by Michael Sanibel

Created on: February 16, 2009

It's Time to Pay the Piper.

If any of you are as confused as I am about the government's so-called "economic stimulus" plan, I think I can understand why. I know I'm just a country boy from New England, but I do have my share of common sense and logic. You see, I'm having a very hard time distinguishing between the things that got us into this financial mess and the things the government has proposed to get us out. Let's take a look at the facts:

What got us into the current financial mess:
1. Out-of-control government spending
2. Historically low interest rates
3. Easy credit
4. Growing budget deficits and debt to foreign countries
5. High levels of consumer spending based on excessive personal debt and high leverage
6. Lowest personal savings rate in history

What Presidents Bush and Obama proposed to solve the crisis:
1. More out-of-control government spending (in the multi-trillions)
2. Lowest interest rates in history
3. Breaking the credit log-jam and making credit easy to get again
4. Exponential growth in the deficit and foreign debt
5. Encouragement by the government for consumers to spend, spend, spend to save the economy
6. Rebate checks from the government that you are told to spend, not save

Is it just me, or do these two lists look almost identical? What the government is doing is analogous to giving a heroin addict larger and larger doses of heroin rather than breaking him of his addiction. It may work in the short-term, but in the long-term the addict will expire. The same can be said of our fictional economy.

Unfortunately, the only way out of this mess is to break our addiction to debt, once and for all. Otherwise, the United States as you know it will cease to exist. Why aren't our leaders in Washington telling us this? Because they are doing what almost every politician before them has done they are pushing the problem into the future to let the next guy fix it. They don't want to be remembered as the "next Herbert Hoover." And most of all, they want to be reelected.

Contrary to what the politicians would like you to believe, this crisis was not suddenly caused by the greedy titans on Wall Street. The seeds for this meltdown were planted slowly over the past fifty years as our nation transitioned from being the world's greatest industrial power with a production-based economy to being a consumer-driven service economy. Please read that last sentence again. It is the underlying cause of the current problem, and set our economy up for certain failure.

Once you

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