[StBernard] Houston, we have a problem

[Westley Annis]

The High Cost of the Stimulus
by Ross Mackenzie

On precisely the day Barack Obama signed into law the 
most gargantuan economic measure in the nation's peace-
time history (White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel 
termed it "the most major, sweeping, comprehensive 
legislation as it relates to economic activity ever") 
-- at almost precisely the moment of his pen-strokes 
-- the stock market's hope balloon went "bang!" 

The Dow fell to its bear-market low. In a cascade of 
awful economic news, the market had struggled to hold 
on. But the signs weren't good. It fell on the day of 
the inauguration of a man who had campaigned as the 
embodiment of an idea called hope. It fell on the day 
his tax-challenged treasury secretary rolled out his 
salvational plan. Then, at the signing, it fell again. 
Said The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, with gold 
pushing toward its all-time high (up 9 percent this 
year, with the Dow down 14 percent): "The rising gold 
price says investors are starting to freak out over 
governments' response to the credit crunch."

The market is testifying to the difficulty of keeping 
hope alive. And to borrow the understatement Apollo 
XIII astronaut Jim Lovell gave the language, "Houston, 
we have a problem."

Again on the day of the signing, these things also 
happened:

-- Chrysler and General Motors begged for $21 billion 
in additional taxpayer dollars to keep from going 
toes-up.

-- Word came that Lloyds of London may follow G.M., 
et al., down bankruptcy's road.

-- China, the holder of $900 billion in U.S. Treasury 
bills alone, bought in big time to one of the world's 
premier gold-mining companies.

-- Roland Burris -- the joke now occupying Obama's 
seat in the joke called the Senate -- insisted in the 
face of calls for his resignation that he did not 
misspeak to investigators about his communications 
with Illinois' (former) joke of a governor.

-- Hugo Chavez won a referendum effectively crowning 
him tin-pot dictator for life in Venezuela, one of our 
major sources of imported oil.

-- Pakistan conceded the inevitable and sanctioned 
Sharia law in the country's jihadist-held Swat Valley.

-- Kansas halted taxpayer refunds because it is out 
of cash, and California continued giving refunds in 
the form of IOUs.

-- After a very public display of drunken incoherence 
at a meeting of the world's leading economies, Japan's 
finance minister resigned.

-- It was revealed that following passage of the 600-
page stimulus bill, wherein Congress restricted 
private-sector executive pay, Congress acquiesced to 
its own annual pay raise. Shameless members of 
Congress from both parties then prepped for junkets 
to exotic locales here and abroad to -- you know -- 
fact-find and confer.

And that's just a partial listing. Houston, we have a 
problem that is huge, vast and broadly economic but 
not exclusively so. These days, we hear hardly a word 
about terror and what the administration just ended 
called The Long War.

For an economy in freefall or meltdown or whatever, 
Obama our secular savior -- in concert with the Demo-
cratic congressional elite -- has advanced a stimulus 
package larger than any single element of Franklin 
Roosevelt's New Deal. In doing so, they evidently are 
following the advice of progressive Princeton economist 
(and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman, who be-
lieves FDR's policies didn't end the Great Depression 
but extended it until the onset of World War II because 
FDR didn't spend enough.

Obama shares FDR's impulse that throwing federal money 
at a depression is the way to tame it. Yet spending
rarely works. Tax-cutting usually does -- as Presidents 
Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan (three times), and Bush II 
demonstrated. Obama does not share their belief in the 
virtue of cutting taxes to strengthen the economy. Nor 
does he share, notably, Reagan's abiding optimism. Talk-
ing grimly about imminent catastrophe, Obama sounds 
more like Dr. Doom.

The problem we have is this.

Americans in the past 12 months have lost $13 trillion 
in the stock and housing markets. Their debt burden 
includes $2.6 trillion owed on vehicles and credit 
cards and $10 trillion owed on home mortgages. Most 
of these good people have no confidence in the economy. 
Most have done nothing wrong except to buy into the 
federally promoted debt culture for things they couldn't 
afford and didn't need -- a culture wherein the federal 
government now proposes to bail them out with money it 
doesn't have either. The government can manufacture 
such money only through devices that will inflate the 
dollar -- thus diminishing its value down the road, 
along with the value of dollar-denominated nest-eggs.

In the first month of his administration, Barack Obama 
has exhausted nearly all his bipartisan goodwill largely 
on social programs long coveted by heavy-breathing 
leftists -- programs that will cut few substantive taxes 
and create few durable jobs. Perhaps he has taken a leaf 
from the notebook of Stuart Chase -- a New Dealer who 
wrote upon his return from a trip to the Soviet Union: 
"Why should Russia have all the fun remaking a world?" 
Yet the fun and havoc of change come at high costs in 
broken lives and broken balloons of hope.

Oh, and we've hardly mentioned (or heard Obama mention) 
islamofascist terror -- and its relentless, insidious, 
ambitions on the West.