The current Republican Administration and Democratic Congress now talks about turning over $700 billion to the Wall Street welfare queens, much more than ever given to any welfare queens in Harlem, Detroit or South Chicago.
Just think what that $700 billion could do in giving a kick-start to the U.S. Energy Technology (ET) industry. This is our future, not enabling Wall Street welfare queens.
As the late Sen. Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking about real money.”
According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, the Head Start Program’s budget is $7 billion dollars, which is used to help 900,000 disadvantages students pay for their education. The $700 billion gift to the Wall Street welfare queens could be used to fund Head Start for 100 years.
Every expert has told us the world economy (not just the U.S. economy) will collapse if we don’t socialize Wall Street losses. But they are also concerned that we won’t allow them to capitalize profits after we finish bailing them out. Wall Street isn’t really all that different than the hyperbolic welfare queens of the 1980s.
They are just numerous orders of magnitude more expensive.
Do we really lack choice? Is there no other option than throwing $700 billion at the problem without any accountability?
If we do not bail out Wall Street what is “The Ripple of Evil” that will result?
The investment banks will collapse. Many people will lose their savings, with many pension plans tied up in these investments. Also investors from China, Saudi Arabia and Dubai will lose their shirts (or at least a sleeve) and be much less willing to lend us money or invest in our corporations in the future.
This will cause considerable instability in other banking institutions.
Houses will drop significantly in value. People will walk away from their homes when they don’t see quickly getting back to their mortgage value. It will become fairly common to walk away from your house valued at $200,000 when you have a million dollar mortgage.
Housing prices will drop more, leading to more walking away from mortgages. The housing market Ponzi scheme will end just as Ponzi schemes always end, with the late investors left holding worthless notes.
The housing market will eventually be priced as their value as shelter, rather than investments. Homebuyers will ask themselves, how much is it worth to have a roof over my head not how much can I make when I flip this house.
With so many banks failing, so many foreign investors leery of U.S. investments, credit will become difficult to obtain meaning buying fewer new cars, fewer jet skis and less crap from Walmart.
Americans, whose only remaining super power is our spending power, will stop spending. People will live within their means. We will lose out status as a super power, in the short term probably replaced by a vacuum, but if we don’t make the right moves, replaced by petro-dictators.
It could be a very tough next ten years. The country might actually have to make sacrifices for their crazy behavior over the last few decades.
All nasty stuff, maybe nothing like it since the Great Depression.
The good news is the government can respond. Apparently they have $700 billion laying around Washington D.C. that they didn’t use to bail out Wall Street (it really doesn’t exist, but it can be available.)
Rather than bailing out the Wall Street welfare queens, we use some portion of the $700 billion stake to invest in thousands of different Energy Technology initiatives. We use some to retrain the unemployed, so they are equipped to handle the future energy technology.
We try a huge number of different ideas; $700 billion can buy lots of buckshot. Some will work, most will not. That’s okay, that is what government can do is try things that might not be worth the gamble for someone looking for profit motives.
When there is a world without a hegemony, eventually some nation steps into the vacuum. The next hegemony will be the nation that can answer the oncoming energy dilemma. A country that can supply the world with cheap and renewable energy will make the world decisions.
The World Bank estimate one out of every four people, 1.6 billion people on Earth are off the energy grid, no access to power. Hooking them up to the dirty energy grid will be expensive and bad for the planet. Bringing them a solar generator will be expensive today, but will become cheaper as the technology improves and the scale increases, all made possible with the U.S. finding the right use for $700 billion.
Can you imagine living on a small farm in central Africa that has relied on human and animal energy? Someone from America comes to you with a reasonable priced solar energy generator to power both your farm and your house, no reason to chant “Death to America.”
With petro-dictators no longer having the money to repress their people or invest in terrorism, we truly get to see democracy sprout in parts of the world it has never had a chance to gestate without sending in troops.
We become the world leader by leading at what we can do best. Not spending or invading other countries, but by investments.
The first step is to stop being enablers for the Wall Street welfare queens and tell them the free market is working just as it should.
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