Deja Vu All Over Again

 

You know, sometimes you just can’t see the forest through the trees.  The answer to our country’s economic crisis is so simple I’m amazed that our president and our congress haven’t seen it.  Massive government spending of money we don’t have will only balloon the national debt to unrecoverable levels.  The better approach is to stimulate private sector spending that will only drive up personal debt and not the national debt.  Congress could simply pass a bill that would require banks to issue credit cards to un-qualified lenders.  That’s right, basically a credit card to anyone who wanted one, the higher the spending limit the better.   They could pull a trick out of the Jimmy Carter playbook and call this bill something like the: “Consumer Reinvestment Act.”  This would really stimulate the economy.  Millions of people could then go out and buy, buy, buy.  They could buy whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, whether they needed it or not, or could afford it or not.  It would be much better to have private citizens do this rather than the government.  This would accomplish two of the president’s stated priorities, to “spread the wealth around,” and to jump start the economy.  Government would love it because it would create millions of happy constituents.  Manufacturers would love it because factories would just keep cranking out all kinds of stuff.  Banks and financial institutions would especially love it because they could collect extortion-like interest on these loans.  They could call them “sub-human prime loans.”

 

Sounds like a really great idea, doesn’t it?  I can’t think of anything that can go wrong, can you?  Government wouldn’t have to watch over this too closely since they created it.  In fact, the government could get in on a big chunk of the action and set up its own bank to profit from all this.  I know two bankers who are perfect for the job, a married couple actually, Freddie and Fannie M..  It would be great for business, as banks and financial institutions could bundle up lots of these loans and sell them to each other all over the U.S. and around the world, and even make more money than the straight interest on their “sub-human prime loans.”  This is awesome… it could stimulate the economy for years, even decades to come.

 

Of course, the only possible problem could be that eventually the good people holding these extortion-like loans couldn’t pay them back.  Not really a big problem because the government could just step in again and pass another bill.  They could simply buy back these dead-beat loans from any banks and financial institutions still holding them that haven’t already gone belly-up.  Unfortunately, they’d have to use the hard earned tax dollars of every American to do this, but not a big deal, because with any luck the government would get a few pennies back on every one of your dollars they spend.  They wouldn’t really be able to call this exactly what it was: a dead-beat government bail-out program of a dead-beat government program, so congress would have to make up a fancier, more acceptable sounding name, something like the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” or T.A.R.P.

 

Isn’t it really amazing that something that is obviously such a great idea hasn’t already been thought up and implemented by your government?