Spending Our Way Into More Debt
Huge deficit spending, a supposed stimulus bill, and financial bailouts by the Bush administration failed to stave off a deep recession. President Obama continued his predecessor’s policies with an even bigger stimulus, which helped push the deficit over the unimaginable trillion dollar mark. Prosperity hasn’t returned, but the president is persistent in his interventionist beliefs. In his speech yesterday, he told the country that we must “spend our way out of this recession.”
While a dedicated segment of the intelligentsia continues to believe in simplistic Kindergarten Keynesianism, average Americans are increasingly leery. Businesses and entrepreneurs are hesitant to invest and hire because of the uncertainty surrounding the President’s agenda for higher taxes, higher energy costs, health care mandates, and greater regulation. The economy will eventually recover despite the government’s intervention, but as the debt mounts, today’s profligacy will more likely do long-term damage to the nation’s prosperity.
Some leaders in Congress want a new round of stimulus spending of $150 billion or more. The following are some of the ways that money might be spent from the president’s speech:
- Extend unemployment insurance. When you subsidize something you get more it, so increasing unemployment benefits will push up the unemployment rate, as Alan Reynolds notes.”
- More infrastructure spending. This will lead to misallocation of resources since only markets can allocate resources efficiently. Governments allocate capital on the basis of politics instead of economics.
- “Cash for Caulkers.” This would be like Cash for Clunkers except people would get tax credits to make their homes more energy efficient. Any program modeled off “the dumbest government program ever” should be put back on the shelf.
- More Small Business Administration lending. A little noticed SBA program created by the stimulus bill offered banks an “unprecedented” 100 percent guarantee on loans to small businesses. The program has an anticipated default rate of 60 percent. Small businesses need lower taxes and fewer regulations, not a government program that perpetuates more moral hazard.
- More aid to state and local governments. State and local government should be using the recession to implement reforms that will prevent them from going on another unsustainable spending spree when the economy recovers. Also, we need fewer state and local government employees – not more – as they’re becoming an increasing burden on taxpayers.
The president said his administration was “forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it to others to solve.” Mr. President, nobody has forced you to do anything. You’ve chosen to embrace – and expand upon – the big spending policies that were a hallmark of your predecessor’s administration.
Executive Comp Restrictions Could End Up Costing the Taxpayer
The Obama administration’s announcement this week on cash compensation for those seven institutions receiving “extraordinary assistance” has generated the all-too-predictable responses. Either you think executives at the entities are bad and greedy and should be punished, or you believe this is just the first step in an all-out class war. Sadly the real victim in all these efforts has been, and continues to be, the taxpayer.
Now that the taxpayer is the most significant shareholder in these companies, the top priority for Washington, as representative of the taxpayer, should be to see these companies return to profitability. Quite simply, if these companies are not profitable, that loss will fall on the taxpayer, as shareholder.
And of course, without the ability to retain talent, it is all the more likely that these companies will not maintain profitability. I suspect the competitors of these seven are already eyeing their best talent. And let’s not kid ourselves, leaving these companies stocked with mediocre employees will not help taxpayers get their money back.
In trying to punish the bailed-out companies, we are also punishing ourselves. This is one of the very reasons we should never have bailed them out in the first place: once we are the owners, there fate and ours are linked.
A Warning for President Obama
Last November’s rejection of the failed GOP didn’t mean voters were ready to embrace a massive increase in the size of the federal government, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew Research Center:
Obama campaigned for strong government action on the economy and health care, and most of his voters agreed with this direction. But Obama’s efforts to expand the role of government have alienated many of those who did not vote for him but nonetheless gave him high marks when first he took office.
Pew Research’s political values survey this spring showed no surge in public demand for more government. Indeed, anti-government sentiment, which had been building for years, was heightened by the financial bailout and stimulus program.
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