Rudd’s package stimulating your economy?

So the cheques are in the mail, K Rudd has chosen to stimulate thousands of Australians with hard, hard cash.  Which all in all is a pretty typical response by politicians in recession.  I mean his last stimulus package didn’t really do anything, and in the infamous reasoning that has made the politician infamous, and not to mention entirely worth his three hundred thousand dollar salary, K Rudd’s decide that we need to do the same thing again, just on a grander scale.  Coupled with this, Rudd has called for greater regulation in the financial market and so on, supposedly leading the charge.

The irony of the whole situation is K Rudd doesn’t get it.  Him and all his federal companions, whom I swear are sleeping in their mansions and town houses with a picture of Lenin (or possibly Adolf, depending on who you ask) upon their bedside table, have lead the call, “markets don’t work.”  While I’m certainly no fan of corporate capitalism — and to hell with anyone that dares to tell me that capitalism is a good thing, as I don’t see how CEO’s looking to enrich themselves via enlisting the coercive power of the state can be a good thing — the key element that is being lost in all the media hype is that government bureaucracy created the current problems.  The US started this whole sub-prime mess when the American government enacted legislation with the intention of influencing lenders to give money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back, en masse, and according to some of the people I’ve been talking to, the worst is yet to come with a second wave of defaults.  Low and behold, fortunes are created through artificial means and when the people owing started defaulting the whole thing goes up in smoke and those corporate businesses, as per usual, return to government for a little help.  Unfortunately for them, the American government has prevented any scrutiny against itself and instead blamed it on the market.

We are told the market failed.  And now I must repeat what many other writers before me have written, that markets are composed of people and the free, natural transactions between them.  I will, however, depart from the thinking of other writers before me and point out that we had is capitalism.  Something drastically different and in stark contrast to the free market; a series of regulated markets where government and its allies in big business could interfere and twist the economy to suit them.  Capitalism failed, the free market wasn’t free.  It’s like Sado-Masochism gone… worse.  A couple of chains, some handcuffs, a whip, ball gag and K Rudd telling the markets they’ve been very, very bad.  I’m feeling a little stimulated already.  How ’bout you?

Yes, you’re probably thinking a number of things right now, but the only thing you should remember is Kevin Carson’s slogan, “Free-market, Anti-Capitalism.”  Explains it all.

Twisting the brain?  Should be.

But if you’ll allow me to get back on message, as political advisers would say, I have yet to point out the greatest irony of all.  Our supreme leader, Kevin Rudd, in his attempts to dish out money into the economy has made some interesting moves.  Most notably is the increase to the first home buyers’ grant.  Judging from Rudd’s past economic record (if  care to you remember he created a run on financial institutions) I don’t think he understands the significance of encouraging people to buy/build more homes in a time when job security is already potentially dismal to nil.  Something to do with them not paying back the loan — sound familiar?

Better yet, Rudd’s gone into deficit handing out the stimulus package, which is great for the average Australian at the moment, but will undoubtedly be recouped in higher taxes later down the line.  It has to be. After all, it’s the average Australian — those “working families” talked about at the previous election — that this money was originally robbed from.  Yes, robbed.  At gunpoint.

Furthermore, many average Australians aren’t going to be so stupid as to go out and immediately burn their cash on a new TV, stereo system or some other consumer product they probably don’t need.

There’s a recession on people!

We need to save, for a rainy day.  Maybe, pay off some of that debt we’ve built up on those plastic, magnetised cards with the large interest.  Let us not forget that much of the Australian economy is built on debt. This is the fatal flaw in the stimulus package, along with the assumption that a temporary boost to the economy is going to have any effect at all — if you own a business and you know that times are tough, you’re going to know that stimulus package is temporary.  Well, if you’ve got any brains.  You’re not going to suddenly hire new staff, because what happens after the stimulus is gone?  People are going to cut back on spending, which means less income, which means you’re going to have to cut costs, which eventually means workers are going to have to suffer.

And the Australian recession isn’t all that bad, yet.  But it will be after we create our own housing bubble that will eventually pop because the government needed to ‘stimulate’ the construction industry.  The Americans are trillions of dollars in debt and I ain’t going to sugarcoat it.  How the fuck are they going to pay that back?  There are still outstanding debts from WWII that America hasn’t paid back, let alone something like 12 trillion dollars which is almost equivalent to everything they made last year.  When America turns to the printing press, inflation hits and the country turns into something reminiscent of Detroit, then there’s definitely going to be a problem with the Australian economy, especially as America going bust makes China calm down.

So I ask you, is Rudd’s package stimulating your economy?