The Keynesian policy junkies are out in force, all strung out and exhausted from retching and withdrawal, but like an OxyContin psychotic storming drugstores desperately looking for his next fix, they have picked themselves up and taken to the airwaves and Internet in an attempt to foist their megalomaniacal schemes and demands on America's future.You’ve got Paul Krugman rambling endlessly in the New York Times about the “real story” and being “right” about the bubble and “right” about stimulus and “right” about the size of the stimulus and “right” about GDP and “right” about unemployment and “right” about the second half slowdown and “right” about needing another $800 billion stimulus program… With a disturbing cultish zeal, Krugman will not cease his childlike diatribe until, in his mind, the whole of America relents and agrees that big government holds the solution for anything and everything.
Then there is Laura Tyson who, while blathering on recounting her reckoning of the events of the economic decline, the government’s response and the importance of additional aid to the states, ironically ends her bit of wisdom with a slap at the past suggesting that “imprudent fiscal decisions before the recession” were the real culprit of our long-run economic problems… This coming from one of the main architects of the 90s-era quantum-leap to free, unfettered and immediate global trade liberalization that subsequently opened the floodgates to today’s off-shoring of manufacturing and professional services jobs.
Finally there is the administration’s “Recovery Blog” that teems with creepy propagandist content like a clip about federal subsidized home weatherization and the government sponsoring “groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs” while simultaneously issuing a multitude of defenses of the Recovery Act against such treacherous and critical sources as the Associated Press’s “Fact Check” and the USA Today money section.
Interestingly though, the policy junkies message, however shrill, appears now to be falling on deaf ears as an American populous suffering from a major case of stimulus fatigue and reeling from continued weak economic times loses confidence in hollow claims and clunker-chicanery.
What the government meddlers need now is a new and exciting stimulus policy not just the same old “shovel ready” scam or green energy flimflam.
To that end, I’d like to propose two new initiatives “The First-Time Goldbuyer Tax Credit” and a new government sponsored enterprise (GSE) “Goldie-Mick”, programs that together would benefit innumerable numbers of disenfranchised Americas who have never had the opportunity to own an ounce of gold bullion.
While the gold bullion ownership rate has been increasing as of late, it’s still at historic lows and with steadily rising gold prices fewer and fewer Americans can afford to own gold bullion.
What the economy needs now is more gold ownership which would work to stabilize household balance sheets, provide a much needed benefit for gold brokers while also saving and/or creating thousands of new jobs in the mining sector.
The implementation of these two programs should be fairly obvious as they would simply take the shape of the government’s past housing related nonsense but in this case with a much more popular and exciting asset-class!
Housing is out … Gold is in!!
It’s time for big-government to step up to democratize and subsidize access to an important, yet under-appreciated piece of the American Dream.
