Baa-Baa Black Sheep

Mum used to repeat a saying whenever she was about to buy something more expensive than she had planned to—like a pair of glamour shoes that she couldn’t resist. “Oh well,” she’d sigh. “I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”

I thought about her the other day when I received an e-mail apparently from someone who does not support Barrack Obama. Normally I read the first sentence of these political missiles, whether Republican or Democrat, and send them to the trash bin. This one, however, managed to get my attention. It stated outright that Obama was looking at a tax on property owners whose houses were larger than 2400 square feet. I have to admit that my common sense went out of the window for a few moments. I froze. My house is 2700 square feet and I already pay multiple thousand dollars in property tax. Could this be true and I hadn’t heard? There was even a list of articles from reputable magazines where this was apparently reported.

It took me several moments to regain my bearings. Huh? Property taxes are local and state. How could the federal government possibly impose this tax? Didn’t make sense. Nor did the other alarmist claims in the e-mail. I went down and actually read the articles listed at the bottom of the e-mail and found that not only was Obama NOT proposing that kind of tax, but the articles cited actually said the exact opposite of what the e-mail was claiming. Whoever wrote the e-mail was hoping/expecting that the recipient (me) would surrender to panic and not read the so-called supporting material.

The e-mail, in other words, was a lie and a big one. That’s what made me think of Mum and her sheep. It seems that if you are going to lie these days, you might as well make it a whopper. This experience probably had the complete opposite effect of what the sender intended. I checked out the claims and now am highly suspicious of what the Republicans have to say—not that I can hold John McCain personally responsible for this e-mail, but I’m human—I have to wonder if this is typical of the ethics and honesty of his supporters.

I can report now that my new skepticism appears somewhat justified. I find myself wondering how the Republicans can be fielding a platform of change when they are the ones who have been in power for the past eight years. What, in other words, are they changing from? Is it, we’ll do the same thing only this time we’ll do it better? We are now watching the meltdown in the financial markets resulting, I believe, from lifting of regulations and the belief that if the economy is driven solely by the profit motive then competition will provide whatever regulation is necessary rather than government doing it. I happen to believe that some regulation IS necessary because the world cannot long endure on the basis of a greed that encourages the strong to devour the not quite so strong (those who can only afford a million dollar house rather than a ten million) let alone the weak who tend to live in flood plains.

The current news of the collapse of the investment banks makes my point. Even I can see that corporations and investment banks are not a substitute for government even if their lobbyists would like to believe so. Corporations exist for one purpose: to make money. They do not have to worry about unemployment rates in the US—they are multinational and are free to move jobs to wherever the work can be done more cheaply. There’s nothing wrong with this self-interest. This is what corporations do. But it is not what governments are meant to do. They are meant to balance all the competing interests in the national interest. When was it decided that enriching corporations was to be the national economic policy? How naive can one get? We learned from the Reagan administration that trickle-downs don’t trickle down. They trickle out to investors and corporate leadership. We’re all greedy in some way—but corporations are greedy with about five zeroes after my net worth and what they do matters. They represent too much of our net worth as a nation to be allowed to flounder around just pursuing the buck and rewarding their executives obscenely on the basis of increased earnings regardless of how they are achieved.

If I sound my usual churlish self about this, well I don't apologize. I don't have investments and pots of money tied up in this market. But I am still concerned about my house value, how far my pension will stretch, whether my commercial bank made stupid investments, and whether I will be able to afford whatever medical nonsense my body inflicts on me. I don't believe John McCain and his trophy vice president (sorry) feel the angst of people like me who are likely to feel the fall out from the Republican's great economic experiment in believing that what is good for corporations is good for America. In the end, though, politicians can make whatever claims they want--it's up to us to think for ourselves and sort the lambs from the sheep.

Baa