Tuesday, February 10, 2009

What’s another trillion dollars?

So Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced a revamped bank bailout plan today and to be generous it was a little shy on details. Lots of vague platitudes about restarting the lending system and preventing foreclosure, but not much specifics. That is fine if you are talking about the business plan for an eBay store, but when you are throwing numbers like $2,000,000,000,000 around, people are going to be looking for some details.

The market is far from reassured that this “plan” is going to work. At 3:00 the Dow is down over 350 points, back below 8000. That is hardly a vote of confidence from people who desperately want some good news.

So what is President Obama going to do when this doesn’t work? There is no back-up plan. He has committed all of his political capital and almost a trillion dollars of tax payer money to the notion that this will save us. There is little guarantee or even rational hope that this “stimulus” spending is going to do much of anything. Even if it does help spur the economy, we are certainly not getting much bang for our (trillion) buck(s).

President Obama is rapidly being exposed for what I suspected he was all along, an empty suit that lacks the experience or the vision to lead this nation. He handed a blank check for $800 billion to the most radically leftist elements of Congress and let them go hog-wild with spending on everything but programs that make sense. Now he is left trying to defend and push a bill that frankly I don’t think he knows much about and certainly is having a hard time selling to an increasingly skeptical American public.

Talking about “hope” and “change” is easy. Leading this nation in a time of crisis is a lot harder.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Watching him last night, I just kept thinking that the courtship is over. He has wooed the American public, and now that she gave herself to him, his true colors are starting to show.

Arthur Sido said...

April,

That is a very apt analogy. The honeymoon period is just about over and now the American people are starting to realize just what they signed on for, and they don't much care for it. He may be quite a campaigner but he isn't much of a President thus far.