camel eye

When your flight hits turbulence and starts to bounce, you don’t tear up your ticket and jump off.  You trust the pilot.  So why are we right wingers now having conniption fits?

Oh dear, my $300,000 home isn’t worth as much as I wish it was.  Crisis is living in a cardboard box in the middle of the African desert, eating mud cookies for breakfast and watching your children dye from diarrhea.  Nothing in America remotely qualifies as a crisis.  Temporary inconvenience at worst.  But, “temporary inconvenience” doesn’t attract many radio listeners.  Thus, we make catastrophic sensationalism and pretend we have it so bad.

Reagan inherited an economy from Carter that was, by most measures, worse than the current one.  He had a stimulus package of his own:  he cut taxes and spent like a drunk sailor.  Record deficit.  He passed the consequences on to Bush #1 whom it crumbled.  The difference between his package and Obama’s is who gets the first tier money.  With Reagan, it was defense, star wars, a bust superconducting supercollider, and enough pork to gag Jimmy Dean.  But, he had an “R” after his name so we were happy and optimistic.

Now, same tune, second verse but because the Pilot has a “D” after his name, we’re shaking in our boots to the point we get stupid and wish for failure.  I don’t care if the President is a one-legged Eskimo named Yamamoto.  I hope beyond hope that whatever he is doing works.  I don’t have a monopoly on effective government and let’s not forget that it was my fellow Republicans, over the past eight years, that added another trillion to the debt, failed miserably with the February 2008 bail-out, and steered us to this mess in the first place.  Is it any wonder that the country is not terribly interested in what they have to say at this point?

Oh no, you say, “Clinton caused this financial mess.”  Actually, it was our own Republican
Senator from Texas, Phil Graham, who slipped a 262 page amendment into the omnibus appropriations bill;  the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.  The essence of the act was the deregulation of derivatives trading (financial instruments whose value changes in response to the changes in underlying variables; the main use of derivatives is to reduce risk for one party).  The legislation contained a provision, lobbied for by Enron, a major campaign contributor to Graham, that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight. Basically, it gave way to the Enron debacle and ushered in the new era of unregulated securities.  Graham’s wife, Wendy, had been part of the Enron board, and her salary and stock income brought in between $900,000 and $1.8 million to the Graham family prior to the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.  The Act also eliminated a tremendous amount of regulatory oversight in addition to Enron’s energy trading.  It also undid the Glass-Steagall Act and set the stage for the collapse of the predatory capitalist mega-banks and mortgage companies.

It’s time to quit our pathetic panic whining and realize we screwed up.  Let’s give someone else a chance to do better.

Let’s consider the first tier stimulus recipients.  For stimulating the general economy, it matters little who gets the money directly from the fed.  Whomever gets it turns it quickly and it explodes through the economy.  When I get a fat check, I pay my contractors and suppliers, who pay theirs, who pay theirs, and the whole amount explodes through the economy all the way to the bottom of the economic food chain in a matter of days.  Other businesses are exactly the same: whether it’s Lockheed building Reagan’s space ray guns, your local school district wiring buildings for internet, or some landscape company re-sodding the mall.  Stimulus packages have worked, for this very reason, since the Biblical days of  Caesar Augustus.

The nice thing about this one is that the first tier recipients can actually do something for me.  It’s mostly infrastructure that I am connected to: roads, bridges, educational capital investment, medical procedures, etc.  Sure, there is other people’s pork we think is a waste.  Just don’t eliminate my pork.  Let’s not forget the prime objective is creating jobs and, in that light, sodding the mall could quickly be very effective.   The first tier recipients are doing things we need done.

Some of us want an exalted nation and prayed for a righteous leader because God says that is what it takes.  We got a saved, baptized believer who isn’t the least bit bashful about sharing his testimony and his daily prayer for revelation of God’s will in his life.  What are we afraid of?  The radio talking heads have us so worried about tomorrow that we can’t enjoy today.  My God is bigger than any economic mess and bigger than Rush.  My God is also Obama’s God.  To me, that is more important than party affiliation.  “Don’t be anxious about tomorrow.  God will take care of your tomorrow too”,  Matthew somewhere.