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When people in Washington start creating fancy new phrases, instead of using plain English, you know they are doing something they don't want us to understand.
It was an act of war when we started bombing Libya. But the administration chose to call it "kinetic military action." When the Federal Reserve System started creating hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, they called it "quantitative easing" of the money supply.
When that didn't work, they created more money and called it "quantitative easing 2," or QE2, instead of saying:
"We are going to print more dollars — and hope it works this time."
But there is already plenty of money sitting around idle in banks and businesses.
The policies of this administration make it risky to lend money, with Washington politicians coming up with one reason after another why borrowers shouldn't have to pay it back when it is due, or perhaps not pay it all back at all. That's called "loan modification" or various other fancy names for welshing on debts. Is it surprising that lenders have become reluctant to lend?
Private businesses have amassed record amounts of cash, which they could use to hire more people — if this administration were not generating vast amounts of uncertainty about what the costs are going to be for ObamaCare, among other unpredictable employer costs, from a government heedless or hostile toward business.
As a result, it is often cheaper or less risky for employers to work the existing employees overtime, or to hire temporary workers who are not eligible for employee benefits. But lack of money is not the problem.
Those who are true believers in the old-time Keynesian economic religion will always say that the only reason creating more money hasn't worked is because there has not yet been enough money created. To them, if QE2 hasn't worked, then we need QE3. And if that doesn't work, then we will need QE4, etc.
Like most of the mistakes being made in Washington today, this dogmatic faith in government spending is something that has been tried before — and failed before.
Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said confidentially to fellow Democrats in 1939:
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work."
As for the Federal Reserve today, a headline in the Wall Street Journal of April 25 said, "Fed Searches for Next Step."
Walter Williams fans are in for a treat — and people who are not Walter Williams fans are in for a shock — when they read his latest book, "Race and Economics." It is a demolition derby on paper, as professor Williams destroys one after another of the popular fallacies about the role of ...
Over the past 16 years, we have seen a remarkable transformation of the United States' fiscal picture. In 1995, the federal budget deficit was spiraling downward. At 2.2% of GDP, the deficit was in its third year of decline, a trend that held so strongly that the budget went into surplus from 1998 ...
So what of the cumulative evidence against our maybe-president's citizenship? Let the reader judge the balance and weight of a summary appraisal. (Curious machinations over a crucial piece of evidence, a birth certificate of all things, changed the balance for me.) 1. If B.H. Obama is a ...
I will give you the unpleasant punch line upfront: There is sufficient evidence to reasonably conclude that Barack Obama is probably not a U.S. citizen, therefore constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States. The fact that he has been serving in that office would then be not ...
When Fujio Mitarai became CEO of Canon in 1995, the company had built up debt of $7.5 billion. Its many product divisions were described in the press as a bunch of warring, money-losing fiefdoms that plodded along year after year. Nobody was making the tough decisions. The problems were clear: lack ...
That said, there is a place for intervention if businesses just want to milk government for continual favors, reverse worker protections (while saying we have plenty of them) to maintain those favors, and threaten to move to despotic locales if they can't get divine amounts of favor. Sowell wants to force recovery, but in a way that is more like Tammany Hall's business favortism. If he wishes for that, there are plenty of despots willing to offer Mr. Sowell that kind of Faustian deal.
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Perhaps businesses should stop trying to stifle the recovery by withholding from it or trying to sour it. Trying to make a desperate workforce does not make people want to create businesses, but to kill the desperation in any way possible. The solution to the whole temporary work/part-time dodge, is to make the increased indirection / shorter term lengths make things worse. Desperation has no place in the US; businesses that promote it are ones that do not want a recovery.
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Amen Brother! The meddling in the economy by the government has stagnated it. As I recall, Obama and the press spent 2 years saying the economy was bad during Obama's campaign for president. That didn't help matters either.
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News flash: voters impose term limits on CONgress by not re-electing a single incumbent. Just dreaming"¦
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