Lies My Government Told Me
The Daily Diatribe:
The dog ate my homework and the Congressional Office of Management and Budget said that healthcare reform will reduce the deficit by 136 billion dollars over the next ten years. Both are big, hairy lies. The only thing that surprises me is that the media buys it and tries to sell it to you.
Let me point out just a couple of things that make me wonder why anyone would believe what comes out of government officials regarding the economy. We don’t have to go back that far either. I want everybody to go back to December of 2008. Barack Obama was the President-elect and President Bush, through Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, with Obama’s full support was pressing for a 780 billion dollar stimulus package. The proceeds were to be used to buy up the toxic assets that were on the banks balance sheets. Without that bailout, we were told that the United States would be in serious, serious trouble. Unemployment would go to 25%, but if we pass the stimulus bill and buy up the bad assets, unemployment would not go past 8 percent. That’s what we were told. Congress passed the stimulus.
In March of 2010, unemployment is at 9.7% and none of the TARP money was spent on the toxic assets. Not one dollar to date has been spent on those assets. In other words, the banks still sit on those toxic assets. They are still on their respective balance sheets. So, what did they do with 780 billion dollars, and, oh, by the way, since the toxic assets are still there, how come the banks are still there. Wasn’t the whole notion of “too big to fail” about saving the banks from themselves.
All my colleagues in the media would not give me an answer then nor now. I kept asking how bad would it be if we let the private markets settle our issues. Well, we would lose Merrill-Lynch, we would lose the Bank of America, we would lose Fannie and Freddie. All God’s chillun would be homeless selling pencils on the street corner.
I would point out that the truth is we will never know what would have happened because we didn’t do it. Here is what I do know. We are still here even with the toxic assets. Even with the bailout, the stock market went down 54% before staging a comeback. It is still down 25% from its high. And, worst of all, the government has runaway deficit spending and they are in charge of almost 50% of the economy. With Healthcare passage, they will be in charge of over 60% of the private economy.
Now, I don’t know about you. The economic stuff never scared me. I have seen it before and I know that left to its own devices, America would have figured it out. There would have been some pain, but the private sector would have figured out how to put money where it gets treated very well over time. Here is what scares me. The government is running things, and it’s fixing to get worse. Now, that is scary.
So, I am going to coin a new phrase. I am going to call this the Elmer Fudd economy because all of us need to be “vewwy, vewwy afwaid.”
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