We Americans are really living in preposterous times, both with the economy but also with ourselves as a citizenry. This country elected a new president in November 2008 to help rebuild this country. Rebuilding is not free. Even in times of serious financial hardship, spending money to repair damage is an unfortunate necessity. In any financial crisis or temporary emergency, it would be understood that the expenses needed to repair any damage previously incurred would soon level off. As the health of the structures that were damaged regain their momentum, that initial expenditure of money would cease or be redirected and used for other things, say for lowering, and then eliminating, the temporary and former debt.
Our national economy was nearly bankrupt. The solution at first has to be a solution at the federal level and with federal money. The country asked Obama to help by electing him as our next president. The Obama administration took their job seriously and took necessary steps to save that bankruptcy from happening. That assistance was not going to happen with little-to-no expenditure by the federal government. The economy is now healthier than it was a year ago. However, the public is still being critical now, but for a different reason. President Obama is being criticized for spending the money that was necessary to rebuild simply because federal money was spent. We are only seeing that more money is being spent and added to the already bulging deficit, but we are not understanding the importance of how and why the money is being spent. It is necessary and it has been effective. The recession that we were facing has diminished. Not all the problems facing the country are over of course, but they have been lessened and improved. But the public is only seeing the temporary necessary spending as more federal government wasteful spending in the face of an enormous deficit. However, in this case it is not wasteful spending. The spending of the Bush administration that created the enormous deficit (after Bill Clinton’s surplus) was wasteful. What the public at large does not see is that even in the face of a deficit, some money needs to be spent in repairs in the short term to ensure that the economy regains its footing and rebuilds for the health of the country for the long term. Once again, this is an example of many of the citizens of this country being much too short-sighted and wanting results too quickly. But it is simply not possible to correct eight years of disastrous policy in only one year. The preceding year needs to be looked at in terms of money necessarily spent in order to begin to rebuild.
Our national economy was nearly bankrupt. The solution at first has to be a solution at the federal level and with federal money. The country asked Obama to help by electing him as our next president. The Obama administration took their job seriously and took necessary steps to save that bankruptcy from happening. That assistance was not going to happen with little-to-no expenditure by the federal government. The economy is now healthier than it was a year ago. However, the public is still being critical now, but for a different reason. President Obama is being criticized for spending the money that was necessary to rebuild simply because federal money was spent. We are only seeing that more money is being spent and added to the already bulging deficit, but we are not understanding the importance of how and why the money is being spent. It is necessary and it has been effective. The recession that we were facing has diminished. Not all the problems facing the country are over of course, but they have been lessened and improved. But the public is only seeing the temporary necessary spending as more federal government wasteful spending in the face of an enormous deficit. However, in this case it is not wasteful spending. The spending of the Bush administration that created the enormous deficit (after Bill Clinton’s surplus) was wasteful. What the public at large does not see is that even in the face of a deficit, some money needs to be spent in repairs in the short term to ensure that the economy regains its footing and rebuilds for the health of the country for the long term. Once again, this is an example of many of the citizens of this country being much too short-sighted and wanting results too quickly. But it is simply not possible to correct eight years of disastrous policy in only one year. The preceding year needs to be looked at in terms of money necessarily spent in order to begin to rebuild.
Jacob Weisberg wrote a very direct and astute article in Newsweek (“Down With the People: Who’s to blame for the political mess? You.” Newsweek, February 15, 2010, p. 20) asserting that the American public wants in both ways. We want the federal government to solve the problems facing the country, but we don’t want the federal government to use any of our tax dollars to do it. As Weisberg points out, this is utterly unrealistic. It is also unreasonable and uneducated. You have to continue to spend some money to rectify a serious mistake, no matter who is to blame. To think that the Obama administration can implement any successful recovery from the recession (that we’re still in though less severe now) without a largish temporary price tag is just not using our collective heads.
We need to wise up as a country, take a deep breath, swallow hard, and face the fact that we are going to have to spend some money (probably by increasing the federal deficit, plus revenue from some higher taxes (yes, mostly on the wealthy because they can afford it, and because some of them got us into this mess in the first place) ) temporarily so that we can curb spending more later. This is just common sense, mature thinking, and the mindset that the nation had (even if only subliminally) on Election Day, November 2008.
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