Dispatch #14

When I began this blog on the 25^th of February, unemployment in the U.S. stood at 8.3%; the Dow-Jones Industrial Average stood at 12,943; and gas prices hovered at about $3.59 per gallon, record highs for the month of February. Six months later, unemployment has declined only slightly to 8.2%; the Dow ended the week at 12,822, but had hit 12,943 last week, having been as high as 13,279 over these last six months and as low as 12,101 at the beginning of the summer. The Dow, which can signal economic hope or fear, signals mostly uncertainty these days. Still. Gas prices have fallen to the point that we don’t complain about them as much as we did in February and blamed President Obama, but lower gas prices actually indicate weaknesses in the world economy. At any rate, we haven’t given the president any credit for the price declines.

All of this is to say the U.S. economy hasn’t gone anywhere and is churning more or less in place. Given the weakening growth projections in China and the continuing budgetary struggles in Europe and the political fallout from them, economic movement in the right direction will not likely be forthcoming before the election. If the economy remains depressed or begins to sink, the election will be very close, with a slight advantage going to Romney. If the economy recovers slightly, or begins to move forward visibly in any way, Obama should win re-election.

The polls show Obama and Romney about even at the moment, at 46% and 47%, too close to call. Obama should be doing much worse in the polls, owing to the flatness of the economy, but Romney has been taking a beating in the media, at the hands of the Obama campaign, for not releasing his income tax records. He’s a very rich man, and his records likely show a very rich man paying comparatively, perhaps considerably, surprisingly, and remarkably, less in tax than the average person would expect. He’s also being baited as a “vulture,” not a “venture,” capitalist, someone whose former company, Bain Capital, preyed upon weakened companies, scavenged the remains for their own profits and outsourced the work to foreign countries where labor costs were lower. This strategy certainly represents “success” in contemporary managerial practice; it’s just that Mr. Romney would prefer to be seen as the general image of it, of “Success.” The details of how that success was achieved and where the fruits of that success were squirreled away make for a less agreeable narrative and and a less sympathetic candidate. Mr. Romney is failing to take political advantage of the country's economic doldrums.

I see on Polskieradio that Mr. Romney is planning a trip to Poland this fall. I recommend Poland highly to him. I recommend him to Poland less highly.