The parable of the reckless drivers

WARNING: This story and commentary will be offensive to Democrats and other Obama supporters.

Once upon a time there was a father who entrusted his expensive pickup truck to his son. His son, a young man in his twenties, had proven he could drive a smaller pickup truck quite well, and he promised his father he would drive it carefully.

The young man loaded up the pickup truck with people he thought were his friends. They proceeded to drive down country roads. The passengers kept putting their personal stuff on the dashboard, eventually hiding the speedometer and other important items on the dashboard. They all encouraged the driver to go faster, which he did. After all, he had no indication that he was speeding. Everything seemed to be going well, except that some of his passengers wanted him to go even faster.

Eventually, there was a pretty bad accident. The truck landed in a ditch, and the driver had to get someone with a tow truck to pull it out. As they started driving down the road, it became apparent that the truck was damaged. It just didn’t handle right, and the driver was reluctant to try to go fast again since the truck made a lot of bad noises and shimmied when it got very fast.

Everyone in the truck decided that they had to have a new driver. It came down to two candidates, one older fellow, more seasoned, but still not used to driving a truck. The other was a young fellow with a learner’s permit. He was absolutely sure he knew how to drive the truck better. He was charming, good looking, and he spoke very well, so he was elected as the driver. When he got behind the wheel, he made a couple of the passengers from the front seat get back in the bed of the truck because they had had too much fun when the other guy was driving. Then, the new driver stepped on the gas as hard as he could and drove on down the road telling everyone that his driving skill had averted a horrible disaster, but they had to drive faster than before to make up for the time lost while the truck was in the ditch. So far, he hasn’t put the truck back into a ditch, but the truck is making a lot of noise and the whole truck is shaking pretty hard. And, the new driver keeps reminding us that he’s doing pretty well considering the condition of the truck that he got from the other driver.

What, you ask, is the point of this story? The point is that President Obama isn’t doing anything helpful to fix the economy he got from George W. Bush. The policies that put us into the ditch are either still in place, or are worse. The culture of debt, cultivated under Bush and the Republican Congress has been given steroids by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi. Sure, the President has made a fuss about bonuses that the top bankers get, but those bonuses are not the cause of the credit freeze of 2008 and they aren’t the cause of the high unemployment of 2009 and 2010. If going into debt were the answer, we wouldn’t have had the problem to begin with. Debt is dangerous. Debt backed by overvalued assets is even more dangerous. I don’t see President Obama or Speaker Pelosi doing anything to address the real causes of our economic mess. They are driving down the same road as President Bush and the Republican Congress, but they have all their feet on the accelerator.
We elected a man with less executive experience than Sarah Palin, and he isn’t doing anything that can reasonably be expected to bring about an economic recovery. All he can do is blame Bush while he encourages Congress to spend even more than the Republicans. That tactic may make for good politics. It won’t inspire investors to risk capital in new businesses. It won’t allow a growing economy to create jobs.