- Time To Eat The Minstrels

I don’t think the debt deal will help anything. And the reason I don’t is that the problem with government spending is not the fact that it’s spending, but what it’s spending on. Had the Tea Party folk been able to slash spending the way they wanted to, it would have been a VERY short term negative economic impact while all those federal workers from the then non-existent commerce, education, and energy departments went on unemployment. But as soon as the economy understood that those people wouldn’t be around to prevent economic growth anymore, the economy would have roared back more than enough to make up the difference.

Instead we’ve eliminated a couple of interns, and canceled a study or two on the effect of hip hop music on the mating habits of brine shrimp, but the infrastructure of large government remains in place. And it’s just as fully capable of obstructing economic activity as it ever was. This is what the Democrats and Obama won’t tell you. The reason we have such slow growth and high unemployment is that Democrats view them as a necessary and perfectly acceptable evil. They view them as the price you have to pay for properly chastised oil companies, and for keeping those ‘private jet owners’ from increasing the gap between rich and poor.

Democrats don’t think economic growth is important. They say they do, but that’s really just for the rubes at election time. If you look at the things they do instead of the things they say, it’s obvious that they don’t care about it. But you know who does care about economic growth? Moody’s, S&P and all those foreign holders of US debt...they care plenty. They didn’t buy a bond which pays more if the greenhouse gas emissions fall. They don’t do better if coal miners are driven out of business or if more Americans drive electric cars. How ‘organized’ their community is means nothing to them.

But those are all things that Democrats do care about. In fact, they care about them so much, that they would sooner preserve a billion in funding for ACORN voter registration drives than use that same billion for law enforcement. They want to accomplish ‘purely political’ goals rather than economic ones. In fact, many of them understand economics so poorly that they can’t tell the difference between the two. As an example, somewhere there is an idiot Democrat staffer right now saying something like “Well higher mileage makes people feel good about the planet, and since they feel good they’ll spend more money right?”

Achieving higher economic growth is not a mystery. The trick is to spend money in ways that give you higher growth not lower growth. If we eliminate those things that government does which actually inhibit growth instead of encourage it, then we’ll get a ‘double whammy’. And since those practice also do a great deal to unnerve CEO’s, it might even be a triple whammy. With the kind of economic numbers we've been posting lately, that's exactly what we need.

But the ultimate irony is that radically increased economic growth would also increase tax revenues, making it possible for Democrats to spend more money on the kind of economically useless things they think are important. We can have it all, so long as we treat vigorous economic growth as a first priority, and all the feel good 'rainbow and unicorn' regulation as a second. But that’s not where we are. Instead, we've left all of the economic obstruction of government in place, and only trimmed its budget around the edges a little - making it as capable of preventing growth as ever, but doing it more inefficiently. That won’t help.

When the folks at Monty Python went after their Holy Grail, sir Robin went forth into the wilderness with a team of minstrels. They were useless of course, but when the things got harsh, they ate them... "And there was much rejoicing." That’s where we are now.

Sir Barak has ridden forth into the wilderness with his full retinue of minstrels. They're slowing us down, consuming vast resources, and contributing nothing toward reaching our holy grail of low unemployment. All they do is sing about how much sir Barak is healing the planet, punishing the "corporate jet owners", and keeping those evil oil companies in line. They’re singing about how he’s dismantling the racist imperialist tradition in America, and spreading free medical care and Pell grants for everyone. But none of that is helping us achieve stronger economic growth.

We've entered that harsh winter. And what we should really do is eat his regulation generating, waiver issuing, employer suing, tax increasing minstrels. Every step they take or note they sing makes things worse not better. And if we eliminated their jobs (we don't actually have to eat them), then we’d all be much better off.