This week

My schedule the past week or so has been a bit unorthodox, so I thought I'd clue everyone in to what I've been up to, or, as I like to call it, 'the happs'. I've been taking a break from therapy in order for my neck stitches to heal and the scar not look all gnarly, so I've been finding other ways to occupy my time. Monday evening, my grandparents and I attended a debate downtown between Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek columnist and Amity Schales, a conservative author and pundit. The topic was the effectiveness of the New Deal on the US' recovery from the Great Depression. This obviously is relevant these days as well, as we try to recover from the 'Great Recession'. Check out my notes from the speech after the jump.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays the past month and a half or so I've been interning at Hanon McKendry, a brand consulting and advertising firm downtown GR. It's been a great opportunity not only to get some experience in the marketing and advertising world but also just be in an office and around a business. You can't knock til you try it, so I wanted to try it out and see firsthand what it is like. I enjoy both sides of the business, both the statistics based strategy aspect as well as the creative side. So I'll be there a while longer and see how it goes.

I returned to therapy today after a couple days off, and had several revelations. First, a couple days off can wreak havoc on your conditioning; it was obvious why swimmers and runners train on Christmas when I was huffing and puffing after just a few minutes. Second, we identified some tightness in my hip that's been causing me some issues in my gait, a literal 'hitch' in my step, and promptly stretched it out into oblivion. It's amazing how much your pelvis rotates and moves as you walk just straight ahead; I can't even imagine side to side. Loosening that up made a huge difference.

We're headed to AA for the football again tomorrow; for those keep score, my predictions are 6-0. And with a Div 1-AA team coming in, I'm confident in a win.
And...a bear on ladder to take you into the weekend.

Jonathan alter vs. Amity Schales

It was a debate style presentation, moderated by someone affiliated with the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at GVSU. The topic at hand was the Great Depression and the effectiveness of the public policy response, namely FDR’s New Deal. In light of the so-called Great Recession, and its effects still lingering nationwide, chiefly 10% or so unemployment, the debate was a topical one. Both speakers were entertaining and very well informed, bringing impressive resumes with them to Fountain Street Church. Alter argued articulately on behalf of a strong government stimulus, positing that had FDR not instituted the CCC, WPA, among other similarly abbreviated government works programs, the citizenry of the 1930s would have suffered even more spectacularly. ‘Even if you pay someone to dig a hole then pay someone to fill that hole in,’ you’re still moving money around the economy, he said. Schales countered, in a style more factually based than eloquent, that if that money is not spent to its utmost efficiency, than it is wasteful and best not to be spent at all.

Alter is a proponent of the Keynesian style spending happening today in Washington, while Schales prefers a government-free, free market system where failing companies are allowed to fail and are never nationalized. She argued that the market warped after Lehman failed, the gov’t freaked, and all subsequent banks were deemed ‘too big to fail’; by simply allowing all non-performing entities to exit the market, surviving firms would have swallowed their share and life as we knew it would have continued.

This however was obviously not the case. And as a result of the massive loss of wealth in September 2008, credit dried up worldwide, many jobs were lost, and many people were in need of some sort of assistance. Alter, I think correctly, argued that this helping hand must come from the gov’t. Who else would it come from? A govt stimulus package is simply a temporary tourniquet designed to stop the bleeding, not enable millions of lazy delinquents. The stimuli enacted in the ‘30s were absolutely necessary – some worked, some didn’t, but a pragmatic leader, ala FDR and current Pres Obama, hopefully can tell the difference. And the Depression was truly solved by the largest govt works program in US history – WWII.

In a pure free market system of capitalism, there are winners and losers. It is the moral imperative of the govt to aid the ‘losers’ – make sure they can eat them, offer them inexpensive housing, assist them in returning to the workforce. The idea is not to make them comfortable living on the govt dole, but to ensure that they can continue to live period. Basic necessities is not too much for a govt to offer its most destitute citizens.