We are so screwed.
The writer doesn’t understand. The socialist bail out is working perfectly. It has nothing to do with improving the economy. The goal was to expand government with more mandates and regulations. The money was merely the carrot.
You see, anyone who has studied economic and monetary policy understands not only THAT FDR's New Deal policies failed miserably, but we understand WHY they failed.
They failed because, in order to fund those government-paid programs (i.e., stimulus), that money can come from one of two sources: the government can either directly tax the people to pay for it, or they can print new money to pay for, which is an indirect tax on the citizens via inflation.
FDR taxed. And he taxed businesses. As a result, he created jobs that did not create a self-perpetuating employment as most jobs in the private sector do. They were make-work jobs that only consumed funds from other sources. Well, those sources were largely businesses — businesses that create self-perpetuating employment by continually responding to a market demand for goods or services. Stimulus is no different. It is make-work jobs that is not responding to a market demand.
By taxing businesses for make-work jobs, government deprived the private sector of their earnings — earnings that they could have used to create real jobs, and thus perpetuated the Great Depression. Many claim that WWII got us out of the Depression, but it didn't really. It only eased some of the economic indicators (unemployment, manufacturing), but did so minimally and only briefly. By the end of WWII, those numbers were already starting to back off. It wasn't until the much-ridiculed 1950’s that economic prosperity really took off again in America. Why? That is when many of the government restrictions on pay and price and many of the government programs (taxes on business and earnings) backed off. The left likes to claim that war is an economic boom. But it isn't (it only creates temporary bubbles), and they make this claim to link Capitalists with war-mongers and war-profiteers. The left also likes to ridicule the 1950’s as being some sort of vapid, meaningless, feel-good decade the Labrador-retriever decade of Americans, so to say. They do this in order to ridicule and minimize the economic prosperity that resulted because of a return to free-market principles.
After FDR, however, politicians learned that directly taxing the citizens and businesses was a very unpopular approach to funding socialism. So, they did what all good tyrants do when they want to buy the support of the people: they turned to the presses to create fiat money. Printing money with no tie to GDP or any other national wealth devalues the currency in circulation. If you have ten dollars in your wallet and your neighbor counterfeits so much money that all the stores in your area double their prices, your neighbor has, in effect, stolen half the value of your ten dollars. That is what the government does when they try to “print their way out of debt” or “monetize the debt” or, according to their latest newspeak, employ “quantitative easing.” It is all the same: the government printing money by fiat with no tie to economic growth and thereby acquiring their spending power at the expense of the money that people have and the value of their assets.
So, I say again. The people in the federal government are well aware of these basic economic principles. They are employing them deliberately. They are doing so either hoping that the people will be deceived into believing there is economic recovery and so begin to spend and borrow again to prevent the entire bubble of our economic from finally bursting, which won't work anyway. Or they are doing so deliberately not to sustain the economy or improve it but to completely destroy the value of the US dollar and, more importantly, to ruin the credit rating of America. Why? Because they are ruled by the global-collective ideology. The only way they can get Americans to give up their freedoms and sovereignty is if they so reduce them to economic misery that they beg the government to give up the US dollar and sign on with an economy controlled by a global, central bank such as the World Bank for the IMF or some other to-be created global economic ministry.
Why would businesses be hiring? You have an administration and congress who is passing bills penalizing growth and success.