The day has arrived for the annual Presteblog tradition, That Was the Year That Was 2012, the title borrowed from David Frost‘s satirical 1960s TV series “That Was the Week That Was.”
Business has gotten to the point where I am now writing two TWTYTW 2012s. The first, covering southwest Wisconsin, can be read here, along with here Wednesday night. (Yes, 2012 in southwest Wisconsin was so event-filled that two 1,000-word columns were required to cover it all. So I guess that makes three TWTYTWs.)
Now for a frankly bizarre proposition: Was 2012 the best year ever? The Spectator says yes:
Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too. …
Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world are living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 this year. Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a fifth in half a decade. …
War has historically been humanity’s biggest killer. But in most of the world today, a generation is growing up that knows little of it. The Peace Research Institute in Oslo says there have been fewer war deaths in the last decade than any time in the last century.
Independent Journal Review adds an important modifier that basically blows up the Spectator’s dubious premise:
Simply because two behemoth states are running as fast as they can from communism and socialism — China and India — embracing industrial technology and exporting goods to the EU and the US, the global standard of living has been bettered.
While life in the U.S. economy is devolving under the colossal weight of big government, former hardcore socialist countries are introducing just enough of the successful American institutions of market capitalism to ease their national misery.
The United States will only return to prosperity when it stops approaching economy as a matter of haves-and-have-nots, instead unleashing its potential for innovation and productivity. This effectively means getting the micro-managing, parasitical government of Washington D.C. out of the nation’s way.
That last paragraph isn’t going to happen in the next four years, of course, because the same administration that generated the weakest economic recovery since World War II got reelected by a majority of voters. (Insert Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.) If the world’s most important country isn’t better off, the world isn’t better off.
The national Republican Party had a rotten year. The state Republican Party had quite a different year. Gov. Scott Walker survived his (illegitimate) recall. Republicans lost control of the state Senate in June, only to gain it back Nov. 6. Consider that since Nov. 2, 2010, Republicans now control all but one statewide elective office and flipped control of both houses of the Legislature.
Recallarama Part Deux was the most nasty campaign in Wisconsin history, at least until the 2014 gubernatorial campaign. Christian Schneider notes:
A college friend of mine once had a contrarian theory on how to find the best women to date. He believed you should always target women already in relationships. “If a girl has a boyfriend, you only have to be better than that one guy,” he would say. “With single women, you have to be better than every other dude in the world.”
In 2012, Gov. Scott Walker took this advice to heart as he staved off a bitter recall effort initiated by swarms of angry public-sector union members, whose ability to collectively bargain he had all but eliminated in 2011. One observer cleverly deemed the public unions’ efforts in Wisconsin “frozen custard’s last stand.”
But Walker didn’t have to defeat the concepts of “collective bargaining,” or “unions.” He simply had to beat the political corpse of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who had lost two previous bids for governor, the last in 2010 to Walker himself.
The June 5 recall election fractured Wisconsin both at the state and individual level. On election day, a Chippewa Falls woman tried to drive to the polls to vote against Walker but was blocked by her estranged husband – so she ran him over. The recall inspired a Madison-area rapper with the unfortunate sobriquet “Dudu Stinks” to pen the “Walker Recall Anthem,” which included the Beatle-esque lyric, “Get this power hungry man out of office and away we go. … this is larger than the current student-teacher ratio.” Inexplicably, the voting public failed to heed Mr. Stinks’ plea and re-elected Walker by a larger margin than he had garnered against the somnambulistic Barrett merely two years earlier.
Certain members of the state media learned that the Open Records Law also includes signatures on petitions to recall governors. Then again, much of the mainstream media had a bad year as demonstrated by their completely being in the tank for Obama (apparently being skeptical of authority figures is no longer taught in journalism school) and their getting such details as the name of the suspect wrong in the Newtown, Conn., mass murder.
The Packers proved for the second consecutive season that the regular season and the postseason are separate. The Badgers shocked even themselves by earning their third consecutive Big Ten … er, T1e2n … uh, B1G … football title after a season that could be rewritten as a soap opera. The Brewers were sort of competitive after losing Prince Fielder, but still lack left-handed power hitting, but more importantly still lack pitching, particularly after letting Zach Greinke go.
What about 2013? The Washington Post asks …
The Great Recession, which began exactly five years ago, is fast receding into the history books. But its effects don’t merely linger; they haunt almost every region, industry and household. With each turn of the calendar, the world wonders and hopes: Will this be the year?
Will this be the year that the economy breaks out of its pattern of sluggish growth that has held since the recession ended in 2009?
Will this be the year that jobs are created on a large scale, that people who haven’t seen a raise in half a decade might finally see bigger paychecks?
There’s your last laugh of 2012. Our recovery in name only includes unemployment correctly measured beyond 14 percent. There is no sign that families will recover the 10 percent of their income that the Obama administration-led economy siphoned from their pockets in the first Obama term. Businesses are neither hiring nor investing in capital. (The only retail that’s doing well is gun sales.) And that will lead to an economic expansion? In what meth-head’s dream?
The economy is going to tank in 2013, whether or not a “fiscal cliff” solution occurs. Either taxes are going to increase automatically tomorrow (which won’t be noticeable until the first 2013 paychecks arrive), or taxes are going to increase as part of the fiscal cliff deal. (In addition to 2013’s ObamaCare tax increases.) Tax increases always depress the economy, even a strong economy, and no one thinks this is a strong economy.
Wigderson Library & Pub has more optimistic predictions:
1. Justice Patience “Pat” Roggensack will win re-election.
2. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett will not receive an appointment from President Barack Obama.
3. The John Doe investigation into the county administration under Scott Walker when he was Milwaukee County Executive will produce no further prosecutions.
4. Tony Evers will win re-election at State Superintendent for the Department of Public Instruction. The legislature will then take away more of his responsibilities. …
7. There will be unsuccessful attempts made to recall Justices David Prosser, Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman. …
14. Wisconsin will cut the state income tax. …
19. The state legislature will pass a mining bill acceptable to Gogebic Taconite.
20. Global warming will cause snow and rain, after causing last year’s drought. Tornadoes will be Governor Scott Walker’s fault. …
24. No gun control measures will pass the state legislature.
And, thus, with the nation headed to the precipice of a fiscal cliff, with 2012’s slate of gun violence from coast to coast, and with Wisconsin’s summer of discontent behind it, 2013 has a very low bar for success. It doesn’t have to be better than most years; it only has to be better than 2012 to be a considered a winner.
Well, may your 2013 be better than your 2012. I think the United States’ 2013 will not be better.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 