American TV viewers would be well-served by a reality show about economic realities

In “Good Time for a Brainy President,” a Nov. 27 column for the Washington Post, the venerable David Broder made what he referred to as “an embarrassing admission.”

After first referring to his more than 50 years experience as a White House correspondent and how it’s a good thing that Obama is smart enough to grasp the complexities of the economic meltdown - complexities that by his own admission elude Broder - he goes on to tell his readers he is utterly stumped by the current financial crisis.

“The sums are so staggering,” Broder wrote, “the vocabulary so unfamiliar, the experience so uninformative that I have not a clue whether Bernanke, Paulson and Co. are on top of the situation or are inadvertently making things worse.”

Broder may be embarrassed by his admission, but The Punditty Project sees it as nothing less than an act of colossal bravery. Whether he knows it or not, Broder is speaking for the vast majority of Americans when he says that he’s stumped. Just what in the hell is going on?

It’s a fair question, and as much as TPP would like to answer it to everyone’s satisfaction, the resources just aren’t there. Or here, for that matter. But the suggestion box is: Wouldn’t it be nice if the networks would take the time to educate us?

Given the American appetite for pitting one side against the other, an appetite fueled in no small part by the financial dynamics of cable television, what better than a series of debates with a reality show edge to teach the American people about our monetary system?

A team led by Ron PaulRon Paul (or suitable stand-in) would live in the same Beltway hotel as a team led by Ben BernankeBen Bernanke (or suitable stand-in). Three times a week for a month (12 episodes), they would meet for two hours (with commercial breaks) in front of a banquet room audience and engage in an all-out effort to convince the viewership which side has the better approach to building a strong economy.

How would Team Bernanke respond to Team Paul’s charges of encouraging an even greater economic meltdown through the inevitable inflationary after-effects of bailouts and rescues? How would Team Paul respond to Fed and its surrogates trashing their precious Austrian Economic Theory like so much Creationism, dismissing their calculations and applied libertarianism as mere irrelevancies?

However it played out, it would likely make the viewers smarter. It’s not too much to ask of the networks. They devour our time and shape our minds, whether we like to admit it or not. The least they can do is try to help us understand why the very foundation of our economic system seems so frail. Then maybe the columnists like Broder who get paid big money to tell us what they think about big issues wouldn’t find themselves writing words like these:

“…I am utterly dependent on others to decipher the clues that may unravel these mysteries.”

Wouldn’t it be something if, upon closer inspection by the wider viewing public, the “mysteries" of the meltdown became a little easier to understand and the options for solutions became at least a little more transparent?

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