Too Many Distractions and So Little Focus on the Real Issue

by Errington C. Thompson, MD

Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a concerted effort to distract us from the real problem we face, the big issue, the elephant in the living room. The more people try to deal with that problem, the more other “stories” there are to take our minds off it.

Today’s distraction, one of many, is that Michael Jackson’s “doctor” has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Jackson died two years ago; his personal physician was responsible, at least in part, we’ve known it all along. Let’s move on.

The other major distraction of the week is Herman Cain, accused of sexual harassment of several women.

First, let’s not confuse Herman Cain with a real presidential
candidate. It doesn’t matter what his standings are in the polls;
Americans are notoriously bad about predicting how they will vote months
before election day.

In early November four years ago in Iowa, Mitt Romney was leading in
the polls, followed by Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and
actor-turned-politician-turned-actor (or was it the other way around?)
Fred Thompson. The eventual Republican nominee, John McCain, was a
distant fifth in the polling. Herman Cain’s ranking this month is
meaningless.

Second, if you go on national TV and answer a question about foreign
policy by making fun of the name of Uzbekistan, as if that nation and
its people don’t matter, you’re not a serious candidate. And if, day
after day, there’s a new revelation coming from yet another woman saying
she was sexually harassed, groped, or whatever, and you respond that
“someone has it in for you” or “someone’s trying to get you”… well, you
cannot be a serious candidate. It doesn’t matter how well you can sing;
it doesn’t matter how much press coverage you garner; it doesn’t matter
how much Tea Party types claim to love you: you are not a serious
candidate.

The third distracting nonstory is like a 1950s adventure title: “The
Super-committee and the Deficit.” Several months ago, Congress abdicated
its responsibility to fix America’s finances. Some in Congress wanted
to focus on the debt, while others wanted to focus on job creation.
Congress was stalemated. There was no progress, just an endless impasse.
Therefore, Congress came up with the incredibly boneheaded idea of
developing a “super-committee.”

This committee is made up of an equal number of Republicans and
Democrats. It is supposed to come up with some way out of this impasse,
or automatic triggers will cause drastic cuts across the board. The
super-committee is charged with reducing Federal deficits by $1.5
trillion over ten years, a goal the members could easily reach using a
combination of tax increases, tax reforms, closing tax loopholes, cuts
to military spending, or even cuts to the growth of entitlement
programs—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Is it any surprise that…the super-committee is super-deadlocked? The
Democrats have even suggested cuts to the sacred trio of entitlements,
but the Republicans won’t budge on taxes.

This whole process is inane. For one thing, we do not have a deficit
problem in this country, at least not a financial deficit. That deficit
is not going to kill us, at least not in the short run—the deficit that
is killing us is the JOBS deficit.

Sure, we do need to bring down our deficits and control our spending.
But more than 14 million Americans are out of work. 14,000,000. FOURTEEN
MILLION! Last month, the American labor market added 80,000 new jobs.
We would need 15 times as many—1,200,000 a month—every month for a year,
just to catch up with today’s job deficit, just to put today’s jobless
back to work. That doesn’t count all the people who will enter the job
market after finishing high school and college in the coming year, and
those who lose jobs they have now.

This is a crisis. In trauma (I’m a trauma surgeon), when there’s a
crisis, we call a “trauma stat”: all hands on deck. All resources are
brought to the forefront to take care of this one problem, this one
crisis. Well, what our nation needs is a “jobs stat.”

Some in Washington continue to act as if it’s simply business as usual.
They go about their merry way, they bring up the same old clichés, they
argue about things that simply don’t matter at a time of crisis. The
U.S. economy is going up in flames: it’s meaningless to argue over a
balanced budget while the house is burning down, and it’s insane to
argue about lower tax rates for people whose incomes have soared despite
the deep, long, jobless recession.

We need jobs. If we increase our deficit while putting millions of
Americans back to work, who cares? It will be easy to fix the deficit
once we fix the economy—when people are back at work, they pay taxes,
and those revenues will do more than all the super-comittee’s “fixes” to
balance the budget.

We need jobs. We can wait no longer while Washington dithers. Now is
the time for action. Now is the time to join together to tell Washington
that we need jobs—that we need jobs now.

We need jobs. It is time to write our congressman and senators—our
representatives in Washington—or email them if you prefer. Your letter
should be simple and to the point, saying just this: “Dear
Representative/Senator _______, I am an American citizen. I am a patriot
who loves my country, and I want to work. I want a job, but there are
no jobs. We need jobs now. Sincerely, John/Jane Q Public.”

If they don’t respond, the next step is for millions of Americans to Occupy Washington.