A Failed Obama Hero

Where do the trillion-plus dollars come from that Congress and Obama are spending in an effort to stimulate the economy? How about Santa Claus, or maybe the Tooth Fairy? If you said, "Come on, Williams, you're being silly! The only way government can spend a dollar is to tax or borrow it," go to the head of the class. In the case of a tax, one should ask what would that taxpayer have done with the dollar had it not been taxed away. He would have spent it on something that would have created a job for someone. If the government hadn't borrowed the dollar, it might have been invested in some project that would have created a job. When government taxes, borrows and spends, it shifts unemployment from one sector to another. Of course, the sector that benefits tends to be a political favorite of the shifter.

Between 1787 and 1930, our nation has seen both mild and severe economic downturns, sometimes called panics, that have ranged from one to seven years. During that interval, no one considered it to be the business of the federal government to try to get the economy out of a depression because there was no constitutional authority to do so. It took Hoover, FDR and a frightened and derelict U.S. Supreme Court to turn what might have been a three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 15-year meltdown.