Out At Home

 

Now that the season's over and the various awards have been made, consider a baseball team.ⁱ

A winning team.ⁱⁱ

An amazingly winning team – way in front of the league, more than any team has ever been at this point in the season. And every day getting even further ahead. Sure there are problems, including rowdies and ticket scalpers, but the bottom line is a record unlike anything that has ever preceded it.

So what should be done? Over the manager's protests, the front office fires some of the old team and hires new players so that there is now a majority of new players, both position players and pitchers. Makes sense, doesn't it? After all, the existing players are doing well, so why keep them – a change is certainly advisable. Still the momentum continues for a while, with the team's lead lengthening.

For a while, but only for a while. Then, with the new team in place, the bottom falls out.ⁱⁱⁱ There is loss after loss, and a point is reached where the team has forfeited a good deal of its advantage. It's still far ahead of where it was at the beginning of the season, but not as far as before, and the losing is continuing.

The following season the decline continues, although after a while there is a reversal of the team's fortunes. Several changes are attempted but they don't seem to have much effect.

So what should be done now? Clearly the problem is that there are still too many members of the old team – the one that was winning. The front office fires some more of the pitchers. That makes sense too. The new team wasn't doing well, but maybe more of them, with an inexperienced manager who claims he can solve all the team's problems, will change everything so the front office fires the old manager and brings in a new one as well as more of the the new players. – both position players and pitchers. However to the front office's surprise and consternation, the losses continue. For a couple of years.

So they get cold feet. And wish for the “good old days.” They fire many of the players to bring in some additional ones – mostly from the old group but with a few others who are new – so they anticipate, for the following season, an old-school majority among the position players though the majority of pitchers are still newbies. The manager, who has an unbreakable long-term contract, stays on. The post-season games remain though, during which the previous players still predominate in all positions. The newly chosen players are barred from the action because they came onto the roster too late. But those still there are confident that they can battle back and achieve all their goals before the season ends and they're traded away.

That's where we are now. Only it's in government.^iv The year it started was 2006. The stock market was more than 2,000 points higher than it had been in on Election Day of 2004 (12,105 on election day 2006 versus 10,054 in 2004. A Republican was President and the GOP controlled both houses of Congress. At that point, in the November elections, the electorate decided on a Democratic House of Representatives (233 – 200) and a Senate, which, while equally split (49 – 49), was effectively Democratic controlled because two independents voted with them. The market continued upward and reached a high in early October of 2007, but then began to fall. It had gone down to 9,324 on Election Day of 2008 when the voters gave the Democrats large majorities in both the House (257 – 178) and Senate (57 – 41, with two independents who voted with the Democrats) and selected a Democratic President. And they had the Vice President (the President of the Senate) on their side in situations that required it.

The next two years, 2009 and 2010, with a great deal of stimulus, have brought the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to about 11,000 – higher than the previous low, but lower than when the Democrats took over Congress. The reasons were obvious to true believers. The greedy Republicans were answerable for the losses (their policies, a few years earlier, were the cause of all that ailed us) ; the gains were generously bestowed by the Democrats.

There are, of course, other measures of our economic situation. Unemployment on election day in 2006 was about 4.3%. With a Democratic Congress it had reached about 6.5% by election day 2008 and the most recently available figure at the time of the election – for October, 2010 – was 9.6%,^v having come down from 10.6% which it reached in January. It will be interesting to see what it is next January when the “post-season,” the lame-duck Congress, is over and a final attempt has been made by the party currently in power to right the wrongs of our situation. They claim that they'll pass all the legislation that they put off until after election day. It's not clear that they'll be able to deliver on their promises.

Are the Democrats to blame? Certainly not. But neither are the Republicans. It's too easy to put this all into a political context and start pointing fingers. Nice guys may not finish last, but this isn't a baseball game. We have to understand that the economy is a complex issue and to look for “good guys” making hits and “bad guys” making errors is to trivialize it – to use it as a vote-getting device rather than a springboard for national unity and action.^vi

We'll recover. We've been through cycles like this before and whatever happens will not be based on the greater wisdom of one set of politicians over another. Perhaps some day we'll learn to treat the economy with greater respect than a national sport. But I doubt it. We're too enamored of looking for someone to blame. So if our team isn't winning of course we won't blame them, but we can always kill the umpire. No. Wait. That's us.

Next episode: “Blow Up” – The inflation explosion.

i      Not the Mets.

ii     Now you know why.

iii   The Mets don't need a change of personnel to collapse.

iv   I don't suggest this is a perfect analogy. There's no such thing and this one is far from perfect. But perhaps it will provide the opportunity to consider the rationality of our actions by comparing this national exercise with the national pastime.

v   In November it reached 9.8% but this was after the election.

vi  Actually sports events have better headlines, so the media prefer a competition to an accomplishment.