Obama and McCain on the Role of Government in a Troubled Economy
The economy is on everyone’s mind. Everyone’s talking about the job losses and the high gas prices. As are the candidates. What are they saying?
“I’m calling on Congress and the president to enact real, immediate relief with energy rebates for working families this summer, a fund to help families avoid foreclosure, extended benefits for the long-term jobless, and assistance to states that have been hard-hit by the economic downturn.”
And here’s McCain, from the same NYTimes piece:
“At a time when our small businesses need support from Washington, we cannot raise taxes, increase regulation and isolate ourselves from foreign markets,” McCain called for “tax relief, job creation, and investment in innovation.”
Based on what you’ve just heard whom would you vote for? Well if you’re most of all looking for help from the government with your problems Obama has your vote. He’s promising you relief, relief, and more relief. No question but that it’s the government’s role to help you in your trouble.
Do more and more people feel this way? If they do McCain’s chances of winning the presidency are not good. For McCain says little about what government should do for the people (tax relief, help by creating more jobs, and that’s about it) and he’s not very convincing when he says it.
He is probably more convincing when he talks about what the government should not do (drawing on his conservative roots?). For he definitely implies that things would only get worse if the government were to raise taxes, write new regulations, and set protective tariffs to stem the manufacturing job losses.
But neither McCain nor Obama seems willing to confront head on the principal motor that is driving this economy down. Granted you can’t stare down the oil price rise, nearly $150 a barrel today. And you probably can’t in the short term increase the supply of oil by the discovery and tapping of new fields off shore and in Alaska.
But on the demand end there’s a lot we can do. McCain got it all wrong when he said he would lower the taxes on the price at the pump. For this would only increase the demand. Obama got this right when he refused to take that route.
But neither has had the courage to take the unpopular stand and tell us, if we want relief, to use less oil. Any number of small sacrifices on our part in regard to our oil and gas consumption would do more for the health and strength of the economy than all the government relief programs that all the candidates could ever devise.
For example, how many times when driving to work have you seen cars with any more occupants than a single driver at the wheel. Our efforts to change this situation have up until now not made a significant difference. The “fast” lanes created in and out of our congested cities as a reward to drivers who pool often have few takers and the congestion with the loss of a traffic lane is even greater than before.
Government’s role should be to encourage and actively promote “mass” transit, whether this be two or more occupants in the car, new trolley and train lines, fast trains between our major cities, or any number of other means. This policy if carried out seriously could most of all lower our demand for oil, and even if it did nothing to lower the price at the pump, it would lower the transportation budget of each one of us.
So why in difficult economic times do we talk about what the government can do for us? That was all the talk during Roosevelt’s New Deal and a new deal for the economy never resulted. That only came with the Second World War. Why not talk about what we can do for the country (and the world) by our own efforts? Why don’t the candidates talk about that?
