Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Our Toxic Government Wants To Do More

George Will today in WaPo with my comments following below the star line.

Will begins - - -

With the braying of 328 yahoos -- members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate the legal earnings of a small, unpopular group -- still reverberating, the Obama administration yesterday invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government.

This latest plan to unfreeze the financial system came almost half a year after Congress shoveled $700 billion into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, $325 billion of which has been spent without purchasing any toxic assets.

TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden.

That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."

Another embarrassing auditor of American misgovernment is China, whose premier has rightly noted the unsustainable trajectory of America's high-consumption, low-savings economy.

He has also decorously but clearly expressed sensible fears that his country's $1 trillion-plus of dollar-denominated assets might be devalued by America choosing, as banana republics have done, to use inflation for partial repudiation of improvidently incurred debts.

The rest of Will’s column’s here.

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My Comments:

You can’t blame China for worrying when it sees the Fed print more than a trillion dollars. Just like that! Just the way Monopoly money’s printed.

On top of that, President Obama, who’s heading a government that can’t begin to meet its current financial obligations unless the Fed prints what amounts to Monopoly money, steps forward and says he wants the government to pay the medical bills of 40 million + uninsured Americans.

On the other hand, Obama doesn’t want to ease government restrictions that make it all but impossible to build nuclear power plants.

Sure they’d create jobs and add to the tax base while providing mostly clean, domestic produced energy.

When energy’s produced here we need to buy less foreign oil. That means more of our dollars stay at home, our balance of payments improve and, other things being equal, our dollar strengthens.

All of that would be good for America. But the Greenies who supported Obama don’t want nuclear power plants and he’s not going to go against them.

Printing money, taking on huge government debt and sponsoring new programs that will add more huge debt to the backs of taxpayers is fine with Obama.

Too bad it’s not fine for America.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

John,

It even is worse than what you have written, if that is possible. This administration is creating a major currency crisis, and I don't think most of your readers really understand what happens when a calamity like this occurs.

In the late 1990s, there was a major currency crisis in Indonesia, and people found almost overnight that their money could buy only about half of what it did before as the price of imports greatly increased. Right now, we are importing huge amounts of foreign goods, from high-ticket items such as automobiles to basic consumer goods you see at Wal-Mart.

For many years, we have been sending foreigners dollars, and they have sent us goods, and then put that money into U.S. government bonds. Now that it is clear that the government has no intention of paying back those bonds in real money (as opposed to the printed Zimbabwe stuff), foreigners are going to demand both that they be given real goods with those dollars, and they will refuse to lend us any more money.

On that Day of Reckoning, which surely is coming, we are going to find prices skyrocketing, and the government will blame businesses and impose price controls as well as capital controls. On the supply side, this administration has been demonizing the few profitable industries left, and even though we need these industries for a real recovery, Obama will destroy them, too.

In short, the last thing this administration and Congress want are real economic recoveries such as the one we had in the mid-1980s. The government does not want Americans to be able to live their lives independent of the state anymore. They want high rates of unemployment and a politicized economy so that people who want to be able to work will "cooperate" with political authorities.

In short, the "American experiment" is over. Done.

I know this is terribly pessimistic, but there can be no explanation of what Obama and Congress currently are doing except to say this destruction is deliberate. Yes, there is economic ignorance and arrogance involved, but in the end, it always leads to more political control over our lives.