Maybe If Keep Saying "China," We Can Inherit Their Economic Growth

At election time, the constant refrain and mantra in Taiwan was, "Our economy is so bad, we need a change."

Excellent editorial piece by Jerome Keating, on Taiwan and Presdient Ma after just under 2 months into his presidency : http://zen.sandiego.edu:8080/Jerome/1215568227/index_html

In short, Ma, the KMT, and the largely pro-KMT media in Taiwan led the people in Taiwan to believe that what they need to be concerned about is the economy. Sure, that's a reasonable issue to be concerned about- something I'm concerned about here. During the election campaign, Ma blamed the "bad economy" of Taiwan as a result of Chen Shui-bian. That "bad economy" was actually quite good last year at over 5% GDP growth. And now that Ma is in his second month and the economy of Taiwan is even worse than before. And as Keating so elegantly puts it:

"Before the election, even though the world economy was bad and Taiwan's economy was fair it was not a global problem; it was Chen's fault. After the election when Taiwan suddenly discovered that the world economy had been bad all along and when Taiwan's economy became worse, this was not Ma's fault, it was a global problem. Logic? No, but that also is not a strong point of many of Taiwan voters."

So what used to be called a bad economy two months ago is now an economy where the "fundamentals are sound."

The problem in not admitting that there is a problem (with the economy) is that without admitting that there is a problem, you can't solve the problem. See the problem now?

This should be a simple reminder that one man cannot "change" everything and solve all the nations problems. Say Obama?