by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n Obama recently promised $250 to seniors (who got no cost-of-living increases in Social Security because there had not been sufficient official inflationary pressures to merit them), and a good-paying job to every American who needs one. Apparently, the president did not say that in this period of $1.6 trillion dollar deficits and $12 trillion paper-printing national debts, he is going to borrow several more billions of dollars from the Chinese to spread around as the proper duty of the great benefactor in Roman bread-and-circuses fashion.<\/p>\n This madness, of course, of dressing up borrowing as \u201cstimulus\u201d will come to an end when the debts pile up and creditors begin to sniff that just maybe, in the style of Germany in the 1920s, we may be inflating our currency to prepare to pay off debts at a discount, and therefore they will want not 3 percent, but as in the days of Jimmy Carter, 10,12, or 15 percent to subsidize American entitlements not accorded to their own far poorer Chinese citizens. The servicing of the debt is going to be so large and take such a percentage of the annual budget that these same present beneficiaries will soon have to help to pay it all back with interest, given there are not enough greedy rich geese left to pluck.<\/p>\n Here in California, when the tab for past insanity came due, we didn\u2019t call 10% across the board pay cuts \u201ccuts\u201d at all, but merely \u201cfurloughs\u201d (that way a state professor can still brag that he really \u201cmakes\u201d $100,000 when in fact he is told to take sufficient days off to ensure that he earns only $90,000). Presently Nevada is running ads inviting more Californians to flee to its non\u2013tax sanctuary, while officially we are told either that 250,000 are not fleeing a year, or that they are not mostly the well off and educated \u2014 even as we damn Nevada for its below-the-belt ads.<\/p>\n If the President wants to give everyone a job and seniors cash, then he will probably soon impose a national sales tax so that in merry-go-round fashion we can pay a lot more for what we buy to get a little more in government checks \u2014 with thousands of new job holders taking the necessary cut for the expense and bureaucracy of administering the “redistributive” process.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner Obama recently promised $250 to seniors (who got no cost-of-living increases in Social Security because there had not been sufficient official inflationary pressures to merit them), and a good-paying job to every American who needs one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[651],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-zw","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3024,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/try-a-little-honesty-in-2009\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":0},"title":"Try a Little Honesty in 2009","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The country is still divided over the government bailout of the Big Three automakers. Mostly Democratic supporters cited the need to save jobs and ensure that a hallmark manufacturing industry remains healthy and American. Mostly Republican opponents complained that taxpayers were asked to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2590,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-psychology-of-debt-obamas-rendezvous-with-political-reality\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":1},"title":"The Psychology of Debt: Obama’s Rendezvous with Political Reality","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Debt Matters Over the last two decades it became an article of popular faith that budget deficits did not matter that much. Conservatives began to talk of annual red-ink in vague terms of percentages of the gross domestic product rather than in real billions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2009"","block_context":{"text":"July 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/july-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3000,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dont-waste-a-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":2},"title":"Don’t Waste a Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 25, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Absorbing as much of the economy as possible. by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Euphemism comes from the Greek word\u00a0euphemia, which means \u201cusing the good word\u201d\u2014usually in place of the accurate bad one. Recently we\u2019ve become experts at it. Printing trillions more dollars and growing government to cover new\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1181,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/2011-out-with-a-whimper-not-a-bang\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":3},"title":"2011: Out with a Whimper, Not a Bang","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services It proved as hard to break up the bankrupt European Union as it was to create it. For all the hundreds of stories predicting the imminent end of the union, insolvent Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain still hung in. Apparently if these debtors\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The EU"","block_context":{"text":"The EU","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/the-eu\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9599,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/braver-new-world-for-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":4},"title":"Braver New World \u2014 for Now","author":"Megan Ring","date":"November 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The Corner The one and only. By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Given the status of the post-election state legislatures and executive offices, the Republican-controlled House and Senate, a Republican president, and a Supreme Court that will not go leftward for a generation, it is hard to see how conservatives\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3521,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/charge-it-america\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":5},"title":"Charge It, America!","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services President Bush's current approval ratings are about 32 percent. Only one in four Americans approves of the Democratic-controlled Congress. So why are we so upset with our political leadership? Despite the housing slump, it is not the worst of times. After all, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2007"","block_context":{"text":"October 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/october-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2203,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions\/2203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}