Do Not Get Mad, Focus

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

Everywhere you look, the media is telling us how mad, angry, disaffected, and totally bummed out the American electorate is.

We are not happy with anything. We are like an infant with colic. Why? Why are we so ridiculously upset?

The terrible Fox News (a fable)

Fox News and the rest of the conservative media have been telling us for the last seven years that Barack Obama is a failure. He not only failed to move the country forward, he is actively working to drive the country into the abyss. He hates the military; his policies have hampered and crippled big business. Wall Street is a shadow of its former self because of the policies of Barack Obama. ObamaCare has ruined healthcare and killed jobs.

Nothing is better, everything is worse. We’re in constant peril from subversion within (Obama hates America), and without (Mexican ISIL foreigners are invading us, like in the movie Red Dawn). Billionaire Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again,” which clearly implies that America is not great now.

The real news (from the reality-based world)

Hogwash! If we roll the clock back to 2008-2009, we see the American economy careening down the hillside as if in a Road Runner cartoon. Between September 2008 and February 2009, we lost 3,927 million jobs – an average of 650,000 jobs per month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average – “the stock market” – had fallen from 10,587 on George W. Bush’s inauguration day (1/20/01) to 7,949 on his last day in office (1/20/09), a loss of 25%. We were going over the cliff and were going to crash-land like Wiley Coyote on the desert floor. Splat!

The fact is, Barack Obama and the Democrats prevented certain disaster. The $800-billion-dollar stimulus package (American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009) and multiple other measures were instituted in spite of united Republican opposition; for the most part, every single one of his measures worked.

The economy has turned around. 5.6 million Americans have found work over the last two years. Unemployment, once well over 10%, is now 4.9% nationally (5.6% in Republican-led NC). Despite recessions in Europe and Asia, the United States has had 70 uninterrupted months of private-sector job growth. The stock market has gone from 7,949 on Obama’s inauguration day to 16,204 at press time – an increase of 104%!

This is great. This is nothing to be upset or pout about. If George W. Bush had accomplished this feat, or anything near it, we would never hear the end of how great he was. He would be the Second Coming … of Ronald Reagan.

Affordable Care (at last)

Also, in spite of all the bellyaching and whining, ObamaCare (the Affordable Care Act) has pretty much done what it was supposed to do. Remember, as ObamaCare was being crafted, Republicans and blue-dog Democrats worked hard behind the scenes to limit the scope and effectiveness of this legislation, to turn it into a small safety net for middle-class Americans who could not afford healthcare. This health-care legislation would also help some lower-class or poor Americans who had full time employment. Today, approximate 12 million Americans, most of them previously uninsured, have gotten insurance through ObamaCare.

One of the best things about ObamaCare is that it has eliminated crappy healthcare insurance plans that ripped off customers for decades before the ACA (remember those plans that, when needed, did not cover any hospital expenses, had low lifetime caps on coverage, refused to pay for certain treatments?) Nonpartisan economic think tanks have found no evidence that ObamaCare has killed jobs or has forced widespread cuts in worker hours which was widely forecast by conservatives. This is another win!

Real problems exist

Now, I am not saying that everything is wonderful and that we should all hold hands and sing kumbaya as we walk into the sunset. Instead, I think it is important for us to focus on real problems and work for real solutions.

Wage stagnation is a real problem. The average American is making the same or less than they were making five, 10, 15, even 30 years ago. The reason for this is multifactorial, and it’s not a new phenomenon under President Obama: real wages were virtually stagnant under Bush 40, Bush 41, and Ronald Reagan, and grew very little under Bill Clinton. Manufacturing jobs have packed up and gone to Mexico, Malaysia, and other Third World countries. The jobs that are left are in healthcare, which pays pretty well, and in the service sector, which pays fairly poorly.

We still need unions …

Another thing we have to take into account is the fact that unions help put more money into the pockets of the average American. Over the past 30 years, unions have been crushed by big business, Republican politicians, and the Supreme Court. So, if you want to be mad, this is something to be mad about. Americans are more productive than ever but are rewarded less and less for their productivity. The only people who are getting rewarded are those in the financial sector and the top 1%.

…and affordable education

College tuition is another reason for Americans to be frustrated and angry. There was a time, not too long ago, when the government subsidized a good portion of college tuition. In the 1960s, 1970s, and through the mid-1980s, state college was affordable to almost everybody. Then the government began to slash those generous subsidies, and administrative costs rose exponentially, on the theory that a university president’s salary should be competitive with a private-sector CEO’s. (Sports budgets also rose dramatically). As a result, college tuition began to skyrocket. Students had to take out more and more loans and acquire more and more debt.

Now, if you graduate from school owing $50,000 or $100,000, you will spend the next 15 or 20 years trying to pay it off. You cannot buy a house. You cannot afford a reliable car. You are simply drowning in debt. Yet without an education, it is hard to get out of poverty. Education is the key, and if we want to end poverty, if we really are a land of opportunity for everyone – as we used to be – then we have to tackle this education problem. The pitiful fact is that only a few politicians are seriously putting out plans to attack this huge American problem, and that’s worth being angry about.

Answers exist, too

When you are mad, really mad, your judgment is clouded. You make epically poor decisions, like voting for someone who has been known more for firing Americans than for hiring Americans, who has made billions for himself while declaring bankruptcy (four times) to avoid paying his own debts to others.

But once we settle down and take a deep breath, we find out that America is actually heading in the right direction. The economy is growing plenty of jobs. We just need to figure out how to ensure that those jobs pay more instead of putting all the gains, all the profits, in the hands of those already at the top. We need education and housing to be affordable. We need our society to be more racially just.

We can fix these problems. We need to learn – no, to remember, for we did it well for generations – how to compromise and work together. It is that simple.