“GM’s fate, government response will determine if job-letting is over.” That’s the headline on yet another opinion piece in Sunday’s Kalamazoo Gazette, this one by Peter Luke.
Here’s the online version. It’s headlined somewhat differently: “As GM, Chrysler downsizing looms, White House must find ways to keep Michigan employed.”
Like Rick Haglund and indeed like most newspaper people, Luke’s outlook is more government-centric than people-centric. An example is the closing paragraphs of his article:
The president’s overseer for the recovery of auto communities, former MSU economist Ed Montgomery, visited Michigan last week to say Obama is “committed to having a strong, viable auto industry” and to helping us “deal with the situation.”
GM’s downsizing is inevitable. But any reorganization — even a structured bankruptcy — designed to build a stronger, viable company should at least mitigate further job losses. Otherwise, Montgomery’s recovery efforts will be that much more expensive.
The economic stimulus, responding to a national recession that is 15 months old, does not do the whole job. Michigan’s downturn started nine years ago and has shredded the economic fabric of whole regions of the state.
Montgomery said he “gets” Michigan’s situation. Which is: If Detroit, Pontiac, Flint and Saginaw don’t get the federal help they need to rebuild, the state will continue to bleed income, population and, to borrow a word from Obama, hope.
So in other words, according to Luke, the fate of our economy depends on the feds spending money. But if he was a better-informed reporter, he might realize there are other ideas out there as to how economic growth takes place. That may be a little much to ask, but he could start small and think about what happens when the federal government spends money.
His current thinking is much like that of the old industrialists. For example, there was the idea that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” Or that the way to improve sanitary conditions in cities is to dump the sewage into the nearest river. At one time it was acceptable to think that getting rid of the problem locally was good enough. Now we know better than to just solve our local environmental problems at the expense of the global ecosystem. If only reporters like Peter Luke would apply the now-commonly-known principles of ecology to economics, and keep in mind how everything is connected.
For example, take those federal stimulus dollars. They have to come from somewhere. Mitigating job loss in Michigan through stimulus dollars is going to mean people in other parts of the country losing their jobs to pay for them. Or maybe we can borrow the money and do it through inflation, taking jobs away from the next generation to save those of our own. It’s not right to think we can solve our local problem without paying any attention to the problems the solution might cause for those in other times and places, or even in other sectors of the local economy.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for federal action in dealing with our economic crisis. There might even be a place for federal spending. But the beginning of wisdom is to quit taking such a narrow view of the problem, and realize that there are more interconnected parts than the federal government and the Michigan auto industry. It’s ironic that on the facing page to Luke’s column there is an editorial titled, “How much do you really know about the media?” In it there is this paragraph:
Yahoo and Google don’t generate news, newspapers do: Yahoo and Google use Associated Press or local news organizations’ news reports, create a headline and a link and make it look as though they have news on their pages. This is called “aggregation.” The truth is that without newspaper staffs reporting the news in print and online, there would be precious little credible local news available anywhere on the Internet to aggregate or blog about.
Ignore for a moment the unfortunate wording that suggests that newspapers invent or manufacture news. The writers probably meant something like “report” rather than “generate.” At least I hope so.
But if newspapers want to give themselves credit for reporting local news, they ought to start by encouraging people like Peter Luke to broaden their horizons and truly cover the local news. Perhaps pay less attention to government people like Ed Montgomery, and more to all the interconnected people and businesses that constitute the economy. We do get lots of news stories about people who are affected when government program X is cut, but there is a lot more to the economy than government spending on individuals and on industry.