So, just to get a jump on the competition, let me say that the phrase "wasting a crisis" has officially jumped the shark. Rahm Emmanuel, the chief of staff for President-elect Obama, was describing the opportunities available to the Democratic party based on the financial crisis. His point was that in any crisis there is an opportunity for change that would have been resisted previously. In the crisis, however, the factors that may have blocked the change seem more insignificant or are eliminated. It's in the crisis that we may find new opportunities.
Kipling summed this up in his poem "If" (I know, Kipling is a out of date and out of fashion, but some of his stuff holds true today). "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...". What is often difficult in the middle of the crisis is to stop and consider the upside and the opportunities that may unfold. If you can keep your head and focus beyond the crisis, there's no telling what new opportunies may be available for those who can divert their attention from the train wreck.
After all, in most human endevours we are faced with all sorts of crises. Any that don't result in homelessness, death or injury will eventually passed and in time will be called a "learning experience". We live in a time when a crisis is often defined by the lack of a favorite dessert, or some other small inconvenience, when people alive at this same time in our lives face starvation, religious persecution, hatred and war on a daily basis. We are in the throes of a finacial tightening and potential recession. We've been in one in this country on average about every 10 years. This one hurts more because the run-up to the crisis was so steep. The higher you fly, the farther you fall.
The real question we should be asking ourselves is not "where's the bottom" since that is relatively unknowable and different for each person. The question we should be asking is: how will things be different on the return? In the 50s, due to a wage price spiral, the government provided a mechanism to allow industries to offer healthcare to workers as a benefit. To this day, the reason we in this country obtain our healthcare through our employers was due to this legislation, which was put in place to allow increased benefits without driving higher inflation or wage demands. Now, don't you think many of the GM workers would prefer to have other insurance options?
This is simply the law of unintended consequences - what appeared to be a good thing coming out of a downturn eventually locked too many people into high medical costs and slowed innovation in insurance offerings. We need to be thinking now about what the eventual changes in the markets, the workforce, the shifts in consumer demand and how to address all of those changes now. Let's not waste a perfectly good crisis, and let's understand what is a significant but temporary incovenience and what is a real crisis.
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