Slaughtering Cattle to Make the Sun Rise
Many “primitive” religions confuse cause and effect. The priest tells you to sacrifice an animal (or sometimes a human being) to make sure that the rains come, so that there will be a bountiful harvest. Would the rains come anyway? Who knows? Why take chances?
President Obama and most Democratic members of Congress insist that a crisis will become a catastrophe if we don’t pass this pork-laden stimulus package right now. But imagine my surprise when I recently read the Congressional Budget Office’s January 8, 2009 projection for the next ten years (available at
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9..._Testimony.pdf). The report explicitly says on page 1 that they assume “that current laws and policies regarding federal spending and taxation remain the same...” And their prediction on page 2? “CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II. (The longest such recessions otherwise, the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions, both lasted 16 months. If the current recession were to continue beyond midyear, it would last at least 19 months.)”
This is not surprising. Boom and bust cycles are a natural part of a capitalist economy. The 2003-2007 boom was spectacular, and even if there were no subprime
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madness going on, this would have been quite a bust. But notice that CBO was, only a month ago (when this stimulus package was being written), still expecting the recession to end in the second half of this year, even without the stimulus package—-and Congress’s own economists told this to Congress. Congress knew this, while insisting that “something has to be done now.”
Much (perhaps even most) of the enormous debt burden that this stimulus bill will handcuff onto the next generation will be for spending that will not start until after the Congressional Budget Office believes the recession will be over. So why was there this unseemly rush to get this bill passed?
The sun is going to rise shortly. The priest is insisting that we need to slaughter that bull right now or the sun won’t rise. But here’s the difference between that primitive priest and the Congressional majority that just passed the stimulus bill: the majority knows that the sun is about to rise—-and they are terrified that if we wait much longer, we’ll figure out that the sun was going to rise anyway, and this enormous burden of debt to pay off special interests wasn’t necessary.
