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Spend now, worry later
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| An Editorial |
February 24, 2009 |
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According to best estimates, World War II cost the United States approximately $288 billion. This converts to about $3.4 trillion in today's money. This was a staggering amount of money. It was spent battling enemies on two fronts - the Nazi's, who wanted to wipe out an entire race and rule the world with an iron fist, and the Japanese, who deliberately attacked us.
Including Roosevelt's Lend-Lease and other activities, it took us close to a decade to spend the money. We are well on the way to spending even more money in the course of a dozen months, and we don't even quite know who the "enemy" is.
Congress just passed the largest single spending bill in history. Lawmakers actually told reporters that the bill was too important and too urgent to read before voting on it. We have yet to find a legislator who will state that he (or she) read the entire law before voting for it. (The bill, they said, had to be passed quickly so that the Speaker of the House could go on a taxpayer-paid junket to Europe and so the President could sign it immediately. The President did not actually sign the bill for four days after passage.)
We were a different country when we fought and financed WWII. We had not yet forfeited our industrial might to third world countries and we were, indeed, the "arsenal of democracy" touted by FDR.
For the most part the money to finance came from us - folks were paid for working in our manufacturing plants and they - in turn bought war bonds. When the debt was paid, the money came back to us and our citizens bought cars and houses - improving their standard of living.
Back then our country actually created wealth by mining raw materials and making them into useable machines. This is a vital phenomenon that has escaped the American psyche - the creation of real wealth. When one pays for a fast food burger, no new wealth is created. Money merely changes hands. As we have learned in the past few months, when one pays an inflated price for a piece of real estate or buys a worthless piece of real-estate related financial paper, there is no real wealth created.
For various reasons - shopping demands, greedy union bosses, poor management, and bad Washington leadership - we have dispatched our great industrial wealth to other countries.
We are now a debtor nation and owe our survival to governments who don't have our best interest at heart; dictatorships like China and Saudi Arabia.
When the money is paid back this time the principle and interest will come out of the pockets of Americans and into the coffers of foreign countries. Because of the Pelosi - Reid Congress, future Americans will have a lower standard of living, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO says the so-called stimulus plan will create so much government debt that it will crowd out private investment in a few years and leave the U.S. economy in worse shape than if we had done nothing.
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©The Democrat 2010
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