Posts
Hi All,
Sorry I’ve been silent for awhile. I’ve been very busy with work and with getting additional training to keep up to date on this fast paced world. So clients had to come first and the blog second.
Politics and the Economy! The economy is still stumbling and may fall again BECAUSE housing prices still aren’t stable. While most people agree that health care needed reform (they disagree about the form it should take) it just isn’t as important as jobs. And unemployment won’t get any better until housing prices stabilize. I think I said that more than a year ago and it remains true.
The politicians at all levels just don’t get it. But come November members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are going to get a rude wake-up call. Perhaps we need term limits, perhaps we just need to be a little less parochial and a little more involved in what is good for the entire country. Perhaps we just need to get a little more involved…period.
Raising taxes at this point is unwise, but it may be necessary. How we do it and what when we do it is more important right now than what we do. Stimulus packages full of special interests (PORK) really didn’t help turn the economy around. You can blame the Bush administration for the economic conditions and trends in January 2009. However the economy is the purview of Congress and most of the same players are still there. Now it is nearly September 2010 and the economy is worse off that it was then. Clearly the House of Representatives (responsible for all appropriations measures) didn’t get the job done (since they were the folks who screwed it up in the first place). Whether it was a lack of experienced leadership or just wrongheaded ideas in the White House can be argued, but at the end of the day it was the house, lead by Nancy Pelosi, that has failed to turn the economy around. It is not the Fed (Ben Bernanke) or Treasury or any of the other agencies. It was the House of Representatives. They passed bills appropriating Billions upon Billions of dollars to “help the economy” yet the economy is not on the road to recovery. It is their fault. As Harry Truman said “the buck stops here” so, yes the Obama administration gets the blame as well.
What all this means to you is that we need to do a significant House cleaning (Senate too) to wake everyone up in Washington. It may take more than just the upcoming election in November. We may have to keep the pressure on through the elections in 2012 and beyond to get things back on track. In one of my columns I predicted that unemployment would not get back to 2005 levels until 2017. I hoped that I would be wrong and that we’d recover sooner. Now I worry that it may take longer, that we may duplicate the Japanese experience and lose not just one decade but several.
Charlie Rangle of New York, Maxine Waters of California are both being investigated by the House ethics committee. They may or may not be guilty, but that suggests that they are not squeaky clean. It just so happens that they are Democrats. There have been a fair share of Republicans investigated too. Part of the problem is that the ethics committee is made up of four Republicans and four Democrats (all also members of the House of Representatives) so it is a bit like letting the Fox watch over the Hen House. You wonder, after seeing the deals that were made with individual Congressmen to pass the Health Care bill what kind of deals are being offered to the members of the Ethics Committee. Oh, but that would be unethical, wouldn’t it?
Remember, the longer it takes to retrain Congress to work for all the citizens of this country and not the special interests, domestic and otherwise, the longer the economic malaise will continue. Draw your own conclusions about what that means to you and your family.
