Sword and Sextant

Alright, truth time.  The GOP has very little idea how to get out of a recession, placing them behind even the Dems.  However, before I get caught giving too much credit to the Democrats, lets talk a bit more.  Democrat policies are still incorrect, but a side-effect of their foolishness is the crux of the illness that our economy feels when we throw $750B at banks and let them sit on it.

The fact is, this recession, like the Great Depression, is a monetary crisis, and not a social crisis or anything like that.  Its evident when you notice that our economy has no credit at the moment, and isn’t flowing.  The money is frozen, quite literally, at all the places it normally flows fastest.  Its as if your peripheral circulatory system is functioning, ie stores still sell milk, but your aorta is blocked off, or just refusing to let anything through.  So, no new factories, but everyone still needs shit.

Now, this leads to job losses and huge Wall Street issues because businesses and investing both hinge on growth potential.  No one buys a stock that is going to stand pat, unless its form of growth is expressed in a dividend quarterly, which is a different story.  Anywho, no one will invest in improving a business venture that can’t expand due to credit issues, regardless of where they derive.  Lack of upward mobility is a huge issue, and the banks have put a low ceiling over everyone for about 16 months now.

All this adds up to a reality in which we realize that the flow of money must be restored to invigorate the economy.  This brings us to Obama who will do exactly that with his stimulus bill.  He clearly doesn’t get why what he’s doing is good, as he runs on the dubious neosocialistic term fairness and whatnot.  (He called the Bush tax cuts ” wealth transfer to the wealthy”!  Since when is giving people their OWN money back a transfer of wealth?!?!?)  It just so happens that he also jams money down the throat of the country when he does this foolishness, so he may accidentally fix our woes.  Sadly, giving money to the poor and taking it from those who created it isn’t the best way to go about this, but I digress.

GOP-types understand this principle as little as the Dems, but their policies don’t felicitously cost tons of money we don’t currently have, so they look even worse.  Also, their notion that the New Deal failed and WW2 saved us is a false dichotomy once you think about it.  If WW2 saved the nation, it was surely the deficit spending that rallied us, as making things that blow up and kill people on other continents isn’t usually the way a healthy economic cycle works.  Therefore, the New Deal was on the right track, but not because of any airy social agenda.  As always, it was about the money.  The money is where you find most of the true answers and power in this world, and this is no different.  The New Deal failed because FDR didn’t spend enough, he spent too much time thinking his social agenda was the important factor, and he also detached supply from demand with price controls, a surefire way to kill off healthy economic signs.

One thing the GOP has at its disposal to spend money and get money flowing is the tax cut.  Its more indirect, but putting money into people’s wallets has a way of causing them to take it out of their wallets.  If anything, more tax cuts should occur and be counted as deficit spending.  Not a thinly veiled partisan hack grandstanding effort like the stimulus check, but actual income tax cuts.  Sadly, GOPers used up their opportunities badly a few years ago, and the party is as dead as the Dems were six years ago.  Also, the moderates run the asylum at the moment, and they are running from their supposed principles at top speed these days.  

As a conservative, and at my age, I can only smile that our nation will inevitably survive Obama, no matter what havoc he wreaks on us, and my generation will be at the helm when we return to our true ideas.  Not sure Jindal is the guy, but there are millions like him and millions more like myself.  Watch out, liberals, we’ll be back.  You can’t kill an idea, no matter how hard you try.