Money For Nothin' - Why The Bush/Pelosi Tax Refund Is Dangerously Stupid

OK, let me get this straight... pretty much anyone breathing right now in the U.S. is going to get a rebate check. Our government says this money is for spending -- go out and buy something, anything, for gosh sakes; it will help save our economy from recession.

Please don't use it to pay down your credit cards, or save it for retirement, or put it under the mattress, no sirree, Bob. Our friends George and Nancy want you to make like a bandit for the department store, the car dealership, Disney world, where ever, and blow it as soon as you can.


This is nuts.


For one thing, where are those billions coming from? Isn't this country running a huge deficit? Isn't our dollar's value pathetically low? Aren't we already straining, budget-wise, due to the war?

First things first. I think I can credit Mike Huckabee for the following thought, but don't quote me on it:

We don't have $150 billion sitting around, we have to borrow it. Who loans us money these days? The Red Chinese. We pass all that money out, and what will we be buying down at the local Wal-mart? Stuff made in China... so whose economy are we helping, anyway?

That's right, Mike. Think of how history would have been changed had Herbert Hoover just printed up a few extra billion dollars and spread it around the country back in 1929. It boggles the mind -- Roosevelt might have lost the election. No WPA, no CCC, no NRA, no "We have nothing to fear, but fear... itself".

Poor Herbert, he was a victim of his own pre-Reaganesque trickle-down, supply-side economics, though to his credit he actually thought the dollar should be worth a dollar. It was Roosevelt who took us off the gold-standard, remember... and Americans were forced to turn in their gold coinage. (Gold was something like $32 an ounce, then.) Even when we were kids, paper money had the words "silver certificate" printed on them. Theoretically, you could exchange the paper for real silver at the treasury. Your paper money these days is just...paper.

So, these days, rather than create a beneficial, seemingly benevolent governmental bureaucracy to put people to work, like FDR did, it's easier just to hand out some dollar bills and hope the problem goes away. Yeah, right. George and Nancy are, in effect, Giving cancer patients aspirin; they can say they honestly did something, and if the patient doesn't feel any better, at least they will.

It's the same reasoning we used in Vietnam. Remember Zippo raids? Our troops would march in to a village, set the hooches on fire with their Zippo lighters, round up the civilians and ship them off to someplace "safe". Our logic was that we had to destroy the village in order to save it. Our government thinks that in order to save the American economy, we have to destroy what value the dollar has left, so that our debts are essentially less and the hourly value of our labor more competitive with the third world.

So, in short, neither Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal have the slightest clue how to save our economy without destroying it. May God help us all.