the revenue side. 

There are some signs the cliff will never be reached.  Having lost the last two Presidential elections (and five of the last six if you count 2000 correctly), the GOP is now being hoist on a demographic and ideological petard that it quickly needs to unshackle itself from if it is to win nationally in the future.  This means appealing to more than the 1% (or their wannabes) and religious fundamentalists, ending its alienation of Hispanic voters, and becoming pro-growth.  Obama is proposing a pro-growth and relatively painless give-up on their part -- the rich pay more but everyone else stays where they are and draconian spending cuts are significantly softened; he is doing this in a post-election world where the polls say voters will hold the GOP accountable, as they should, for the anti-growth austerity the "cliff" tries to mask. 

This is, as Bill Kristol told them shortly after the election, hardly a bad deal for the GOP.  It allows them to retain their no tax bona fides with most of the country and doesn't undermine long term deficit reduction.

They will probably accept it, or some version fairly close.

If not . . . 

There are twenty six shopping days 'til Christmas.

RELIEVED

RELIEVED

Others will and already are picking apart the election result and explaining why it happened.  

The featured causes include significant increases in the number of Hispanic voters, the GOP's seriously declining share of that vote, the ubiquitous gender gap, extremism on the right, and -- perhaps owing to that extremism -- the inability of Romney, though he tried,   to credibly embrace the center once the general election was upon him.  

All are valid.  

But the thing that most struck me about the election was not why it happened but rather the dominant emotion the result elicited.  Other than in the immediate aftermath, it wasn't elation or exuberance.  It certainly wasn't chest thumping or braggadocio. It wasn't even all that much score settling (though statistics and real evidence guru Nate Silver -- who called the Presidential result in all fifty states -- is clearly entitled to take a lot of names).  Rather, on the extreme right, it was denial.  And everywhere else it was . . . 

Relief.

The Europeans were relieved.  The Chinese were relieved.  The Middle East was relieved to the extent possible in that part of the world.  Seniors and  women were relieved, and so were all those people living on the coasts who just got hammered by Hurricane Sandy and don't believe "the jury is still out" on climate change and global warming.  Even Floridians, where the vote is still being counted, were relieved, no doubt grateful that Ohio and Colorado put someone over the top and spared the rest of us a re-run of 2000. 

So why was this the case?

The simple answer, I think, is this.  Had Romney been elected, and certainly had he been elected along with a Republican Senate and House, the country was going to march to the beat of a radically different drummer.  From an immediate fixation on drastic spending cuts to a resurgence of neo-conservative militarism, the future was not going to look remotely similar to the recent past.   The country's foreign and domestic policies undoubtedly would change.

But, much more importantly, so would its priorities. 

In a demand starved environment where austerity has failed wherever it has been tried, the new normal would have been, at the very least, a second recession or depression.   The British demonstrate this reality in spades.  In 2010, having jettisoned a government embracing reasonable Keynesian stimulus for one that denied its necessity, the UK cut spending and watched itself slide into another downturn from which it has yet to emerge.  Nor have the austerians fared any better on the continent.  Unemployment is at historically tragic levels in southern Europe, civil unrest is becoming a serious problem in Greece,  and the absence of real growth is even now starting to hurt the inflation-obsessed Germans.  

America, in contrast, has been a relative success story since Obama became President.  

And this was not by accident.  

The auto industry bail out saved Michigan and a large part of the mid-west.  The early term Recovery Act pumped billions into an economy that was then on life support.  It is true, of course, that the patient has only recently  been released from intensive care.   And she is hardly able to walk out of the hospital.

But she is no longer dying either.

The likelihood is that all this would have ended or been reversed if Romney had been elected President.  However much he tried to convince us of late that a moderate heart beat in 2012's version of an otherwise extreme political body, Romney never wavered in his opposition to the stimulus.  He falsely claimed it had failed but truly believed it should not have been adopted.  Ditto on Obamacare, which he would have repealed.  To bend the medical cost curve, which Obama bends with his state-based exchanges and best-practices panel, Romney's answer was privatized Medicare, which in the end could only bend it by denying care to those without the means to supplement their vouchers.

Romney was about ending the New Deal at home . . .

And resurrecting the Neo-Con Deal abroad.  

How else to explain the unasked for increases in military spending.   Or the fact that any Republican cabinet would have included their Secretary of State in waiting, John Bolton, one of the architects of Bush II's armada uber alles approach to foreign policy.  Or the false claims that Obama's approach was to undertake "an apology tour."  Or the GOP's xenophobic approach to immigration, where the first question asked any Hispanic (let's not kid ourselves here) would have been "where's your green card," in the hope that "self-deportation" eliminated the need for the nastiness now au courant in Arizona.

And then there was the Supreme Court.  Which is likely to have three or more vacancies in the next four years.  Romney wanted more Scalias.  

Most of us do not.

So, at the end of the day, in a reprise of that old Alka-Seltzer commercial, the country woke up on Wednesday morning having been asked how it spelled relief.  The answer was . . .

O-b-a-m-a.

MOTHER NATURE AND MITT

MOTHER NATURE AND MITT

It was supposed to be the week we all focused on those eight swing states -- New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

And then reality intervened.

The latest "storm of the century" hammered the tri-state New York region earlier this week and we are not remotely far along in digging out from under.  I lost power but was among the lucky who had it restored within two days.  Hundreds of thousands remain in the dark.  No electricity, and for all but those whose technology is circa 1950, no heat, no hot water, and  (absent working refrigerators) no fresh food either.  Gas lines reminiscent of the Arab oil embargoes of the '70s dot the suburban landscape.   Jobs became an escape, until everyone had to actually begin the commute to them.  Then they just morphed into part of the continuing nightmare. New York City south of 34th Street is still dark.  Many of the  subways are idle in that part of town, and some of the tunnels remain flooded.

The city that never sleeps is officially exhausted.

Natural disasters bring out the worst in Mother Nature but often the best in us.  New Jersey's in-your-face Governor, Chris Christie, had a moment, actually more like a long weekend, of consummate class this week, continually praising the President he had been routinely lampooning, honestly grateful for the on the job competence Obama exhibited on Sandy, in contrast to the federal government's insouciance on Katrina in 2005.  The same, however, could not be said of Mitt Romney.  The man who only months ago told us he wanted to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and out source disaster relief to the states and localities affected, was eerily silent when journalists asked if he was still of that view.

What's he waiting for?

Memo to Mitt -- next Wednesday is too late.

Further memo to Mitt -- closing FEMA is truly a bad idea.

In case Governor "I-saved-the-Olympics-am-a-businessman-and-trust-me-will-create-jobs-even-though-I -can't-tell-you-how-because-what-I'm-for-actually-doesn't-do-it" hasn't noticed, natural disasters tend to cripple or seriously hamper the areas affected.  Last time anyone checked, Louisiana did not have the resources to dig out from Katrina on its own in 2005, nor do New York City or New Jersey or Connecticut in the wake of Sandy today.  As of now, FEMA can call in the Army Corps of Engineers, which actually has a unit committed to nothing but "unwatering" a flooded levee (or tunnel).  And today, those "unwater-ers" are busy drying out lower Manhattan.

So Mayor Bloomberg doesn't have to.

Disaster relief has been part of the federal government's mandate for more than a hundred years.  The only reason it was not part of that mandate beforehand is that the feds did not then have the capacity to move resources and manpower to the scenes of natural disasters on a moment's notice.  Today they do.  Right now, there are hundreds of FEMA employees from across the nation, marching through the Rockaways in New York City and through towns up and down the Jersey Shore, making sure those without access to phones or the Internet can immediately apply for the assistance they need.  Last night, the National Guard in their army convoys was ferrying families in flooded Hoboken to safety.  In the months ahead, the federal government will be writing checks to tens of thousands of victims who will re-build their homes and businesses.

The states and localities could not do that on their own either.

Throughout this Presidential campaign, I have been searching for the best word to describe the GOP's challenge to Obama this year.   And I now think Mother Nature has come up with that word.  Romney's vision, if it can be called that, is artificial.  There is a disconnect between the problems we face and the so-called solutions he trumpets.  You can't jump start an economy starved for demand by crippling the ability to use fiscal policy to create that demand.  You can't empower women while controlling and denying their access to  health care.  You can't beat terrorism by ignoring the world's terrorist in chief, the now dead bin Laden.  You can't lament the frequency of now annual storms of the century while denying climate change or global warming.  And you can't be for disaster relief if you demand that it come only from those governments least able to provide it.

That's not relief.  

It's neglect.  

And it is Romney's platform.  

He may have been a  can-do businessman.  But he's now proposing to be . . . 

A won't do President.