- Ernest Hemingway had today's politicians pegged while
most of them were still in short pants:
-
- "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation
of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity;
both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic
opportunists."
-
- He wrote those words during the 1940s. They are still
true.
-
- The currency is inflated. Just measured from 1967, it
is so inflated that $5.29 is required to purchase what $1 would buy in
1967. When I married about that time, my wife and I could buy three or
four big paper bags of groceries for $16 or $17. Today, you can carry $18
worth of stuff out of a supermarket in one of those little plastic bags
hooked over your little finger.
-
- Of course, a dollar in 1967 would buy only what 42 cents
would buy in 1940. Politicians and the Federal Reserve inflate the currency
by putting more and more of it into circulation. Congress runs deficits;
the Federal Reserve issues bonds to create the money to cover the government's
otherwise bad checks.
-
- Then we had the wars - World War II, the Korean War,
the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the War on Terrorism (and,
pretty soon, little Bush's Gulf War II). And those are just the ones we
were in. There were a lot of profits for defense industries and big construction
companies in those wars; as for the men who had to fight them, there were
public debt, deficits and high taxes if they were lucky enough to escape
the grave or a VA hospital.
-
- Today, many veterans cannot get proper health care. The
government cheats its retired soldiers. If they are eligible for disability
pay, it is deducted from their retired pay, though in fact they are two
separate things, both earned separately. Most Americans can't afford health
care, and it's only a matter of time before the premiums get so high that
most of them will not be able to afford insurance. We have homeless people,
jobless people and children in schools with leaky roofs and no textbooks.
The unluckier of the elderly are rotting away in some fly-by-night nursing
homes. Thousands of Americans have lost their pensions and most of their
life savings to corporate shenanigans and stock-market bubbles.
-
- But, despite all that, our president believes it is necessary
to spend $30 billion to $50 billion and God knows how many lives just to
remove a third-rate dictator 7,000 miles away. There will be some good
profits to be made on this war, but the young men and women who have to
fight it won't get any.
-
- I'm not going to try to talk you out of this war. I've
learned that a president, when he sounds the war tocsin, can convince 74
percent of the people that Jesus Christ is the devil and needs to be lynched.
-
- I do hope you realize, though, that the war is a distraction,
just as Hemingway said, to take your mind off all the real problems that
President Bush is not even trying to solve. I do hope you realize that
Bush is risking a number of very bad unintended consequences. It could
become a regional war. We could get stuck in Baghdad for years. We might
end up, if it spills over into the oil fields, with $80-a-barrel oil, which
would wreck what's left of the economy.
-
- Yes, I know, Prince Bush is saving you, just in the nick
of time, from the bloody jaws of the Lion of Baghdad. Believe that if it
makes you feel better.
-
- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
|