Stuck
Posted on November 20, 2013
We are stuck in 2009 and we can’t get out.
The United States just signed an agreement with Afghanistan that will keep a contingent of our troops there for ever, despite the fact that nobody in America gives a rat’s ass about that country.
Why do we have to stay there if nobody wants to visit?
Ben Bernanke predicts that interest rates will stay near zero forever and a day. He doesn’t see the Fed relaxing its easy money policies, even if we go below a 6.5% unemployment rate.
I understand why the Fed wants to keep the money flowing, especially because Congress seems to be allergic to pro-growth fiscal policies, but isn’t there a price to pay for so much easy money flowing around.
And if Bernanke is preaching the gospel of easy does it, can you just imagine what the new Fed Chairman is going to preach?
Obamacare is another one that boggles the mind.
It is going to be a disaster. We all know that. The President lied to get it passed. The website roll-out has been so terrible that the woman whose picture was on the front page of the site has received hate mail, and she had nothing to do with the passage of the law or the creation of the website.
You can make the case that people are crazy, and I would agree with that assertion, but Obamacare has made them more crazy.
And guess what? We can’t do anything about it because this President will never sign its repeal.
So, our troops are stuck in an unpopular war, the Fed is stuck on a dangerous monetary policy and the American people are stuck with Obamacare, and there is nothing that any of us can do about it.
And let’s not forget the other things we are stuck with.
The sequester that hits discretionary spending the hardest seems to be stuck on auto-pilot. That will kill jobs and hurt our defense capabilities. But unless Congress bands together and turns off the automatic axe, we are stuck with fewer jobs that come from normal government spending.
We are stuck with entitlement programs that will bankrupt this country unless we change them fundamentally. The President has backed away from his promise to deal with this problem in his second term.
We are stuck with a complicated and counterproductive tax code that actually inspires major companies to move to places like Ireland or otherwise keep their profits parked in banks overseas.
We are stuck with a broken immigration system that just about everybody agrees much be fixed if we want to grow out economy.
We are stuck. The President doesn’t have much of a plan to unstick us, other than call a press conference or make a speech.
The American people are tired of being stuck. But Washington has a vested interest in keeping us stuck, so stuck we remain.