The pork of the new economic stimulus package that passed through the House last week is certainly hefty of a price tag. Almost 900 billion dollars, and let’s face it, while it does contain spending for infrastructure, benefits for the unemployed, and tax cuts for business and families, it contains a lot of the new buzz word in politics, pork. The same stuff President Obama and John McCain vowed to rid the government of.
So where’s the beef?
The fact is, economists will argue until they’re blue over how to stimulate an economy. The favorite conservative approach, is from top to bottom, usually in the form of tax cuts, capital gains cuts, and other cuts to business taxes and such, allowing businesses to hire workers, spur purchases, etc. The favorite liberal approach, is from bottom to top, pouring money into public works projects, increasing welfare and unemployment benefits, social services, and other projects. Both have been employed in the past, and both have seen mixed results.
So the question is, in the face of another recession, what course of action must our government take?
Now conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh actually said it the best last week. He proposed a deal in which Obama would take more than half of a trillion dollars and spend it his way, and the Republicans would take under a half of a trillion dollars and spend it their way. Compare the two, and see which stimulates the economy faster. Seems fair, right?
Personally, it is hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of political things. It is not that I don’t try or want to understand, it is that the picture is so large, that the macromanagement is so robust, that when you attempt to understand where trillions of dollars goes in a fiscal year, you end up loosing focus on the little things you find unnecessary to the big picture, the pork if you will. The problem with government is that it has gotten so big that it is simply unable to micromanage every aspect of itself, and in doing so lets a lot of money and resources out through the cracks.
What is harder for me to completely understand is how each form of stimulus should work. I don’t believe this country is as socialist as everyone likes to believe, although I do protest the amount of money we are essentially wasting into people who are just sucking it up and not putting it back into the economy. Welfare, unemployment, they sound good from the outside, but each year we seem to be moving towards removing all responsibility of living from every person, moving towards that feared communism-type state where the government tells you how to live, what to eat, and where to work, because they pay for everything and manage your lives. It is a scary thought, and a very real thought in some countries. The problem is, people like this form of pseudo-slavery. People want to have their lives managed by someone else much like their parents did to them as a child. I don’t blame them in some ways, not having to deal with the hardships and issues in life makes everything so much easier, but then can you really call it your life? Because at the same time, human beings crave more, they want to be on top of each other, better than each other, and that is what this country was built on, being free, being free to decide how we live and what we do.
Obama came from Chicago, and many parts of Chicago are not great. Being a community leader as he was probably meant having to talk to and help a lot of poor folks, but how many of those poor folks are poor because there was nothing else they could do? How many lower class folks in the country are poor on purpose? There are genuinely needy families out there, there are disabled people, there are single mothers and single fathers, there are homeless and there are poor children. Many of those people should be helped, and are helped every day by public and private organizations, churches, and very generous people. A lot of people however, are lazy, irresponsible, fiscally irresponsible, and unwilling to help themselves or their families, and those people are the ones who are on public programs for money and social services, they even go to great lengths to find loopholes to get more money from them, or get in them in the first place if they shouldn’t have been otherwise. The housing and mortgage crisis highlighted this very well, an example of why banks should not have been giving loans and mortgages to people who could not (or would not) ever pay them back fully. The result is a very deep recession in which now government has decided they need to step in and rescue everyone, but at what cost? For that matter, who do you rescue? The same people that got us into this mess, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The financials? Wall Street?
What Congress needs to be doing is to be coming up with a plan that is truly bi-partisan, Obama needs to be delivering on his word in the campaign that he’d work with Republicans to do what is best for us all, not for his “bros”, or Chicago, or whatever/whomever he seems to be looking out for. I fear however that even though I don’t always agree with Rush, I do agree, Obama seems to be after taking this country as far-left as possible, to a point where no right turn can ever happen again.
Incidently, the one semi-conservative talk radio host I do enjoy listening to is Jim Vicevich, here in Connecticut on WTIC1080. He isn’t exactly conservative as Rush, but his show aims to kind of straddle the middle of the spectrum and at least promote free-thinking rather than “sheep-on-the-bandwagon” thinking that most people have about politics, usually the people who don’t engage in politics and just swing behind the winner. http://radioviceonline.com/
tl;dr: Around Lefts, Never Relax. Around Rights, Never Relax. Around Centrists, Ask for Directions.