“I’LL GLADLY PAY YOU TOMORROW FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY”

6/10/10

This morning’s (i.e., Thursday, 6/10/10’s, page A8) Wall Street Journal reports that Fed Chairman Obsequious Ben Bernanke said that, given the size of our federal deficit ($1.4 trillion according to the CBO), it would be a good idea to have a deficit reduction plan in place but that we shouldn’t implement such a plan yet because the economy couldn’t take it. His words:

“We have a recovery under way now. So, in the very near term, increased taxes, cuts in spending that are too large would be…a drag on the recovery. At the same time, we need to convince markets that in the medium and longer term we have a sustainable fiscal path.”

The Fed Chairman, back when America was great, was the country’s lead central banker, charged with, and only with, managing the money supply in such a manner that inflation was kept in check. Unfortunately, over the last few decades, coincident with a sharp decline in the competence of those who have held the post, the Fed Chairman’s job has metamorphosized into economic czar, a repository of some sort of manifest wisdom whose every utterance must be treated with the deference formerly reserved only for popes who have served since Pius IX declared himself and his successors infallible. So now we have our economic czar telling us, in effect, that, yes, we have an unprecedented, gargantuan deficit that is clearly unsustainable and thus we should have a plan to bring it down. But we shouldn’t implement that plan yet because the economic recovery that is so celebrated on Wall Street and CNBC is far too fragile to withstand the rigors of fiscal discipline. But, yes, sometime in the future, when things get better, we should put that plan into place, yes sir.

And people wonder why I do not share the unrestrained bullishness, on either the market or the future of the Republic, that is so much the rage nowadays.