How not to save the Economy

by Lou Barletta - No Comments
Posted on April 20th, 2010 5:41 pm

Ronald Reagan used to say that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Nowadays, that seems to resonate with most Americans. On Monday, a Pew Research Center poll showed that nearly 8 in 10 people don’t trust the government and have little faith it can solve any of our problems.

Only half of Americans believe the government runs programs efficiently. More people believe the government negatively affects their daily lives than believe the government positively affects their daily lives.

And, by a wide margin, more Americans have a favorable impression of the IRS than they do of Congress (47 percent to 25 percent).

Our elected officials have given us little reason for hope. Despite their spending of billions of dollars on a so-called stimulus package, our economy is still sputtering. The government is working hard to redefine traditional “unemployment” to keep the rate from reaching double digits while their own statistics show that 17 percent of Americans are underemployed – or have given up looking for work altogether.

Here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, thousands of people wonder each day how they’re going to feed their families, pay their bills, put their kids through college, and plan for retirement.

How do our Congressmen want to solve our economic problems? Spend billions more. Create new bureaucracy and new, expensive government programs. And keep adding weeks of unemployment benefits for those unlucky millions who cannot find work.

As most Americans have already discovered, Congress is on the wrong track. We saw during the nationalized health care debate that we cannot trust our Congressmen to do what is right, let alone what we implore them to do.

We need to fix our struggling economy now. Increasing government spending is not the solution, but the government can be part of the solution. It can start by getting out of the way.

Uncle Sam isn’t going to save our economy, but Moms and Pops across America will. Small business owners and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of this country. We need to improve our business climate so that small businesses can thrive again and create jobs again.

The best way to create jobs is to reduce the high taxes and burdensome overregulation of small businesses. Business owners cannot hire new workers because of uncertainty over pending taxes and regulatory policies. Increasing taxes and regulation will only stop their growth and stall our economy.

Huge stimulus packages are not the answer because, as we have seen, they do not work. We should immediately return any unspent stimulus money to the people that fronted the cash in the first place – you, the taxpayers. That will revive our economy because it puts more cash in your pockets.

The government should cut wasteful spending in order to shrink its budget, shrink its tax burden, and grow the economy. We all have to balance our checkbooks. Congress doesn’t. Congressmen think the solution to every problem is to throw money at it. Well, they threw the largest sum of money ever at a problem with little or no positive effect. Now they ask us to just trust them a little more, let them spend a little more – and conveniently, this spending happens to occur around election time.

Thomas Paine, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

As more and more Americans are constantly discovering, when it comes to the economy, Congress cannot lead effectively. It will not follow the will of the people.

The best thing Congress can do is get out of the way and let the American people save our economy.

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