236: My Two Cents
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If you think your life is confusing, consider for a moment what happened to Congressman Ernest Istok last year. He's a Republican from Oklahoma. He believes that the federal budget needs to be balanced, believes it so fiercely that last year he formally proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would require a balanced federal budget. And then, just a few weeks later, he voted, along with the majority of the House of Representatives, for a federal budget that would create the largest deficit in American history. They were $147 billion. Even without the money that we were spending on the Warren Iraq, it would have been the largest in history. I talked to him about it at the time. Certainly a majority of the American people, and a majority of the people in Congress on principle, say that they support a balanced budget amendment. That's great. But it's, you know, it's just like the Scarlett O'Hara syndrome. I'll worry about that tomorrow. Well, tomorrow never comes. Right. And so many other people in Congress believe that we should not have a deficit. Why not just vote against this budget with this deficit? Yeah. I voted for the budget, not because I support the level of spending in the budget, but because I understand in the process that we go through in Washington, D.C., if we did not adopt this budget resolution, we would end up with higher spending levels. Those are the political dynamics that are afoot. If this doesn't really seem like an answer to the question, it is all that he would say. We went around and around on it, me asking, why not just vote for less money, him saying this was the lowest amount Congress could agree on. For our program this week, all of us who work on the radio show wanted to do a program that would give us a sense of what the hell is going on in the economy, because everything that we read about it or hear about it seems so contradictory. You've got deficit hawks like Congressman Instok supporting a tax cut from President Bush that could boost the deficit by a third. You've got the economy growing steadily for over two years now. In fact, last summer, it was growing really fast, 8.2% growth, which should have created jobs, but somehow it didn't, and nobody exactly understands why. Then, two months ago, the economy finally started creating jobs, and again, nobody really understands why it happened then. And then there's this. At the same time the job picture has been so bleak over the last few years, because of low interest rates and cheap mortgages, lots of middle-class people had money in their pockets. And so, even during the recession, people bought homes and cars and record numbers, which is not what a recession used to mean. Welcome to WB EZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International on Our Glass, today on our radio program, a show that we call My Two Sense, which we try to get a grip on what is happening in this weird, contradictory economy, with stories from three different people in three different places in the economy. At one of our show, Dave Knows, the story of a man who might have a better grip on what
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