Pros and Cons of the Stimulus Bill

[SpursFanFirst]

Aggie:

While I think promoting good health is important (immunization programs, health screenings and counseling, smoking-cessation programs, scholarships and loan repayment for health professionals, research, and evidence-based disease-prevention strategies), I agree that there's no place for it in this stimulus package.
This just doesn't make sense. No wonder there were so many "nays."

Mike Pence (R - Indiana) was against it, and this was one of his reasons.

[mogrovejo]

Massive generational wealth transfer (which curiously will affect negatively African Americans more than any other demographic), pork fest, pay off to Obama cons uents. How can anyone seriously believe that this pork fest can work - or any other stimulus package - may "work" sounds bizarre to me. It'll only make things worse on the long run.

[Winehole23]

from Minyanville.

Currency Destruction

Mr Practical

The details of the good bank/ bad bank plan have yet to be revealed, but it's important to remember one important point: Any program initiated by the government is a zero sum game, at best. The government can't create wealth/productivity; it can only transfer wealth from one en y to another.

A government given the power to create money (debt) out of nothing, as our current financial system has been allowed to do since the creation of the Federal Reserve (particularly after Bretton Woods) results in the destruction of the value of the currency. Thomas Jefferson would label our current system uncons utional.

The plan is a derivation of all the previous plans, with a new name and a new sponsor - the FDIC. Does anyone believe the FDIC can manage bad assets any better than the private market did? What the FDIC can do, with the help of the government, is create money (debt) to buy bad debt (I'm not going to call them “assets”). But what price do they pay the banks for it?

If a bad loan has a 50% chance of being paid back, perhaps its market value is $0.60 on the dollar. If the government pays $0.40 on the dollar for it they have a reasonable chance of getting the value back (as long as the situation does not deteriorate further).

But if the government buys the bad debts at $0.40 from banks, banks will have to take huge losses and possible go bankrupt. This is because they have no capital left to absorb those losses. I would guess the government would have to pay $0.75 on the dollar for banks to be able to transfer/break-even. This is probably what the government is thinking. So the chances of getting that money back for taxpayers is very poor.

To increase those odds, the government will then transfer wealth from the productive ones among you to those who have to pay back that debt. They will pay the healthcare and education and give poor jobs to people in debt. They will borrow the money to do this from our children. Essentially they will create money today and worry about paying it back later. When you create money, you devalue the money.

This is what the government plan is: To further destroy the value of the currency to try to help people and the economy. But remember: An economy is based on production, not the ability to borrow. The standard of living is based on wealth, which is created by production or income generation, not the ability to borrow that wealth from someone else.

We were borrowing from the rest of the world to keep our standard of living high. Now we're increasingly borrowing from our children, who will eventually experience either much higher taxes or a much lower dollar; either will lower their standard of living.

But my words will fall on deaf ears. Policy is settling in. We just confirmed a Secretary of the Treasury who was directly responsible, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, for monitoring proper capital at all of our money center banks. They failed, because they didn't have enough capital to support the vast lending they were doing. Geithner isn't going to change his tune.

The one thing we can be sure of: The more government says these plans will “get us back on track to long-term 'healthy' economic growth," the less that will be true. We're only sustaining a too-high standard of living at the expense of our children.

The more the government pays over the real price for bad loans, the less deflation there will be (debt destruction) and the quicker hyper-inflation (currency destruction) will ensue.