The Stimulus Package and Other Things

I know it's been awhile since I've last posted; my apologies. I've been quite busy with the new semester with school work, intramural sports, and the new seasons of 24 and Lost. Any who, I'm going to use this post to lambast the stimulus package, or should I call it the pork package, that was recently passed by Congress and signed by the all-knowing, messianic President Barack Obama. 

This bloated, pork-filled piece of hyper-partisan legislation is simply a way to reward many of the interest groups that supported Obama and the Democrats in the fall. Billions and billions are going to serve special-interests that cannot and will not affect, to any measurable extent, our current economic plight. I will be the first to say that I am not an economic major nor do I have any sort of economic expertise other than a college-level macroeconomics course I took in high school, but to give billions to special-interest groups, of which ACORN which is currently under investigation by the FBI for voter-registration fraud, and call it a stimulus package is flat-out dishonest to the citizens and tax-payers that elected these law-makers. Economic laws and principles dictate that this current recession will not last forever regardless of what kind of government intervention is employed, and when the economy is recovering sometime later this year or next, the Democrats will, without fail, claim credit for the recovery. Again, this will be flat-out dishonesty. Obama says that this stimulus package will create or save three and a half million jobs, but, in reality, no one really knows for sure how many jobs will or will not be created. The Obama Administration, to put it in the words of Karl Rove in an editorial in last week's Wall Street Journal, "is winging it." If you were to ask President Obama, himself, right now if he thought the stimulus package would create or save any jobs, he would probably rattle off some statistics or numbers that his economic team pulled from an outdated and extremely narrow study performed in the 1980s. 

The one thing we can unequivocally say about this stimulus package is that it will dramatically increase the size of the federal government. The package contains provisions for a vast expansion of medicare and medicaid, and also SCHIP, the program that gives free insurance to children whose parents can't afford it. These expansions, alone, greatly increase the future tax burden we are placing on the next generation of the American workforce. A workforce that I, myself, will be entering into in the next several years. Our current national debt is nearing eleven trillion dollars. That's close to seventy-five percent of our annual GDP. And with our current annual budget standing at over a trillion dollars for fiscal 2009, there seems to be no end in sight in which the budget is reigned. This cycle of deficit spending, begun by the Bush Administration, cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually our creditors will stop lending us money. According to Wikipedia.org, China holds close to seven hundred billion U.S. dollars of our debt. Woe be unto us when the day comes that China says that no longer wants to be the leading foreign creditor to the U.S. and floods the world economy with our currency, effectively sending the dollar into a hyper-inflation spiral upwards. The deficit spending must be stopped. The budget must be balanced, and the trend of increasing government involvement in personal life must be reversed. Thomas Jefferson, this nation's third president said, "The government that governs best, governs least." I think we'll all agree that times have changed since the infancy of this "noble experiment" but the premise is still the same. Massive government intervention in the economy and the private sector has never led to anything good. 

Switching gears, last week, Iran launched its first satellite into planetary orbit. U.S. officials basically ignored this launch and equated it with the launch of Sputnik that could only go "beep, beep, beep..." This view is naive and dangerous. The rockets used to carry Sputnik and Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, were the same rockets to which our early nuclear warheads were attached. Iran already possesses enough fissile material to create a nuclear bomb, and clearly, they possess the technology to shoot aforementioned bomb into a sub-orbital trajectory. The Obama Administration must act now in response to the launch. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a noted Holocaust denier, has said repeatedly that he would "wipe Israel of the map" if he had the means. Are we going to sit back and let this "president" dictate to us what it will do with its newly acquired WMD's? For our sake and for the sake of Israel, our strongest Middle East ally, I would hope not.