Posts Tagged ‘economy’

Get Out Of The Way

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

President Obama gave his so-called jobs speech tonight, and as was widely predicted, it’s nothing more than another “stimulus plan” he’s trying to fly under the radar. Sure, there are lots of things in this imaginary bill that he was blathering on about that might actually help, but there are a lot of other things that are just more of the same failed throw-money-at-it solutions that seem to be the only trick up his sleeve.

I didn’t have much chance to listen to the speech live (but have taken the time to read through it since), but one line I did hear really struck a chord with me…

Those of us here tonight can’t solve all our nation’s woes. Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers. But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.

Unbelievable. I couldn’t help but think about the chapter in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged; John Galt, when put on the spot after the looters in government had very nearly destroyed the country, captured him and pressed him into service in order to rescue them, was asked in front of a nationwide audience what they should do next. He simply said, “Get the hell out of my way.”

And that should be Barack Obama’s first step that Washington takes in order to “improve people’s lives”; just get out of the way. It’s blindingly obvious by now that when it comes to the economy (and many other things) he has no clue what he’s doing, that everything he’s tried has not only failed but has made things worse, and he is totally bankrupt of ideas. The best thing he can do is to step aside and allow his first thought in that quoted paragraph take hold; unshackle the businesses of this country and let the the recovery begin.

Actually, Newt Gingrich said it much better in the Sept. 7, 2011 debate than I could;

And speaking of Newt, here’s another awesome piece of his mind that came out in the debate:

I know Newt hasn’t a prayer of winning the GOP nomination, but dang; the man has pluck. And cheek. And I dare say some good ideas.

Let The Buyer Beware

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Monday’s Wall Street Journal opinion article, America Gets Downgraded really hits the nail on the head:

Friday’s downgrade by Standard & Poor’s of U.S. long-term debt… will be the first of many such humiliations if Washington doesn’t change its economic and fiscal policies. Investors and markets & not any single company’s rating & are the ultimate judge of a nation’s creditworthiness. And after their performance in fanning the credit and mortgage-security mania of the last decade, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch should hardly be seen as peerless oracles. Their views are best understood as financial opinions, like newspaper editorials, and they’re only considered more important because U.S. government agencies have required purchasers of securities to use their ratings. … Yet is there anything that S&P said on Friday that everyone else doesn’t already know? S&P essentially declared that on present trend the U.S. debt burden is unsustainable, and that the American political system seems unable to reverse that trend. This is not news. …

Reading that article (not necessarily the quote above) reminded me of something one of my business profs said back in my college days: Nothing is worth more than someone is willing to pay for it. The President can make all the speeches he likes decrying people who made the call on the downgrade of the US credit rating and saying that their opinion doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are solid reasons behind the downgrade. Obama talked a good game during the election, positioning himself as a moderate, but his actions since entering office have business owners & investors on edge; the pervasive uncertainty in the business community is what’s keeping the economy down. I don’t see much hope of things getting better as long as Obama is in charge.