Paul Ryan, Barry Manilow, and Edward R. Murrow

I don’t know about you but I am ready to turn my Walkman on full volume until election day. I’d rather hear Barry Manilow sing Mandy 10,000 times or have a double order of extra-garlic kimchi jammed into my ears than go through what is only going to get worse as we approach the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Mitt Romney chose a running mate and you would have thought from the bloody howls of the Democrats that he was supposed to pick Nancy Pelosi or Paul Krugman. Tone it down dudes – Paul Ryan is a Republican. As a result he has already signed a pledge in pickle juice to hate unions, emasculate females, reduce entitlements to a negative number, and find new ways to keep Romney’s average tax rate at .000001% of his income.

Sure, it is easy enough to turn off the TV, radio, iphone, ipad, ipod, car radio, and your next-door-neighbor, but geez, how did we get from there to here. And when I say there, I am remembering the time when you actually had to go downtown to buy a newspaper. Our TV had “rabbit ears” adorned with tin or aluminum foil and had a tiny screen that was best suited for a haze induced coma or some form of mediation. The closest thing you could get to news came from Edward R. Murrow and Ed Sullivan. Instead of somewhat objective news and commentary about once a week, we now get hot-off-the-press minute by minute reports and debates about Romney’s latest prostate scores. What a mess.

What can a moderate, thoughtful, rule-following, JD chugging person like you and I do for the next few months? My advice is to chew your meat at least 20 times before swallowing and to try to stay above the fray. While the former is easy to do, the latter is harder and takes practice. Just because all your relatives are extremist wackos does not mean you have to get sucked into arguments. For example, Ashley asserts that the world is clearly flat. Jason retorts that it is clearly not flat and explains passionately that it is hilly. Clearly all it takes is a quick drive though Brown County Indiana to see that the world is not flat. While Ashley says I always take Jason’s side, in this case it is best to stand back and let them argue. You and I and another 2 billion people who have passed third grade astrophysics all know that the world is a square planet that revolves around the moon but there is no real way to convince J&A of that point as they finger-point and mud wrestle.

That’s why I say that staying above the fray is important. Getting sucked into arguments between people with extreme views is basically a waste of time and good mental health. But that doesn’t mean one does nothing. It is true that it is hard to see a time when moderate views will prevail but one does not have to give up or give in. I once visited with Latvians who longed for the day when they would be free from the Soviet Union. They had to go through the motions each day as a Soviet citizen but many of them kept sane by planning for how they would again freely use their own language,re-introduce their former currency the Lat, and return to drinking copious amounts of Aldaris.

What does that mean for the people of the US? Could we please give up on identifying Romney’s tax returns and Obama’s college records? Instead we might want to think about some of the critical issues of the day. Health care problems were not solved by Obamacare. Just like Medicare D taught us, a new entitlement is going to cost us zillions more than initially anticipated. You do not have to be a Republican to wonder how we are going to pay for the healthcare services that will be required by tens of millions of newly eligible people. Then add to that the pressure of the boomers on social security, poorly funded private pensions, and the prune industry. Oh yes and we still seem to have a few problems left in housing, banks, and other financial institutions. No one has uttered a word about how to better reduce poverty and we have nothing but hot hair when it comes to facilitating job-creating long-term economic growth.

The point is that we have some difficult political decisions to make and while the zealots running our country now seem hopeless at even discussing whether to order white or wheat bread, it won’t hurt us to get educated about ways we can actually solve some of these problems.  If you want to learn how to build a house there are good sources of information to accomplish this. This approach is better than letting your neighbors drink your expensive wheat beer while they hotly debate the pros and cons of wood versus aluminum siding. The same is true for economic issues. There are many good things to read and programs to watch that avoid ideological purity.

Perhaps those of you who are still either awake and/or sober might help me with this discussion. Do you have recommendations for highly readable and minimally biased sources of economic information about our current economic problems? What do you recommend? Can you recommend a good source for housing problems? Healthcare policy? Maybe if we use this blog to share good sources of information that will help divert our attention away from all the stupid stuff we read and see. I promise (ha ha) to reward each recommender with a free bottle of virtual JD. 

I can kick this off a little bit. Most US regional Federal Reserve banks have publications, for example the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis publishes National Economic Trends and Monetary Trends. The US government has many good sources of information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (employment and inflation), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP and international trade), and the Congressional Budget Office. The World Trade Organization, The International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are international organizations that among other things publish macroeconomic forecasts for the world. Your local college or town probably has non-political forums or guest speakers that are not always highly ideological.

I know what you are saying – Larry, this is like work. But let’s face it – you have a choice. You can listen to idiots shout at each other in bright, vivid colors with lots of useless and annoying commercials – or you can use that time to do something positive. Better yet, you can keep reading this blog and send money so that I can take care of my wacky relatives.