Syndicated columnist Michael Barone: Three surprises from 2022
2022 was a year full of surprises. Important things didn't work out as many people had expected on just about every point on the political spectrum.
The prime example: Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin's Russian troops invaded on Feb. 24, it looked like an independent Ukraine was toast. Military experts on cable channels said Russia had overwhelming superiority. It would take Kyiv and occupy the whole country.
The Biden administration evidently shared this view, evacuating the U.S. Embassy and offering a plane to rescue the president (and former comedian) Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who at this point uttered the immortal words, "I need ammunition, not a ride." The Biden administration, to its credit, adjusted to the unexpected reality and provided Ukraine with vital military and economic aid. This week, Zelenskyy is visiting Washington voluntarily, not as an exile. And it is Putin who is describing his side's position in Ukraine as "extremely difficult."
The lesson is that morale can trump material. People will prove braver and more resourceful when protecting their freedom and their nation's independence than firepower statistics suggest.
A second surprise of 2022 has been the decline of China. It wasn't so long ago that sophisticated soothsayers predicted its economy would soon be larger than America's and that its centralized and admittedly authoritarian experts were showing the way to plan for the future.
So much for that. The Chinese Communist Party's rigid lockdown to suppress COVID-19 has done more economic damage than just about anyone deemed possible. This was not the regime's first unexpected infliction of self-harm. That would be its 1970s one-child policy, which has left China now with a population that has become elderly before it got rich.
A third surprise this year is that massive transfers of trillions of dollars, initiated by the Trump administration and vastly increased by Biden Democrats, have not restored the low-inflation economy with growth tilted toward the low-skill - and low-income was chugging along nicely in the Trump years up until February 2020.
The theory behind these enormous infusions is that when demand is down, if you throw enough money out of helicopters (Milton Friedman's metaphor), growth will result. That's how it worked in the Detroit of my childhood years: you gave consumers more money through subsidies or tax cuts, demand for cars rose, and GM, Ford and Chrysler recalled all those workers they'd laid off a few months before. Everything was back in place.
But today's economy is more complicated than the Detroit midcentury model suggests. So the trillions of dollars injected into the economy have left many people out of jobs, even while employers vainly seek employees - the so-called Great Resignation. These trillions also sparked skyrocketing inflation, which Democrats and the Federal Reserve insisted was transitory but now looks to be out of control.
Economic damage from pandemic restrictions, it turns out, can't be repaired the same way as economic damage from downward thrusts in the business cycle.
Some surprises, such as the weakening of Russia and the chastening of China, are good news. But others, like America's current economic conundrums, leave us puzzled and most likely unprepared for the surprises of 2023.
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