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"A Play for Power"
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Doo-doo economics!
Folks, I finally get it.
I know, I know, some of you thought it would never happen, but it did. After listening over and over to Obama's February 24 budget speech to Congress, it finally sank in. Instead of voodoo economics, he's offering us doo-doo economics.
The man said, "The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for. And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before.
In short, the President said that we are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education - importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy, not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools. He added, "Well, a day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here."
Just damn ... my hands are sore from clapping! As they say down south, "who woudda thunk it?" Who woudda thunk it, indeed!
Who in their right mind would have ever thought that the basis of all our economic ills was a lack of wind mills and solar panels ... the fact that everyone isn't covered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield or that hundreds of thousands of high school drop outs don't get good jobs or a free pass to the college of their choice.
Who would have ever thought that green energy, free healthcare and free college tuition was the answer ... that our problems came from our failure to spend, not our failure to save.
Who would have ever thought that economic salvation would come to us if we only loosened the government's purse strings and this year spent $1.75 trillion, or 12.3 percent of the overall economy, on vast new investments in the big three: health care, energy and education?
But, as they say on TV, that's not all. The president's proposed budget also includes:
$1.7 million "for a honey bee factory" in Weslaco, Texas? (I suppose nothing takes out the "sting" of the weak economy than drinking coffee sweetened with government funded honey.)
$475,000 to build a parking garage in Provo City, Utah (Federal money for a local town's parking garage? Don't local folks usually pay for that?)
$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program that could help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past (When money is tight, how about clothing?)
$300,000 for the Montana World Trade Center (Terror alert!)
$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah (Earplugs are cheaper!)
$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi (Don't hunting licenses make money?)
$2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York (When I was a kid, I used to watch "The Six Million Dollar Man." Now, we have Wolverine.)
$332,000 for the design and construction of a school sidewalk in Franklin, Texas (Again, a local issue.)
$2 million "for the promotion of astronomy" in Hawaii (Anyone can just look up at the sky at night while on one of Hawaii's beaches.)
$1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa (If it makes better pork chops, I support this one.)
$2.5 million for the revitalization of National Parks ... hundreds of thousands to repair a lighthouse at the Outer Banks and hundreds of thousands more to digitize photos at the Wild Bill Cody Museum in Cody Wyoming.
Amazing, isn't it? Why have the republicans and El Rushbo made all of this so difficult?
Why in his column in the Washington Post just this morning Charles Krauthammer railed that at the very center of our economic near-depression is the credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry ... Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.
Krauthammer continues, "The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe."
Silly man! Didn't he hear the president? Doesn't he believe in hope and change? Doesn't he believe in the power of doo-doo and the president's ‘tax cuts' for 95% of working Americans?
I guess not, because Krauthammer concludes today's column by saying, "The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions - the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic - for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
"Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy - worthy and weighty as they may be - are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime."
Why all of this republican gloom and doom is enough to make me hang onto what little is left of my IRA instead of running out and buying a new big screen TV or some really nice rims for my Honda.