Thursday, February 5, 2009

Obama's Scare Tactics

Are you scared? Barack Obama wants you to be. He says that if the stimulus package as drafted by Nancy Pelosi isn’t passed, it would be a catastrophe. He says an economic downturn would occur from which America would never recover.

Horse manure!!!! My father-in-law used to say, things never get as good as people say they are going to get, but never get as bad either. The 1982 recession was worse than this. The job losses are tragic. It is bad out there. But good times will be back, and quicker than you can imagine in this day and age of instant communication and transfer of capital. Obama should be ashamed of himself. The American public deserves better than to be scared out of its wits to pass what by any measure is a traditional, Democratic spending plan, only on steroids. Do you really want your tax dollars to fund an $850,000.00 frisbee golf course?

Certainly reform is in order. Non-regulated hedge funds, indecipherable financial securities, and no-money down loans need to be curbed. I have beaten the energy issue to death and I won’t repeat it here. The biggest failure in the Bush presidency was the massive run-up of the national debt. Spending at levels that are going to come down the pike very shortly is like trying to cure an alcoholic with a case of whiskey. It won’t work.

And it will make the situation worse. The money has to come from somewhere. The government will either have to borrow it, or print it, on scales heretofore unimaginable. The result will be rampant inflation and skyrocketing interest rates. This isn’t theory, it is history and common sense. If the government borrows the money, they will be competing with the private sector for capital, and have to pay increasingly higher interest rates to sell its bonds. Trillions of dollars have already been printed up and shoved into the economy. That money has to land somewhere…and it will land in goods and services with the traditional too much money chasing too few goods.

Here are the true, scary statistics. The entire amount of goods produced by the United States economy is around $14 trillion. The national debt, as of August of 2008, was $10.6 trillion. The debt ceiling is now raised to $11.3 trillion...almost equal to one year's Gross Domestic Product. Obama, in one spending package alone, is going to spend in excess of $1 trillion, on top of the already existing record breaking national debt. This package would equal the equivelent of spending $648,000.00 every year since the birth of Christ. The debt service on the national debt is about 4.9%, or $6.86 billion, per year. The national debt currently is approaching $38,000.00 for every person in the United States, excluding illegal aliens, which is why he probably wants to grant them amnesty...sort of lightening the load. This economy will never be able to sustain that kind of debt load and service. On top of that, Obama intends to tax the most productive segments of our society to pay for it, small businesses.

Stabilizing the banking system will do more to help this economy than any stimulus the government can spend. The cure as proposed by Obama and his Congress is really what this country should be afraid of. There will be catastrophe.

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