Common Sense

One comment I often hear, and even make myself, is that - “I wish our politicians would use a little common sense”. That’s not to say that they don’t… part of the time at least. I realize that politicians have to wheel and deal with a lot of folks that they probably don’t agree with, and who may be anything from a friend to an acquaintance to someone they actively hate. This of course can make life difficult when ‘ya have to smile and shake hands with some ignorant fool you just reached a compromise with, even if you would prefer to visit great bodily harm on his slimy carcass. It’s all part of the job and there’s not much you can do about it, irregardless of whether you happen to be the Mayor of a town to small to have a horse, President of the United States, or even the “Galactic Overlord”. Local politics can get downright bloody at times, particularly in the larger jurisdictions, but those of us in the smaller communities are “reasonably satisfied” with the job our elected officials are doing, most of the time. Generally they’re people we know, and usually we can talk to ‘em, explaining our problems and viewpoints, and they also know the local voters aren’t going to buy a scam. If the Grangeville City Council makes a bum call, they’ve only got three thousand people mad at them. If the county commissioners do it, they’ve got fourteen thousand irate people snapping and snarling at their heels. But if the US Congress makes a major mistake, three-hundred-million people out for blood isn’t a pretty sight!

But we still maintain that “Common Sense” is sorely lacking in American politics, which I usually agree with. Common sense is defined as what people “in common” would agree on as prudent and sound, without reliance on an in depth study or prolonged research. Thus "common sense" equates to the knowledge and experience the person using the term believes that they do or should have. And there’s the rub. We don’t all have exactly the same knowledge and experience, therefore we have different viewpoints. As an example, most Democrats apparently think the bailout and stimulus plans makes perfectly good sense, while most Republicans think its complete insanity. As I’ve often stated in the past, my knowledge of economics is severely limited. But even I know that you can’t long survive if you continue to spend money you don’t have and aren’t going to get!

Bailout and stimulus seem to be the hot button subjects at present, and a good reason why common sense is so necessary in our government. The present plan is to spend another eight hundred billion bailout dollars or so over and above the Bush era bailout, and I’ve yet seen anything said about how we’re supposed to pay for all this. The eight-hundred billion dollar Bush bailout essentially went to the big banks to keep them solvent, wherein the banks promptly split the take between their major stockholders and executives (none of whom are exactly poor by any measure). The “little guy” investor was left holding the bag, and waving good-by to his hopes for a comfortable retirement. The “Big Three” automakers got a few bucks as well, to keep them in business, but I notice they’re still loosing money hand over fist! Congress is happily investigating all the “wastage” of investors’ money, which strikes me as a case of the pot calling the kettle black! Now we’re going to come up with yet another bail-out, and stimulate the economy to the tune of another eight hundred plus billion dollars. Five-hundred or thousand dollar “free money” checks from the government is a nice chunk of change for most of us, but hardly enough to “stimulate” anything. For most Americans, that isn’t even enough to pay the months rent, or cover a car payment! I suspect the grocery stores will do pretty good… for the month… but what happens next month? The states are supposed to get a few bales of money to sink into an assortment of infrastructure projects that have been deferred for years. All well and fine I suppose, there are a lot of roads and bridges that need repair, schools that could use a facelift, and hospitals that need an up-grade. But how much of this needed work is going to be pork-barrel projects designed to enrich the friends and supporters of prominent politicians? Another thought comes to mind as well, why sink a lot of money into fixing roads and bridges when nobody is going to be able to afford to drive on them?

President Obama plans to cut taxes for roughly 95% of the American people, which leaves the remaining 5% to pay the bills. That’s a lot of government income that we won’t see! At the same time we’re going to spend another two trillion (approximately) dollars in covering bad debits and kick-starting the economy? Well, I don’t work for the Treasury Department or the White House, but I do know enough about home finances that when my income is dropping I’m not about to run out and buy a new car along with remodeling the house! Certainly there are a lot of things I’d like to accomplish, yesterday if not sooner, but if I can’t afford them right now, they’re going to have to wait until I can. Do it all on credit? Yeah, right! Far to many people have found to their sorrow that credit card bills have to be paid as well, and it would have been a lot cheaper in the long run to delay that big purchase, waiting until they had cash in hand. Keeping in mind that government cannot create wealth (it can only spend what it can extort from the citizens) the proposed tax cuts and skyrocketing unemployment are going to severely depress the government’s revenues (income). Bailouts and stimulus programs will do nothing more than increase an already staggering annual budget.

President Obama says we have to act boldly to solve the financial crisis. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner added that we have to try things that have never been tried before. The Obama team wants to boldly take our economy where no economy has gone before. Humm… somewhat like “Star Trek”, only right now we apparently aren’t going to have the assistance of the Vulcans to save the day. Obama’s economics also begins with a violation of the Prime Directive of a free-market economy, you can’t stabilize the economy by increasing the deficit! We’re going to “bring the full force of the United States government to bear to strengthen our financial system” according to Geithner, but he didn’t say how, when or why. That’s not so much a plan as a wild idea! Besides, “the full force of the United States government” hasn’t been very successful at anything since we fought World War Two! This approach is based on the idea that doing something quickly is more important than doing it right. And if you don’t know what you’re going to do, make an announcement that is designed to placate people with vague promises of “change”.

Our republic has been threatened by socialism (with a striking lack of success) for many decades, but now it looks like Obama-Pelosi-Geithner Axis just might make it happen. The Democrats seem to think that that throwing government money at a problem will immediately solve it and the grandkids will be happy to foot the bill. Congressional Republicans on the other hand are using a bit more common sense I’d say, wherein they seem to realize that bankrupting the nation isn’t going to solve anything.