Amateur Hour

Is it idiocy, naivete, ignorance or lunacy that drives the administration’s economic policies? I’ll reluctantly give them a pass for the original TARP package because that was driven by the Bush White House but with eager participation by many in the current leadership. Each attempt to address a sector of the economy seems larger and less effective than those that preceded it. We’ve migrated from discussing hundreds of billions of dollars to nonchalantly speaking of trillions. The national bank account is overdrawn, the promises made by the government to our citizens are largely unfunded, and those who have been lending us the funds for this spending binge are becoming antsy. So, how do I really feel about the administration and its congressional co-conspirators? Please play. Sally Ann Howe captures my sentiments with uncanny precision.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQDiKGRut80


So, the President has proposed a “new” stimulus package partially funded by TARP funds that have been returned by affected financial institutions (it’s probably illegal-funds allocated for one purpose cannot be diverted for another). If you were to examine the first stimulus package ($868 B—chicken feed), you might note that an extraordinary portion of the funds were targeted for governmental agencies and NGO’s who provide “services” under the auspices of government watchdogs. Because the government’s reporting data are unclear, it is difficult to ascertain just how many jobs were “created or saved” by the initial stimulus of 2009. In addition, the dearth of specificity in the data makes it impossible to identify if those “created and saved jobs” were in the private sector or the public realm. I have no facts (they won’t produce them), but I suspect that if we could acquire hard data, we would discover that the overwhelming beneficiaries of Stimulus I are public sector entities.

To date, only about forty per cent (40%) of Stimulus I has been distributed, and yet the administration is aggressively promoting a second round. To me, an humble old country boy, it seems as if the inmates were running the asylum. Their modus operandi appears to follow this pattern: declare a crisis, hastily construct a massive unintelligible bill, pass it quickly in the dark of night, and blame the Bush administration. After the new legislation proves to be inadequate or ineffective, then declare another crisis and repeat the pattern.

Meanwhile the deficit grows geometrically as the funds for each “crisis-solving” piece of legislation is passed. There are only three areas of true growth under this Obama/Reid/Pelosi formula. They are: the debt, the deficit, and government. The private sector, meanwhile, is either stagnant or shrinking. The only segments that have consistently demonstrated growth in the last three quarters are healthcare and the sale of firearms and ammo (maybe commodities especially gold). So, the Administration’s driving purpose appears to be that it wants to throw money at every perceived problem—something like ‘whack-a-mole.’ And government continues to grow. I titled this piece “Amateur Hour” because the approach in Washington is nonsensical and counterintuitive, but I wish it were the “Gong Show” so that I could bang the magic twanger and get them off the stage.

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