Wasting Time With Alex

Passing the buck

Democrats again proved that they are believers in the “Pass the buck” economic policy when they decided to straddle the next few generations with the massive debt their partisan $3.6 trillion spending budget will cause. The anger at the fiscal irresponsibility of republicans that managed to double the nation’s debt in 8 years and the promises to fix those, like practically every promise they made during the campaign, is gone up in smoke. Now they will tell you that they are doing this because of the economic crisis, which they conveniently and with help from the shamelessly partisan MSM blame on Bush, we are now in. That’s all bogus.

First off, this economic crisis is of the democrat’s own making. Bush gets blamed by the left, but the indisputable fact is that this crisis started after Congress went over to democrats in the 2006 elections. And need I remind people that the underlying problem that brought us the economic collapse was caused by the unbelievably stupid PC based push by democrats? Remember that they used the force of the law (Congress) to brow beat the banking, mortgage, and securities industries into making loans to high risk people, and then compounded that PC time-bomb by creating and encouraging the trading of flimsy securities based on those toxic loans? And the worst part is their role in promising the people taking these government mandated risks that government would bail them out if things went wrong! They keep saying Bush did wrong, but they are doing the same things he did, only they are giving away three times as much cash, and giving it to their friends, operatives, lobbyists, and past & future donors! One should also not dismiss the convenient fact that the economy took a tumble during the election process where the democrats had lost their chief weapon, the Iraq war (which we won despite their attempts to make us lose, but that’s a different story), after democrats said things that precipitated the housing and subsequent mortgage & banking meltdown. One needs to remember which party we keep getting told profits at the ballot box from economic downturns. It is disgusting that these facts are hidden in a well orchestrated media and democrat disinformation campaign that has shifted the blame onto Wall Street’s greed, capitalism, and of course, republicans, and especially president Bush, whom are accused of deregulating the market when the fact is they where beaten down and accused of having racist motivations whenever they tried to address the problems that caused the meltdown we now are suffering.

So now, after nearly a trillion dollar patronage bill was passed by claiming it was a “stimulus bill”, and the Obama team tacked on another $2.2 trillion dollars to the original $700 trillion earmarked by the Bush Administration for TARP payouts, essentially tripling it, they go and pass a bill which sets both a new deficit and annual spending record! Oh sure they added new taxes of all kinds, gutted our defense and intelligence spending, are playing loose with the projected numbers, and want to pretend this is some kind of fiscal discipline, but the facts speak for themselves. This budget is replete with massive entitlement spending, on a scale that would make even FDR and his people faint, and is nothing but a socialist’s dream of expanding government’s power and taking over the lives of so many voters which will now become dependant on these handouts, that it almost guarantees the party running the show, a permanent lock on power. We are now conservatively seeing predictions that by the time it is all set and done, and these collectivists have stuck us with all the new spending and government programs they want, we will be in the hole to the tune of $12.8 trillion dollars! That’s almost our annual GDP. If this stuff was wrong under Bush, why is it now not just right, but a sign of great leadership and government showing fiscal discipline and responsibility, because democrats are doing it? See the hypocrisy? At least republicans are finally acting like they are for fiscal discipline finally.

The sad fact is that this stuff will do nothing but hurt us economically. We can not create this kind of debt, especially when the people we have been borrowing from have become reluctant to feed our habit going forward, and not pay for it. There will be consequences, and they will be dire. Of course, these democrats do not care because they expect the bill will go to the young, whom seem to be disproportionally in love with these morons. So maybe there is some kind of Karmic justice, after all. “Hope & Change”, indeed.

UPDATE: Financial Times has an article showing the statistics ofhow hard the current screw job by these collectivists will hit the young.:

The next decade was always going to be difficult. As retirement beckons for the middle-aged “bulge” in many national populations, governments have been facing an expensive demographic transformation. Now, the economic crisis makes the outlook only worse. Once the recession passes, countries will need to work on closing their gaping fiscal deficits without triggering further collapses in output. They will also need to service bloated national debts. The International Monetary Fund estimates that among the Group of 20 nations whose leaders meet in London this week, the industrialised members will have increased their national debts by an average equivalent to nearly 25 per cent of gross domestic product between 2007 and 2014.

That is a heavy burden. But, to 2050, the cost of this crisis will be no more than 5 per cent of the financial impact they face from the ageing of their citizenry. As the IMF says, “in spite of the large fiscal costs of the crisis, the major threat to long-term fiscal solvency is still represented, at least in advanced countries, by unfavourable demographic trends”. Unfavourable from a treasury’s point of view, that is. Increased human longevity is otherwise hardly a bad thing. Fewer people are dying young, in industrial accidents or from disease. If they make it to old age, retirees live ever longer on their pensions. Birth rates are often low, however – leaving fewer children to look after parents in their dotage and a smaller workforce to pay the taxes that also support them.

Officials in many countries are prone to talking about the problem in terms that hide its immediacy: the impact of ageing on the world in four decades’ time is more commonly discussed than the weight of the problem in just 10 years. But demographic phenomena can have a significant impact on a society within a short time-span.

This collectivist house of cards not only guarantees us hard times, but it shoves the burden on the young. All these wild eyed young people that fell for the Obama bull have got it coming to them.