I remember silver bullets from watching The Lone Ranger on television years ago. The Lone Ranger "decides to use only silver bullets—the precious and valuable metal serves to remind the masked man that life, too, is precious and valuable and, like his silver bullets, not to be wasted or thrown away."
President Obama in a recent speech said
There’s no silver bullet. There’s no quick fix to these problems.
I agree there are no silver bullets. That said, by not applying the lessons of the Great Depression and not kicking ass the president is throwing lives into the trash bin of unemployment.
Let's be clear, the economy never recovered. Housing is again in decline. Unemployment is increasing, not decreasing. The decline was slowed, but never reversed. And yes the president did promise a silver bullet. The bullet was called change. Significant change has not happened.
No one expects the structural problems of the economy to be cured overnight. Unemployment is not due to a structural problem. Unemployment is due to a lack of demand, and nothing the president has proposed will create the demand necessary to reduce unemployment. Tax breaks will not create demand. Fifty billion will not create demand. To get an idea of how small fifty billion dollars think in terms of the education budget for one county, Montgomery County Maryland. The education budget alone is over 2 billion dollars. Fifty billion dollars will not pay for the education of students in less than 25 counties the size of Montgomery County. That is to restore infra structure in 50 states. You gotta be kidding.
To put this in yet another perspective, World War II was needed to lift the US out of the Great Depression. In today's dollars the US spent 5 trillion dollars a year on World War II. Not all the money went to producing jobs, but people worry about spending five trillion dollars over the next six years to recover. A mere 800 billion dollars with much going to tax breaks does not cut the mustard. Tax breaks do not create demand. Tax breaks don't cause companies to hire. Hiring just does not work that way.
Now to get back to silver bullets. No one expects the unemployment problem to be solved tomorrow. However, to reduce unemployment to below 7% in a year, does not sound unreasonable. Instead unemployment has risen to 9.5%, not a way to win an election. This looks like a bullet to the heart of the American worker, not a silver bullet to kill unemployment.
Now no one thinks that government spending is the silver bullet to bring back a middle class with better incomes in the future. We know we need to improve education from the time of conception to the time of death. Race to Top like No Child Left Behind just ain't going to do that. We also know that we need cheap energy that can be produced in the US. This takes not tax breaks, but a carbon tax, as well as investment into research and development. This just ain't happening. Then we also know that we need better trade agreements so that other countries pay better wages to workers and do not use currency manipulation to keep prices artificially low.
There is a whole lot of work that needs to be done. Yes, there are no silver bullets, but we can have a president kicking ass to create the kind of change needed to put the country on a better course than we are now traveling. The problem is republicans had us on a course traveling towards rocks. Yes the course has been altered and the ship slowed down. But not by enough. We need to turn the ship around not move by a few degrees.
Unfortunately if republicans take more power the course will shift and the speed will change so we hit the rocks sooner.
So when will we learn? I have no idea.