WEEEEEEEEEISEL!!!!!! Washington’s ‘new tone’ might be ‘tone deaf’
Just five days after his inauguration, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have already given us a taste of what’s in store for America over the next four years.
Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
How bumpy? Well, for starters, despite the historic significance of the first black American to become president, the stock market fell 332 points on the day he was sworn in, the worst Inauguration Day cratering of the Dow Jones in 113 years.
As the new president told us in his inaugural address, it’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again. Nice tune — ironically enough it was sung by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And he also said in his inaugural that we must ask ourselves “not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”
And that is the $3 trillion question (and counting). Maybe the question we should be asking is whether anyone in Washington has a clue as to what works. So far nothing is working, but it’s early in the game for the new administration and rebuilding the American economy will indeed take time — lots of time.
However, there are troubling signs that business as usual on Capitol Hill is rearing its ugly head. It seems The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Rep. Barney Frank, of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fame, back in December saw to it that a favorite bank of his in Boston got a $12 million injection from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that was supposed to be sent to healthy banks to jump-start lending. This was a bank (OneUnited Bank) whose capital had disappeared and was being hammered by federal regulators for poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses. Frank, chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, wrote into the TARP bill a provision specifically tossing taxpayers’ bucks at his hometown bank.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There was more:
Timothy Geithner, despite failing to pay payroll taxes for several years, is going to be the Secretary of the Treasury, which makes him responsible for the Internal Revenue Service. His “innocent mistake,” as his party supporters in the Senate termed it, would likely be described as “tax fraud” by unforgiving IRS auditors if such a mistake was made by the average Joe taxpayer.
Eric Holder, who was confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General, is the same guy who rubber-stamped President Bill Clinton’s pardon of notorious felon Marc Rich. Holder will be in charge of seeing that the Justice Department affords suspected terrorists and enemy combatants their “constitutional rights.” He is also being pressured to pursue a criminal investigation of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies. We feel safer already.
There’s much more, not the least of which is whether the new administration and Congress will craft a stimulus package that will really work. Will they focus on incentives for people and businesses to invest, produce and work? Will they throw money at people who don’t even pay taxes and instead emphasize reductions in marginal income tax rates, especially where these rates are already high and fall on capital income? Or will the emphasis be on massive public works programs that have little impact on revitalizing the entire economy? They didn’t work back in the 1930s during the Roosevelt administration and they won’t work in 2009. More government spending is not free — future generations will eventually receive a due bill. “Voodoo economics” is not good policy.
We’ve heard a lot about a “new tone” in Washington, and “bipartisanship,” and an end to the “petty grievances” and “recriminations” that have poisoned the conduct of government. America sorely needs that from our president and Congress, yet signs are already in the air that a “new tone” could become “tone deaf” among those in charge in Washington.
The American people have put a lot of hope and faith in the new president, and it is incumbent on him to provide some adult supervision to those in his party who so far don’t see the big picture. It’s not a pretty picture, and the economy and how business in Washington is conducted will continue to tank unless a makeover occurs — soon.
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