Time is longer than twine, and writing a column every fortnight, as opposed to every week, leaves the eager commentator champing at the bit when seminal and topical issues escape the flashing pen.
April has produced a Republican nominee in the form of Mitt Romney and it has revealed that the Britain has slipped into double dip recession whereas the United States is surely emerging from the morass of a recession which confronted Barack Obama as the first black Commander-in-Chief of the United States.
Now, this is high politics, but it concerns us. First, because we pull the majority of our tourists from Britain, and second because we are inevitably caught up in the economic wash of America. After all, we play cricket, like the British, and sing country and westerns expertly like the Americans!
But what has Obama been doing that is right, and what have the British been doing that is wrong? That is the question. Put another way, is it true that faced with the same problem, the policies of the people behind the policies can make the difference?
The answer to that question is one that will occupy the minds of political commentators and analysts in the opposition parties in Britain and in the US.
It is true that all countries in this world are affected to a greater or larger extent by the recession, but some people at home here and others abroad have said that the Government is doing the wrong thing.
These statements have been attacked as political and thus unworthy of belief because of the source from which they have come. But, wait a minute, wait . . . . Did we not have among us a few years ago, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, the distinguished Professor Stiglitz? He delivered the Sir Winston Scott Lecture in 2007, and here is part of what he said then: “We need to begin with a general lesson often lost sight of in the midst of an economic downturn: every downturn comes to an end. Economic policy does make a difference; it can make the downturn shorter or longer, shallower or deeper. It can make the expansion longer . . . .”
Well, let us accept that “economic policy does make a difference”. In that case, perhaps one of the reasons why Obama’s America is not in double dip recession, and Britain is, may well lie in the different policies adopted by the two governments.
I leave it to the economic gurus to sort that one out, but the car industry in the US has been saved and is making profits again. The banks have repaid most if not all of their government-backed loans, and the free world has breathed a small sigh of relief that the raging fires of economic hell have been tempered by the cooler winds of appropriate fiscal and other policies.
And yet, the Republicans complain . . . but that is politics, and what is good for politics is not always good for the economy.
Now, if we are serious about economic debate in this little neck of the developing woods, we would recognize that the economic policies of Errol Barrow and Tom Adams made an enormous difference to Barbados. Barrow’s education policy and Adams’ tenantries freehold legislation and the airport/West Coast highway were matters rooted in the interstices of the principles of political economy.
But of more recent times, we have been confronted in a more direct manner with the choice between divergent policies. Here is what Clyde Mascoll said in 2008 about the Democratic Labour Party Budget of that year:
“The Budget will increase the cost of living; it will slow down the economy; it will increase unemployment; it will increase the national debt; it will reduce the fiscal deficit . . . .”
Barbadians will have to think on the accuracy of this prediction, but four years later is a good enough time for such reflection.
We now know that Obama’s policies were right and Cameron’s policies seem so far to have been wrong, but nearer home, a legitimate and nonpartisan question for all Barbadians must be: were the economic policies in place in this country since 2008 the right ones for our country?
