Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (301688)	4/18/2009 5:56:14 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793963

Interesting thoughts from Charlie Moore in The Telegraph. These are doubts from a sympathetic observer. Like New Labour, Mr Obama likes to speak – he used their favourite phrase again in Georgetown – of "tough choices". So when he offers his social reforms to the American people, he argues that they will be financially as well as morally virtuous. He says he is attacking entitlements – what Tony Blair and later David Cameron called "the bills of social failure" – and he rightly castigates the waste and fraud in existing US medical provision. But it is not clear that these choices are actually going to be made. What is clear – it is publicly stated – is that an extra $634 billion has been allocated in the Budget to begin to create his new health-care system. When Aneurin Bevan set up our own dear NHS, one of his beliefs was that better health care, by making people well, would lead to lower health spending. To say that these savings did not materialise is the understatement of the century. Two thoughts occur. The first is to ask what markets will think of this as it sinks in. Suppose, for example, that this burden of debt crowds out the economic recovery that Mr Obama is trying to engineer. Suppose that the small stirrings of life showing just now disappear in the third quarter as nervous Americans continue to save, not spend, and more people lose their jobs. The world contemplating buying US government debt will understand why it might be worth spending big to repair the banks. Would it feel the same about money borrowed for a US-style NHS and lots of windmills? If the world really doubted America's dedication to its own fiscal and financial order, that would topple the dollar, and with it American power. The second thought occurred to me because I had made my train journey to Washington from Princeton University. There I had been lecturing, 30 years on, about how Margaret Thatcher confronted economic crisis when she first came to power in 1979. The point that strikes one is that it was the crisis which, above all, galvanised her, captured her intellect, harnessed her energy. Like Churchill in relation to the Second World War, she felt that all her life had been a preparation for that hour. Her vision of what was wrong with her country, and how to put it right, was seen entirely through the prism of the crisis. The same cannot be said of Barack Obama. This is not merely because he has no previous experience of governing. It is because his idea of what he wants to do is really something quite different from what is actually happening to his country. In his inauguration address, he spoke of the need to get on with the business of "remaking America". For him, that economic stuff is not really part of the remaking, but a distraction from it. His vision of a more social-democratic country was conceived almost without reference to the greatest economic catastrophe to hit America for 80 years. He barely had to argue, or even think about it before or during the campaign. It shows. He says that his education, energy and health reforms must happen so that "such a crisis [the financial one] never happens again", but he merely asserts the link: he does not prove it. Through his astonishing personal qualities, allied with his ethnicity, Mr Obama feels like the right man to be President. But perhaps he has come at the wrong time. telegraph.co.uk