Saturday, January 31, 2009
Steyn Remains Brilliant
Mark Steyn on the horrible bloated stimulus spending bill which, it appears, will be passed but by Democrats alone. Money quote.
It is not unusual for a couple in America with a yearly earnings of $200,000 to borrow three times that amount, $600,000, to buy a house and spend the rest of their productive years paying it off. Can't this nation then borrow three times the GDP, say $14 Trillion, that is, borrow $42,000,000,000,000, and spend the next 30 years paying it off? Because when Obama leaves office in 2017, that is my guess of what the national debt will be. It is a mere $10 Trillion now. Oh, I see the problem, we never pay it off. You know, you talk a Trillion here and a Trillion there and pretty soon you're talking real money (my apologies to Everett Dirksen). As Rahm Emanuel says, no crisis can be wasted. What will we do when there is no one to lend us money past the $42 Trillion we already owe. That, my friends, will be a crisis.
But the "stimulus" package is just politics as usual with a few extra zeros on the end. Will you notice anything? No. Don't get your hopes up. If you're broke now, you'll be broke in October. The Congressional Budget Office estimates only 25 percent of it will be spent by early next year. The other 75 percent is as stimulating as the gal in the Nancy Pelosi Pussycat Lounge telling you she had such a good time she's penciled in a second date for spring 2010. A third of all the spending won't come until after 2011.
In a media age, politics is a battle of language, and "stimulus" is too good a word to cede to porked-up statist hacks. "Stimulus" has to stimulate – i.e., it's short-term, like, say, an immediate cut in payroll taxes that will put real actual money in your pocket in next month's paycheck. That way, you don't need to wait for ACORN: You can start "stabilizing" your own "neighborhood" right now.
It is not unusual for a couple in America with a yearly earnings of $200,000 to borrow three times that amount, $600,000, to buy a house and spend the rest of their productive years paying it off. Can't this nation then borrow three times the GDP, say $14 Trillion, that is, borrow $42,000,000,000,000, and spend the next 30 years paying it off? Because when Obama leaves office in 2017, that is my guess of what the national debt will be. It is a mere $10 Trillion now. Oh, I see the problem, we never pay it off. You know, you talk a Trillion here and a Trillion there and pretty soon you're talking real money (my apologies to Everett Dirksen). As Rahm Emanuel says, no crisis can be wasted. What will we do when there is no one to lend us money past the $42 Trillion we already owe. That, my friends, will be a crisis.
Labels: Government spending; Mark Steyn
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:10 AM 
