by Jed Estrada

This year, millions of Americans are making New Year’s resolutions for better lives. For most of them, that means better finances. Television, magazines, and tabloids are ablaze with the top financial resolutions to save money in 2010. Money is a popular thing these days. So many politicians, businessmen, and newscasters are talking about money, and in such large amounts that it is hard to imagine what use the few dollars you hold in your pocket really are.

The past few years have seen several major calamities and overhauls in the national economic scene. Unfortunately, these are not merely isolated economic fluctuations, but signs of the unraveling of our entire economic system. The housing market crash, the mortgage meltdown, and the demise of several national banks were all dominoes in a greater and imminent collapse, which started with the lowering of banking standards from years before. (See “In Whom Do We Trust?” April 2009) What is next?

This decade has seen unprecedented government intervention and control, with the business industry being the latest sector to see government tampering. In September 2008 the federal government stepped in to bail out AIG, one of the world's largest insurers. Then on June 1^st 2009, the government bailed out General Motors, the second-oldest member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Now the Obama administration is calling for yet another stimulus bill, supposedly focusing on job creation. The Heritage Foundation, a public policy research institute published a report citing the failure of Obama’s previous stimulus bill. “In January 2009, White House economists predicted that the stimulus bill would create (not merely save) 3.3 million net jobs by 2010. Since then, 3.5 million more net jobs have been lost, pushing the unemployment rate above 10 percent,” said Brian Riedl, the Heritage Foundation's lead budget analyst.

The fact is that more money alone has never solved economic problems. If the government run economy is consistently faltering, that means that the procedures are failing. The situation we have today is like a convoluted operating room, with so many instruments and medications, that we can’t even diagnose the problem, so as to even begin to find a solution. One thing is clear: the stimulus option does not work, and has a long history of not working. The Heritage Foundation reports, “The idea that increased deficit spending can cure recessions has been tested repeatedly, and it has failed repeatedly.” In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” doubled federal spending, but unemployment remained above 20 percent until World War II. President Bush tried to improve the economy through Government spending in 2001, and 2008, but the economy continued to worsen both times, exacerbated by the costs of the war. Now Obama is attempting yet another stimulus bill, while at the same time increasing national spending (a.k.a., national debt).

The most dismal factor in all of this is that the money being spent to fix the economy is coming from taxpayers. Government intervention works on the principle that the Government can spend your money better than you can to fix your problems. That’s exactly what our government has been doing, and now our nation is 12 trillion dollars in debt. According to information from the U.S. Treasury and Federal reserve, the burden of debt per taxpayer is $112,671. That’s how much the government has spent on you. In a nation where 15 million people are unemployed, we can only wonder what those people would have done if they had their own money. President Ronald Reagan believed that “there is nothing wrong with America that Americans can't fix.” A free market built American prosperity. A free market rebuilt our nation after the Great Depression. What could we do today if we were free from government intervention and control?