Posted by
Always To The Right on Monday, July 05, 2010 3:28:05 PM
Oddly, Zakaria offers a hair-of-the-dog solution in the short term,
demanding another government stimulus package in the summer. Why?
Because teachers will lose their jobs, Zakaria claims, falling into the
same trap that the national media bought in the wake of Porkulus. Never
mind that dozens of state- and local-based media reported accurately
that those jobs were never
actually in jeopardy, as the “education” funds received by the
states allowed them to shift resources to protect jobs in other
bureaucracies. Zakaria spends most of his column showing how
destructive the government interventions have been, and then argues we
can’t live without just one more round, like an alcoholic who
promises to swear off the bottle tomorrow.
In order to unlock the capital in those ledgers, the US needs to set a
fiscal course that demonstrates deficit reduction and elimination
through substantial spending cuts rather than future tax hikes. That
means an end to government interventions, especially those added or
enhanced in the last few years that took the annual federal budget from
$2.77 trillion to over $3.8 trillion in just three fiscal years.
Capital markets need to see pro-capital policies, run by people who
actually understand capital markets, and not by ivory-tower
intellectuals whose closest experience to private-sector management was a
case study published by the Harvard School of Business. And until
Washington starts producing those kinds of policies, investors will
continue to shield their capital — or find other markets in which to
invest it.