Earmarks to the Rescue

Now that congress has passed Obama's 800 gazillion dollar Earmark Stimulus plan, will Obama stop talking down the economy? My guess is he and the rest of the democrats have only yet begun to spend, so the answer is probably not. That's too bad. Eight years ago the media openly ridiculed Bush for speaking out loud about how bad the economy was before he took office. That was the word in DC back then.... don't say anything bad about the economy because if you scare people it only becomes worse. People stop spending, CEO's stop hiring, and the house of cards falls down.

Today that is happening, but now the media is cheering the scare mongers onward. The Great Depression 2 scare is going full steam, and the Scare Monger in Chief is Barack Obama. Between Obama's scare tactics and the mindless spending coming out of congress, well things are probably about to get worse. Amazingly, Obama has said that tax cuts didn't work to stimulate the economy. Many others in the media are echoing this line. So now the democrats and the media are pretending 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 were all just a dream. Sadly this is a case where ignoring history will not lead to us repeating it. Too bad, because the economy was in great shape for most of this decade, thanks to tax cuts.

Before we have a depression, we need to have a really bad recession going, and that's where Obama has a problem. Right now this doesn't come close to 1982 or 1973-74. Much less the 1930's. During Hoover's term the economy dropped 35% from high to low, before it started recovering. Recovering while Hoover was still president I might add. So far, the Great Depression 2 has seen the economy drop by 1.1%. Yep... you might want to come in off that ledge. The Great Depression was 3000% worse than our current situation.

So how bad are things really. For a great comparison between now and the big bad recessions, neither of which came close to being a real depression, try this out for size: http://www.cnbc.com/id/29163654

In the mean time, sure this could be a bad recession. The last two were pretty mild, but they were fought off by real stimulus. This one is being met by the same wild out of control spending we saw when we saw our budget surplus of 1998 pop it's head out of it's mole hole, only to be whacked back to sleep by a money-drunken congress. But I digress.

When you hear a congressman say that wildly spending money will save us, that we are all Keynesian's now, well remember that Nixon was the last guy to say that and he gave us 1973-74. Also remember that Keynes insisted that the way to recovery was paying people to dig holes, and then paying people to fill the holes back in with dirt. When Nixon and Keynes are at bat, playing it play by play, maybe we'd better get back out on that ledge.