Say Anything Blog

Spot-on analysis from one of the few Republican governors in America who is keeping his head amidst all this stimulus mania:

WASHINGTON (CNN) – As many state and local officials clamor for their share of the billions of dollars in federal aid in the stimulus bill under consideration in Washington, South Carolina’s Republican governor is sounding a note of dissent about federal efforts to help the economy.

“A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt,” Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy,” Sanford also said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is “what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.”

“That is quite different than a market-based economy where some rise and some fall but there’s a consequence to making a stupid decision,” Sanford said after pointing to the powers granted to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to help deal with the current economic crisis.

Sanford is exactly right on the two biggest dangers of the “stimulus” and bailouts in general.

When we look to the government to solve our problems, or to bail us out of poor decisions (such as taking or making bad loans), we lose our independence.  And we lose our freedom.  But it seems like everyone wants the government to bail them out.  People want government health care.  People want the government to re-build their homes after natural disasters.  And even the government itself wants bailouts as the states turn to the federal government to bail them out of their self-inflicted budgeting disasters.  Rather than being self-reliant, we are becoming government-reliant.  And a government that’s powerful enough to give us everything, or bail us out of anything, is powerful enough to take everything away (to paraphrase something someone else said).

Also, when we try to ban failure from our economy by refusing to let bad-actors in the economy fail, we try to ban the very thing that makes our economy so strong in the first place.  Companies (or even state budgets) that can’t survive without a bailout don’t deserve to survive.  Because they are unsustainable.  And by bailing them out we only ensure that their unsustainable bas practices continue.

We may be able to play this bailout game for a while yet.  We may be able to play this game where the federal government pretend like it has an endless supply of resources with which to prop up every out of control state budget and every unprofitable business model for a while yet.  But we pay for everything we get, and every bailout or “stimulus” that gets passed is either going to be mean more tax burden for us (if our leaders are at least responsible enough to raise taxes now to pay for them) or more tax burden for our children and grandchildren (if we’re irresponsible and just allow all this new spending to explode our national debt).

Either way, we’re not solving anything.  We’re just creating more problems for ourselves.