harmonicminer

Imagine if you took vitamins in moderation, ate a healthy diet, exercised regularly, and got enough rest.  Now, imagine you have gotten ill, due to exposure to something that has challenged your immune system, or some unexpected toxic exposure.

Imagine someone who told you that your good habits are what made you sick, that you’ve overdone all that health stuff, and you need to develop a few new vices and ease off the healthy lifestyle.  Imagine that person never mentioned the possibility of bacteria or virus as the cause of your illness, and when it was pointed out as the likely reason, simply denied that germs or toxic exposure have anything to do with being sick.

What would you think of the judgment of someone who gave you the following advice?

1)  You should stop eating a healthy diet.  Eat more fat, salt, sugar and alcohol.  And preservatives.  You need preservatives.

2)  You sleep too much.  Watch TV a couple extra hours each night, and still get up at the same time in the morning.  That’ll help.

3)  Forget the supplements.  Vitamins and minerals are overrated, and may be hurting you.  You should smoke or something.

4)  When you get well, for pity’s sake knock off the aerobic exercise and weight-lifting.  You’ll do yourself a mischief.

Is this making sense to you?  Or would you suspect that maybe your friend owned stock in a tobacco company, or had a Twinkie franchise?  Or maybe just hated you?

At a minimum, even assuming the good intentions of the advice giver, you would have to assume that he or she was ignorant to nine decimal places about how the human body actually works.  How would you feel if you could not discern whether the person giving you this advice was a fool, or actually wanted to hurt you?

So.

The Democrat Party and Obama want us to believe that the reason we are in economic hard times is because George Bush cut taxes, the stock market went UP for six years, the national economy built jobs, and unemployment went DOWN for six years.  The truth, to anyone with a smidgen of economic knowledge and who can read, is that our economic hard times are based mainly on three things:

1)  Failure to produce oil domestically, so that the oil speculators could not cause so much harm.  There is no possibility of a “speculative bubble” for something that is not in shortage to start with.

2)  Federal pressure on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac to guarantee loans to unqualified borrowers (mostly Democrat inspired, although some Republicans are also to blame…  not many, though).  While it’s easy to blame Wall Street financial shenanigans in bundling loans for resale, improperly rating securities, etc., NONE of that would have been possible without the Congressional pressure (again, largely Democrat inspired, with some exceptions) to make bad loans in the first place.

3)  Federal overspending in the last six years.  Blame here attaches to both parties.  There was often a feeling that the only way Republicans could get Democrat support for necessary spending was to approve Democrat pork, and some Republicans were pork-meisters themselves.  Pork is poison, costing far more than its “face value”, because pork distribution is used to get senators and congressmen to vote for other, far larger and more costly government programs.  When you see 100 million in pork (small potatoes, it may seem, compared to the whole budget), it may represent 10-20 billion in spending deals that the pork bought.  We had 10-20 BILLION in pork in too many of the last budget years.  Guess how many HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS in spending that pork greased?

The Democrat Party and Obama want us to believe that raising taxes on business and the wealthy, while giving money to people who pay no taxes, or only a little, will aid the economy.  (Consider: what will help people more, a secure job in a growing economy, or a $1000 federal giveaway each year?)   They want us to believe that a trillion dollars in spending, in new entitlements and government programs/giveaways, will help the economy.

No credible economist of any political stripe believes that government can tax and spend its way out of economic hard times.   Economists who know anything about it now acknowledge that tax hikes, tariff raises, and government spending lengthened the Great Depression of the 1930s, despite urban legends of being rescued by FDR’s New Deal.

That’s it.  It is deadly to make ANY tax increase during an economic downturn, especially on the class of people who MUST invest if we want the economy to grow.   It just won’t work.  Obama has shown no willingness to adjust his economic plans in the light of our current situation.

We desperately need to accelerate nuclear power plant construction AND oil drilling in the USA, off shore, in ANWAR, western shale, etc.  It is economically critical.  Obama refuses….  he wants to pursue mostly alternate energy sources, instead.  That’s more than a bit like telling the half-starved patient that he shouldn’t eat that fatty meat and mashed potatoes he can have soon, but should wait for the vegetable garden to mature next summer, so he can eat healthily.  While waiting for all that healthy food, he may die.

We have to get the federal government out of the loan business.  Social engineering, trying to get people who aren’t ready into mortgages they can’t afford, is a large part of the current problem.  The laws of economics cannot be repealed, regardless of government’s “good intentions”.  Those laws are as reliable as gravity, and as unforgiving.

Federal spending is so far out of control that it’s difficult to imagine how to reduce it.  Yet we must try.  A place to start:  rigidly enforce a simple rule that spending may not increase more than 2% from one year to the next.  Period.  Regardless of what entitlement program must have its growth slightly restricted.  If we do that, our typical growth rate in the economy (on the order of 3.5% to 4%) will allow us to simply grow out of the problem, in about 20 years.

I wonder if, instead of living a healthy lifestyle, and instead of going to the doctor when ill, Obama just buys a nice box of leeches and drains a little blood to remove the “ill humours”.   That’s about the level of intellectual integrity to be found in his economic plans.  He’s going to be tacking a LOT of leeches onto the national economy, if he gets his way.  As I recall, leeches are believed to have accelerated the death of George Washington.  If Obama’s economic strategy is tried, bills with Washington’s picture may be the only ones we have left.

Tags: economy, leeches, Obama