Congress Just Doesn’t Get it: Stop Spending Our Money!
All I’ve heard about in the news lately is how President Obama and Congress want to spend more money to stimulate the economy and create jobs. When will they learn that going deeper in debt is not going to help us grow? They spent $900 billion to create jobs but more jobs have been lost. Their solution: spend more! They spent even more and now they are proposing the largest budget in history. The President said in the State of the Union Address that we need to spend more this year so we can cut back over the next few years. Amid grumbling from the assembly before him, he then retorted, “That’s how budgeting works.”
No, that’s not how budgeting works. You cannot spend more money than you make. Continuing the same behaviors but expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Congress needs to realize that we cannot go deeper into debt with failed programs (from both political parties) and expect to turn around the economy. Here’s an idea to create jobs: Let’s just give $50,000 to 2 million people to do nothing. That’s $100 billion to provide an average income to 2 million families. We could pay people to do nothing and create an income for them while spending only one ninth of the initial stimulus plan. I’m not suggesting we should pay people to do nothing but where’s the logic here that we are creating jobs by spending trillions of dollars? What if we just gave that money to businesses to hire more people for a year? Or give the money back to taxpayers to have more money to spend or eliminate debt so they can buy more of the products and services that keep businesses in business?
The point here isn’t that we should be giving money away. The point is that our leaders in Washington continue to spend more money with the hope that the economy will turn around. Hope is not a plan. There are a lot better ways to spend (or not spend) the taxpayers’ money and get much better results.
Matt Wegner is a personal finance, career, small business and leadership coach focused on teaching his clients the tools for L.I.F.E. (Living In Financial Excellence). Start enjoying L.I.F.E. at www.financialexcellence.net.