Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, director of the White House national economic council, have now diagnosed the real trouble behind the economic crisis – not enough government regulation. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, the co-czars of Obama administration economic policy were emphatic that “the pace of innovation in the financial sector has outstripped the pace of regulatory modernization.” Their solution is creation of a “new” federal financial regulatory system. But the problem isn’t outdated bureaucracy, it’s too much bureaucracy. Geithner and Summers are merely making the same old Big Government pitch: Just give them more bureaucrats, more red tape and more tax dollars, and this time, it will work. No, really, it will. They promise. Just like when Big Government saved the family farm, eliminated poverty, stopped illegal immigration, made hunger a thing of the past, eradicated urban ghettos, ended the fear of old age, erased traffic congestion, and turned America’s public schools into such shining examples of educational achievement.
The reality becomes clear in The Examiner’s three-part series of excerpts from “Housing America: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown.” Government deserves the primary blame for the wreckage of the U.S. economy. For three decades, politicians in the White House and Congress from both political parties pressured lenders to give specialized mortgages to millions of unqualified low-income buyers. Naturally, housing speculators, and assorted crooks who lied about their income or assets, also got into the act. As housing values skyrocketed, government debt guarantees encouraged shady investment practices on Wall Street. When the bubble inevitably burst last fall, the economy all but collapsed.
Now, government’s solutions for the disaster it created – bailouts, nationalization of major corporations, borrowing hundreds of billions for stimulus spending, hiring new hordes of petty bureaucrats – will saddle unborn generations of Americans with an unimaginably huge public debt burden. But public skepticism is growing. A Rasmussen Poll on Tuesday found that 71 percent of U.S. voters think Washington should sell its ownership position in banks to private investors. And 80 percent favor doing so with the government’s stakes in General Motors and Chrysler, as soon as possible.
On Monday, the Congressional Budget Office released its finding that Obama’s health-care plan would cost $1 trillion over the next 10 years. And that’s before tabulating the long-term cost of the administration’s Public Option plan for the uninsured. As Sen. Mike Enzi, R-WY, put it: “This bill will cost too much, cover too few, and cause too many to lose the coverage they enjoy now.” And here’s a thought: If you think what they’ve done to the economy is bad, just wait till they finish nationalizing America’s health-care system.
