Remember when you were 17? You blew off anybody who knew more about the world than you knew. Unblocking those adolescent eyes and ears was vital to growing up. But there are people who see no need for learning. The naturally brilliant ignore anything that contradicts their natural brilliance.
Take Democrat Senator Charles Schumer.
He refers to those who question the $787 billion Obama-Pelosi “stimulus” bill as the “chattering class” that doesn’t understand that “the American people really don’t care” about “porky amendments.” Yet polls do show that two-thirds of Americans want more tax cuts and less spending. Only slightly more than a third supported the stimulus bill at all.
But omniscient ones haven’t time for such “chatter.” How could anyone who disagrees with Barry, Nancy, and Chuckie be worth listening to?
Congress has voted to waste the wealth of several generations of Americans in order to improve an economy which will improve on its own. In The Wealth of Nations, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith observed,
To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.
Though Smith has been repeatedly proved correct, a herd of economically illiterate donkeys, boasting that they know better, has plopped forth a huge pungent pile of imaginary “gold and silver.”
Peter Ferrara, former member of President Reagan’s Office of Policy Development, points out that “what we suffer with today is not the worst economy since the Great Depression, but the worst economy since Jimmy Carter—the last time liberals were dominant politically and intellectually.” Today’s dreamy-eyed idealists have as tenuous a grip on the situation as the bunch that once crowded around Dr. Peanut.
The stimulus will help fashion the biggest government expansion in the history of civilization. The stimulus and the bailouts assure high future inflation. And on top of both travesties rests yet another layer of complexity.
Follow closely.
To finance stratospheric debt-spending, the Treasury will again hit up our buddy across the Pacific, Wee Ohn Yu. But since China already holds a ton of U.S. government debt, it will not finance the entire stimulus. If other foreign and domestic investors do not pick up the entire difference, Secretary Geithner will need another buyer for his new bonds.
Here comes the tricky part.
The Federal Reserve Bank will borrow from the Treasury to buy bonds that the Treasury will use to borrow from the Fed in order to finance debt that the Treasury will assume in order to spend money that neither entity can back up with anything but its word.
Bernie Madoff was arrested for this sort of thing.
Furthermore, to prevent high future inflation from becoming hyperinflation, Obama’s advisors will correctly advise that higher interest rates and taxation are ways to bleed out vast amounts of money which reckless policies put into circulation. The President will get his wish to increase already disproportionate taxes on the wealthy in the interest of “fairness” to the “less fortunate.” Good luck with that. Increased taxation will intensify the decay of a once again weakening economy.
All this is of no consequence to the enlightened ones, who will command the economic gods to repackage stagnation as “fairness.” And even before the dust settles—maybe very soon, if nutcase Senator Barbara Boxer has her way—Democrats will also seek to fulfill their promise of industry-crippling energy regulation and taxation schemes aimed at reversing no-longer-occurring global warming that we didn’t cause and cannot prevent.
Alas, expecting “progressive” intellectuals to abandon leftist agenda-driven madness for sound reasoning is like asking Reid and Pelosi to give up sneering.
Later this year, when $1.6 trillion that is currently parked in “cash” (precious metals, CDs, money market funds, etc.) begins to flow into stocks, markets will begin to recover and some time later an overall economic recovery will commence. The recovery will happen not because of anything which the smirking donkeys have done. In fact, little of this liberal agenda stink-bomb stimulus will have been spent by the time the recovery starts. Some of the spending won’t even occur until 2016.
Already we see teensie-weensie signs of economic hope: January’s increase in retail sales, reversing a six-month decline, and a slight down-tick in new jobless claims. But because of the astronomical new spending called for in the “stimulus,” modeled after FDR’s and Dr. Peanut’s failed policies, recovery will be slow compared to the robust times that followed past recessions. Until voters stop letting inmates run the asylum, we’ll have malaise-à-la-Carter Phase II, complete with elevated unemployment and inflation—conditions which should not surprise us after allowing stubborn, all-about-them, know-it-all children to play with adult toys.
