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Obama
Must Toss the Bums Out of Treasury, End the Wars and Start
Leading
24 November 2009 By
Dave Lindorff
If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve
chosen to sit amongst your bone-headed, slacker
friends, don’t turn to them for help when you can’t
figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell
you the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.
Obamaville, USA: tent cities, a feature of the
Depression, when they were called Hoovervilles after
an earlier president, return to US
That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in
today in the White House. Having surrounded himself
with the very Wall Street con men who set up the
crooked game that led to the current financial crisis
and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy
advice they have been giving him since last January
has left the country still mired in deepening economic
decline, with the banks still not lending and
unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs
that instead of bottoming out and starting to recover,
the economy is threatening to fall a second time, to
new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has turned to
the same rotten advisors for answers.
A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he
was in China off all places (a country that has made a
stupendous stimulus investment to create domestic
jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time, that America
faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession.
That’s fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did
he say the risk was? Not that the government has been
failing to put significant numbers of people back to
work, but that the government keeps piling up
deficits.
This has to be the lamest economic thinking since
Herbert Hoover started tightening the screws on
government spending at the onset of the Great
Depression in 1930.
Clearly the American government needs to do just the
opposite of worrying about deficits. The only growth
the US economy has seen to date has been the result of
government funding—the cash-for-clunkers program gave
a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and
the $8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up
home sales briefly. We know this because when the
clunkers program ended, auto sales crashed, and when
the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The
hundreds of billions of dollars poured into so-called
“shovel-ready” state and local projects like roads,
schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as a
million jobs, but the economy lost many times that
many jobs over the same period.
The problem with these stimulus programs is that they
are inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs.
If roughly one million jobs were created through the
stimulus spending of say $200 billion (assuming that
the February $800-billion stimulus program, to mollify
Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only
one-half actual federal spending, and that this
federal spending was spread evenly over a two-year
period, that’s $200,000 per job!
If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury
and in his Council of Economic Advisors, and instead
asked your Labor Secretary to initiate a wide-ranging
$200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do
everything from teach in overcrowded urban schools to
laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from cleaning up
parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have
given jobs to close 8 million people—people who would
have then spent their money on goods and services and
helped rally the economy from the bottom up.
Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this
point! The country is up to the gills in debt without
creating any jobs. (It’s kind of like my mortgage. Why
would I worry about using my credit card to buy food
for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage
has me deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s
financial advisors, on the evidence, would tell me I
should let my family go hungry, because I need to
worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried
about deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. It is costing one million
dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to Afghanistan
or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys
over there. That’s $100 billion a year right
there—enough to hire four million unemployed Americans
back here at home!
This president is well on the way to rescuing
President Hoover from history’s crap heap by
one-upping him in the realm of economic mismanagement.
We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but
Naming Day isn’t far off.
At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war
while the economy was collapsing around him.
President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His
fans, and I was one of those who was willing to give
him a shot last November, are mostly giving up on him.
Activists are already turning on him. My union friends
are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake
their heads in dismay. Liberal friends act
embarrassed. A leftist friend, retired, who devoted a
month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost
weekly to Obama’s former campaign manager David
Plouffe and others, blasting Obama’s handling of the
bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly Obama
cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to
Blue Dogs in Congress and expect to be re-elected in
2012.
Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans
in the Fed, the Treasury and his Council of Economic
Advisers out, and doesn’t stop listening to the
self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of
next year.
President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an
embarrassment to your friends and family? Aren’t you
tired of being mocked by your foes?
Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something
unconventional and daring. End the wars, bring the
troops home, announce a huge jobs program, issue an
executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the
1960s, and let’s get the country moving forward again.
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