President Obama claims he’ll have “more flexibility” after the election, and he is hoping to get reelected to exercise that flexibility on the coattails of the economic flim-flam of Quantitative Easing Three (QE3). QE3 is “inside the Beltway-speak” for creating inflationary conditions in order to make the dollar in your pocket worth less. “Why do that,” you ask? Well, it is about the only way remaining for Uncle Ben Bernanke and his gang of green eyeshade gnomes, who are allegedly guarding the treasure of the Federal Reserve, can artificially prop up the economy and stave off financial collapse before November 6, Election Day.
Barack Obama as James Bond in ‘Quantum of Easing’
What are the repercussions of such gnomistic economic chicanery? First, it keeps interest rates artificially low, which eventually creates a financial bubble very much like the financial bubble that burst in 2007-8 to generate the current economic turmoil. So, Obama’s own personal monetary gnome, Uncle Ben, is creating a bubble to fix a bubble. Such is called “recovery” in the Obama economic lexicon.
Since the Obama regime’s fiscal policy is a joke, Uncle Ben, his Fed gnomes, and their long-term inflationary policy tool constitute the only game left in town. What this monetary policy means for “Main Street,” as well as “Wall Street,” is stealth taxation without representation. Inflation is the cruelest tax of all because it is regressive, that is, it punishes those with the least money the worst. And as a result of the U.S. Federal Reserve system, congress gets no vote on this under the counter taxation.
What are the “mechanics” of Uncle Ben’s financial debt expanding hoax that seeks to perpetuate the “Obama economic miracle?” It begins with printing money, mountains of money, reputedly to buy up mortgage loans. But who knows? Like TARP and Obama Stimulus that preceded this current economic slight of hand, the Fed money could also be diverted to other currently unpublicized purposes like buying U.S. sovereign debt or U.S. corporate (read GM) debt, thus rescuing the auto union once again. QE3 amounts to administering to our debt-addicted economy yet another dose of Keynesian crack. Thus the liberal debt junkies will be on still another beautiful, temporary, blissful high. Uncle Ben is the liberals’ “dopeman” in this debt-addiction fiasco.
We are in a “debt trap” that is like a crack-house for physically drug addicted. Nations that get addicted to borrowed money fall into debt traps, and the U.S. is in a deep one. Our debt trap is the largest on the planet, actually. Triple the size of Japan’s. The U.S. debt trap dwarfs any in Europe. Italy is Europe’s most indebted country, but Italy’s total sovereign debt is about one-tenth of ours. But Obama is oblivious to this debt trap.
Such are the intended financial effects of the QE3 deviousness. But what are the intended political effects? Naturally our “stock market tycoons” will use this windfall infusion of Fed money as an excuse to continue to avoid coming to grips with the true state of the economy in their never-ending pursuit of short-term gain. Obama will capitalize on their greed by continuing to play Main Street against Wall Street by publically castigating the “Wall Street financial fat cats” to excite his leftist base, while secretly assuring his Goldman Sachs contributors that he will continue his under the table crony favoritism policies. In other words, QE3 will just perpetuate Obama’s class warfare. And as we all know by now, Obama’s class warfare is codeword for raising taxes on the rich.
In summary, QE3 is just a scheme to get Obama reelected, as well as to further his class warfare political obsession, but all of the American people will pay for this scheme through the regressive tax of inflation.
Col. Thomas Snodgrass, USAF (retired), is Director of Military Affairs for The Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE) and was adjunct professor of history at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, AZ campus.