“Only the Beginning”

On February 13, the day his $787 billion Stimulus Plan passed Congress, President Obama praised the bill, saying, “Passing this plan is a critical step, but as important as it is, its only the beginning of what I think all of you understand is going to be a long and difficult process of turning our economy around.”

In such, the Obama Administration bought itself some time before judgment can be passed on its recent overt and unbridled actions.  Meanwhile the federal government, like a cancer, continues to creep throughout our society, with the President himself orchestrating this rapid cell division.  Eugene Robinson, liberal-apologist-posing-as-journalist, claims in his Washington Post article “The President of Everything,” that, “This is a presidency on steroids,” and, “All Barack Obama wanted was to be president.  He may have to become an auto executive, a banker, a mortgage broker and who knows what else before this crisis is done.”

What does America expect in this “new” era of hope and change?  Do we expect this Administration to overturn the previous era’s deficit spending with additional deficit spending?  Or did we expect his plethora of new websites (recovery.gov, change.gov, etc) to usher in social exhilaration, stoking the fires of this “new” economy?  How exactly does “change” happen?

Regardless of rhetoric, this “new” government will not be successful at creating a “new” economy; molding our private sector is up to the American people, and although the public-private merger may never be broken, government can do little to break the will of humanity.  Humanity has always, and will continue to, act in its own self interests.  This phenomenon has been elusive to the mathematical diagrams used to calculate economic growth, as free will is neither a constant nor a variable.

Frankly, I think government should mind its own dang business; its Constitutional purpose is not business, but governance, namely, the guarding of civil liberties.  We have moved way past that. 

This past week has made two truths quite apparent:  first, that Obama does not have a mandate, as he only garnered 56% support in the House, and 60% support in the Senate, for this Stimulus plan; and second, he could care less to gain bipartisan support anymore.  By all accounts, the three Republican Senators who voted in favor of the Stimulus were specifically targeted, or as the Politico put it, “wooed” by Rahm Emanuel.  The Left got their Bill, and at all costs.

Language of the Bill

Going beyond the fray of current political theater, though, what concerns me most are the longer lasting effects of our situation, possibly made worse by this bill.  Economic turmoil can breed civil unrest, and eventually, political upheaval.  Don’t blame me, I didn’t make the rules; open your eighth grade history book and read about it.  That’s asking a lot, though, considering the example our Congress set by not reading this 1100-page bill.  The President actually had possession of the bill before signing it for a longer period of time than Congress had to read it before voting on it.  So much for the “fierce urgency of now.”

That being the case, there are a couple of items slipped into this bill that may have been harder to detect with all the back-and-forth on tax cuts and pet project spending.  I found a couple of them interesting enough to point out here.

1.  Retroactive Social Justice

In what is called the ‘‘Cap Executive Officer Pay Act of 2009,” in Section 6012, there is a new limit on executive compensation, exceeding the scope of the President’s earlier mandate.  The bill reads, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law or agreement to the contrary, no person who is an officer, director, executive, or other employee of a financial institution or other entity that receives or has received funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (or ‘‘TARP’’), established under section 101 of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, may receive annual compensation in excess of the amount of compensation paid to the President of the United States.”

The bill actually goes back in time, to exact social justice on those who agreed to terms and conditions before them in the month of October, not a ruling that would come four months later in February.  Changing a contract after the fact is elementary-level Indian-giving from a body that, in fact, probably defined “Indian-giving.”  Although I may agree with the idea behind the act, we must tread lightly in our endeavors to persecute our aristocracy.  This is a slippery slope embarked on throughout modern world history:  the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789; the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917; Cuba in 1959.  Pero cuidado, comrade.

2. Trade Wars (v. 2.0)

There is, in fact a “Buy American” clause in this Stimulus Bill; Section 1604 reads, “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for a project for the construction, alteration, maintenance, or repair of a public building or public work unless all of the iron, steel, and manufactured goods used in the project are produced in the United States.”  There are additional guidelines for the clause, including quality and cost concerns, and the simple statement, “This section shall be applied in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements.”

What does this mean?  Isn’t it good to buy American?  Well… yes, if it doesn’t incite a trade war, as was the case during a particular recession in 1929.  Then along came the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, that turned a recession into a Depression, and a Great one at that.  Are we so short-sighted to forget even recent history?  I personally believe the floaty bouyancy of “hope” and “change” may have slowly pulled us away from reason.  Consider the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis:  “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”  

3.  Increasing the Baseline

Last week the Wall Street Journal opined, “The bill will mark the largest single-year increase in domestic federal spending since World War II; it will send the budget deficit to heights not seen in 60 years; and it will establish a new and much higher spending baseline for years to come.  Combine this new spending, and the borrowing it will require, with the trillions of dollars still needed for the banking system, and we are about to test the outer limits of our national balance sheet.”

This Administration has, in fact, already increased discretionary spending  eighty percent for this fiscal year with this bill.  Consider federal funding for education:  this bill added another $100 billion to the more than $150 billion already given annually by Uncle Sam.  How about the $137 billion it allocates to health care, or the $92 billion to energy solutions?  Will government spending decline next year?  I personally don’t foresee it in the 111th Congress.

This is the beginning of an agenda I don’t believe ends too well.  When we trust government to supplement costs for housing (including home weatherization), car loans, health care, retirement, etc, we commit the fatal conceit, sacrificing our liberties to a governing body.  Who pays for these programs?  The short answer is our future generations.

The long answer?  According to the Tax Foundation, “Government spending targeted at the lowest-earning 60 percent of U.S. households is larger than what they paid in taxes in 2004.”  That means the top 40 percent are pulling a wagon that the other 60 percent are riding in.  That’s apartheid, and that was in 2004 during the Bush era, long before this bill committed $67 billion to unemployment benefits, welfare checks, and food stamp benefits.  Will Congress phase those appropriations out in the following years? 

Leadership Failure 

What we see is a populace voting for their self-interests; Congress is willing to promise Americans more than it can actually deliver, and everyone feels better instantaneously.  Nobody seems to have courage enough to tell the truth, even if it hurts.  So instead, pandering to a benign populace on a feel-good platform ensures reelection, regardless of the facts.  But there’s an old saying on Wall Street:  “Buy on rumor, sell on fact.”  The American people may ignore our fate’s unfolding, or the process therein, but they don’t ignore their own economic realities.  No amount of stimulus or government intervention can inject consumer confidence.  If you don’t believe me, look at how the Dow Jones sank 300 points today, reaching a three-month low, hours after the bill was signed into law.

This stimulus bill was a disastrous, tumultuous ride for anybody paying attention, but as Otto von Bismarck once quipped, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”  Our dreamboat President warned us though:  this is only the beginning.  Remember, as you watch our government flail and twitch this way and that in the coming months, with claims that “only government can save our economy,” it cannot bend the will of humanity.