When I first saw that, I was greatly relieved. At last, I thought, the President is going to insert sanity into the government take-over of the economy. Certainly the ‘catastrophe’ he referred to was the spending of TRILLIONS to fund every pork project Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank could come up with. Alas, it was not so. The generational theft continues apace.
Now, the “stimulus bill” is just one use of a trillion dollars. Another is a bank bail-out plan. At around 11:AM EST this morning Treasury Secretary Tim Geither decided it was necessary to explain how the government was going to help. That didn’t go so well, investors were not impressed, and the stock market tanked (see chart). Thanks Tim, thanks a lot.
Taking this conversation local, the interesting battle over the next few days will be between the House and Senate to reach a compromise bill, and one of the big differences between the two bills is that the Senate version offers significantly less largesse to bail out state governments. Without that money, states may actually be forced to live within their means. For Massachusetts, that means our Democrat Governor, Deval Patrick, may have to preside over some long-overdue down-sizing of state employees. His alternative is to raise taxes, which would really deep-six any hope of the state economy reviving. But hey, this is Massachusetts (TIM) – a fiscally sound plan to get out of the spending hole would be completely out of character.
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