I just got an email from the Vice President with the title, “There’s a new sheriff in town”. It starts off with:
Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?
Vilifying government is what Republicans do. Do we really need the Obama administration to pile on? And what is Biden proposing to do about these empty buildings, put them on the real estate market during a real estate bust? That ought to bring real estate prices back up, note heavy sarcasm.
Here is the response I emailed back to the Vice President:
I didn’t vote for your team to out Republican the Republicans.
While cutting waste is very laudable, there are far bigger and more important issues that your team is ignoring.
The Republicans are proposing to solve the lack of product demand in the economy and the $2 trillion of corporate wealth that is sitting idle waiting for this demand to appear, by cutting taxes, regulation and spending. Cutting spending when corporations are sitting back, waiting to see more spending is so ridiculous the Republicans ought to be laughed off the stage of serious policy proposers.
This idea is so obviously counter-productive that your team should be shouting this from the rooftops. The mainstream media certainly doesn’t show enough knowledge of economics to do the job for you.
If your team won’t stand up for reason in economic policy, then I can see the inevitable consequences. The debate will be settled before you even raise your voices. All that will be left to argue is how much of the wrong policy to have.
I never expected that you would be able to push through all the correct legislation through Congress. I did expect your team to know what that policy is, to stand up for it, and to make sure these ideas were vigorously stated in the country’s marketplace of ideas.
Your team has been a close to utter failure in this regard.
Instead your team has come up with the silly phrase, “Winning the future.”
If you expect campaign donations from me, you are going to have to sharpen your game considerably starting this instant.
And let’s not start any more wars for oil such as the one you just started in Libya. Your so called humanitarian justification for trying to grab Libyan oil for US oil companies is so transparent, to be laughable. The dignity of the office is not upheld with laughable arguments.