In the last few years of his life, the late, lamented Thomas Farrell defined rhetoric as "the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter." The definition directs our attention to intensity--it matters to me--and to materiality--making "things" (cloudy ideas or words?) into matter. It's also become clear, from a recent issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric and elsewhere, that Farrell was intrigued with magnitude, size, amplification, lesser and greater--argument types that established size, or lack thereof.
I bring him up because he would be having a field day right now. Congress has agreed on a $789 billion stimulus bill and the major arguments concerning it concern size.
The Republicans who oppose the bill have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to translate its size into terms "ordinary Americans" can understand. In truth, they need to do so for everyone, because none of us have ever seen a billion of anything, much less 789 billion anythings. We have no conceptual framework. So, like Ronald Reagan and his efforts to amplify the national debt in the late 1970s, they start spending a "million dollars every day since the birth of Christ" or they "stack dollar bills into space" or they have those dollar bills "circle the globe." In virtually every instance that I've seen, they fail. Take these examples. Most of us haven't seen a million anythings, either, so that doesn't help. We haven't been to space or the moon. We haven't circled the globe. They've been unable to provide any useful argument for turning these dollars into matter--and recall, dollars are no longer matter. They simply float, free paper that depends solely on the confidence we have in them. To turn them into matter, to create that confidence, requires rhetoric.
The Democrats, or at least the liberals, haven't done much better. Paul Krugman has fully convinced me that this package is simply too small and he's done so through the very rational notion of a "hole" or a "gap." In his blog or elsewhere, he has consistently argued that there's a "looming hole" of $2.9 trillion in the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, for that to make sense to most people, they needed to have taken Econ 101, Macroeconomics, from the incredibly engaging Kal Goldberg at Bradley University or they needed to have studied up on macroeconomics when writing an article on JFK's economic rhetoric. Sadly, that is not likely to be true for most Americans.
Krugman is saying: Under "normal" circumstances, the economy could be expected to generate $2.9 trillion more of goods and services than it will over the next couple of years because of the credit crunch, housing collapse, Bush incompetence (speaking of things so large they cannot be measured) and so on. So, to get us out of this downward economic spiral, someone, somewhere needs to pony up $2.9 trillion. We need to fill that hole. Now, government doesn't have to fill the entire hole; if it, to use the battery metaphor, "jumpstarts" the economy with a big enough economic stimulus, then the private sector can drive the car, i.e. the economy, around the block for a while until the battery is charged again.
The problem? The jumpstart, thanks to the centrists Krugman bitterly denounces in the link I provide, isn't big enough or of the right sort. Now, it's better than the Republican "alternative," which was a complete joke--$3.1 trillion worth of permanent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. The next time you hear a Republican worry about the deficit, realize the level of hyprocrisy--when it comes to help for the wealthy, s/he will ignore the deficit.
At any rate, there's too much crap in the bill--an Alternative Minimum Tax fix and a credit for flipping your house that seeks to jumpstart another housing bubble (great idea, huh?) and not enough spending on things that matter.
For instance, we know people pocket tax cuts; not all of it gets spent. You want bang for your stimulus buck, build a school. It creates jobs to build it, it creates jobs for teachers once built, and it creates jobs when educated children create new ideas for new industries--Bill Gates's high school had a great computer curriculum. No funds at all in the bill for new school construction, thanks to the three idiots (Collins, Snowe, Spectre) who demanded their ounce of flesh from the hides of children.
Overall, however, Krugman faces the same problem as Collins faces the same problem as McConnell faces the same problem as Obama. We cannot wrap our heads around the SIZE of the US economy nor around the amount of stimulus it will take to get it going again. We do not think in these terms and the major problem of rhetorical invention is one that I suspect Farrell would love: How do we make size matter?
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