"The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.
Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.
~Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, Jan. 2009
The above statement, far from being an argument to expand the government, is an argument to turn Washington, D.C. into a ghost town. If there is one thing we know after almost eighty years of government spending on well-meaning but paternal programs it is that, aside from being entirely unconstitutional, they do not bring about their stated ends. Thus Obama should, by his own rhetoric, once and for all put the alphabet soup of federal agencies to rest. That would be change that every thinking person could believe in. Instead we are on the cusp four of years of politics as usual--except now we face a president with tremendous political capital. This will result in not just politics as usual, but politics as usual on steroids.
Nothing so far proposed or done by the new Obama administration is worthy of being called change. The stimulus to be voted on today is a variety of the ripest political scam imaginable. In the name of blindly "doing something", Congress is going to vote on a nearly one trillion dollar stimulus package. The process has been far from transparent; there have been exactly zero committee hearings on the bill. Its contents have been determined outside the deliberative process of Congress, just like the recent $800 billion TARP bailout under Bush. Further, the bill has has been designed with little attempt to determine (if this is even possible) if the money is being spent wisely. The stimulus bill contains money for the arts, Amtrak, and a host of other politically-favored rat holes.
"I would love to not have to spend this money," Obama is reported to have said. What a sad joke. There is no sound economic or historical reason to spend this money. The stimulus bill is a simple act of desperation--a "hail Mary" pass. The Fed has done virtually all it can do to attempt to re-inflate the economy with monetary policy, to no avail. Now politicians are vainly resurrecting fiscal stimulus. It will not work; it cannot work.
Unless we consider putting politics as usual on steriods to be change, we are in for four years of the same old same old.
What would you do to get the economy on track?
ReplyDeleteCapitalism would be a great start. No bailouts. We talk about lack of accountability but that's accountability on the market--the threat of bankruptcy. It keeps ever-present greed in check. We need to end our trillion dollar a year overseas empire. Government spending should be cut back to a minimum. Will there be pain? Yes. Bust cycles that are caused by inflationary policy are inevitable. We have just been able to "paper" over the bust cycle until now. It would be jarring, but short lived, as capitalists who have been successful reorganize our capital to productive ends with long run wealth producing power. All we are getting now is a recipe for extended economic malaise--like Japan. The same people who got us into this,in govt and business, are the ones being trusted to get us out. The ones who warned us and ran their businesses and lives soundly have to pay for it. The recipe is just more of what caused the problem to begin with--loose monetary policy with explicit or implicit government guarantee against losses. A recipe for disaster in the past and a recipe for more trouble in the future.
ReplyDeleteAlso the commentators on CNBC, most of whom I disagree with usually, declared the stimulus as passed by the House a pure spending bill. Forget any hopes of investing based on an infrastructure boom. Jim Cramer said to immediately unload any stocks, like CAT, you bought anticipating infrastructure profits. So even if infrastructure spending were a good idea, the stimulus bill fails to provide even that. It is, rather, a naked gift to left-wing constituencies, politics as usual.
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