If I am elected one of the guiding principles of service I will adhere to is this: No More Rigged Games.
When you pay for health insurance you should receive care. When you make a bank deposit that should be recorded first, then any charges against your account would be applied.
And when We, The People collectively make a deposit into the banking system in the form of an bailout, and those banks fail to return to their lending duties, someone has to do the job. Promptly.
If you know a little history of the New Deal you’re aware of the recession of 1937. The Democrats had won big in 1930, 1932, 1934, and 1936. The same deficit hawk talk we’re hearing now kicked in, government programs were pulled back, and the crash was prompt and hard. We already know precisely what will happen if we back off the stimulus throttle, the Republicans know it, and they’re counting on this to derail our national recovery so they can seize control of the House of Representatives this fall.
If they manage to do this we’ll see Barack Obama subjected to the same nonsense flung at Bill Clinton - Darrel Issa of California’s 49th District has promised as much. Not only will our national recovery be derailed, the best president we’ve had since I was in grade school will be unable to tend to the nation’s business because he’ll be busy fending off delusional theories about his alleged birth in Kenya or his purported secret Muslim faith.
The lessons of the last Great Depression are clear; when the banking sector fails the federal government is both the lender and employer of last resort, standing in the place of private industry until tough regulation can squelch bad practices and time squeezes all of the bad debt out of the system.
The Republicans can only cast the government’s role in this as a grave deficit concern. It’s a pity they weren’t so brave and resolute as our previous president buried us in debt with tax cuts for the wealthy and off budget wars. Need we exhume any more of their record in this area?
Every dollar spent on unemployment insurance puts nearly two dollars into the economy as it circulates. Direct federal jobs in the 1930s left us with a legacy of national parks, county fairgrounds, bridges, schools, and other durable things we still enjoy today. Our grandchildren will thank us eighty years from now if we apply the hard won wisdom our grandparents collected eighty years ago.
Those federal direct jobs that the Union of Unemployed Union of Unemployed are seeking are important and I would back measures in this area until American entrepreneurship kicked in, but we also need to prepare the ground for those seeds of rebirth. A paycheck from a direct job is nice ... but not all that useful if every store on Main Street is already shuttered.
Federal stimulus dollars should flow in a judicious fashion through existing programs to ensure that this utter collapse does not come to pass. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, and other entities are already configured to provide grants and loans directly, or to manage funds flowing through existing banks.
These programs should be funded out of the United States Treasury with the expectation that this is not a hand out, but a hand up to hard working Americans, who will repay this investment many times over in both the job creation at which small business excels and in tax revenues from their endeavors.
Programs like these are not expenses, they’re INVESTMENTS.
I’m ready and willing to do the work needed, but I need your help to get there. If you can afford to do so, my ActBlue link is here. If you’re unemployed or tapped out for the moment you can still help me pump up my name recognition by talking to me on Twitter and commenting on my Facebook page. Friends and followers are nice, but conversation is much more important, so I really do hope that I’ll hear from you.