Apparently, a grand total of sixty United States senators failed their economics and history courses in both high school and college. This would appear to be the truth since a letter signed last September by the said sixty senators clearly points to their complete lack of knowledge when it comes to these two areas of study.
The letter, signed at the urging of a major labor union, declares that statistics show that if countries around the world simply stop manipulating their currencies via devaluation, then our devaluation policy would create several million new U.S. jobs. The thinking goes that if only the United States was devaluing, and no one else was devaluing (including China, Japan, Argentina, and most of the world), with our products being cheaper, they would be the products of choice worldwide. Evidently, since no one would be buying other country’s products — only our products would be purchased — it would require much more U.S. production, leading to increased demand for American workers, resulting in higher rates of U.S. employment. Thus, the senators, via a strong suggestion from the union, are looking for ways to actually penalize the world for doing exactly what we do every single day, namely devalue our currency.
Interestingly, our “learned” senators call it currency manipulation. Domestically, we refer to it as quantitative easing — it’s good for the goose but not for the gander. Indeed, it’s just another example of highly questionable economic senatorial thinking to say the least.
Of course, the aforementioned sixty senators also come up short in the subject of history as it appears they forgot all about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which was passed on the premise that no other country would mirror our level of significant tariff protection. Again, the thinking went — according to the “learned” senators — that we can do whatever we want and the rest of the world will not respond, they’ll just watch and probably applaud. That kind of thinking led to the Great Depression and a catastrophic worldwide war. However, the “learned” senators didn’t seem to recall any of that when they signed the union induced letter.
Keep in mind, these are the very same senators who give backing to an international policy that seems to lead us from one crisis to another, these are the same senators who fully backed “we’ll know what’s in it when we pass it” (Obamacare), and these are the same senators who seem to think that “Operation Fast and Furious” and “Benghazi” were merely the two most recent movies starring Vin Diesel and Matthew McConaughey.
Undeniably, the “learned” certainly didn’t do well in the academia of economics and history and unfortunately they’re not doing very well in the real world either. Although the “learned” won’t pay the price, we definitely will.