I've stored some 350 articles away in my bookmarks so that I could pull out quotes and site sources for different thoughts. I'm instead going to take just one quote from an unexpected source, Laura Linney in the acclaimed and awarded HBO mini-series John Adams: 'You don't have to quote great men just to prove that you are one.' I'm not going to use any of those articles at all. If you have a question about something relating to anything going on with the economy over the last six months post a comment or email me and I'll send you a link. I'm just going to write what I know and hope you guys take my word for it, I think I've shown in previous articles that I know what I'm talking about most of the time.
There are millions out of work. There are millions who are losing their homes. The national debt is in the trillions and there is no end in sight. As earlier stated in a different blog, nothing seems like it will get better before it gets worse. That is true. I find that we are in a situation in which we have broken the rules and must now be grounded. Of course our GDP is going to fall, it was too high for the wrong reasons. With the end of the Bretton-Woods Gold Standard in 1971 we started working with fake money. You remember Y2K? That's because of fake money that only exists in computers and only slightly less fake money that exists only on paper. Yeah our GDP is in the trillions and not the billions, that's great. How much is each dollar worth compared to the old days? Practically nothing.
We have started giving companies money from the taxpayers because they are going bankrupt. Nevermind that the taxpayers are already bankrupt from financing two military occupations that are neither legal not necessary. Not only does this go against the veryeconomic fiber that we used to defeat the Communists just 18 years ago, but it falls in line with our fallen former foes. With the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 (it was already pretty much dead after other congressional actions from the decade prior), the banks themselves lost their minds and now we are seeing that not only are our banks, investment companies, homes, major companies, and nation deep in the red, but we have also bankrupted the rest of the world since we have done such a great job of both inserting our companies into foreign markets and making the dollar the international currency of business.
Now the Democrats in Congress are taking a bad bill from President Obama and making it worse. The little bit of Republican support that Obama built up in his three visits with congressional leaders is squandered and the bill will face even bigger scrutiny in the Senate. If any Democrats in the Senate vote against it at all and it passes, Obama would be very wise to veto the bill and try again. See Bill Clinton's Presidency for what happens when you lose Congress after two years. Reagon's economics worked great in 1980 because we were in a recession. Bush's economics didn't work because he was using a form of Reagon's economics and we were in a boom. Obama needs to do something even more daring than Reagon and Roosevelt put together. He needs to do what is bad for politics. Congress needs to sign on with him even though it's bad for politics because if it works everyone will be re-elected.
First, we need to bring all troops home to cut Defense spending to something maintainable. I don't mean troops in Iraq. I don't mean troops in Afghanistan. I don't mean troops in the Middle East. I mean troops everywhere. Every American soldier that is on foreign soil, or American soil since bases and embassies in other countries are considered American, needs to be brough home. Go to Washington, D.C. and you'll see many foreign embassies, but you don't see the army of every other nation in the world in our nation's capital. If we want to send an ambassador to another country that's fine. When John Adams was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James (Ambassador to England), I don't remember him getting a large embassy with a full staff and a regiment of troops. My memory is pretty good, he didn't get either. He lived in an apartment and had one assisstant. When all of our troops are back in our country not only will we save a ton of cash, but we will also see our diplomacy options improve. We have used Teddy Roosevelt's big stick for beating for too long and it is brittle. We must give a new tree time to grow so we can make a better big stick and replace the old one. What I mean is that we saw starting as far back as Vietnam that nobody is using conventional armies anymore. We don't fight conventional wars. We aren't fighting conventional enemies. So we must give our armed forces time to train new recruits in the new ways of war against new enemies. And while we are building a new big stick, we can take our voice, which is hoarse from all the loud talking we've been doing and return to speaking softly and with influence rather than power.
Second, we have to return power to the states. The alphabet soup of government agencies, as my history teacher used to call it, is too big and too ineffective and far too exepnsive to keep around. If states want to take their tax money and create these sort of agencies, good for them. That's not the federal government's job. If you want to know what the federal government's job is, read the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. It says that any power not specifically listed as a power of the federal government MUST be left to the states. That cuts spending, cuts the size of government, and keeps government agencies easier to keep in line because each agency would be smaller.
Third, we must reduce taxes. We must remove the capital gains tax. If someone gets lucky in the stock market and makes money on their investments, good for them; they now have more money to spend or reinvest. If someone puts a lot of money into savings and makes money on that, good for them; they now have more money for life's surprises, investment, or retirement. We must lower income taxes. I want to say remove, but I think it will take a little bit of time to pay off the debt and I'd like to do that before completely doing away with income taxes. They must be reduced dramtically. When one in every six dollars I make goes to the federal government in taxes, and that's the low tax bracket, something is wrong. If each person had more money in their pocket along with a new initiative to make savings more attractive we will see a return to a savings-based demand-side economy. Spending-based supply-side works for a little while to make a lot of money, but it will always fail.
Unfortunately, all of those things are bad for politics. One shinigng example proves this wrong though. Ron Paul has been saying these things and more for years and somehow he keeps getting elected by the good people of Texas. I'll leave you with the lyrics to a song near and dear to us all: the theme song to All in the Family.
"Boy the way Glen Miller played, songs that made the hit parade, guys like us we had it made, those were the days, and you know where you were then, girls were girls and men were men, mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again, didn't need no welfare states everybody pulled his weight, gee our old Lasalle ran great, those were the days!"
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