Only disaster can save us !

President Biden’s melodramatic speech in Philadelphia was an amped-up reprise of Hillary Clinton’s in Reno back in 2016: a combination of bogeyman politics with a promise to do something for the people.

It’s hard to tear our gaze away from the dirty tricks both sides are playing now, but really it’s the plans for the country’s reconstruction we should be considering. The question is, do they go far enough, or are they merely intended to get the Democratic Party safely through this November’s mid-term elections?

For example, there’s the Student Loan Relief scheme announced on 24 August. The $10k-$20k for qualifying applicants will be some help, yet not really solve the problem of the big debts and high interest charges. At an estimated cost to the taxpayers of half a trillion dollars (or even double that) it’s a very expensive token gesture. (It may also be technically illegal, if Biden has really declared the end of the pandemic.)

A more significant move would be to rescind the 2005 law – which Biden himself supported – that made it impossible for students to cancel their debt by declaring bankruptcy; that would make banks much more careful in assessing whether the chosen academic course was likely to boost the graduate’s earnings sufficiently to justify the lender’s risk.

Then there’s the ‘we beat Big Pharma!’ crowing over reducing the cost of prescription drugs, which on closer inspection won’t take effect before 2025, applies to a limited number of medications and won’t seriously impact that industry’s profits.

The recently released Biden-⁠Harris Economic Blueprint has much more in it and it remains to be seen how much of that is also subject to the death of a thousand provisos. The New York Post called it ‘58 pages of malarkey’ and ‘ financially illiterate’ and Fortune said it was ‘a love letter to the unions’; well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

At Philadelphia Biden boasted ‘the largest economic recovery package since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’, yet the comparison is more like a contrast. One doesn’t feel there’s a real challenge to what Bernie Sanders has termed America’s oligarchs. Maybe it’s because the Democrats just don’t sense they are strong enough.

In 1933 the nation was in a five-star disaster; goodness knows how many Americans died of starvation, disease exacerbated by malnutrition, deaths of despair. Some who didn’t know what things were really like in Russia were beginning to think Communism looked a better option. In came FDR and warned in his inaugural address that if necessary he would use ‘broad Executive power’ to deal with the emergency. Among many other measures, he swiftly allowed some banks to fail and regulated others, in particular passing the ‘Glass-Steagall’ Act to keep depositors’ money separate from speculative investment banking.

In 1999, President Clinton – a Democrat – declared that the Act was ‘no longer appropriate’ and signed off its repeal, a step that some see as a major contributory factor in the Global Financial Crisis a few years afterward.

When, a decade later, another Democrat – President Obama – came to power, many people, myself included, had great hope that he would use the crisis and the deep support of the people to cleanse the Augean stables of high finance; but no.

I still can’t work out whether these two suffered a failure of nerve or were simply colluding with enormously powerful forces, ones that have kept down the workers and sucked up the economic growth of decades for themselves, and are even now buying up farmland and residential property wholesale so that they will control the nation’s food and turn its people into perma-renters.

The young are burdened with inescapable college debts, cannot afford to buy a house and have children, cannot support a family on one income… the cheerful, stand-on-your-own-two-feet Fred and Wilma Flintstone lifestyle is receding beyond their grasp. The growing demographic imbalance may make mass worker-age immigration necessary even as it magnifies the scale of America’s systemic difficulties.

The dysfunctional economy is in some ways as bad as back in 1933, but disguised by ‘magic money’ and terrifying levels of debt, otherwise surely something really big would have to be done now.

‘Getting’ Trump and the MAGA louts will only tackle the symptoms. The longer effective treatment is deferred, the greater will be the crisis. Better, perhaps, to desist from party politicking and admit that major catastrophe is upon us.