This Politico article on the sad plight of Big Business in the coming year almost reads like sarcasm.
Corporate bosses from across the spectrum are pressing Congress and the White House for action on a host of problems, ranging from soaring gasoline prices to health care reform.
But with Democrats poised to gain greater majorities in the House and Senate and possibly recapture the White House, the solutions unveiled next year may not be the market-based antidotes envisioned in boardrooms.
Yeah, they will have to get used to not getting the “market-based” solution of “shutting up, not asking questions, and handing us big piles of money every couple years,” of which the Republicans were so fond. I mean where exactly did Adam Smith talk about anything like the K Street Project? The idea that anyone still has the balls to throw around terms like “market-based” after one of the most crony-ridden, pro-corporate, anti-competitive Presidential Administrations in modern American history is laughable.
“The unions’ agenda really turns the clock back 40 or 50 years,” said R. Bruce Josten of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “And if you were one of the companies that played in those political spaces on tort reform, you’ve got to be concerned as hell.”
“Play in the political spaces on tort reform” has got to be one of the most chilling euphemisms I’ve heard since “stress positions.” In plain English that means “one of those companies whose business model depended on being able to hurt lots of people — in ways that are already illegal — without having to pay for it.” Those mean old Democrats might actually make you pay more!
My big problem with articles like these isn’t the fact that they’re written with such a corporate slant. It’s that they fail to put all of these position in context. The whole tone of the article seems to be “Holy Shit, the Democrats are coming to whisk us back to 1940!” Very little mention of the pressure that our “mental recession” is putting on government budgets, and the fairly high likelihood that ANY future President will have to raise the tax rate even to sustain our existing crappy safety net (and I really doubt you could cut it much more without incurring major political fallout — look what’s happened with SCHIP and Medicare reimbursements). A single throwaway line on the healthcare and housing crises, nothing on the banking crisis, nothing on food inflation (let them eat cake!), all of which will virtually demand new spending. Certainly no analysis of how Bush’s crony capitalism, inept financial regulation, and loose access to credit likely provoked this recession. I think it’s fair to expect any article on economic regulation to include at least some of that context.