Don’t Know Much About History?
Published 10:49 am Wednesday, February 11, 2009
It has been said that debt is only a substitute for the chains and whip of the slave master. So why is it that our new president and the Democrats Congress want to borrow massive amounts of money from China to give a $500.00 check to people who do not pay taxes so they can go to a big box store and buy produces made in China?
For all our new presidents intellect there seems to be a lack of history in his most recent decisions.
Should Mr. Obama’s educational stimulus package include a provision promoting Chinese as America’s second language so our children will be able to speak with their landlords?
It is astounding that the American taxpayer has been betrayed by its government into slavish debt to Red China, a state that is neither a friend nor ally but a savvy adversary.
It has been known for millennia that, “A small debt produces a debtor; a large one, an enemy,” Publilius Syrus, (Roman author, 1st century B.C.)
One has to wonder what they are smoking in the Rose Garden, everyone (except Washington economist) know you cannot borrow your way out of debt.
Thomas Jefferson said, “…to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”
What is most troubling however is there seems to be a willful ignorance as to the moral implications of borrowing and lending. Our nation’s hunger for instant gratification is the root cause of this financial crisis and a thorough cleansing of our national soul is surely needed.
Credit, after all, is based on the trustworthiness of a borrower. If the lender fears he will not be repaid then the lender has reason to not lend. Moreover, if the lender expects to be repaid with his own tax dollars the lender has every incentive to not lend because this is little more than government redistribution of wealth.
January saw U.S. employers eliminate 598,000 jobs, the most since the end of 1974. Yet the majority of the so-call stimulus package does little to address job creation.
However, the proper solution to job creation is an infusion of capital into the markets. A wonderful side-effect of failing businesses is that many times it opens an opportunity for smaller start-up to take their place thus infusing the economy with jobs created by entrepreneurs and innovators who find new solutions to new problems and bring them to market.
To encourage capital investment the Obama administration should lower the risk of investment by cutting capital-gains taxes or even eliminate them for the next four years. This one act would bring stimulus, hope and change into the economy.
Is this not what Obama promised? Yet, all we hear out of Washington is the congressional equivalent of Chicken Little, “The sky is falling!”
The trillion-dollar stimulus in its current form seems to predicated on big government, give-a-ways and a lack of moral judgment.
“Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people” or so said, Wendell Phillips.
