My column in the March issue of TAP argued that President Barack Obama's primary mission was to change the culture and assumptions of American democracy, but he had acquired a second mission, which was to change the culture of capitalism. But the sicknesses and erroneous assumptions in the two cultures were intertwined, and even though the task is approximately twice as unimaginably large, he might be better off taking on the two missions together. A key section in last night's non-SOTU speech captured precisely what I was thinking of:
We have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.
-- Mark Schmitt
