BY RUSSELL TURNER
MORE POCKET MONEY
My grandfather had an old saying about people speaking out both sides of their mouth. What he was talking about was all of the double talk that the political class uses to baffle and deceive the American voter. Over the past several years the current presidential administration has declared war upon the wealthiest citizens of our country, but in the long run the wealthiest Americans are the ones who have benefited from all of the policies that the president and the Federal Reserve have implemented.
There have been several stimulus programs that were supposed to get our economy up and running, but none of them have achieved the results that were promised. The latest, “QE3” quantitative easing program, is scheduled to end by November. The scheme injected $85 billion into the economy every month. The idea was that the money would stimulate investment and help everybody. Instead of helping all citizens, a small sector of the country realized a massive financial asset bubble. Money flowed into stocks and bonds, mainly benefiting wealthy Americans. Not much trickled down to Main Street, where unemployment stayed stubbornly high and wages stagnated for years. What we citizens witnessed is what I call Crony Capitalism, it happens when government policies unfairly benefit the well connected donors to political campaigns. Fortunately we Americans are starting to experience a stimulus in spite of the government.
With the QE3 program, the average citizen would have to wait for the money to trickle down after Wall Street got their cut. Today we are seeing the cost of energy dropping; everything from gasoline to natural gas has become much more affordable. While the total monetary amount is not nearly as much as the stimulus program, the benefit to the average American is immediate. When someone has to commute to work every day the savings tend to build up quickly. Those savings allows a person to spend the extra money on other necessities; there is more money to eat out more often or purchase something to make life easier. This kind of stimulus does grow the economy for everyone. You would think that everyone would support having cheaper energy, but there are those who do not support it. One example is our President; he has made it perfectly clear that he wants us all to reduce our fossil fuel consumption and high prices are a good way to discourage energy use. While he does at times brag that our oil production is up in the United States, he is not telling that the increases are on private lands. Public land drilling has been going down instead of increasing. He has also refused to allow the construction of the Keystone Pipeline; that project alone would create thousands of well paying jobs and have the effect of increasing the oil supply. If the current administration would stop pandering to the environmental wacko crowd, we could have had more money in our pockets for a long time. The American free enterprise system is the only thing that can repair our economy and not some politician speaking out of both sides of his mouth.
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