Posted on 10/10/2010 6:34:33 PM PDT by jfd1776
Washed, Waxed, and Detailed, But It Still Won’t Start! By John F. Di Leo, for Illinois Review, October 10, 2010 A.D.
The Troika of President Barack H. Obama (D, Trier Tavern Club), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Lubyanka Square), and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, Cheka) has been assigned the duty of looking after a lovely but non-functioning automobile. It sputtered for awhile, then stopped. Now when you turn the key, it just makes that well-known “click-click-click” sound. It doesn’t do a thing.
So they washed it, because that’s something they know how to do. They washed off all the dirt; they used a bucket of soapy water, sponges, and a new yellow chamois… it’s clean as a whistle now. But it still won’t start.
So they waxed it, because that’s also something they know how to do. First they used a paste wax… and it still didn’t start. So they tried that fancy “new” liquid – not a wax, but a space-age polymer – and the car still didn’t start.
So they vacuumed the interior... polished the wheel rims… even painted slick racing stripes on the side… “it’s sure to work now!” But when they turned the key… nothing.
Wonder why.
Not all of us are handy. I’m no mechanic, I admit… I have to drive my car to the dealership or repair shop when I need an oil change, let alone a big repair job. But I know how to vacuum out the interior, or wash and wax the exterior. I can tell – easily – whether my own talents will suffice, or whether the services of someone much more talented are required (which, in my case, is just about anytime you have to lift open the hood!). If the car needs its engine cleaned out because there’s gunk clogging the pistons, if the distributor cap is shot and the fuel injector isn’t forwarding the fuel, then I can’t do a thing; I know I need to turn over the project to someone who can.
Surprisingly, not everyone can make such a basic determination. We can all see that the group at issue here – currently based in Washington, D.C., but hopefully not for long – really can’t tell the difference between their own talents and the talents of others. They stubbornly refuse to give up on their own methods in favor of the proven methods of others, no matter how obvious is their failure, no matter how doomed their continued effort. They just don’t know – won’t admit – that they’re out of their element.
The broken-down car above is the housing sector – a broad sector of the economy, and critical. Everything the Troika has thrown at it has failed to produce so much as a blip. Economists say that housing has led us out of the last seven recessions, and because of how the housing sector works, the statement is defensible.
The broad term “housing” really means a mixture of home sales, home building, and home repair and renovation. It involves sales of land, manufacturing of structural materials, construction work, new utility hookups, new insurance policies. It creates jobs from sump pump manufacturers in Delavan to kitchen faucet filter factories in Milwaukee… from sawmills in Ann Arbor to roofing plants in Shakopee. Housing keeps every aspect of our economy moving, from huge public companies to independent weekend workmen.
That sector has been at a near standstill for the past couple of years, ever since the housing bubble of high home prices burst. The administration has been responding as if the sector is all about housing sales, and if we can just get housing sales to increase, all will be well again. So they’ve addressed the issue the only ways they know how, thinking the way liberals think, applying fixes that appeal to the mind of the tax-and-spend puppeteer state:
• To get the banks to loan more money to builders and real estate investors so they’ll build more new homes, they’ve freed up massive credit at virtually zero interest,
• To free the banks from the drag caused by the immense weight of the many foreclosed and near-foreclosure properties on their balance sheets, they have moved many properties into other banks, and given them inducements and encouragements to open new loans,
• To get construction companies and others to hire more people so they can build and manufacture more, they’ve offered employers a whopping $3000 per new full-time hire in a one-time tax credit. Oooohhh.
• To help the absolutely worst-risk homeowners resist foreclosure or “walking away,” they’ve offered a limited government-sponsored home modification program,
• To help unemployed homeowners to keep making payments, they’ve started a practice of continual extension of unemployment benefits through the upcoming national millennium celebrations in 2776,
• To get those homeowners to buy new windows, doors, and insulation, they offered up to $1500 in tax credits if they did it quickly,
• And to get people to buy new houses, they’ve offered a one-time personal tax credit as high as $8000 just for buying now rather than responsibly waiting until they can afford it.
Yes indeed, the ruling troika of Obama, Pelosi and Reid have tried every form of stimulus imaginable for pushing people and companies into housing-related activity. If people were in a position to do so – if they could afford to do so, but were unnecessarily putting it off – then these steps would most assuredly have done the trick and nudged them into the desired activity.
So if it hasn’t worked – and heaven knows, it sure hasn’t! – then it must be something else, right? Of course it is. The problem isn’t that people don’t want to buy houses. The problem isn’t that Americans have suddenly stopped desiring upward mobility, that they’ve suddenly decided that a one-bedroom cottage without heat or air conditioning that the environmentalist extremists seem to advocate (but of course would never choose for themselves) is perfectly satisfactory to them. No. The problem is that in the current economy, they just can’t afford to move up.
We have a published unemployment rate of ten percent, a real unemployment rate of about seventeen, and most of the rest of the employed population is suddenly without confidence in their jobs and a reasonable expectation of either regular raises or upward mobility in their careers.
The price of the house and rates on their mortgages aren’t just dropping, they have become irrelevant for millions, because whether it’s ten percent cheaper or twenty percent cheaper or even forty percent cheaper isn’t a deal if you aren’t confident that you’ll be getting a paycheck in six months or a year. So you don’t buy this year, or next year, or even the year after that. The reason our housing slowdown – no, our housing standstill – has dragged on so long is that this critical issue hasn’t yet been addressed. All the steps the Troika has taken to try to force these people into additional housing choices are therefore contrary to their interests; the Troika’s approach would just pull ever more and more Americans into the same maelstrom.
The recently standard American economy – that is, the economy of upward mobility, job-hopping, and general, broad opportunity that has been a standard for a generation – from Reagan’s triumphant conquest of the Carter recession all the way through the Pelosi recession that began almost as soon as she took command of the House of Representatives in December 2006 – has no solution for this problem, not even any experience with it.
In past recessions, people would eventually move from industry to industry, or from industry to service, from sector to sector. There would be pain for a while, but the whole country didn’t collapse at once, leaving no alternative careers for the displaced to find and settle in. We could always adjust.
Not so this time, because the Troika has hammered every industry, not just some. The automotive nationalizations and dealership purge, the energy overregulation and total oil rig shutdown, the assault on banks and insurers, and the crushing weight of Obamacare – these have not just been direct shots against the bow of one sector or another; each one weakens the entire country; every sector feels it, from retail to wholesale, from transportation to construction, from manufacturing to services.
Idiotic little targeted stimuli like the Troika have been offering – $1500 off a $20,000 window job, $3000 to hire a new $75,000/year employee – cannot make up for this economic climate; only a fool could imagine it would. The solution is to fix the economy itself, to recognize what is bringing it down, to put an end to the incessant punches that are being landed on the chin of our economy by a national capitol (and by dozens of state capitols as well) that take no breaks from the beating.
• Housing will come back when existing businesses and potential entrepreneurs alike are able to stop fearing the heavy hand of government regulators.
• Housing will come back when we cut our corporate income tax and capital gains taxes – not temporarily, never temporarily, but permanently, so that we don’t crumble in fear as a sunset date approaches, unsure of whether an economically illiterate Congress will extend them, as we have for these past four years.
• Housing will come back when the endangering and purse-bursting mandates of Obamacare are repealed and replaced by free market solutions and tort reform.
None of the Troika ever held normal jobs in the business community; they are lifelong political activists in the non-profit – even anti-profit – sectors of community organizing, local government, and state and federal government. When businessmen who run for office sometimes say “My opponent has never met a payroll, he doesn’t understand how jobs are created” it’s often spun as an irrelevant insult; now that we see what happens when the country is run by people who’ve never met a payroll, it turns out there was some validity to this issue after all.
One of the key problems with the Troika’s entire approach to governance is that it looks at every issue as a segment to be managed, an interest group to satisfy. Take from the rest and give to this bunch… take from the rest and give to that other bunch… take from the rest and give to these bunches over here and over there. They never counted on a time when they’d need to give to every bunch, and there was no more “everybody else” to overtax to fund it. The steal-and-bribe technique doesn’t work when you need to bribe everyone, and there’s nobody left from whom to steal.
There is a bright side, however. Our system gives us a chance to throw the bums out every two years… more in four, all by six. The great awakening that began in 2009 with the elections of Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell has the potential to sweep out the detritus and send worthy individuals to our capitols again, as has not occurred en masse in over a century, if the public stays focused beyond this current election… and if our police and states attorneys are watchful on Election Day and are vigorous in their prosecution of vote fraud, so that the true public will may be realized.
For even though the rosy promises of the Troika – “Unemployment won’t go over 8%, the recession ended in June 2009,” Yeah, sure – are outrageously wrong, so too could be the predictions for a molasses-slow ten-or-twenty-year recovery period that so many fear.
Just as the market has caused home values to plummet, a recovered market will cause home values to rise, and quickly too. When unemployment is back where it was before Speaker Pelosi took power, when Obamacare, the death tax, surcharges on the rich, the drilling moratorium, and Cap and Trade are all a distant memory, then people will not only have jobs and upward mobility again, but they won’t be afraid to sign those mortgages, and to hire those remodelers.
No amount of Democrat Party policies – rebates, credits, bribes – will cause the housing sector to rebound. But when conservative policies are given a chance, so we may again see five successfully employed buyers competing for one house, rather than five desperate sellers competing for the same buyer – then at last will we see price, profit, and profusion again return to the housing market, concurrently resurrecting manufacturing, insurance, construction, banking, and in fact, the entire economy at large.
There’s only one way to get there, and it’s been abundantly proven that the party currently in power is either incapable, unwilling, or both to take that route, so we need to show them the door.
November can’t come soon enough.
Copyright 2010 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Customs broker, international trade compliance expert, and serf. He hopes to extract himself from that last title, assuming November 2 turns out as it ought. In the interest of full disclosure, John is proudly employed by one of those great American manufacturers who still makes sump pumps, kitchen water filters, and other construction materials right here in the Midwest, and he and his colleagues are all looking forward to being a part of the recovery!
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There are a number of points in this piece that have hyperlinks to other articles; please go to the original posting in Illinois Review if you're interested. Thanks for your patience, Freepers!
I’m going to read this offline.
No, wait...they've already done that.
Really great post, thank you.
There isn’t enough water in the Atlantic Ocean towash the dirt off this Congress and it’s false President.
>> “Really great post, thank you.”
That was good jfd.
Thanks.
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