The Feds will cut interest rates!
George Bush wants a stimulus package. Tax cuts, tax cuts and make my tax cuts permanent! After all, that policy has worked so well. He said the cuts must be at least 1 percent of the GDP. That will be $145 billion.
Harry Reid and Nancy Policy (the King and Queen of Effective Politics) will offer a competing one (tax cuts, tax cuts!). Although they promised pay-as-you-go economic policies from a Democratic legislature.
Pundits in the media talk about a crisis in consumer confidence. And how the fix is to restore it. So we will go out and buy. Presumably on credit.
How about consumers think there's a problem because there is one. Not because they're weird emotionally. They reasonably see themselves so overextended, with so little hope of being better earners, that they won't be able to pay things off. Not even with a one-time government check of somewhere between $300 and $1,200.
In short, most of those solutions will go to making things worse.
The real solutions are pretty obvious and pretty simple.
First, we have to make a choice: Do we want a sound economy for all of us and a strong America? Or do we want to have a few people of unlimited wealth who use that wealth, among other things, to control the government so that it helps them milk more money from the rest of us?
By the way, this is not a call for socialism! Or other ism! Except a call for sensible and effective capitalism. Based on what we've seen work and seen fail.
In the real world, there are no such things as free markets.
In the real world, business people manipulate and conspire to control markets, and governments both control and collude with business, while tax policies and government spending have a major affect on the economy.
Let us accept that, and then the argument is only over how best to do it.
Simply giving money to rich people doesn't work.
Bob Novak, the conservative commentator who calls the investor class "the most creative class," is flat out wrong. As we've seen, outside of their ability to buy influence in politics, the media and the law, the rich are like the rest of us, relatively passive and unimaginative, prone to putting their money in the easiest place that promises a return, in whatever bubble is in fashion at the moment and wherever some salesman who gets their attention tells them.
Money has no mind of its own. It has to be directed toward areas that will generate and support business and good jobs at good wages. As it happens, our economic goals are on the same road as the social good.
The No. 1 target has to be alternative energy.
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