Sunday, February 03, 2008
I'm incensed at the Bush/Pelosi $150 billion economic stimulus package.
You should be, too.
Sending us a check for a couple of hundred bucks is a pandering joke — an economic slap in our faces.
Hopefully you are smart enough to see through this economic smokescreen. Even if you spend all of the money — your money, by the way, coming back to you — it will do little if anything to improve the sagging economy.
Sending Americans a check is economic flash over substance. If our professional politicians really wanted to improve the economy, they would do a couple of key things.
* Cut the bloated, wasteful federal budget. Cut it by 10 percent or more over the next couple of years.
The blob-like federal government has grown to such a size that it is now eating itself with a $9 trillion debt and billions in deficits, smothering economic opportunity.
If you want real economic stimulus it cannot be accomplished until the federal beast is reined in and put on a diet.
Although I am no economist, this is so fundamental to improving our economy that I am surprised so few of the talking heads have discussed it as a means to improving the long-term American economic condition. I have always lived within my means, and my government should, too.
* Give small businesses tax relief. We must create incentives for small businesses to expand and hire more people. We could accomplished this by getting the onerous, unaccountable IRS off of individuals' backs.
Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. Strangling them with taxes and stacks of regulations, rules and requirements sucks the life out of our economy.
We must do whatever we can to assist small businesses and encourage them to grow.
Putting money back in Americans' pockets is a good idea only if the money is in the form of permanent tax cuts.
Keeping more of their money gives them more economic choices. Socialists and bloodsuckers aside, I have yet to meet an American who does not favor tax cuts and keeping more of his or her money.
Instead, the professional bureaucrats who run our government want to give you some of your money back in hopes that you spend it on blingbling, big-screen televisions and other indulgent garbage.
Even if everyone blew through the money, it would do little to prop up our economy.
Bailing water on the Titanic may have sounded like a good idea at the time, but you would have drowned anyway.
Robbing and spending our grandchildren's tax dollars today is a recipe for economic disaster. We cannot tax our way out of this economic mess without pushing the middle class further into the economic abyss.
The only way out of this is to grow our way out of it. That can be accomplished only by reducing the size of the federal beast, doing whatever we can to help instead of hindering small business, and giving all Americans permanent and meaningful tax cuts.
As the American presidential primary juggernaut roars down the political track, voters need to ask two key economic questions:
* Do I really believe that federally controlled health care will improve the quality of health care?
* Do I believe that more or less government intrusion is the right approach?
America remains an economic powerhouse. Our economy is four times that of China, but China, India and other burgeoning economies are nipping at our economic heels. If we continue down the path we are on, China's economy will eclipse our own by 2030. That's not good.
The foundation of freedom is economic freedom. You know far better than others how to spend your hard-earned money, how to invest it, and how to take care of your health. Vote for your economic freedom. The economic fate of our country is your hands.
Ted Nugent is a Waco-based musician and television show host. Contact him at tednugent.com.
