Week 6 Blog

I was reading an article on the online version of the U.K.'s "Telegraph" in which Simon Heffer says that perhaps Barack Obama can't fix America. Heffer said that the pork spending that America is spending with the stimulus bill, which is somehow still being talked about, may put our nation in eternal doom. He mentioned the fact that there is a book by Ayn Rand about how America is destroyed by high taxes and a reliance on welfarism, and Heffer sees the significant resemblance when he looks at America today.

Here's my take on this article. It's good, I'll give it that. But I don't really agree with anything he said. How can we see that this president will do a bad job? Who is to assume that even if he is issuing pork with his package, that it won't help the country escape the reality that is the recession in America. Ever since the package has been signed into law, for example, the stock market has been going up. Isn't that a sign that we may be rebounding, and that, who knows?, the recession may be coming to an end? How much of the credit goes to Obama? It will be very interesting to see how things go the next fifty days of his presidency, after the first fifty days haven't really given us enough yet to judge how good or bad of a job he is truly doing.

While perusing the net, I happened to see Steve Forbes's op-ed on forbes.com that was inquiring Obama as to why he has not taken the Abe Lincoln approach of firing incapable leaders. He focuses the article on why Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke still have jobs, when they obviously can't perform.

In the case of Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary, Forbes argues, has done nothing to do away with the principle of mark-to-market. This principle has been losing money on the book and, while they have more money, the banks have less regulatory capital to use, due to auditors fearing a lawsuit if they do not take action. In the instance of Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Forbes notes that Bernanke has made every mistake possible in creating and dealing with this economic process. He has shrunk the balance sheet of the Fed to $400 billion, which Forbes compares to firemen rolling up hoses in the midst of a large fire.

Overall, very good point made by Forbes. These men clearly have made mistakes, and I would appreciate it if Obama could realize that these men are not doing the job that they signed up for. We need competent leaders if our country is to succeed, and, right now, they aren't showing too much competence.

Finally, I saw something in the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson that, like the article above, criticized Geithner. He said that it is unbelievable that Geithner has not fired the CEO of AIG, Ed Liddy, after it was revealed that Liddy had given our money to its workers as bonuses. Instead, in the eight weeks since Obama got inaugurated, Geithner has decided to be nice to banks and insurance companies. Meyerson thinks the solution to this is simple. Naturalize these companies. 56 percent of Americans, including Alan Greenspan, support this idea already. That way, the government can appoint trustworthy leaders and prevent situations like the one at AIG.

I definitely agree with this article because it is quite clear that we need more government intervention in these companies, and nationalizing them would help us tremdously.