Get out the vote?

It is the first of the year. This year promises to be a big year. First of all, it is a leap year. Second, it is an election year.

When elections come around I hear all the talk from politicians and I am reminded of my father. Some have said, “Bruce was a republican.” They thought this because he was a die-hard Ronald Reagan fan, as am I.

My father did vote for Reagan and Strom Thurmond (a distant cousin of mine). However, he also voted for Jimmy Carter and Butler Derrick. Both of them were democrats.

 I asked my father about this seeming bit of confusion. He explained, “Son, you vote for the man, not the party.” He went on to say that a person who votes a party line does so because they are letting the party do the thinking for them. This makes sense.

We have some interesting choices this year. We have several different Republican candidates, none of which seems to stand out from the others. We also have Obama. I was opposed to Obama as president because he did not have the experience needed to run the country.

He has surrounded himself with some very smart economists. His top advisors include people like Paul Volker, the former Fed Chairman who broke inflation in the 1970s. Still, our economy is just inches from a depression. The only reason this is a recession instead of a depression is that we don’t have prices going down. Every other indicator would show it to be a depression. We are in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

I could not tell you who to vote for. As of yet, I am undecided. What I do know is that we need to pray for our elected officials. We need to ask God to grant them all wisdom.

For Obama we need to pray he listens to his economic advisors. We need to pray the economic advisors remember the lessons of the past. In the past, we learned that Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” determined how the economy worked. For now, we have an economy that has been monkeyed with for so long the “Unseen Hand’ can’t work properly.


First of all, we need to look back at what has worked in the past. After the Great Depression we put laws in place so that banks could not be stock brokers, insurance companies could not be banks, etc. Then, we monkeyed around with all of that and relaxed those laws. We need to put them back.


We need to get government out of business. We need less regulation of the business industry (except the financial industry) and let business do business. Yes, we will have some greedy people get rich and take advantage of the economy. You know what, we will always have people trying to game the system.


If we went to a strictly cash-based system of accounting we could eliminate some shenanigans. If a sale isn’t a sale until the money is received, we wouldn’t have any manipulation of revenue. Assets are valued only at what they could actually sell for on the open market. There should be no mark to make believe concept.


Supply-side economics does work. History proves that. The reason we get into such problems in the economy when we use supply-side economics is it works too good. People get stupid.


Guess what? There is an old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That saying is correct. We saw it with the dot com bubble and the housing bubble and Enron. People see a stock taking off and they know that sooner or later there has to be a fall. They think they are smart enough to pull out just in time. Very few people are able to restrain themselves when they think they have a little more time before they have to pull out.


So, what do you think the next bubble will be? How long do you think it will be before the economy turns up again? Comment here and let us know.