Victor Davis Hanson: Funny Money
[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College.]
Obama recently promised $250 to seniors (who got no cost-of-living increases in Social Security because there had not been sufficient official inflationary pressures to merit them), and a good-paying job to every American who needs one. Apparently, the president did not say that in this period of $1.6 trillion dollar deficits and $12 trillion paper-printing national debts, he is going to borrow several more billions of dollars from the Chinese to spread around as the proper duty of the great benefactor in Roman bread-and-circuses fashion.
This madness, of course, of dressing up borrowing as “stimulus” will come to an end when the debts pile up and creditors begin to sniff that just maybe, in the style of Germany in the 1920s, we may be inflating our currency to prepare to pay off debts at a discount, and therefore they will want not 3 percent, but as in the days of Jimmy Carter, 10,12, or 15 percent to subsidize American entitlements not accorded to their own far poorer Chinese citizens. The servicing of the debt is going to be so large and take such a percentage of the annual budget that these same present beneficiaries will soon have to help to pay it all back with interest, given there are not enough greedy rich geese left to pluck...
Read entire article at Private Papers (website of Victor David Hanson)
Obama recently promised $250 to seniors (who got no cost-of-living increases in Social Security because there had not been sufficient official inflationary pressures to merit them), and a good-paying job to every American who needs one. Apparently, the president did not say that in this period of $1.6 trillion dollar deficits and $12 trillion paper-printing national debts, he is going to borrow several more billions of dollars from the Chinese to spread around as the proper duty of the great benefactor in Roman bread-and-circuses fashion.
This madness, of course, of dressing up borrowing as “stimulus” will come to an end when the debts pile up and creditors begin to sniff that just maybe, in the style of Germany in the 1920s, we may be inflating our currency to prepare to pay off debts at a discount, and therefore they will want not 3 percent, but as in the days of Jimmy Carter, 10,12, or 15 percent to subsidize American entitlements not accorded to their own far poorer Chinese citizens. The servicing of the debt is going to be so large and take such a percentage of the annual budget that these same present beneficiaries will soon have to help to pay it all back with interest, given there are not enough greedy rich geese left to pluck...