Lunacy

Democrats bring Teddy Kennedy to the Senate for the first time since Obama's inauguration and get votes from RINO's Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter to steal $838 billion from taxpayers to give to Democrat special interests. This is the change we knew Obama would bring, but the majority of voters voted for it anyway. Senate passes stimulus boondoggle 61-37. Stocks are down 355 at this moment. 5 minutes later, stocks are down 386. 5 minutes later, stocks are down 412. It ended up down 381. Obama and liberals are destroying our country, and they put the stock market into free fall.

Reason reminds us that because the Senate and House bills are very different and both very bad, the final bill out of conference will probably be worse than both. The committee generally takes the worst provisions from both chambers and puts them in the final bill.

As one Democrat boondoggle passes the Senate, Treasury Sec. Geithner announces another to prop up failing banks. That's like giving a heroin addict another hit of heroin to stabalize him. Let the bad banks fail so the country can recover instead of trapping us ever deeper in this recession. The economy has to heal the damage caused by government, overbuilt, overpriced housing market, bad investments, bad debt, but government is intent on sustaining the damage. This new boondoggle starts at $1.5 trillion and will certainly grow from there. Geithner calls the problem complex. That's because he's a central planner. He would call building a tree complex too, if he tried to do it. But if he got out of the way, the seed would grow into a tree all by itself. If you're looking at every individual tree in a forest, it seems complex. But from outside, it's just a forest.

You would think that the aristocrats in Washington would recognize that if Americans had a spare $2.3+ trillion (not counting hundreds of billions in interest payments) laying around to pay for these boondoggles, we wouldn't be in a recession.

I watched some of Obama's town hall in Florida today, and when Obama annouced that the stimulus had passed, the people (who must have been hand picked by Democrats) universally cheered. What kind of idiot is happy to have his taxes raised to pay for $1.2 trillion in boondoggle spending (that's how much taxpayers will have to pay for this stimulus boondoggle including interest)? They also cheered when Obama said this was just the beginning. He was going to create seperate programs to saving mortgages and health care and whatever else.

Who in their right mind would cheer for stuff like this? Somewhere along the way, liberals forgot that money doesn't grow on trees. When Congress passing spending bills, money, or more accurately, wealth doesn't magically appear to pay for it. When the Fed prints money as if it grew on trees, wealth doesn't magically appear to back up that money. We all pay for every spending bill out of our earnings. And since we're running a deficit, we pay not only for the bill, but for the interest on it or the inflation for funding it. We also pay for it in the prices of everything we buy because government spending makes our economy less efficient. We pay for it in lost jobs because of reduced investment. We pay for it in increased poverty. Americans are drowning debt public and private, and these people are cheering the creation of new debt on an unprecedented scale. It's lunacy.

In the best case scenerio for the stimulus boondoggle, Congress is giving us $838 billion in services, and we're going to have to pay $1.2 trillion for them. In what world does that make any sense? But it gets worse - government is inherently, outrageously wasteful. Optimistically, we can count on well over $100 billion of that $838 billion to be wasted - it'll probably be much more. So basically, we're paying $1.2 trillion for about $700 billion in services. But it gets worse - since government is spending our money on what the aristocrats and specials interests want instead of what the American people want, this bill perverts our economy. That means we have to pay more for the goods and services we want, and that's another hidden tax. I don't know how to quantify it since there will probably be some overlap between what government spends the money on and what the people would have spent the money on, but I would be surprised if the overlap was more than half. But everything that isn't overlapped is wasted because it takes resources away from producing the goods and services we want. So we're paying another $400 billion or so in hidden taxes in the prices of the goods and services we buy in addition to the $1.2 trillion in actual taxes, call it $1.6 trillion, for about $700 billion in services, at least half of which we don't want. We know we don't want them because American weren't already buying them with their own money.

Now multiply that by how every many Obama boondoggle spending plans Obama creates. We're doomed because our country is being run by lunatics empowered by lunatics.

Quick prediction: the economy will begin to recover before Obama's stimulus boondoggle kicks in, and he'll take credit for it anyway. But once the boondoggle kicks in, the economy will tank again, and worse. So far, this has been a mild recession, but like the secondary recession after the 1929 crash, Obama's secondary recession won't be so mild.