GOP debates or Laurel and Hardy?

By Jane M. Orient, M.D., of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

The evening of the most recent Republican debates, I was visiting some friends who, like me, do not have a television set, and their Internet connection is temperamental. We thought about going to county Republican Party headquarters to watch, but it was a long drive in the rain and snow, so we opted to play Laurel and Hardy videos instead.

Laurel or Hardy are endearing and hilarious, while the only candidate who appears to have a sense of humor is Ted Cruz. There is nothing funny about the political theater of the debates, but the national political scene reminds one of a Laurel and Hardy show. In one episode, Ollie wakes up with a terrible hangover, and sees the havoc created in his house from the wild party he gave the night before. He knows the hour of reckoning is approaching fast: His wife is returning at noon. So he calls in his friend, Stanley Hardy, to set things right.

As always, one disaster follows another. Finally, the house appears to be in order, and Stanley decides to light a nice fire in the fireplace while Ollie is at the depot to meet his wife. A match won't ignite the big logs, but there is a can of gasoline close by.

Ollie at least knew he had a huge problem, of his own making. Does Congress? Do the candidates not know the caliber of disaster, or do they just decline to mention it? Once in office, will they call in a crony to fix it? One with a record like Stanley's, or the architects of Healthcare.gov?

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The economy, despite Obama's State of the Union celebration, is as dead as the logs in Ollie's fireplace. One map shows that there are no cargo ships crossing any of the earth's oceans. They are all stuck in port. New steel piping from the fracking industry, bought at $2 a pound, has been sold for as little as 2.5 cents a pound, less than the price of scrap metal. (Scrap steel is about 7.5 cents, down from 15 cents, where it was for years.) For some commodities there is "no bid." A congressional candidate walking Main Street in small towns in 2014 found half of the businesses shuttered, and many of the remainder had no one working other than the owner.

Do the candidates propose another "stimulus" – quantitative easing, also called money printing or debasing the currency? Will this be like pouring gasoline on some logs and lighting a match? It might burn down the financial house without creating any productive economic activity.

The economic problems are structural; the Federal Reserve cannot fix them. Economic activity, from mom-and-pop stores, to small medical practices, to fracking is crushed under a load of taxes and regulation, and crippled by crashing commodity prices.

Yet costs are rising. Independent physicians are being driven from practice by escalating administrative costs, made much worse by Obamacare. Young physicians, like other young people, are buried in debt owing to the massive increase in the cost of education. Patients find their choices dramatically restricted, and costs increasingly unaffordable because of Obamacare plans' narrow but expensive networks coupled with huge deductibles. The medical profession is demoralized, institutions are being destroyed and care is often deplorable.

Who has solutions? From Democrats Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton we can expect more taxes, more regulations, more redistribution – taking more from productive people who still might have some resources, to pay off the crony capitalists and well-paid government bureaucrats who administer trickle-down benefits to voters? Will they import still more needy welfare cases or low-wage workers to drive middle-class income down further? Can we learn from the 20th-century experiment with socialism, or from the doctors' strike in Britain?

From Republicans, will we have more socialism-lite? Will we just have attacks on other Republicans, damning accusations launched too close to the primaries to refute?

It's little too much like the Laurel and Hardy episode in which Ollie forces Stanley to box in a hopeless match against a fearsome fighter, then bets that he will lose.

But in that episode, Ollie's nefarious plan misfires. Let us hope that a man or integrity and sound ideas will survive the political establishment's war to preserve its privilege.