What these kids NEED to be worrying about is how they're going to pay the gargantuan debt they will "inherit" from this administration. In ten years' time... just the interest on that debt will be 900 BILLION annually. That's like paying a Porkulus out-of-pocket every year.
Buh II doubled the national debt to pay for tax breaks for billionaires and two land wars in Asia, too
Obama is going to double it again trying to get us out of this economic disaster.
Like you, I have suspect that this Keynesian cure will likely kill this nation in the longer run, anyway.
But had Bush II,
and then Obama failed to react to save the fiancial system, this nation would have gone belly up last year.
Bankruptsy delayed is bankruptsy avoided.
The Keynesian method depends upon consumer confidence. In theory, the economy is a big, spinning plate that has slowed down. So, you nudge it with an influx of cash, demand picks up, the need to produce supply puts people back to work, everybody has a little money to spend, and the plate spins on its own.
Problem is twofold... First, Porkulus didn't stimulate consumer spending because too little of it reached consumer hands. Second, EVERYTHING Obama wants to do, deflates employer confidence. Between Obamacare, Cap-and-Tax, Cardcheck, and progressive taxing policies... producers can't make a coherent business plan. It's a serious break in the chain of events that needs to occur if we want the plate to start spinning again.
As far as the spending of Bush and Obama is concerned... Bear in mind that Bush left office with a 27% approval rating. Now, that didn't happen just because the 20% of Americans who self-identify as liberals didn't like him. It happened because his spending and his growth of government was UNACCEPTABLE to 73% of Americans.
That said, Bush was yesterday. And while I don't agree that the financial meltdown was his fault, considering the fact that he repeatedly called upon Congress to repair Fannie and Freddie, and I don't agree that his refusal to squeeze more cash out of the top 10 percent of taxpayers who are already paying 71% of taxes.... we have to worry about today. Obama coming along and doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the very things we didn't like about George Bush is NOT going to be met with better success. The criticism will naturally amplify just as the spending has. That shouldn't surprise anyone.
Bankruptcy delayed is not necessarily bankruptcy avoided. It didn't work for GM or Chrysler. We gave them a ton of money and basically just ended up buying the UAW a couple of car companies.
Meanwhile, taxpayers and bondholders took it in the teeth. And the States are already running out of all that Porkulus money. The make-work jobs were temporary, and all the "saved" government jobs are unfunded again. But the next two generations are going to have to PAY for that year's reprieve.
The 700 billion in TARP was
supposed to "unclog the arteries" of our lending system. It was supposed to remove the bad debt. Instead, it's simply been handed off to the financial industry to keep it afloat. Lending still isn't cooking even if you could somehow get producers interested in growth. Worse, the problems which caused the housing crisis still have not been corrected. Fannie and Freddie, for example, have been nationalized and currently have an open checkbook on our treasury, empty as it is.
Every bit of this spending and the failure to address the economic disaster looming on the horizon regarding unfunded entitlement liability is destroying our ability to revitalize this economy. We've got an active volcano under our feet... and Obama is pissing around with yet another government-funded entitlement.
The 2008 election was just a disaster from start to finish. We needed a REAL leader. We don't have time for idealized utopian dreamers. We needed practical solutions that could be implemented in time to save this country from decades of political pandering and stupidity. And now, we're going to have to somehow manage to hold on and hope to God that SOMEONE, who's not an abject idiot, will come along by 2013 and lead us out of this mess. Clearly, Obama is not going to pull his head out of his ass.
