Posted by
M. E. Ward on Friday, January 23, 2009 12:25:51 PM
As anyone who’s done a family budget or financial plan knows, the best way to make sure your family becomes prosperous overnight is to put everything on credit. Delayed gratification is so yesterday. Instant gratification is the way of the modern era. So much so our own government has adopted “instant gratification” as the wave of the future to guarantee us all there will be a tomorrow. We’re being told that we’re in such dire straits financially that the only way out is an economic stimulus plan that mortgages our children’s future.
It’s kind of like a Father sitting the family down at the kitchen table and saying, “I want us to have everything we deserve right now, so we are going to max out our credit cards, take out a number of home equity loans and mortgages and then after your Mom and I have passed on, you can worry about paying the bills. Or you can just declare bankruptcy and move into a trailer park. Either way, what’s important is we realize it is our patriotic duty to keep spending so as to keep our nation’s economy strong. So who needs a new Blackberry or HDTV?”
That makes about as much sense as the pap we are being spoon fed by the Federal government.
Perhaps the lone voice that actually has some good ideas to jump start the economy and get us out of this economic morass without bankrupting the country is Larry Kudlow of CNBC. His basic premise is the investor class has gone on strike and because there’s no new money flowing into equity markets, there’s no new economic growth being generated by the private sector. He’s even gone so far as to suggest a two year capital gains tax holiday to entice private money back into the markets. He makes a good point. Since the Federal government is going to be buying up toxic assets and selling them at auction, they just might get more interested buyers if those investors were guaranteed a tax break on any risk they take from investing in these assets nobody wants to buy under current market conditions.
To quote from Larry’s most recent column at National Review online, “One inaugural line of Reagan’s in some sense encapsulates his philosophy: ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.’ It arguably is the most famous line of the speech. Fifteen years later, in a State of the Union message, President Bill Clinton said, ‘the era of big government is over.’ Yet Barack Obama has said that only government can solve our current economic problems.”
So big daddy Obama has just sat all us little kiddies down at the kitchen table and laid out his plan to spend us into prosperity with instant gratification. So, when you get your stimulus check in the mail, make sure you spend it on items manufactured in the United States. If you can find any that is.
(BTW: Why are we still taxing interest on savings accounts? People pay tax once when they earn the money, and then again when they save it. Why not end double taxation once and for all?)