Wheel of Fortune

Political Debates come in all sorts of flavors. It’s not unusual for the most vociferous politician to mention at the end of a tirade that “we need a bipartisanship approach to solve our problems”. The United States has fallen on hard times and the answers lie in the dismantlement of our mistakes and crafting bipartisan solutions to address the problems. The Wheel of Fortune is a tool that shows the dynamics of the political spectrum and demonstrates that extreme views on both sides of issues can get out of hand and damage the fabric of the United States. Today’s problems are a result of political and economic ideas taken to the point of almost no return and near national failure. The goal of examining the Wheel of Fortune is to take a fresh look at the problems and craft together a methodology to guide us out of the looming depression.

The mismanagement and finger pointing continues with unmentioned hidden agendas really at the heart of the impasse. The Democratic Party has frittered away their legislative advantage and produced no budget; an unworkable and massively complex healthcare bill unwanted by the American public; and a financial bill leaving intact the basic causes of the recession.

The elite leftist in command have set the stage for a voters charge to the far right. What’s happened to classical liberalism? I can’t find many true liberals in my party. They have tended to the far left. At this time of opportunity we have the wrong individuals representing our party in the Congress and the seniority system has placed those that should be inmates in charge of the asylum on Capitol Hill.

As an engineer and scientist I believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a chart is worth 10,000 words. So I have formulated the Wheel of Fortune to illustrate the beneficial concept of bipartisanship, and conversely point out the evils and ultimately the destructive results of extremism.

The Wheel of Fortune chart demonstrates the full range of political choice. The not so hidden message within the chart is that there is a political continuum. All extremes of political thought are for all intents and purposes the same, whether the path is from the right or the left. Historically, the results of extreme politics have the same consequences, that of national failure. Conversely national prosperity is a result of cooperative efforts by all parties.

The upper right side of the chart shows conservatism eventually blending clockwise with more extremes of right political and economic activity. Capitalism is represented as a coequal quality with the right, just like Socialism is a coequal quality of the left. The extreme efforts along right side of the wheel results in totalitarianism, conversely, the extreme efforts of the left lead to ultimately to the same fate, that of national failure.

Today our country has almost exhausted both its goodwill and ability to support our existing debt. The Congressional Budget Office has simply stated that “our growing budget deficits will cause debt to rise to unsupportable levels”. The United States ever growing deficit and debt coupled with the mounting trade imbalance is a signal that ought to slap us across the face. The answer is to continuously build value in our economy as a plan built into every legislative act, such as the balancing of spending with a reduction in expenditures.

The perfect storm is now building. The Keynesian (left side of the chart) and Friedman (right side of the chart) schools of economics are now operating together in an unsupportable manner. They both have been proven wrong when taken to their limits. The Keynesian school adherents succeeded in pushing our spending and debt to massive unsustainable numbers trying to kick-start a dead horse, while the Friedman school succeeded in reducing US industry through unfettered negative foreign trade and preventing employment growth by the shuttering of our remaining meager factories. This effort has reduced the United States to over-push the construction industry and retail trade to supply jobs.

This odd coupling of counterproductive social activity and exacerbated negative business practices are a perfect storm killing the progress of the United States and sending into a perpetual downward spiral. Ultimately the result will be our country taking its well earned place among the list of third world nations. Job prospects and the poor GDP performance show this to be the most intractable of all recessions during our lifetime. Without the reindustrialization of the United States we shall have a depression. Taxation, tax breaks or other incentives do not begin to cover the actual problems in the manufacturing sector; these efforts are necessary but insufficient to produce a true economic recovery.