Day: September 2, 2010

Stop The Presses!

College of Political Knowledge

Federal Budget Deficit Series

In a speech somewhere West of the Mississippi, Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, it was aimed at the Wall Street bunch, trying to calm the markets after a couple of dismal days and in this speech he gave them the laxative, oh sorry, sedative they needed……

Bernanke downplayed concerns that the economy might slip back into recession, predicting a modest expansion in the second half of this year, with the pace picking up in 2011.

If that forecast proves overly optimistic, however, he said the Fed has sufficient ammunition left and could support growth by purchasing more government debt or by promising to keep rates exceptionally low for a longer period than currently priced in by financial markets.

In other words, he said that if things went badly he would turn on the printing presses….that is right!  He basically, said that he would print enough money to keep everything on track.  After that I expected the Repubs to re-start their bitching about the debt and the deficit and the deficit and the debt….but so far….NOTHING!  Why is that?

Is it fiscal responsible to print more money at this time in the country’s economic life?  I wait for the Repubs to jump on this and try to use it for political advantage…after all it is the election season and all things are legal in the game…..

I pray they do NOT use this as an election ad….why?  Very simple……

When Bernanke was confirmed as head of the Fed…the Repubs could have saved the country from Bernanke…how?

If you dissect the vote, you find something very interesting: had the Republicans chosen to do so, they could have killed the nomination. The numbers come out 48 Democrat ayes, 22 Republican ayes, 12 Democrat nays, 18 Republican nays. Democrats alone did not constitute a majority of ayes. Thus, if those 22 Republicans had voted nay instead of aye, we’d be looking for a new Fed chair right now.

I beg the Repubs NOT to use Bernanke as some sort of political weapon against the Dems….they are as much to fault for the actions of the Fed as anyone….be wise…keep your mouth shut……

The Stimulus Was An Utter Disaster

College of Political Knowledge

Federal Deficit Series

We hear these words daily coming out of the mouths of Repubs…..Obama’s plan is a bust…the economy is worse because of his policies….on and on…..they prattle  and they prattle and we sink deeper into the hole that the Washington crowd has dug, all of them not one party over another….all of them!

But was the American Recovery& Reinvestment Act (the stimulus) really a failure?  Not really….why?  CBO (or maybe it was the GAO)…..anyway their report on the stim plan shows that 1.3 to 3.0 million jobs were either created or saved and that it created $2 billion of economic activity and  that it has added about 2% of the country’s GDP.  NONE ot that sounds like a failure….yes, it could have been better but at least it did stop some of the slide to the economic abyss.

The failure that one may be thinking of is that of the Bush presidency’s bank bailouts…..these institutions were bailed out so that banks would start lending the money and re-start our economic engine….guess what?  It did NOTHING to improve the economy….it did however, save a bunch of gambling banks from disaster for the games they were playing with the people’s money…..

Maybe we should stop calling everything a failure and just stick to the facts…….or at least fix the designation to the thing that was the real failure and stop playing political games for electoral advantage…..