By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa
Money is flowing like cheap wine through all available channels and it is justifiable because the expectation is that the flow will age and turn it into fine wine in the barrels of the economy. But it can also spoil. This is a risk every vintner faces and this risk is higher now than the probability that the end result would be fine wine.
Monetary stimulus could cause inflation and fiscal stimulus could cause higher indebtedness. And trade can keep on raising the trade deficit. The talk and action about wage and price controls is in the air and on the ground. Regulations are being debated to change behavior by keeping the status quo in both New York and Washington. Status quo is the prevailing design constraint for making economic policy at all levels: in the economics profession, in the markets, and in government institutions.
It is time for the orchestra to be brought into concert once again before the audience walks out on the United States. The spotlight is on the skill of the conductor. All 21 guns are firing in Washington in a salute to the commander-in-chief with the expectation that he would fix the state of the country, from the election to the Nobel, but the result is presidential dissonance, with only hope to cope with the economic condition that is reminding the world of pestilence because of little or no action.
Even paralytics get physical therapy. The U.S economy is not because all courage has been drained by complacency because it can be someone else’s problem sometime in the future. The concentration of the depth of the problems, accumulating over time, are being expected to drop onto a future president and a future Congress, for the country to change painfully on a war footing then or get used to the dysfunctional peace, internalizing the very real possibility that future generations of Americans would not be better off than their parents until then.
This president wants to pass the buck after it stopped at his desk. This Rawlesian socialist president prefers to apply laissez-faire for himself. Policy is being made for someone else because his household economics was taken care of before he ran for president. He is not in debt. Many households are and the country, made up of all of those households is. And households apply common sense when faced with debt.
As a country, at its pinnacle of economic power under this administration, albeit its current woes, the United States has many excellent options to emerge from its predicament: it can pay down the debt in the currency it borrowed in, a luxury which not many countries have; or it can borrow to raise national savings; or it can budget-in its capital assets to apply their current and future value against the debt on the books to improve the perceptions of the balance sheet of the United States. Standing on top of Everest, having climbed to the top, the United States has become more concerned about fending off the gales rather than walking down the mountain to lift up the rest, as if the climb is an end in itself.
All these options may not be available when it becomes someone else’s problem in the future. The can will have been kicked down the road dressed up as reform so as not to revisit the matter of the ongoing decline: to accept the state of things, phlegmatically with a level head, as they are, by respecting the inadequate state of knowledge that surrounds him. The President indeed keeps his cool in tough times, but it is perhaps a deficiency in his survival instincts rather than an asset. The purpose of his stoicism seems to be to escape from himself and his context.
The emperor is walking naked trying to find a fig leaf to lose his innocence only to leave behind endless toil for the country he was elected to lead in the future. Where is the boy to tell him that?
One World 
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