Artificial crisis

Newsweek has now gone completely digital. I'm getting used to reading it on my computer and wondering if I should spend $70 on an in-house wi-fi for my netbook or $200 on a color nook or kindle so I can read at the kitchen table. The articles appear in my browser in its own display format with a table of contents and individual "pages" that require scrolling because they don't quite fit. I'm not sure what to make of the "Sign In" button that doesn't give any error message when I supply name and password, but also doesn't disappear or change to a "Welcome" message. Am I getting the extra subscriber content or not?

I'm still reading the first digital issue (dated Jan. 4), though the second is now available. Somehow I didn't get the notice of the first one and lost the link to the subscription page.

I'm not sure pages within the display can be linked by outsiders, so I tracked down the article through the public site.

David Frum, conservative commentator, looks at the recent fiscal bluff deal. Part of this comes from the (conservative? banking?) belief that some day the people who hold all those trillions of USA debt will suddenly realize it will never be paid off. We will reach a tipping point and the whole thing, economy and all, will crash. But this crisis keeps failing to happen. So Congress created an artificial crisis to impose the shock the markets refused to deliver.

But this artificial crisis and its artificial resolution (or delay) did nothing for America's real problems.

* Jobs and economic growth: The crisis was created under the assumption that the debt was America's most urgent problem. Try telling that to the millions who are un- and under-employed.

* Overspending (or federal deficit): Better to describe this as a health care spending problem because it is the amount going up most quickly. America pays much more per person on health care than other developed countries and buys too much of what isn't necessary. Capping spending won't change that problem.

* Low tax revenue: Squeezing more tax money out of the rich, Frum says, isn't going to close the deficit (I don't have any data to confirm or refute that). We need other streams of input: energy tax, carbon tax, or national sales tax.