The buck stops where?
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Give me Liberty
Rodger Williamson
This is not our first national economic crisis, but it is the one that we all must currently address. Back in 1938, a writer for “The Atlanta Constitution” noted that “A depression is when wages are cut so low no one makes enough to live on, and a recession is when the price of everything goes up so high no one makes enough to live on.” I believe that we are currently in the latter situation.
I am old enough to remember a time before 24-hour news. Back when CNN was first announced in 1980, I wondered what news was available that they could possibly talk about for 24 hours a day, every day of every year.
What I did not know then, but have since learned, is that the real business of news agencies is to get more eyes and ears onto their piece of media. More eyes and ears generates more ad revenue. The go-to tactic of what we now call the “mainstream media” is to hyper sensationalize whatever the latest story may be.
Whatever the latest news story is, the media news will bring on their experts to espouse their opinions, this gets the viewers / listeners / readers engaged in the story being spun, and then the news media will milk the story for all that it is worth until the next new story comes along to knock the old story out of its place.
When the coronavirus story first broke, the news media went into overdrive, trying to scare the crap out of the whole of our population so as to hook them on the narrative. Over time, as viewers / listeners / readers began to lose interest, a new variant of the virus would conveniently appear and allow the news providers to again spin up the fear and again generate more revenue for each of the mainstream media news agencies. The mainstream media is without a doubt culpable with regard to our current national economic crisis.
Before the coronavirus shutdowns in early 2020, the United States was energy independent, and our economy was booming. Conspiracy theorists will run amok for generations trying to pin down who was responsible for the flu that most likely escaped a lab in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
Regardless of how it started, or where it started, or how it spread, what matters most is how we responded to it. It was a flu. Like all flus. It was dangerous to those with compromised health, but of those who contracted this virus, more than 97% would see a recovery to their full prior health.
If there had been no mention of the virus on the news, or in the newspapers or anywhere else, I would not have even known that there was a virus going around. Of thousands of people that I know, I know two people who tested positive and suffered through the illness. Both recovered fine. It was just a flu. I myself have taken zero precautions, and I still have yet to meet someone face-to-face who was symptomatic.
When Donald Trump was our president, he got some things right, and he got some things wrong. One of the biggest things that he got wrong were his COVID-19 mandates that shut down the U.S. economy, kicking off our current economic woes.
Trump then signed off on the first round of stimulus checks, and that amplified the beginnings of our economic crisis. No matter how you spin it, Donald Trump made a few bad calls.
In 1953, President Harry Truman asserted in his farewell address that, “the President – whoever he is – has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody.” Sixty-eight years later, in January 2021, Donald Trump ceased to be the United States president, and Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was sworn in as his replacement.
Before the day was over, Biden had signed off on nine executive orders, followed by eight more E.O.s on day two and eight more E.O.s on days three through seven, and ol’ Joe is now up to Executive Order Number 90, and only one-third of the way through his four-year term in office.
As our nation’s CEO, Biden is by default the owner of our current economic situation. However, instead of accepting responsibility for his own failures, Biden has instead chosen to blame anyone he can.
The start point for this train wreck dates back to Trump’s first COVID-19 related executive order number in March of 2020, but when Joe Biden assumed office, it became his duty to order all appropriate corrections. Biden instead ordered more failures.
Biden had been president for more than a year as inflation began to run rampant, and yet he alleged that it was transitory. Biden had been president for more than a year before Russia invaded Ukraine, and now he alleges that their war is the cause of supply shortages and that increasing costs are suddenly the fault of Vladimir Putin.
The responsibility for the economic situation of these United States belongs squarely with one person, the chief executive officer, the “president” of the United States. Biden needs to own up or resign, while “We the People” need to line up a replacement that knows something about basic economics.