Friday, January 30, 2009

What help?

Once upon a time there was economic turmoil. An unpopular President was turned out and a new messianic figure was installed and immediately went to work. That time (1932), President Roosevelt gave us the WPA, CCC et al, an alphabet soup of Federal Agencies and their accompanying regulations. The Federal Government expanded exponentially. The results are instructive. After 8 years of this furious action, the unemployment rate was still over 17% (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Based upon this result, there is no reason to for any of our elected officials believe that this package will have the desired impact.
But they plod on under the same plan: The Government extracts money from the economy, passes it through the Federal bureaucracy and (re)distributes it back in the economy under their rules. The result is more debt, the amount of money is reduced by the mechanics of the government distribution, and there are more regulations to stifle industry.
The answer is to spend less money at every level of government. There is a war that the incumbent promised to stop (now that will take 16 months), there is an endless list of things that the government is involved in that it shouldn’t be doing and our politicians all have their pet projects which should be investigated. The list of expenditures involved in this package should be made public in excruciating detail. The public must be made aware of how these funds are spent.

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