spending

February 9, 2010 - Given the myriad of problems facing the United States right now, you can be forgiven for not worrying about what information your water heater is sending to the US government. The fact of the matter is, right now, it is not sending the government any information. But the Obama administration wants to change that. In fact, it wants to know just about everything you are doing with major appliances in your home on a real time basis; an announcement which it made in this morning's Federal Register. More importantly, it wants to control how you use those appliances. If you think about it, the prospect of this is downright frightening and it would mean the end of privacy in your home as you know it.

The Federal Register isn't exactly the publication that most people read every morning. That fact may be exactly what the Obama administration is counting on. It is however the publication in which new government proposals, rules and regulations must be published prior to the time they can be put into effect. In this morning's issue, the Science and Technology Policy Office which reports to the President published a request for public comments that is quite revealing. The request concerns "Consumer Interface With the Smart Grid", which is what the administration is calling the new electric grid for United States.

If you think that the battle over stimulus spending vs. a free market economy is new, you’re wrong. Many of the economic problems faced by the country today are very similar to those faced by us in 1930’s. The government’s response to those issues years ago involved big government and big spending. The end result was a depression that lasted longer than any other economic downturn in US history. Unfortunately, our political leaders today don’t seem to have studied US history; at least they have not studied the economics of US history. And because of that, we appear to be headed down the same path today that we did 80 years ago. Just take a look at this cartoon from the Washington Post in 1934.

 As the saying goes, those who don’t study history and doomed to repeat it. But the American people don’t deserve the problems that our political elite appear to be determined to feed us. Soup lines. Unemployment rising to 25%. Before you say that can’t happen, remember that the numbers are calculated differently today than they were in the 1930’s. If you use the old methodology, we are currently at better than 16% unemployment – much higher than the official government number – and the same rate faced by the country in 1931. And that rate is still rising.