If I went to my bank and asked for a loan without the equity to back it up and the ability to pay it back, I would not get the loan. If I told them that I could print some money to help with the pay down of the loan, they would most likely have called the police on me.
When you’re a politician, you’re almost legally untouchable. When you get elected to office at the federal level, there’s almost nothing you can’t do if you can get enough people to agree with you. It’s a matter of taking a vote. It’s that simple.
We’re seeing President Obama sidestepping the Constitution by threatening to issue 19 executive orders that would further restrict law-abiding Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
If you don’t like what the Constitution that you took an oath to uphold, ignore it and legislate like a dictator. If you don’t have enough money; just print some more. If you want to take control of the healthcare of every person in America, pass a law based on 2700 pages that few congressmen or the president ever read. It doesn’t matter what it says since bureaucrats will eventually write the rules. It’s all for our good, don’t you know.
If you want to make sure every person in America gets to participate in the American dream, force banks to loan money to people who don’t have the means to pay it back. No problem. Create agencies for people who can’t repay them. When these government agencies go belly up, print more money.
This video by Tim Hawkins says it better than anyone else. You’ll laugh and cry at the same time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LO2eh6f5Go0
This can all be done because there are few boundaries when it comes to government.
There’s a particular scene in the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives[1] that stars Frederick March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, and Teresa Wright that demonstrates the problem of feel-good economics.
March’s character, Al Stephenson, is a loan officer at a bank. Stephenson gets his job back at the back. He greets a customer who turns out be a returning solider like him. The would-be farmer wants a loan:
“[March’s character] asked him what kind of collateral he can provide. The young veteran looks back with a blank stare; he has no collateral. Al explains the bank needs to have some kind of security, a guarantee of sorts so they know they can get their money back. Dejected, the vet still could not understand why he was being refused. Al is painfully uncomfortable telling the young vet all this.
The bank officials are made to look like money grubbers for not loaning money to this genuinely sincere ex-G.I. The bank was right. Al, as much as he believed in the would-be farmer, was wrong. If he really believed in the man’s abilities and the soundness of the business venture, then he should have loaned him some of his own money. It was easy for Al to loan money that wasn’t his. There was no risk to him.
Congress and the President don’t care about debts and deficit spending. It’s not their debts and deficits. All they have to do is raise the debt ceiling. Some in the liberal brain trust are saying that there is no need for a debt ceiling. The sky’s the limit.
Try that at your bank and let me know how far you get. I bet you either get laughed out of the building or men with white coats are called to drag you out.
Notes:
- The film won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), Best Film Editing (Daniel Mandell), Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Sherwood), and Best Original Score (Hugo Friedhofer). [↩]
What Did You Say? 
Comments on: "My Bank Laughed When I ask It to Raise My Debt Ceiling" (3)
Well, that’s because that isn’t how the debt ceiling works.
Raising the debt ceiling is not a call or mandate for ADDITIONAL spending. It’s a mechanism to pay for spending ALREADY INCURRED, that our government has ALREADY committed to.
Think of it this way. You go to a restaurant, order an entree, a drink and maybe a dessert.
You finish your meal and they leave you with the receipt. That receipt is an obligation to pay for what you’ve already consumed/spent on your existing order, not a call for you to add even more items to your bill.
Now, you might see the bill and say “Whoah! That turned out pricier than I thought!” And promise yourself that next time you’ll skip the dessert, or stick with water, or order a cheaper dish (cut spending). Or see if you can pick up an extra shift on the job or get an extra part-time gig (increase revenue).
But regardless of what you do NEXT TIME, THIS TIME you’ve already incurred the charges and are responsible for paying that tab. Whether or not you increase your income or change your spending behavior in the future does not change the fact that you’re responsible for the charges you’ve already got on the tab.
That’s closer to what raising the debt ceiling means. What you did is go ask the bank to bump up your credit line to make room for additional spending. That’s both quite a different story and a completely different point from the debt ceiling issue.
Because of the name of it (“raising the debt ceiling”) it’s easy to think of it as just an increase on the credit card limit but that just isn’t the way it works.
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Your argument has validity. If in fact the Congress needed to raise the Debt Ceiling because of inflation, no one would complain. In fact, Congress has raised the Debt Ceiling to spend money on additional programs (mostly entitlement programs) that has created the Nanny State. Yes, two wars are in some of that increase. A vast majority has been politically motivated to establish a guaranteed voting base of people dependent on the Federal Government for it’s existence.
Using your argument, the Federal Government should follow the example of most working households. You budget and cut out those things you can live without. There are billions of dollars of such cuts the Federal Governemtn can take to put billions of tax dollars back into the treasury.
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Pretty much. I mean if we have the spending problem, fine, let’s think about that on the next bills we have go to the floor to see how fiscally viable it is and how much it’s gonna add to the tab. Just meet current obligations and then be smarter from here on out. Seems reasonable.
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