- If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you've
chosen to sit amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don't turn to
them for help when you can't figure out of any of the answers. They may
all tell you the same thing, but they'll all be wrong.
-
-
- That's the situation President Obama finds himself in
today in the White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall
Street con men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they have
been giving him since last January has left the country still mired in
deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending and unemployment
still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of bottoming out and
starting to recover, the economy is threatening to fall a second time,
to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has turned to the same rotten
advisors for answers.
-
- A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he
was in China off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a "double-dip" recession.
That's fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was?
Not that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.
-
- This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert
Hoover started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset
of the Great Depression in 1930.
-
- Clearly the American government needs to do just the
opposite of worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has
seen to date has been the result of government funding-the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales crashed,
and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home tax credit,
home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions of dollars poured
into so-called "shovel-ready" state and local projects like roads,
schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as a million jobs, but the
economy lost many times that many jobs over the same period.
-
- The problem with these stimulus programs is that they
are inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one million
jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200 billion (assuming
that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to mollify Republicans,
consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half actual federal spending,
and that this federal spending was spread evenly over a two-year period,
that's $200,000 per job!
-
- If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury
and in his Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary
to initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people-people who would have then spent their money
on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the bottom up.
-
- Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point!
The country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It's
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama's financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you're worried about deficits,
Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is costing
one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to Afghanistan or Iraq.
And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over there. That's $100 billion
a year right there-enough to hire four million unemployed Americans back
here at home!
-
- This president is well on the way to rescuing President
Hoover from history's crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the country.
We haven't started calling them that, but Naming Day isn't far off.
-
- At least Hoover didn't mire the country in
another war while the economy was collapsing around him.
-
- President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His
fans, and I was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November,
- are mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning
on him. My union friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just
shake their heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist
friend, retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time
in Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to Obama's
former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting Obama's handling
of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly Obama cannot continue
to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in Congress and expect to
be re-elected in 2012.
-
- Indeed, if he doesn't toss the crooks and charlatans
in the Fed, the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and
doesn't stop listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he
won't even have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.
-
- President Obama, aren't you tired of being an embarrassment
to your friends and family? Aren't you tired of being mocked by your foes?
-
- Come on. We're sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be
a leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and daring.
End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs program, issue
an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise taxes on the wealthy
to back where they were in the 1960s, and let's get the country moving
forward again.
- __________________________
-
- DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
|
