Here Comes Another 'Stimulus' --- $600 Billion

Is it sheer coincidence that one day after the Mid-Term 2010 congressional elections, the Federal Reserve System announces it will begin pouring a total $600 billion into the U.S. economy over the next seven months?

The capital injection will come in the form of purchases of long-term Treasury securities by the central bank---about $75 billion a month between now and the end of June 2011.

By throwing more money into the financial system, the Federal Reserve is hoping banks will lend more, allowing consumers to purchase a home or refinance their mortgages and giving businesses the capital they need to grow their operations.

Sound good?  You bet.  But it isn't going to happen.  Even while banks have been able to loan each other money at overnight rates of zero to 0.25 percent for the past nine months.

Printing more money isn't the answer.  Jobs is the answer.  And while many talking TV heads argue the federal government shouldn't be in the business of creating jobs, we respectfully disagree.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the stroke of his fountain pen in the 1930s, created thousands of jobs for the nation's millions of  unemployed workers, by having them build bridges, dams and other big public works projects.

Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, from 1953 to 1961, did the same.  He is credited with having the unemployed construct the country's interstate highway system when rocky rural and county roads mostly were the only way to move around the nation.

The talking TV heads argue big and small business entrepreneurs should be the ones to be creating new jobs for the unemployed, not the government.

Agreed. But when they can't get the capital from the banks to do that, what happens?  Nothing.

In President Barack Obama's afternoon televised talk to the country Wednesday, he didn't once mention or allude to any blockbuster public works program that his administration might be considering, or should have been considering over the past two years.

Yes, the Administration is and has been funneling funds for job creation to governors in all 50 states.  But you and I know what has happened with that approach.  Nothing.

It is time for the President to partner directly with his Republican brethren to start mushrooming jobs.  He couldn't do this when he had the majority votes in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the past two years.

Can he do it now that he has lost the House and is barely hanging on to control in the Senate?

What do you think?

 

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