What?? What are they doing?
Our current attitude of letting us know, after the fact, that we have entered a recession seems truly odd. Here are these leading economists from both Wall Street and our government getting paid top dollar to state the obvious after the fact instead of recognizing and acknowledging the obvious and applying solid analytical thought to making things better. You know, like the economic genius Allan Greenspan letting things run amok for years including poor lending practices and the export of our country’s valuable edges in manufacturing and design and then looking back now and saying “holy cow, look what happened!!”
Just like right now--- Instead of our leaders discussing how to buckle down and capitalize on our country’s strong points that we have left and ones that may arise in the future so as to secure our economic future, they are borrowing money to bail out Bear-Sterns and give money away to citizens to stimulate the economy for our past bad decisions with nothing more than a cross-your-fingers-and-hope attitude and virtually no real analytical thought being even considered. Hell, they are still waiting for another six or eight months for the geniuses to let them know that our economy is bad!
I am dying to see what these geniuses thoughts and attitudes will be when this “stimulus package” peaks and dies in a couple of months leaving us in worse economic shape that we already were in. What’s nesx, another rate cut? What will happen from all of this is that our world financial standing will worsen from adding more debt, and our dollar will weaken even further. Given it will take more dollars to buy oil even if the world price stays constant, this economic stimulus will soon compost into more money being taken from us than was given out.
We should have taken those same funds and built a nuke power plant or built a pipeline in Alaska to do real benefit for America including demonstrate some reasonable degree of intelligence to the international community-for once lately. Either of these would have spurred job creation and had the long term benefits of lower living costs to Americans and balancing our trade deficit.
Folks, we need to be thinking about what we Americans have to offer the world and covet and protect it at all costs. For instance, education. Only our legal citizens should have access to higher education (or any education for that matter) so we can regain a hope of a comeback in this world economy. If those from other countries desire our quality education that we have to offer, they should pay very dearly and/or agree that their work be proprietary to the United States for the same length of their education here. In other words, we have rights to their inventions and innovations before and exclusive to all others. Matter of fact, getting a Doctorate should streamline citizenship into our country so we can retain and capitalize off of these professionals for life.
Education is one of the best investments that any society can make as its benefits will reap returns for a lifetime. Perhaps we should have put the entire “economic stimulus” money into our educational system as the best investment we could have made for America. Maybe even using it to get the illegal aliens out of our school system so our own kids could benefit from the money being stolen by them would have been a good idea too. That might have been a “two-fer”.
Just thinkin outloud.
Coop