TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy asks why America can’t “function like a fiscally responsible company” and reminds us of why tech writers should stay away from politics:
That pseudo-company is the United States government and in a thorough report issued today, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has taken all emotions, politics, spin and manipulation out of the issues, to present a steely-eyed view of just how hosed our financial situation is. Spoiler alert: It's not pretty. America is gripped by a new red menace and this time, it's not the commies– it's a sea of red ink. If politicians reported to voters the way management reports to shareholders, no one would finish out their terms.
This is followed by a torrent of banality, conventional wisdom, misrepresentations, and value judgments disguised as hard-nosed analysis. No, Social Security isn't actually responsible for our long-term debt problems, and it can be “fixed” by a few tweaks on the margins. No, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t “unfunded” -- they are paid out out of FICA taxes and general revenues -- and no, we won’t solve our problems by arbitrarily slashing said programs; the underlying problem is rapid growth in health costs across the economy, and slowing the growth rate is our only real hope for long-term solvency. No, Americans aren’t in debt because they are lazy and want some of that government largess -- you can thank stagnant wages and the rising cost of health care/housing/education for American indebtedness -- and we’re not actually facing a fiscal crisis. Right now, medium-term interest rates are at a historical low. Our real problem is deep and persistent unemployment, which will sink the economy if left unaddressed.
To be fair, Lacy isn't just wrong on the facts. Like a lot of tech writers who decide to dip their toes into politics, Lacy brings a worldview that is subtly -- but clearly -- hostile to democratic processes. To wit: Her post is an analysis of a report from Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and she praises her with phrases like this (taken from the first blockquote):
Mary Meeker has taken all emotions, politics, spin and manipulation out of the issues, to present a steely-eyed view of just how hosed our financial situation is.
And this:
It convinced her to spend some time taking a deep look at America's financials, and pull out all the politics and emotion to just look at the facts…
Yes, there are some nods to democratic choice at the end, but on the whole, I get the sense that Lacy is bothered by the presence of politics in, well, politics. Which is a shame. Ultimately, Americans aren't shareholders in a company, they are citizens with values and commitments. And far from obscuring our view of the issues, politics is what we do to uncover them. It's the means by which we identify problems and priorities, so that we can eventually fit a kind-of-right peg into a kind-of-right hole. Factual errors aside, Lacy's real mistake is in treating political discourse as less than essential, when it's anything but.
