Lost in the marketing campaign for the Stimulus Bill was a TV ad trumpeting how Harry Reid will get Nevada’s “fair share,” In my experience saying “I’ll pay my fair share” means you won’t. “I want my fair share” means you want more than your fair share. This makes the term vague and meaningless and therefore one of the most irritating in the language. It fits quite well in an ad by the most grating man in the Senate.
The Stimulus Bill includes money for infrastructure such as a high-speed rail from L.A. to Las Vegas which will surely have Sen. Reid’s name on it. It also includes money for ACORN’s bogus campaign registration efforts, money for the former Big Three automakers and a Mob Museum in Las Vegas. Yes, Harry Reid will get Nevada’s fair share thanks to the suckers in the rest of the nation who don’t have a Senate Leader.
We could pick apart the Stimulus Bill line by line but that would take years. No one’s read the thing and I don’t plan to be the first so we’ll look at the big picture. People pay through the nose to the federal government then hope that the elected help can keep out of prison long enough to get more back than they paid in. This is government today. We want government jobs, welfare, retirement, health care, roads, parks and big buildings all on the government dime and we want more than the neighboring state gets. Cutting out the middleman and letting us keep our own tax dollars doesn’t occur to us.
Deficit spending has been tried since the dawn of civilization and has never worked. When Rome was broke Caligula had a novel enterprise for raising funds by opening a brothel with the Senators’ wives employed as prostitutes. I would applaud something similar in Washington but please don’t put Barney Frank in charge. FDR spent wildly but saw manufacturing and unemployment at their worst four years after the New Deal started. Japan’s Lost Decade of the 1990’s saw a stagnant nation because of government intrusion.
If government involvement in the economy were effective we’d all be speaking Russian right now. Or German, North Korean or Cuban. We have the greatest nation and economic engine the world has ever seen and we’re shoveling sand in the gears.
The news reports usually feature anyone from President Obama to some wretched person on the street saying that we have to do something and do it now. But sometimes doing something is much worse than doing nothing. If I dig a hole in the yard today and fill it in tomorrow it would be doing something but don’t confuse it with progress, especially if I hit a gas line. Throwing borrowed money at make-work boondoggles is not the recipe to fix an economy but just the opposite.
The bonds that will finance this bill will be sold to investors in countries such as China until they’re unwilling or unable to buy them anymore. Instead of cancelling the spending we’ll just print money which will lead to hyperinflation. This bill will ensure each of us will get our fair share of economic pain.
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Do you have an alternative solution? Might I remind you that our new president INHERITED this situation? Do we want a Mad Max society to emerge from our lack of action?
ReplyDeleteYes, Obama inherited the situation just as FDR inherited the stock market crash of 1929. FDR made things worse with a tight money supply and Keynesian economics. It is quite possible that another Great Depression will come because of too much government involvement.
ReplyDeleteAre you saying that if the government doesn't borrow more funds and spend it on bailouts and pork that we'll turn into a lawless wasteland?
If consumers won't spend, and business won't spend, there is no new money coming into the economy. Without government intervention, the market will either not reset itself at all or will only reset itself after the human costs to our society reach tragic proportions.
ReplyDeleteYou are assuming that the stimulus package is made up of "pork," instead of necessary spending for education, healthcare, green technology development, and capital improvements.
You are right that a Great Depression might arrive once more, but you would be incorrect in assuming that it would be entirely due to government intervention. This mess was created due to lack of government intervention. At this point, it seems that all of our choices may be in the worse or worser categories. But, a compassionate government does not sit by the side and let market forces, which by their very nature, are moral-less and ethics-less (neutral), set the pace for a drastically decomposing downward slide. A benevolent government intervenes because the human costs are too high to justify sitting on the sidelines.