Go Ask Alice

The net result of the present Keynsian stimulus and government bailouts is that instead of the companies, agencies and individuals that made poor economic decisions losing a few trillion, we get those whom rightfully should bear the financial burden cushioned from their just desserts and the economic consequences of their by-in-large self-afflicted fiscal malfeasance spread injudiciously throughout the public at large. **The size and cost of the total loss is magnified by a negative multiplier effect as the ramifications of the borrowed stimulus dollars' unintended consequences ripple through market after market and the total pain is dragged out over many years instead of just a few quarters. (Does anyone anywhere, for even a minute, expect high speed rail to break even or government subsidized battery factories to pay taxes?) Tragically, the vast majority of Americans in 2013 will never make the correlation between a hypothetical 8% unemployment rate instead of 6% or 2.1% GNP growth instead of 3.3% and the government's economic decisions that were made in 2008 and 2009. By then they will, in all likelihood, be blaming it on the new Republican president, the Chinese or the immigrant population.

The American Dream hasn’t been flushed down the toilet, just slowly bled and borrowed to death by an insulated minority that would protect us from ourselves at no consequence to themselves. And they dare to call themselves compassionate! How can there be any genuinely altruistic action where there is no self-sacrifice? Now, if the public sector would voluntarily take a 10% pay cut, retire at 65 like the rest of us and accept the same fringe benefit plans as the average private sector employee to voluntarily assist in the spurring of a real economic recovery, now that would be compassionate. But the public sector making sacrifices for the private sector?* An oxymoron. It's positively twisted that economically 98% of the sacrifice is made within the private sector but it is they who are excoriated as being greedy and selfish. Or did I miss somewhere the headlines about hundreds of thousands of government workers being laid off? So how did those who make the largest economic contributions and sacrifice to society get morally flip-flopped with the least productive? Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.

* The majority of them see their entire professional lives as one big sacrifice...
**When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large. As with everything from mortgages to credit cards, so it goes for states: the feckless must have their pathologies rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Mark Stein


M.D.T.