Stimulating Growth

The stimulus package that the President and his Congress have cobbled together features very little in the way of items that will stimulate our flagging economy. It is full of spending to mollify those partisan groups that helped get the President elected.

Nature has often renewed itself by allowing the sick and weak to die out so that the stronger species could grow and be nutured from the decaying remnants of those species that died off. Conservationists have even adopted these methods to help nature recover from overgrowth and overpopulation. We burn underbrush to prevent larger catastrophies. We partially log out forests to provide the necessary light to reach the plants below. We sometimes allow forests to burn because the ashes from the destroyed timber replenish the earth with nutrients necessary for rapid and sustained growth.

How is our economy any different? Shouldn't we let lenders and banks and companies that are a cancer on our economy just fail? Wouldn't that make more sense than trying save a corporation that can't survive regardless? The ashes from this recession could give rise to another period of sustained growth like we experienced under Reagan's watch.

Reagan inherited a far worse recession than the one we are currently embroiled. He didn't create a bunch of spending bills to spend our way out of recession. He did it through tax relief, both personal and corporate. Although he did bailout Chrysler, he didn't spend trillions to do it as we are today with no strings attached and no means of measuring success.

We don't need a spending bill disguised as a stimulus bill. FDR tried to spend his way out of the Great Depression and likely cause it to last longer. Who knows how long it would have lingered had he not gotten us into World War II. What we need is to tell these banks and lenders and other financial institutions that they assume the consequences of their risk. In other words, the people of this country are not going to mortgage their children's and grandchildren's futures for their bad decisions. Those companies that can weather the storm will emerge more vital. Those that cannot, well, will provide the nutrients upon which our economy will flourish again.

I have contacted my Senators to inform them not to support any stimulus bill that includes spending of any kind. The only stimulus that needs to happen is to first shrink the size of our government, provide tax relief to corporations to lure them back from overseas, and provide tax relief to all wage earners in this country.

I encourage you to contact your Senators and tell them to toss this monstrous spending bill and stop calling it a stimulus bill. I can't spend my way out of debt and neither can the government.