I hate to sound like a cynic; even more, I hate having my cynicism proved prescient. I am suspicious when the ‘lady doth protest too much.’ For example, today when I walked into the office where my kids were playing Wizard 101 online and chatting, my eldest ran up and started hugging me and telling me how much he loved me. Him being sweet but nine, and therefore not commonly so affectionate; this mom went straight to his chat log to see what he didn’t want me to notice. Praise God it was just him inviting everyone to ‘The Ice Palace’ to see him and some little girl get ‘married’. He was embarrassed. Phew!

Unfortunately, the bait and switch played by the used car salesmen in D.C. was not so sweet and innocent. I was fuming at the hearings on TV yesterday. Every time some puffed up hypocrite invoked the name of “My Constituents” or “The Taxpayers” I think I got a little taste of what Jesus feels when the Westboro loonies curse fallen heroes in His name. The whole time these two-bit shysters were railing on behalf of the people of this nation, attacking Liddy who is working for a single dollar to clean up someone else’s mess, I’m thinking two things, “How dare you act like you are doing this for the PEOPLE!” and “What do you NOT want us to see you sneaky bastards?”

Well today the word is out. The Fed went to work at 4 p.m. yesterday and the echo chamber of the media decrying $165 million in contractually obligated bonus payments was so loud you couldn’t hear the printing presses churning out one TRILLION fresh dollars. This is money from thin air; an unprecedented influx of cash into an economy that is shrinking, not growing. I said to my sister, “I guess China isn’t buying our debt anymore.” “I guess we’re buying our own,” she replied.

It made me think of an old episode of Married with Children. Peg gets into one of those Mary Kay style businesses but she’s a lazy bum. She doesn’t go out and stir up new business. She just buys everything herself and she thinks she’s going to make money that way. Tragically, this appears to be the mentality of our leadership. 

You cannot print your way out of debt. You can only print your way into a Carter economy. In very, very simple terms, all of the cash we have in circulation is really only worth the amount of genuine wealth accumulated by all of the personal holdings in the nation; all of the physical stuff we have. If you double the amount of money in circulation without doubling the amount of stuff in the economy, the value, or buying power of the money was just cut in half. It doesn’t happen overnight of course. It takes time for the excess cash to place an impossible demand on products which then become artificially scarce causing shortages of particular items. Shortages drive increased prices in order to allocate the scarce supplies to those willing to pay the most for them. Wages rarely rise as quickly as prices, which makes the buying power of your income decline. If you earn a dollar an hour and each dollar can buy two packs of gum, but now there are people left and right who are willing to pay two dollars for the same two packs of gum, you can only buy half what you could before with the same hourly income.

I find it incomprehensible that a man as intelligent as Barack Obama obviously is could possibly believe this is an effective response to a faltering economy. In fact, everything he has proposed is anathema to building wealth. He promises to make it more expensive to employ in an environment of burgeoning unemployment. He promises to insure 78 million additional people through government largesse while admitting that the insurance we currently provide is bankrupting us. He promises to cut the national debt in half while tripling it and enacting policies proven time and again to reduce the tax revenue of the national coffers. He promises a better energy policy and more affordable living standards, while crushing the energy market with a two trillion dollar cap and trade scheme, the cost of which will fall on anyone who drives a car or heats a home.

So if he isn’t stupid, what explains these foolhardy endeavors? Could it be that while we are suffering under ballooning energy costs, deteriorating health care and sky-rocketing inflation, this ideologue will use our desperation to institute changes to our way of life that will make the past couple of months look conservative by comparison? 

I am coming closer and closer to the conviction that Rahm Emanuel was understating things when he said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The policy of this Administration seems to really be, “Never let a good crisis end.”