Rebooting America

It looks like Thomas Friedman really does know where the wind blows, on which side his bread is buttered and so on and so forth. Now that it’s politically safe to do so, he’s going full-bore liberal and no longer arguing how flat the world is or how awesome it is that people around the world can buy a Lexus. Time to Reboot America rips the U.S. government for having gotten into the mess it’s in, one very analogous to that in which General Motors finds itself. His column is kind of short, so he leaves out the part where he played cheerleader to every free-market, privatizating and oversight-reducing move made in the last dozen years or so. Now that he’s found a new religion, that’s all in the past. That said, it’s hard not to silently cheer him as he describes NYC infrastructure whose condition has not changed in at least ten years:

“The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented.”

Along with JFK, which feels like “going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones” whenever arriving from any other international airport of note, there is a lot of work to do on the infrastructure of America. It’s really strange how privatization somehow overlooked long-term investment in infrastructure for short-term yearly profits. It’s almost like the investors didn’t care whether or not the good old U.S. of A. would still be around in a few years or not. Funny that. But that’s dwelling on the past, playing the blame game and all that. Let’s instead focus on the brand, new Thomas Friedman, who knows just what to do:

“[The money should go to] training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.”

It starts off quite strong, then ends up babbling about “creative tax incentives”, which has the powers-that-be nodding sagely and flipping the page of the newspaper, secure in the knowledge that Thomas Friedman indeed does still know on which side his bread is buttered.

Good boy. Sit. Beg. Good dog.