The 2012 election is over. Barack Obama will be president for four more years. The Democratic party still controls the U.S. Senate and the Republican party still controls the House of Representatives. Not much will change, right? Not so fast.
The Obamacare law, the fate of which was explicitly placed into the hands of the electorate by Chief Justice Roberts, will be implemented and the federal government will now slowly or maybe not so slowly take over the entire health care industry here in the good old U S of A. The Dodd Frank Financial overhaul bill will be implemented completely with a host of already written and a further host of as yet unwritten regulations including provision for another bailout fund and procedures to provide explicit governmental access to records of your credit card use (only to be used for good purposes of course). The EPA will be free to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as well as oil and gas fracking procedures. Large automatic cuts will be made to the U.S. defense budget and many taxes (including income, Obamacare and estate and gift varieties) will be going up substantially. Also, President Obama will be able to use his newly acquired flexibility to reach constructive agreements with Mr. Putin and Russia to say nothing of China and its new leadership. The Catholic Church will probably either have to abandon its outreach to those in need or decide how it can provide direct funding of abortions and still be Catholic. Two conservative justices who were born in 1936 will hopefully find themselves to be healthy 80 years olds in Mr. Obama’s final year in office. Yes, I observe that many very important things can and will change over the next four years even though the political parties are in essentially the same political juxtaposition that they occupied coming out of the 2010 elections.
I’ll tell you this though. If in the coming biennium the economy gets better in terms of the real unemployment rate (currently well over 15%) and there is a significant increase in real after-tax per family income, I may have to start believing in Keynes’s idea that it is animal (or other) spirits which move our economy. I will also be forced to stop believing that capital formation matters to economic growth as well as in the baseless and outworn concept that a free people prefer economic freedom to the illusion of economic security. I may even come to believe in flying monkeys in the next few years since I will be in such a state of flux.
While I believe that miracles can and do happen, I doubt that I’ll have to make these changes to my worldview between now and 2014 or even 2016. I doubt that the world as we know it will change. Therefore I am deeply concerned about what will happen. Destruction of our economy and way of life is one thing but in particular I pray, as the father of two strong young men, that our program of military disinvestment which is likely to be taken by our adversaries as a show of weakness, does not lead us into an unwanted and unnecessary war sometime during the next four years. Yes, while I seriously doubt that we will enter into a whole new world on January 21, 2013, here’s hoping in Hope for a Change in human nature.
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