Docgrubb’s Weblog

      (This is the unabridged version of my Cincinnati Enquirer submission.  If you read it there, skip this!)

      Recently, at the end of a banking transaction, I asked the young man if he would check my account and see if my “inflation-stimulus check” had been deposited yet.  (I need new eye-glasses.)  He didn’t seem to get the joke, and, given his age, I guess that’s excusable, since economics wasn’t taught even way back when I was a victim of public education, let alone now.  But what’s not excusable is for our national leaders, our highest elected officials, to be ignorant of basic economics. 

     I’ve watched the reaction of pundits to the stimulus bill since debate and implementation.  And I haven’t heard any of them mention the closest correlative to this legislation.  It was in 1972.  McGovern was running against Nixon, and one of the campaign proposals he floated was to give every American citizen two thousand dollars.  The details are sparse, as I was eleven years old at the time.  But America was smarter then, even eleven year-olds, and the plan was derided as economically unsound, as inflation would be the inevitable outcome.  And at least enough inflation to totally negate any personal budgetary gain.  Everyone but McGovern could figure that one out. 

     But that was then.  Now, in our greed, no one wants to ask any questions, even easy ones.  And the politicians don’t ask, they just want us to believe they’re actually doing something, a senatorial, fasces-adorned form of shuffling-the-papers-when-the-boss-walks-by.  So I’ll ask, and show what fools they take us to be.  If giving every taxpayer (and many non-payers) $600 is good for the economy, why not make it six thousand?  Or, better yet, six million?  Well, you know the answer, and I bet even McGovern has an inkling by now. 

     Truth be told, neither they nor we are complete fools.  (One, Ron Paul, even faces reality.)  Some pols must know that, in the end, after the printing presses and inflation, these checks are just a borrowing of a little future prosperity, from ourselves or our children, to enjoy now.  And this is the m. o. of modern America anyway.  But if not fools, then they are connivers, for in passing a bill they know will accomplish nothing, they hope to distract us, at least till after the election, from the calamity awaiting our economy: the collapse of the policy of dollar hegemony.  (Yes, you can google it:  dollar hegemony.  Just sit down before you start to read.)  Because this disastrous policy allowed it, foreign powers now hold over 8 trillion in U.S. dollars, accumulated courtesy of our self-indulgence manifested in burgeoning trade deficits and borrowing to finance our federal debt.  Dollar hegemony has been the dam holding back the liquidation or dumping of all these dollars onto the market ( in exchange for something real), but cracks, major cracks, are in the dam.  And when the leaking becomes a flood, hyperinflation of an Argentine or Weimar magnitude will predictably ensue.  However, I do concede that by that time the inflation caused by a ‘mere’ $100 billion diversion will just be an eddy in the tsunami sweeping away the American Dream.