Why I am Angry

The Kansas City Star’s front page article recently was about anger of town hall meeting participants. They only partially got right why people are angry in the first place. I agree that many people are acting rather stupidly by comparing Obama to Hitler, but our anger is very real and the actions of a class of morons should not diminish that fact. I am also disturbed that the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has the gall to call the anger an astro-turf movement. There is nothing fake about the anger; let me tell you why I am angry, and I don’t need some schmuck from a right-wing organization to coach me either:

We, the people, feel we no longer have a voice. We call our elected representatives in Washington, D.C. to tell them in overwhelming numbers that we do not support TARP or a stimulus plan and they refuse to listen and pass those measures anyway. We are suffering through a terrible economic downturn and are cutting back our own spending habits while the Washington, D.C. crowd continues to dole out the pork. They give themselves a pay raise while millions of jobs are being lost. They decide that health care reform is needed immediately, which I agree it is, but they try and ram through complex legislation that they have no time to read, no one really understands and it does not even include the basics like tort reform. It appears that over and over again, legislation is being written by special interests for special interests and not for the people. Meanwhile our national debt continues to increase to an unfathomable $12 trillion, the budget deficit for this year alone is nearly $2 trillion, and we pay over $300 billion a year in interest on debt. A recent Kansas City Star article stated that the latest forecast from 2010 to 2019 estimated an additional $9 trillion budget deficit for a potential national debt of more than $21 trillion. How are we supposed to dig ourselves out of that hole? Washington, D.C. is not making tough decisions for fear of the political ramifications; rather they continue to pass legislation that is dubiously funded by increasing the taxes on the “rich” while ignoring the very real long-term fiscal consequences. They are intent on a carbon cap and trade system, which some have argued will not do anything against “global warming” and it gives away most of the initial credits instead of charging for them (again special interests and their influence). They institute a cash-for-clunkers program that is not well administered and is nothing more than a car bubble akin to the housing bubble. At a time when more and more people are getting back to basics they seem to be running in the opposite direction.

I have no ties to the “invisible hand” supposedly behind all the “manufactured” outrage. I am an independent voter that despises the republican and democrat parties. I worry what the future has in store for my children because I see that they will have it very hard if we continue down the road we are currently on. Our elected officials consistently refuse to change course. It is simply unsustainable to continue to run this country the way they are doing. It is not working and the rest of the world is beginning to see that. And I refuse for my children to be sold into debt bondage because of the ambivalence, ignorance, and arrogance of our elected officials. They seem to be more concerned with getting their names on bridges and buildings than doing the right thing.

Gee, I wonder why we are angry.

“Your silence gives consent.” - Plato

Why the Stimulus is a Bad Idea

I may just be a simpleton from "fly over country" who sees this stimulus as an utter waste of money. Only about $100 billion is for true infrastructure. You might as well as throw the rest in the fire along with the TARP money. That’s trillions of dollars we will never see any benefit from and that my children will have to pay for now. Why is no one asking how this largesse will be paid for? They simply take it on face value that we need to rush headlong into unwisely spending nearly a trillion dollars. The same crap was pulled with TARP and the Patriot Act and look at where it got us. I am tired of the fear mongering. I thought that would be over when President Bush left office. However, President Obama obviously took a page out of Bush’s playbook and is using fear to get this travesty of a spending bill passed.

What will creating a massive spending government spending bubble actually do? The way I see it, once the money is spent the jobs go away. Government spending as a means to create jobs is not sustainable from my perspective, especially when you have to borrow that money in the first place. How does the stimulus provide long-term sustainable job growth, if at all? That is not change I can believe in.

A good number of jobs were created under during the Clinton Administration because there was innovation in the form of the internet boom. Innovation leads to positive job growth. Under the Bush Administration there were far fewer jobs created because there was no innovation behind the government’s deficit spending. The majority of the stimulus is deficit spending. Little in the stimulus package is geared towards innovation. Sure there is a portion directed to renewable energy and increasing broadband accessibility, but the vast majority of the $800+ billion package is directed to short-term jobs with absolutely no innovation.

The whole idea of getting back to where we were is ridiculous. It was all artificial in the first place. Just when we are finally coming to our senses after decades of spending like sailors in a whore house and now everyone wants to once again spend money no one has. Have we learned nothing? How can that possibly be a good idea when we have so much debt in the first place and we are nowhere close to addressing the long-term fiscal problems associated with social programs such as Medicare?

My gut tells me that this is a bad idea and we will regret it. I look at it and I shake my head because it seems common sense has left the building. You can quote all the economists you want, cite all the job creation numbers from one president to another, and compare it to Sweden or Japan, but ask yourself if you can truly make those apple to apple comparisons. Something tells me that the situation we are in is far worse, much deeper, and far more complex than any of those other situations. Throwing money at it is not necessarily the answer to every problem. Taking a step back and coming up with the right response is always better than merely responding quickly.

We need to feel some true pain. And an unemployment rate of 7.6% is not true pain (yes, those without a job would disagree, but let’s be realistic and look at historic jobless rates and we must also consider ourselves fortunate when looking at the state of the rest of world). All we are doing is providing temporary pain relief but not looking at the symptoms. We want to give aspirin when we may have to amputate a leg.

Please keep in mind I am no economist, I am just a simple civil/environmental engineer who has not knowingly cheated on his taxes so obviously I am not qualified to have made any of the comments above.

Photo by my daughter. Winter weather in Iowa.