The End of the Rocky Mountain News

One Sunday morning, when I was probably 12 or 13 years old, my parents sent me out to buy the Sunday paper. From where we lived in suburban Aurora, Colorado, there were not a lot of options—not a lot of close options—for buying a paper. There were a couple of newspaper machines around, but other than that, your only option was 7-11.

I headed out with my 50 cents on my bike to one of two area 7-11s. The one I was headed to was probably a mile and half away from home. The benefit of this one was that it didn’t involve any major hills. The other was downhill all the way there, but coming home would have been difficult.
I spent a lot of time on my bike as a kid and I was pretty reckless. So, when I came to a stoplight, it didn’t matter much that it was red. As long as it was clear then I was going to go. At one red light I thought it was clear.

I was barely into the intersection when I was struck by a car. I wasn’t hit terribly hard, but there was in the street, myself and my bike half underneath the car, with two old ladies from inside the car standing over me. Why these two old ladies were speeding to church, I don’t know, but I knew that I was in the wrong and my first interest—before even checking for injuries—was fleeing the scene.

The wheels of the bike still turned and no bones protruded from my body, so I was out of there. At the 7-11, I checked myself out. My shoulder hurt, my knee was scraped, and I was pretty sure that I’d hit my head on something. I bought the paper anyway, and headed home maybe a little more carefully—the whole while imagining that I was suffering from broken bones I wasn’t aware of or bleeding in my head that would eventually kill me.

The paper I went out to get that morning: the Rocky Mountain News.

Today, the Rocky Mountain News has issued its last paper. Lord knows it is a hard time for newspapers, but the Rocky was competing in a two-paper town while sharing a Joint Operating Agreement with its competitor. This situation was untenable. The Rocky got the wrong end of the deal and it was probably doomed from the day it signed the agreement.

It was the paper I grew up with. The comics I knew were in the Rocky, not the Denver Post. When I looked for my first job, it was in the help wanted section of the Rocky. It had a comfortable tabloid format, instead of the cumbersome broadsheet format. I didn’t even know that the broadsheet was the standard format for newspapers until I got older.

So, now Denver becomes a one-newspaper town. A single editorial page, a single sports section. It’s a sad day for the loss of a 150-year-old institution, for the loss of choice and a variety of voices. It feels almost like getting hit by a car.

Fiction and the Economic Crisis

So, we're in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, with the Dow losing 45% in the last 15 months, and with around 3 million jobs lost in the last five months. Personally, my own industry is, as an article on the industry stated yesterday, "running off a cliff." While the pain isn't hitting everyone, the economists are scared. The consensus seems to be that we might at least stop the slide downward by year's end, though the job losses will continue to mount in the meantime, making the prospect of a recovery even further in the future. Some think it may well be a decade before we get to the same level of growth we were seeing before this whole crisis hit.

Crisis is always interesting from an artistic perspective. What will the American fiction of the next few years look like? What sort of country will it describe? First, there will be a lot less of it published. With the big publishing houses shuttering divisions, and book stores struggling to keep their doors open, there will be fewer new books. These changes--this crisis--are subjects for another conversation.

The books being written now could very well describe a country in turmoil, lost in a mix of hope and pessimism. Just when things looked up, like the country might be restored and the outlook brighter, greed at every level has driven us to this precipice. And if it's not us falling over that edge, it's the 43,000 workers at GM who will lose their jobs this year, the 10,000 at Boeing. Suddenly, we look at our credit card bills in horror. What was once the normal way of operating now has proved to be incredibly reckless. Our 401(k)s? Don't even look at them. And add a few more years to your planned retirement age. And the mortgage? Even if you're making your payments, knowing that your house has lost 20% of its value makes you question the reasonableness of the purchase.

Thinking about losing your home, though, is as frightening as the prospect of losing your job. Our identities are wrapped up in these things. How lost is a person who has lost either, or both?
How would such a crisis shift his/her perspective? In what way would he overcome?

It is hard to argue against the powerful notion of the American Dream because it is so much a part of our psyche. But we know it fails at times. We know that hard work and the desire for more doesn't save us from ruin. Alternatively, it seems like the country has developed a sense of entitlement. As if we deserve good things to come our way. And if they don't, by God, someone had better step in and make things right. It's at every level. The bank who expects not to suffer when the risks they've been taking have led them to near-collapse. And it's the home buyer who bought well out of his/her price range with a questionable loan who now wants the government to step in and stop the bank from foreclosing.

All of these things are bound to manifest themselves in the fiction we read in the next few years. Maybe these novels will moralize, tells where we went wrong--as if we don't know. Maybe they will offer hope, they will show us an American Spirit that is truer and more noble than the capitalist American Dream. Or maybe they will show a state of ruin in which we will stay and in which we had damn well better find our way, or perish.

Cato protests govt spending in full-page WSJ ad

I suppose it is no surprise that the Cato Institute would oppose government spending. That it would choose to protest government stimulus in a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, is a little more surprising. What is really worth noting is that they state, "Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth," and then support the statement with a long list of people who support that statement. My question for the Cato Institute: Where are all the Yale and Harvard economists on this issue?

The ad begins with a quote from the President, "There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump start the economy." Then Cato begins their ridiculous disagreement: "With all due respect,Mr.President,that is not true.

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

The undersigned include two members of the faculty of my not very prestigious undergraduate alma mater, Metropolitan State College of Denver. Not exactly A-class economists.

Let's look at their arguments. I do think that most economists would agree that the government needs to spend, if no one else will. When things seize up, as they have, the government is the only one with the purse big enough, and the responsibility to move the economy along by spending.

What led to delays in recovery from the Great Depression were attempts to balance the budget which required increased taxation. And Japan's "Lost Decade"? Government inaction was the culprit there. The belief that things would get better without intervention was the problem then, and it is the reason the US government is choosing to act as quickly as possible. Many economists will tell you that if recovery comes swift, it will be in large part because of fed action.

Now, to the belief that tax cuts cure all, we know it's not true. I'd love to shed my "tax burden" as well, but reducing taxes is not going to get us out of this hole. Tax cuts for individuals tend to be saved. How much of last year's stimulus checks actually got spent? And tax cuts for businesses are not going to encourage businesses to hire or increase output when the demand does not exist. It is estimated that every dollar of government infrastructure spending creates $1.59 in GDP growth, while tax cuts generate $1.01. And considering the lack of consumer confidence, expect most of that to be saved.

I tend to support Cato on a lot of issues because of my own libertarian leanings, but we will not find a way out of this problem by telling the government to get out of the way. My question for my Metro State economists, John Cochran and Kishore Kulkarni: What percentage of tax cuts would actually improve economic performance?