Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Citizen suckers, hear this: we could run up cumulative federal deficits in excess of 10 trillion dollars over the next four years, and be fiscally poised for the future, just like we were at the dawn of the cold war.

$10 trillion... that's what Obama could borrow in his first term, and end up making us all better off than we were when he arrived at the White House.

So... what to spend it on?

As some Chinese red mandarin was quoted in the press recently -- we gotta spend it "fast" and with "a heavy hand".

But here's the real point: the best and fastest first shot would be not to spend it at all, but to rebate it: send a check for last years SSI taxes to every payrolled geef and geeffette in this country, and then declare a holiday from the SSI tax till further notice.

It's ours, we earned it, so let us spend it -- or pay down debt, or whatever. Just plain dispose of it any way we want.

Then next we might think of nationalizing the HMO's, like Uncle is already doing with all our big-boy high-finance outfits. Replicate the Paulson/Bernanke/Ribbentrop bailout pact -- but not to the benefit of the silk pajama crowd. Nope. For us -- by socializing the private health insurance industry. Call it single payer by other means.

Once it's partly ours -- get every American signed up to a private plan, and have Uncle pay the first $2000k per head, as social coverage of... well... personal coverage. That oughta get the ball rolling.

Note: This rebate plan is unlike the balance-sheet plugs approach, AKA "bail the big bums out" -- or as Obama all too benignly calls it, "fixing the financial plumbing." Don't matter if it's for the banks, or the insurance companies -- balance sheet injections only benefit us jobblers directly if the pipes leak. Otherwise we gotta pray for lots of so-called wealth effects to lift aggregate domestic expenditures.

Note: anticipating that 5% of upper-crust wealth increase will get spent -- not lent-- is prolly high ...that's as far as wealth effects go.

So if the rich guys behind these faltering hi-fi firms feel restored to former wealth levels, by a trillion or two in bail bonds, then they'll spend maybe ...maybe... maybe... 100 billion more than otherwise.

Not a very high yield, eh? And so far as the "plumbing" goes -- as far as lending goes -- hey, the state of defaults makes lending increases very problematic. The bastards are unlikely to turn the taps enough, any time soon.

Whatever voodoo hoodoo might occur as a result of the series of pain-relieving Paulson corporate injections, a direct rebate to wageling households, of taxes extracted to begin with right out of their own work earnings, will hit the real economy -- the one that makes real products -- much harder. And more importantly, resurrect the job force levels much much faster. It's a virtual WPA, folks -- bootstrap macro at its finest. In fact, if the household expenditure wave is big enough, in about two or three years, when we finally have the plans for our green lean and clean sustainable production machine, we oughta see such hyper-employment conditions, and such a real wage spiral under way, and such a production capacity squeeze that... it'll knock the pips off the dice in Las Vegas.

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Next post:

General product inflation is ripe for a harness. Enter the markup cap-and-trade system -- to end price pollution in our time.