Economics 101

I'm not an economist, but I bleive in my water that I could have written a better bill than the one trotted out from the House cloak room where I'm sure it was posted on a bulletin board with some title like: "Suggestions." It must have been there for several years as there certainly were an awful lot of them.

Let me first state that I believe that we did need to do something but that the package (as I understand the parts that have been revealed) that was voted on is the exact opposite of what we needed to do. First we needed to act responsibly and not willy-nilly. There is far too much pork in this baby aimed at social change rather than job creation. Some of the projects that would create jobs won’t do so for years because of the regulatory paper work that needs to be filed and hearings that need to be held to clear them. One method I've heard for testing spaghetti is to throw a single strand of the stuff at the wall. If it sticks, it's done and the rest can be served. This package is too much like throwing the whole pot of spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick. If it's not done it will fall off the wall. Even if it sticks, there's nothing left to serve and it'll all end up on the floor eventually. In short, it's a waste of money coming and going.

The quickest way to stimulate this economy would be to return taxpayer money to the taxpayer (not to those who didn’t pay any in the first place) so they can spend it as they see fit. If that includes a new car, carpeting for their home, a vacation, whatever, or just paying down their personal debt, so be it. How to return that money? Tax cuts. And don’t go dropping more people OFF the tax rolls for god’s sake! Over 40% don’t pay anything now. EVERY single person in the US should pay some federal tax. (Yeah, I know that everyone pays sales tax—at least in some states. But an awful lot of people are not stake holders in the good old US of A and yet they are permitted to cast a vote worth just as much as the guy paying a million dollars.)

(I read somewhere that the average taxpayer will get $13 a week through 2009 and $8 a week in 2010 in the form of a tax reduction. If gas prices go up again to the $4 per gallon, that might just cover the increase. Which brings us to...)

Another thing…. If I had an industry that was ready, willing and able to go to work tomorrow; that would put people to work at jobs of all skill levels; that would produce a product that could keep the cost of every other commodity made in this country down; that would pay the federal government and the individual states hundreds of millions in fees and a percentage of the raw product for the privilege of going to work; that could, at the same time, help wean our nation of foreign oil…well, if I had such an industry on the sidelines, I do believe I would want to get the hell out of their way. Instead, the Obama administration halted the process leasing the oil shales and sands in Utah and the off shore areas that were opened up last year when gasoline reached $4 a gallon. (Surely you remember that time. Democrats were running around saying we couldn’t do anything because it would take 10 years to bring that oil to the refineries. The same democrats, in many cases, who had halted the leasing of the off shore sites 10 years previously.)

Absolute idiocy. Pure and simple, That's all it can possibly be.

And there’s only 3 years, 48 weeks to go until January 20, 2013.