So then, agreement appears to have been reached on the $800 billion 2009 Economic Illiteracy Advancement Act. In times to come, I will be writing in a bit more detail about economics, but let me say a little brief something now.
In order to “invest” 800 billion into our troubled economy, the gummint must find that money somewhere. Where? Why, it appears that the only source for them would be . . . our troubled economy.
Impress it on your minds, boys and girls. Brand it on your frontal lobes, good people. This is crazy. It is not quite like taking money out of your left pocket and putting it into your right pocket because many different people are involved, unlike the pockets deal, and usually such transfers are made without a great deal of loss. This is more like trying to fill up the low end of a swimming pool by extracting water from the other end of the pool, and doing it by means of a colander that you use to scoop up the water, and then running really fast down to the troubled end of the economy, I mean pool. Remember, the colander is far more efficient at the “taking water out” end than it is at the “putting water in” end.
So, then $800 billion in means at least $800 billion out. $800 billion of private deals, purchases, loans, investments, and so forth, have now vanished. Nobody notices though, because you can’t take video footage of the factory that was never built, and you can’t interview the employees of that factory about how happy they are with their new job. Being private and uncoerced (more or less), these vanished deals were far more likely to have been fruitful.
The government does not create money; it can only rearrange it, about as effectively as that colander. The government does not create jobs — it can only rearrange jobs, and when it does this (as it has now, to the tune of $800 billion big ones), there is inevitably a downgrade. But God is still in His heaven, and America is only getting what America wants and deserves. And America is going to get it good and hard.