Saturday, February 14, 2009

Stimulus?

Regardless of whether or not you believe that an economy can be 'stimulated' by government spending, it would seem that if you are trying to get out of a recession, you would spend the stimulus money now, not later. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, of the $787 billion appropriated in the final bill, $236 billion won't be spent until 2011. That's 41% of this monster. If the true nature of this bill was to stimulate the economy, $236 billion could have been cut and still provided the necessary stimulus. The truth is that this bill is a sham and will burden current and future generations with a mountain of debt. George Bush and Congress (both parties) took 8 years to dig a deep deficit hole, it has only taken Obama and Congressional Democrats days to dig a deeper one.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

I Fear for the Future

On the front page of The Ann Arbor News today there was a little box with a letter to incoming President Obama. In part the letter said:
[...]I think you deserve to be the president because you are going to do smart and good stuff, like give poor people homes and a life.
Granted this letter was from an 8 year old, but this thinking of the President as some sort of Superman is pretty pervasive, and to some degree represents the type of thinking taught in our schools today. I've seen similar comments from adults as well, which is also pretty scary. I really hope that Obama does well as President, but based on concepts and policies coming out during the transition I can't say that I'm very hopeful. Couple many bad ideas with a Congress that is even worse and I fear that a return of the Carter era 70's is quite likely, and possibly something much worse.