Thursday, January 15, 2009

Selling Grandchildren into Slavery.

The Bible tells us that the borrower is the slave of the lender. If you think about this you will see that it is true. What is a salve but someone who doesn't get to enjoy the fruit of his labor, who's earnings are taken away by the slave owner. So, what is Congress thinking about when they are trying to spend nearly $1 trillion on a stimulus package?

Evidently they are not thinking about what this means for our children and grandchildren. They are only thinking about now. Perhaps, they are thinking about the next election. But they are not thinking about the cost to our progeny.

There are about 300,000,000 people in the United States. Lets say 1/2 of them are economically productive. (This is a generous assumption since we can't count government workers, unemployed, children, or retired people. That gives us 150,000,000 people to pay off a $825 billion stimulus package. (Is it just me or does "stimulus package" sound like the latest erectile disfunction remedy?) That is $5,500 per economically productive person. For my family that means we are going to be responsible for $11,100 of the package. But what does that mean?

Hear are three things it means:

1. The money I might have used in the future to spend the way i think is best is being hijacked today by Congress who wants to spend it the way they want to spend it. They want not only my taxes today but to control how I spend money in the future. They think bailing out (e.g. giving my money to) a bank I don't do business with, or a car company who's products I don't buy, or a city I don't live in is a better use of my money than anything else I might possibly think of doing with it.

2. Tomorrow's demand is being exercised today in order to keep up production and save jobs today. This can only mean there will be less demand in the future, thus another, probably bigger, stimulus package will be "required" during the next recession. It's like rerouting and dredging the Mississippi River to control floods only to be devastated when in the future an unusually large flood defeats the engineer's best levy.

3. Because we will not pay back the amount borrowed for the stimulus package, the interest will pile up on the debt and require a future devaluation of the currency (FYI: Our dollars used to be worth 1/20 Oz. of gold. Right now $1 is only worth 1/850 Oz. of gold. It is hard to imagine it being worth less.) or brutal and oppressive taxation. Either one will result in poverty for our children and grandchildren.

My recommendation: Foregoe the stimulus package, and tough out this recession and come out of in a couple of years with no stimulus package debt, with pent up demand and cheap labor.

1 comment:

Matteo said...

"My recommendation: Forego the stimulus package, and tough out this recession and come out of in a couple of years with no stimulus package debt, with pent up demand and cheap labor."

The problem: Enough voters have made government into an idol that can supposedly fix all problems in the universe that there's no way politicians won't do every possible foolish thing to try to prove them right, even if it results in utter ruination for everyone. The upside: at the other end of this, assuming we come out of it as a free people, the idea of government playing the role of such an idol will be widely ridiculed.

Too bad, though, that the majority can only learn from personal experience rather than from reason or history. In consequence, we face a lengthier and much more serious cataclysm.