Moving at the Speed of Light! Obama on a Rampage!
March 25, 2009
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help” will be multiplied by at least 100,000 additional bureaucratic voices if President Barack Obama’s first budget has its way; and it probably will considering that Congress cannot wait to “help” even more.
Now we know why Mr. Obama admired Ronald Reagan for being a “transformational” figure. He wants to transform Reagan’s transformation. During President Reagan’s first term, inspired by his quotation that leads this editorial and an existing economic downturn that was in many ways worse than today’s (certainly so far in terms of unemployment and interest rates), he decreased non-defense employment by 100,000, cut (discretionary) domestic spending rather than increased it, and (with the help of tax cuts) let the economy hit bottom so that it could bounce back—which it did—rather than prop up failing firms. Facing a worse stock drop in 1987, he again let the market fall—and it came right back, in weeks rather than months or years.
President Obama is doing exactly the opposite. He is spending like a drunken sailor, micro-managing the economy, hiking taxes on potential new investors and increasing the number of government experts “here to help.” So far, the results have been opposite too. Instead of recovering, markets keep trending lower, only declining by more during the Great Depression. Looming behind are trillions in liquidity dollars created by the Fed which no one knows how to drain even if recovery should take place. It is early but clear that the president is trying to skate uphill against the history of the past century. That began with unbridled optimism that the government experts could manage markets but ended with a decades-long depression cured only by World War II, the collapse of central planning in fascist, communist and socialist nations, and stagflation and imminent bankruptcy of entitlements in the U.S.
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