The Law of Unintended Consequences Part 4: Stimulus, Expediency, and a Faith-Based Nation (L-O-N-G)

This is a jump-off from the Law part 3: something for nothing.
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A word about the stimulus bill that recently passed (ERRA): entitlement parts of the program will serve to re-instill what Welfare Reform fought so hard to kill—generational dependency and faith that government will always be there to back people up. Extended unemployment benefits, money to states to encourage welfare enrollment, payments to homeowners who (after being bailed out of their mortgage contracts) to continue paying mortgages on time, and tax incentives for people to buy new cars all have downsides as well as upsides.

The downsides of welfare and unemployment should be obvious: to keep people out of the job market, and prevent them from seeking ways to better their economic standing through education or job training. Those same benefits also cost the rest of us who still have jobs (as if we don’t have enough to pay for ourselves). The upsides: the government defends you from hunger and harm, just as you believe it will.

People should feel shamed that they were bought off so easily.

The downsides of the stimulus bill (and some you may not be aware of): These new entitlements only last until the money allocated to them through ERRA runs out—this means there will be no new money to keep these programs alive, even though the economy has yet to recover. Also, those unemployment benefits are taxable as income.

Unintended consequence: dependent people will become welfare nomads to extend their benefits, moving from state to state, and enrolling in each new system until it runs dry for them. This happens now with the current system.

The downsides of rewarding people who couldn’t pay mortgages on their own (either before or after workouts): what’s to stop the rest of us from simply giving up and joining the failure crowd? Why shouldn’t the rest of us get paid for paying our bills on time too? After all, the loss of equity hit every homeowner, and like it or not, we’re pretty much all upside-down in our mortgages, judging by the 20-50% depreciation--we’d find out exactly how much we’re upside-down by having our homes reappraised.

As for the new cars, yep, there’s a credit for buying new cars, but there are unspoken catches:

1. Is the manufacturer going to be around to service your vehicle and honor any warranties that exist for it?

2. Is the instant depreciation that occurs when a new car is driven off the lot offset by this credit? Of course not—this is only an incentive to BUY, not keep. In case you didn’t know, every new car buyer is automatically upside-down when they drive off the lot—the difference in the purchase price and the NADA/Kelley Blue Book values of that same car differ drastically (sometimes by as much as 50%). You might want to check this out before buying a new vehicle.

3. In this day and age of fluctuating gas prices, and some predict we’ll return to the bad old days of $4.00/gallon, not to mention questionable oil supplies, would a Detroit gas-guzzler (comparatively speaking) make sense to buy in the long term?

4. Will this car automatically devalue itself into oblivion when it comes time to trade in or sell off just because the manufacturer went out of business or took bailout money?

5. What are the chances someone will become tremendously upside-down in the car just like they were with the house (and every other bill)? The credit to buy doesn’t account for loan risk or job security. Besides, is there anything out there worth buying right now?

This latest effort by the government to stem the losses on a steadily-spiraling economy is hailed by the Lord and Master himself (that would be Obama) as a DOWN PAYMENT, which suggests there is more to come. The only blessing I see from all this is the time limit—and some states’ governors are looking closely at the strings attached, and turning down this money. The governors know they cannot sustain entitlement programs beyond what money is provided, and when that money dries up, dependent people will be right back where they started, and civil unrest will likely break out. Obama may consider lathering, rinsing, and repeating the whole stimulus thing again at that time, and again it won’t help anybody. It will just prolong the pain.

Dependent people will use their political power to vote themselves more largesse over and over again, and this is what the current administration wants them to do so the Democrats may regain power and keep it through creation and re-creation of dependence--your economic freedom in exchange for their power.

Is this not slavery? Sure, no crops are being planted and harvested, but the seeds of dependence are sown and the political harvesters come along every two-four years to bale their contributions and votes, and haul them to market. Still, there are many who continue to have blind faith in the government to see them through, even though their hands are being tied at every step.

Tell me who’s going to turn down something for virtually nothing? All people have to do is vote in a certain way, and seemingly all their problems get solved.

It’s a vicious cycle. It’s also a surefire recipe for country collapse. THEN who will protect dependent people…zombies, if you will, from harm or hunger?
By then, they will have abdicated their minds, bodies, and souls to the something-for-nothing Democratic Party, so why not refer to them as zombies?

Don’t look at me or any other self-sufficient people—we have enough to do on our own trying to protect ourselves from the likes of those afflicted with blind faith in government. We’re also busy trying to protect ourselves form some other unintended consequences from the bank bailout and Equal Pay Act:

1. Now a pay ceiling has been established for corporate America (thanks to the bank bailouts), devaluing the true worth of executives, and not just in the banking sector. This is causing a brain-drain, meaning worthy talent will go elsewhere to make a worthy income, and we’ll be stuck with bureaucratic set-pay zombies—people who will only do the bare minimum to satisfy their job requirements, sacrificing performance, productivity and innovation opportunities for guaranteed pay (just like unions do).

2. The Equal Pay Act already has loopholes, and yet more unintended consequences—the ones I can think of are: employers can choose to hire an all-female staff, ensuring everyone is paid an equally-low salary (and saving labor costs), hire an all-ILLEGAL staff, hire no women at all, move more jobs offshore to avoid compliance with this act, shut down the business entirely (or conversely, make it an owner-operator internet business), or some combination of all of them. Another loophole is to keep necessary staff, but rewrite all job descriptions and give new titles so nobody technically has the same job, thus avoiding equal pay for equal work. No equal work will exist on paper, and this will stand up to an audit.

I’m not even a lawyer, and I spotted the gaping holes in this plan!

These things are already happening, as witnessed by the number of male layoffs vs. female layoffs in our country. Feminists everywhere blindly believed Obama could put an end to their plight with the stroke of a pen, but nobody saw the easy outs that came with the act. It was a PR win, but that’s all.

This should serve to give an idea of the dollar costs, freedom costs, and political costs of democracy inaction (not a typo) through the expediency of a faith-based nation. Already, the stimulus package creation as a whole has had one unintended consequence of its own: it served to reignite the Republican Party through the anger of self-reliant constituents who used the access to power for their own good.

Those of us who still have jobs or businesses and can keep up their monthly payments without help or incentives are the “new” rich—we who didn’t get ripped off by Bernie Madoff and/or Robert Alan Stanford in pursuit of large returns not found elsewhere, or lose our homes to sub-prime mortgages, our credit to out-of-control credit card fees and interest, our cars to the repossessor, or our jobs to offshoring, illegal aliens, robots/software, and H1-B workers, and those of us who DIDN’T keep the governmental faith. This is the payoff for living frugally and strategically, without blinders or handcuffs made of red tape, and by far the best unintended consequence of them all.