It’s your forum, too.
Posted on February 5, 2010 - Filed Under Financial Crisis, Opinion
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|You Tell Me (Comment)
Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, February 5, 2010.
In response to my comments of two weeks ago, in which I said that Thomas Jefferson would be appalled at the size and the scope of today’s federal government, David P commented as follows:
“The banking industry got less government via deregulation. It was allowed to make deposit banks into investment banks which then took high-return/loss risks….and lost vast sums of money. Sometimes less is more….more corruption, more middle class below the poverty line, more money for the top executives….and more failure for the US as a whole.
By the way, even O’Reilly and Beck have said that M[ichael] Savage is a far right wing nutter; your continued support of him clearly shows that you DO push your agenda through the media outlet you control, regardless of your attempt to deny it. Please take that fool off of the air. Remember: this is a member of your listening public speaking to you, not the government.”
Well, David, thank you for being a member of the listening public and let’s take your comments in reverse order. First, I’m not pushing anything. I’m stating what I believe and inviting you to respond according to what you believe. Thank you for doing so.
I’m also not “supporting” Michael Savage. I’m putting programming on the air that I hope will draw an audience for which advertisers will pay me to have access.
And I never said there should be no regulation. I never went in the tank for the banking industry. The little appreciated fact is that a huge percentage of the top guys at the marquee investment banks in New York are big time liberals.
Many of our largest banks screwed up and they should suffer. But if that is true, and it is, it is also true that they were coerced by the federal government under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to make home loans to sub-prime borrowers. Barney Frank and his acolytes called this “affordable housing.” It was no such thing. It was irresponsible lending and it was scaled up at the behest of an activist Congress and an activist administration during the Clinton years. The banks’ hands are not clean with respect to the mortgage meltdown. But the federal government played the decisive role in the mortgage disaster.
My remarks regarding Thomas Jefferson’s likely take on the federal government of today are more global in nature anyway. The United States government is too large and tries to do too much. Most of what it does it does not do well. Social Security is bankrupt. Medicare is bankrupt. Amtrak is a financial disgrace. Even the post office is going broke.
The economy is sputtering because those who take the risks and invest the capital to create the jobs are hiding their money under their mattresses because they lack confidence in the future. So long as the president and the Congress keep proposing top-down fixes funded by profligate borrowing, such will continue to be the case.
That’s why Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, David, which is what caused me to opine that when Thomas Jefferson said that an informed American public could be counted on to ’set things to rights,’ he was seeing 220 years into the future.
But I thank you for listening, David. Post your comments anytime. That’s why we call this feature, “You Tell Me.”
If only conceit could create jobs.
Posted on January 28, 2010 - Filed Under Jobs
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Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, January 29, 2010.
Two weeks ago, a friend of mine in Tyler, whom I’m going to call Bill, a good vendor to my company and a good businessman, called to tell me that he was shutting his doors. A lifetime’s work was wiped out and 20 employees hit the street. It was a dagger to my heart.
To spare this good man, I’m not going to tell you who he is nor am I going to tell you what line of business he was in. Suffice to say, his company sold goods and services to business owners like me.
As recently as 2007, he was expanding. He was investing in what he believed to be a strong local economy, a core of quality employees and some strategic opportunities to buy expanded capacity on favorable terms.
In other words, he was a small business owner — the very heart of American success.
That’s why this portion of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night was so galling.
“But I realize that for every success story, there are other stories, of men and women who wake up with the anguish of not knowing where their next paycheck will come from; who send out resumes week after week and hear nothing in response. That is why jobs must be our number-one focus in 2010, and that’s why I’m calling for a new jobs bill tonight. “
A jobs bill. Now why didn’t I think of that? All we need is an enlightened act from the 535 men and women of the Congress and the benediction thereon by our messianic president and all will be well. How reassuring.
Mr. President, the country began shedding jobs in April 2008 and has lost millions of jobs in the year since you took office. If a “jobs bill” will do the trick, why have you waited until now? If the federal government can truly help those people who are “waking up with the anguish of not knowing where their next paycheck will come from,” why are you just now proposing a jobs bill?
The 20 employees who once worked for my friend Bill can’t wait.
In fairness, the president went on to say that he would propose elimination of some capital gains taxes for small businesses. Well if that’s a good idea, and it is, what have you been waiting for Mr. President?
But he also went down the list of tired Democrat clichés about investing in clean energy jobs and giving rebates to homeowners who make their homes more green and building high-speed rail systems and taxing companies that outsource work overseas.
Mr. President, borrowing money from the Chinese in order to create trains that will lose money every day they are operated won’t help Bill or his 20 former employees.
Appropriating (read: borrowing) money to dig holes so that workers can be hired to fill them is not job creation.
What galls me the most, though, is the conceit. The very idea that Congress and the president – 536 privileged but largely clueless parasites – constitute the engine of job creation in America is preposterous. A country of 310 million awaits the munificence of 536 politicians? Somebody please give me a word better than preposterous.
Mr. President, forget your jobs bill. If you want to help my friend Bill, instead of promising to do something, promise instead not to do anything. Trace any of our problems, from the housing meltdown to dysfunctional schools to the dissolution of nuclear families and in almost all cases, you’ll find at the root an overweening government program proposed by somebody with a mindset like yours.
As for jobs, if you want to give Bill and me and the few million other business owners who actually make the decisions and spend the money to hire employees the confidence to do so, raise your right hand and say, “I promise to enact as few laws as possible and none that are not related to defending the peace, supporting the currency or acting as impartial referee in the conduct of commerce.”
In other words, just get out of the way and let the American miracle unfold.
keep looking »
