McCain advisor to Americans: stop whining just because you lost your house and shit

Great Debates
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[QUOTE=John Mace]
I’m not in an undecided status. And we’re not talking about something McCain said, we’re talking about something Gramm said. I’ve followed Gramm for a long time, and I’m pretty familiar with his views.

From what I’ve heard Obama talk about with “fair trade”, much of it is pretty conventional and uncontroversial-- ie, enforcing existing agreements. I mean, who wouldn’t be for that? The part I have difficulty understanding, in terms of the “free” part of “fair trade”, is the requirement for labor and environmental laws. Those look protectionist to me-- things that he says are necessary to protect US jobs. But maybe I’m missing the classical liberal angle there.

Oh, one other thing. Like 4 years ago when it wasn’t sufficient to be for Kerry (you had to also hate Bush), it appears that it’s not sufficient to be for Obama-- you have to hate McCain as well. I don’t hate McCain. That’s probably what you’re seeing.
[/QUOTE]

Gramm is a disaster. He pushed for loosen regulation over energy companies . His wife was working for The Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She was pushing to lighten oversight on energy commodity training. He passed legislation for it. She quit working for the public and got a job on the Enron Board of Directors. We all know what Enron and other did when we quit watching.
Then he pushed through legislation to gut Glass-Steagall. Glass was passed during the depression to prevent financial companies from wild investing. It set up a wall between banking and financial institution oversight. He shoved the bill through at the last minute with a bunch of other bills to cover it up. Immediately huge financiall mergers occurred. Then their speculation made billions of dollars for the chosen few. Then we get the financial mortgage disasters that he greased the skids for. Today Indymac bank was taken over by the bank regulators. Glass made financial institutions keep a larger amount of money on hand to help solvency. Not working so well is it?
Now of course Gramm is a lobbyist for UBS Bank. Must be a coincidence.

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I think one of the problems Phill Gramm has in understanding things at gut level is that food and gas/fuel, which are two things that have sky-rocketed recently, don’t take a big bite out of wealthy people’s budget. Actually, nothing in the basic costs of living takes a big bite out of wealthy people’s budget. They’ve forgotten (if they ever knew) what it’s really like to actually need a job to live.

I agree that the economy always has a psychological component, but there are elements of the current economy that are not in the least psychological. The cost of petroleum products is not a figment of our imagination or our psychology. Of course, it’s also not very likely to be affected by the president, but it doesn’t change its importance. Ditto the cost of food. The loss of jobs due to outsourcing or automation is a very real problem, one that must be solved in one of two ways: people must accept significantly lower salaries, or people must find things to work at that cannot for whatever reason be done by foreign workers or machines, due either to the nature of the work or the location of the work. This is a long range problem, and it can be helped by the government, although Liberal will probably say that the government is not the proper organization to do it (I think there is a role for both government and the private sector here, in re-training, re-locating, providing loans and grants and venture capital for new ideas, and also for people to do manual labor that needs doing but no one is willing to pay for, and don’t try to tell me there isn’t any). But people are going to have to suck it up and learn to accept lower salaries, and not only in the lower end jobs. Sooner or later, corporate America will wise up and realize that the star system of CEO hiring is pretty stupid, and start hiring comparative unknowns who may be as good or better than the “stars” and will do the job for a tiny fraction of the price. They’ll also realize that they can get middle managers and professionals in China and India who will do the same work, quite possibly better than their American counterparts, for half the money or less than the comparable Americans.

And we really can’t accept all that much lower salaries with prices where they are. They’re going to have to come down. But not as much as salaries. Americans are going to have to accept that they just can’t have as much stuff as they do right now. We’re going to need to establish mass transit that actually works. We’re going to have to settle for 1 television in a household. Poor people are going to have to learn how to be poor, and middle class people are going to learn how not to live as if they were wealthy. My parents lived through the depression; they know very well how to be poor. I’m semi-knowledgable. But the young people raising families now don’t have a clue. I live in quite a poor neighborhood. The houses may be falling down, they’re eating box mac and cheese, they have no health care insurance and have teeth pulled rather than root canals, but by god, the kids have an X-Box and the name brand athletic shoes.

I agree with Obama that we should make trading partners live up to environmental and labor standards in order to get favored trading status. But that’s ignoring the elephant in the parlor, which is that our people have much higher salaries than those in the developing world, and our education is going down the tubes for everyone but the middle to upper middle class on up. And even they are preferring to go into the fuzzy stuff like humanities rather than the hard sciences.

Unfortunately, no politician can say this stuff out loud and expect to be elected, any more than s/he can say “Look, if you want to continue having safe dams and highways, you’re going to have to pay more taxes.” As a nation we are very spoiled.

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That was a very good post, Oy!. I’m glad you participate in my threads because it increases the light to noise ratio. This line…

Poor people are going to have to learn how to be poor, and middle class people are going to learn how not to live as if they were wealthy…reminds me of a line from my short story, Sarah’s Gold:

“You must realize if you are rich, that you are not entitled to the labor of the poor; you must pay for it. And if you are poor, you must realize that you are not entitled to wealth of the rich; you must work for it.”

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Yes, Oy, that sums up many of my thoughts. A few comments to add.
Phil Gramm has a bent for this sort of tighten up viewpoint which might explain his jumping ship in the early '80s. At face value the OP quote has the sting of truth when comparing Americans to other countries since IMO we’re gluttonous and the fat has been spread widely. The rising tide floated all the boats.
But comparing an average American’s life to that of his WWII coeval is perhaps justification for whining. The parents of Boomers could get a job with minimal education, often less than high school, yet with nose to the grindstone work ethic, rise to almost any level. Even the plodders retired from a lifetime job with a pension and fairly secure social safety net.
I’ve heard a life’s work now means three careers, all involving expensive education, an unknown number of employers and certainly no pension. Knowing a number of Master’s level tech graduates looking for a job after being terminated due to offshoring seems to confirm that.

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Liberal, I thank you very much, both for your accolade and for your story. Unfortunately, while I don’t believe in the kind of wealth redistribution that the out-and-out communists claimed to believe in, my ideas do come far closer to socialism than yours do. I don’t think this is a matter of fundamental incompatibility. I think it’s a matter of disagreement as to who best serves certain needs that I think we both agree need serving: private agencies or government agencies. You seem to be convinced that private agencies will do it better, faster and cheaper. I’ve never understood how adding a for-profit layer is going to make it cheaper without either gouging the employees or the customers or both, and I don’t see anything in the corporate world that is likely to make it any more efficient than government. Both government and corporation are remote entities whose over-all well-being has little to do with the performance of the people who actually do the work, and to whose interest the employees feel very personal little loyalty.

Sorry, I don’t want to derail this thread entirely. But I’m a little embarassed to get this from you when I know that my beliefs in this area so directly contradict your own, so I wanted to warn you so that I didn’t disappoint you down the road.

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Don’t worry, Oy. I have no delusions that we’re philosophical soulmates or anything. I like how you put forward your views even though I don’t hold them myself. It’s the Ratz’s of the world that I can’t stand. :wink:

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Well, I do try to avoid the slimy side. And I think you do too, although in the distant past, I think you had some brushes with it in your enthusiasm.

Wow, someone with a Big Name noticed my existence! Cool!

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The beauty of bad timing, Gramm made the remark just before McCain was giving a speech in Detroit. It would not have flown if he said it in that crowd.