The Great Heist

We have outlined the priorities for a recovery in our accompanying economic blog, for the most part reserving judgement when adorning those pages. We are not writing from the cheap seats; we distill events for our readers, then offer a solution. So have many others; it is not a mystery now what needs to be done. But it suddenly dawned on us that we may have been taken in. This calls for a comment in this arena - politics - a response before Obama lays waste to what remains of our social and economic fabric.

Without a viable banking sector the stimulus package and the budget mean nothing. Simply noise. Everybody knows that. You don’t have to be an economist. But the Obama administration has shied away from embracing any bank solution. What? Under this administration, has a single toxic asset actually been seized, separated, sold, or de-toxified? Don’t think so.

We wondered why BO has done nothing to address the bank problem. (So has the equity market which is exactly why it is in the tank.) How silly of us. The recovery is secondary to BO and his pals. The goal - nothing more than to effect a shift in power to politicians and bureaucrats, to in fact weld a lock on American society. Ths crisis then is a gift to the far left. The stimulus package, as the IBD put it, "is nothing more than a down payment on a socialist economy. It raises taxes on the successful, brings back the welfare state....," hands out favors to friends of the Democrats and imposes controls on the free market in ways that just a year ago would have seemed unimaginable.

What is transpiring my friends is in fact the greatest political heist modern man has ever witnessed. When Emanuel laid out his "Rule One": "Never let a crisis go to waste," he was being brutally candid, exposing his and his boss’s agenda in crystal clear fashion, to all who may have been listening. This is a dream come true to this bunch.

It’s all about spending, taxing and - key - the deep insertion of gov’t in our daily lives that goes with it. A pal in the gym intoned the other day, "Hey, that Pelosi sure slapped Obama around, huh?". Well, not quite. That was a set up. As Rich Lowry put it, "By giving Pelosi running room and enduring a few embarrassments, he got what he wanted, which was as much new spending as quickly as the political system could bear." And by cheerleading for the economy the past few days (changing roles from pallbearer the previous week) he hopes to do the same for his budget plan.


Robert Craven