Debt Is Not the Enemy

I cannot stand scare pieces about the national debt. Instead of educating people they largely seek to scare them with big numbers and piss poor economic analysis. They're ignorance and fear masquerading as responsible, somber thought which need to be dismissed at every opportunity. 

Now that we have a new president, there's been a rash of these pieces lately. Business Insider has one, so does Forbes. For an illustrative example, we'll focus on ProPublica's story about the national debt under the Trump administration. The gist of the article is that Trump insisted he would pay down all of the then $19 trillion debt over the course of eight years. Instead, he increased it by almost $7.8 trillion, which will squeeze our budget for years to come.

All that sounds terrible, right? The idea that we're almost $28 trillion in debt sounds catastrophic when $2,000 in unpaid medical bills could prevent you from getting a place to live or buying a car. But do me a favor, go read that article, come back, then tell me who, exactly, lent us all that money.

Having trouble? It isn't your fault. The article is deliberately vague about just who the United States owes such a massive debt to. Which is odd, considering the supposed point of the piece is to give people a clearer understanding of why the debt increase is a problem. The closest the article gets is mentioning that interest payments on our debt remain low because the Federal Reserve is purposefully keeping rates low. 

Why is that detail important, though? Does the Federal Reserve lend the government money? 

Well, no. 

What happens is the Treasury department issues Treasury bonds, which the Federal Reserve buys, depositing the money into the Treasury's account, and that's the birds and the bees of how money gets made. So what does that have to do with debt? Well, the Fed is part of the government but technically not. It's sort of its own independent thing that exists outside any of the three branches of government but operates with their authorization. 

All this adds up to the fact that when the Fed buys those Treasury bonds, it goes down as an asset on their balance sheet but as a debt on the Treasury's. One man's asset is another's obligation, and all that. The interest rate thing comes into play because the Fed sets the baseline interest rate that everyone uses for mortgages or whatever other loan you can think of. It also means they set the rates for government bonds and debt services, including the bonds they buy from the federal government.

Looping back around, this means all the concern about the debt is getting the vapors over how much money the government owes to itself. When you see that, it suddenly gets much harder to understand what the big fucking deal is. 

 

To be fair, the article is thorough in that it remembers to throw in a bunch of scary sounding statistics about the deficit, too. 

 

We're given all kinds of terrible sounding news about how Trump's tax cuts blew a hole in federal revenue which that our ability to pay back our ever increasing debt is hamstrung by the fact that 62% of our budget is tied to mandatory payments for programs like Medicare and Social Security.

 

This is as good a time as any to point out that federal deficits aren't a bad thing. We think of them as inherently terrible because we associate them with our own finances and figure that if we spend more than we earned for too long, eventually the creditors will descend like locusts to strip us of everything we have. 

 

Except, the government isn't a family. Or a business. Insisting that we perceive the government solely through those lenses is a failure of imagination which hobbles our ambitions.

So if the deficit isn't a signal that we're hemorrhaging money, what does it tell us? In short, the deficit is the amount of money the government leaves in the economy. For example, if the government spends $200 for a service, then taxes back $80, it's leaving $120 in the economy to circulate. It goes down as a shortfall on the government's budget, but that $120 is real money burning a hole in someone's pocket. If the government had a balanced budget any economic activity generated from government spending would be negated. Everything it spent would just be taxed right back, canceling everything out. A surplus is even worse because that means the government is extracting value from the economy rather than adding to it.

That's not to say that all deficit's are desirable. Tax cuts for the rich, for example, are bad not because they lower government revenue, but because it transfers more money to the already absurdly wealthy. By leaving literally billions of dollars in the savings and investment accounts of wealthy individuals and companies, the government is essentially leaving that money to rot. There's no way any one person or entity can use the ridiculous surpluses of cash they have on hand which makes that money effectively worthless because it's not circulating or doing anything except generating interest payments.

For deficits to be effective, they have to come through the government spending money on projects that increase employment or give money to people directly, or both. 

Governments are vehicles for wealth redistribution and deficits are one of the mechanisms it uses to accomplish that. It's good policy to pry that money out of the hands of the ultra rich because all they really do with it is tax avoidance and money laundering. 

 

Letting 90% of the wealth concentrate at the very top .01 percentile does more harm, fiscally, socially, and economically, than a deficit ever will, but you wouldn't really know that. Questioning the validity of private wealth is out of bounds here, a sign of moral and mental corruption if not outright failure. 

We all know something's wrong with this country. At this point, that's undeniable. Doing something about it means spending the money to change everything from the ground up and haul our backward asses into the 21st century. But if we do that, then the power dynamics of the country change, which means the rich and powerful aren't as rich or powerful as they could be. So we're stuck with these idiotic, incoherent pieces that do everything they can to convince you that government debt and deficits will bring about inescapable ruin. 

And yet, the sky never falls. We should take the lesson in that and maybe, just maybe, finally learn we don't have to be afraid all the time.

It's Lies and Liars

The desire to put Trump behind us as January 20th draws closer is approaching something tangible. Already there are multiple retrospectives about his presidency, the impact he had on America, questioning whether we can knit back together what he so clumsily sundered. 

To be honest, I'm not really interested in many of them. After five years, I don' trust anyone who still thinks that Trump is something that happened to America and isn't a representation of what America is.

Let's focus on what many called the most insidious aspect of Trump's presidency- his lies. Surely, there are presidents or people who could match his pace. It seemed like everyday Trump would overwhelm the news cycle with at least six impossible lies before breakfast then move on to entirely new, even contradictory lies in the afternoon. The media never got a handle on this, always seemingly caught flat-footed by the pace and flexibility of Trump's mendacity. They never quite caught on to the fact that Trump wasn't lying to advance anything grander beside making himself look good. Reporter's, pundits, every one kept waiting for the usual script of "Politician lies to support their agenda, gets caught, acts contrite, then moves on to new tactic to accomplish the same," to assert itself, never quite wising up to the fact that the more his lies were exposed, the greater the existential panic in Trump's mind grew, necessitating an even grander lie to square that dissonant circle.

Trump's biggest weakness is that he doesn't know how to play off a loss. He has to be the winner, has to be the best, in everything all the time, no matter what. That pathetic desperation is what did him in more than anything else right from the start. Instead of playing off the fact that his inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's by saying that these were the true patriots, real Americans who fulfilled the promise of the founders, citizens who walked the narrow way of freedom, their smaller number a testament that they were swayed onto the easier, wider path of multiculturalism. Sure, fascist overtones are positively dripping from those sentiments, but that never stopped Trump before. Point is, he could've played up the near religious devotion into even higher pathological levels of worship past what they his supporters are already giving him and encased himself in near unassailable political positioning but, instead, chose to use an overhead shot of Obama's inauguration crowd that took five seconds of reverse image searching to confirm. Instead of spending his first week in office basking in the glow of his victory, he was embarrassing himself by pretending he didn't steal the accolades of the Black president who made him feel so inferior.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Trump's supporters is "How could they accept all the lies?" For one, they've been conditioned to by decades of Fox News and radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who built their entire industry over lying to their audience. For another, everything else about their lives has been built on lies in some way, what makes the presidency so different?

Consider, Purdue Pharma actively paid doctors and generated studies to lie about the addiction risks of Oxycontin. The company even plead guilty in court to this in 2019. But it's going bankrupt, none of the executives are going to jail and the Sackler family already set up another pharmaceutical company to keep peddling their wonder drug. Meanwhile, all the addicts they created are now dying in record numbers shooting up heroin. 

You can do this all day, too. Exxon-Mobile knew that the fossil fuel industry was creating a climate crisis then spent decades setting up a network of think tanks and public intellectuals whose sole purpose was to lie about and obscure this fact. Goldman Sachs would bundle mortgages they knew would fail into complex derivative packages, lie about their worth to investors, then turn around and bet against those very same bundles, waiting to cash in on their inevitable failure. Let's not forget the efforts from the tobacco industry do deny their products link to cancer and emphysema, or the lead industry lying about the toxicity of their product. Oh, right, the Radium Girls- women who got cancer after being told to put their radium-infused paint in their mouths to "point" their brushes- also deserve a special mention.

And oh do things just go on. The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor lied about their evidence to obtain a search warrant, police lie so much on the stand in trial that defense attorney's invented the term testilying as shorthand, not to mention the staggering amount of overturned death penalty cases were police and prosecutors lied through their teeth about the defendant's guilt.The military lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War, Nixon lied about sabotaging peace talks for the same war so he could become president, Regan lied about the Iran-Contra and the CIA's facilitating the crack epidemic. We lied about torturing people, WMD's, NSA surveillance, lead in water pipes, COINTELPRO, among so many others. 

Point is, we can't complain about Trump being a liar when our entire society is built around the manufacture and maintenance of lies.

Is it really surprising then, living a country where they're surrounded by lies on all sides, that Trump's faithful would throw themselves so fervently behind someone who lied about everything he spoke about? The only thing you could call out Trump for on his mendacious personality is how pathetic his lies are. But that he lies constantly, about everything, and kills people because of it? Nah man, that's American as baseball. 

"Can you believe that Trump is pardoning his cronies, his co-conspirators?!?!?!?" Yes, yes I can. If #MeToo, pedophile priests, or any of the rape scandals in the military have taught us anything, it's that powerful people stay that way because the connections and organizations they belong to actively cover up their crimes. Plus, this unprecedented abuse of power already happened when Elder Bush pardoned everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair so they wouldn't turn states evidence against him and send him to prison. 

If truth is supposed to mean anything, then we have to tell the truth to ourselves about who we are. We need to admit that the conditions we find ourselves in now are the same that we've been in. The only difference is that the reality has become too intolerable for the lies to paper over anymore. Which, is good, it's the kick we needed to confront the lies that we've become too complacent with. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that these are sudden developments that sprang out of extraordinary circumstances that just require us to right the ship and we'll be back on course. 

No. 

We are what we are because this is what we've chosen to become. We have to accept the responsibility of that. If we don't, we'll never come to terms with the fact that we allowed ourselves to get duped into believing that this brutal system was freedom. And if we never realize that if we have the power to accept it, then we won't see that we have the power to reject it, too.

Not All Things Are Tricks

M. Night Shyamalan is one of those film makers people love to ask "What the hell happened to you?" His breakout movies - The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs - cleaned up at the box office and were cultural events the same way Star Wars or Marvel movies are now. These days he's more punchline than anything else, a director who had one gimmick that increasingly sputtered out until his work crossed over into self-parody. You can find all manner of retrospectives of his work trying to autopsy his career and pin point the moment were things went bad. 

Interestingly, all these autopsies miss something. They all gloss over what turned out to be the canary in the coal mine, which, to be fair, I didn't even know existed until my girlfriend showed it to me. So, let's talk about The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan and how it spelled the doom of Night's career. 

The movie was a joint collaboration between Shyamalan and the Sci Fi network as a guerilla advertising campaign for Shyamalan's then upcoming release, The Village. It was played off as a behind the scenes documentary, but the entire thing was scripted, which generated some controversy at the time given the claims the film makes, but we'll get into that a little later. 

For now, I want to focus on what I think is the most unintentionally telling moments in the movie. In his first interview with the documentary crew, Shyamalan says that his goal is to make movies that connect in some unusual way; if they don't, then they're "just" a movie. The second comes when he's explaining his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock, specifically that he was a filmmaker who you could always see pulling the strings of his films stories. 

What these moments reveal is the pressure an artist places on themselves to live up to their own reputation. It may be hard to remember now, but the twists of Shyamalan's movies were talked about and dissected all the time. You couldn't talk about his films without talking about the secret, the inevitable reversal of what we thought we knew to be the story. People would look endlessly for clues or inconsistencies in his movies to see if the movie still held together once we all knew the "real" story it was telling. 

In that context, I can't fault Shyamalan for putting the twist at the center of his creative process. Everyone else was.

It's unfortunate how consumed Shyamalan became by the most inconsequential elements of his stories. It lead to situations so absurd, so nonsensical, that knowing them felt like a betrayal of the emotional investment people had leading up to the reveal. An article from the British Film Institute argued that Shyamalan's career tanked because his movies demand a childlike sense of wonder and attention in their quest to inspire deep contemplation in an era of cynicism and short attention spans. To that I would counter that when presented with things like the trees don't like us so they're making us kill ourselves or a group of people hate the modern world so much they decide to go LARPing in the woods, scorn is the only appropriate response. 

The real winner though is this documentary. It claims, with an honest-to-god straight face, that Shyamalan drowned in a lake near his childhood home. And died. For thirty-five minutes. Until he was resurrected by a spirit who gave him a preternatural ability to tell stories.

How anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me. It's too outrageous to accept without question, there's no way the lie will survive even the slightest amount of examination, and there's no way people aren't going to feel betrayed and furious once the lie was exposed. Which is exactly what happened. 

Here again though, we see the pattern that emerged in Shyamalan's films- a baffling decision that couldn't survive any amount of scrutiny with no way to handle the fallout once it fell apart. 

The Village is a perfect example of this. Shyamalan really wants you to delve into the decision making of the town elders in creating the eponymous village. He wants you to feel the grief, the desperation that would allow them to agree to such a ridiculous idea. And, truth be told, there's a really good story in that. The problem comes with the fact that this little pocket of isolation can't exist without taking advantage of the world`it seeks to spurn. 

In order to keep prying eyes away from the town, the land it was built on was bought by one of the founding members and turned into a wildlife reserve. From there, the whole thing was declared a no-fly-zone so no one would accidentally buzz over their heads, ruining the deception. All those things can only happen because of laws and regulations that have come into existence over the last century or so. At the heart of this story is a tension that cannot be resolved. This community of grief-stricken, desperate people wants to live apart, isolated from the evils of the modern world but can only have the isolation they seek because of protections the modern world grants them. 

 

It's an unsustainable situation, waiting for the moment when their implicit relationship with the outside world is forced to be explicit by events they cannot control. Again, this is a fantastic premise with all the examination of guilt and grief that are central themes of Shyamalan's early work.

Except, none of that examination happens. The crime the elders sought to escape finds them when one of their children stabs another out of jealousy, their explicit reliance on the modern world comes out when they need medicine to save said stab victims' life.  

And then, everything works out. 

The medicine is retrieved without complication, the boy lives, and the perpetrator dies wearing one of the monster costumes which makes the lie all the more plausible. We're dropped into an untenable situation on the edge of disaster and leave it much the way we found it. 

How exhilarating.

To see how disappointing this storytelling is, let's work back to the Hitchcock quote from earlier. Yes, it's true that to say that Hitchcock was a filmmaker dedicated to pulling the strings on his stories and play his audience like puppets. But for what purpose? Take Vertigo, for example. We experience the movie squarely in James Stewart's character Scottie Ferguson's point of view. As a result, we are as disoriented as he is navigating the twists and turns as the story makes us question everything we know until it leads us to tragic conclusion. Where is the catharsis of mother son conversation from The Sixth Sense? Where is the quiet acknowledgment of the breakfast scene in Unbreakable? 

For Shyamalan's older works, the twist worked as the vehicle for the characters to find the courage to face a truth about themselves they could not accept, then move on. Both The Village and The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan rely on their twist to shock the audience into bewilderment that they live in a different world then they expected. Which, they already know. The whole point of a movie is to take people out of their normal existence; if all you give them is "You thought you were in this kind of story, but you're actually in a different one. Aren't you amazed? Aren't you astonished?" it should be no surprise that the response is "No."

Maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion. Maybe I'm making too much out of a largely forgotten extended marketing gimmick. But if we've learned anything from a good twist it's that the thing that explains everything, that brings us into the full understanding of what's happened, is usually something tucked away in the corner, always a little blurry until we finally get a good, solid look at it.