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Hillary “Money Grows on Trees” Clinton

September 28th, 2007

One can only speculate as to how Hillary intends to provide $5000 “baby bonds to each and every child born in the US of A. Hillary admits that even she doesn’t know where the money will come from:

“I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home,” she said.

The New York senator did not offer any estimate of the total cost of such a program or how she would pay for it. Approximately 4 million babies are born each year in the United States.

Clinton said such an account program would help Americans get back to the tradition of savings that she remembers as a child, and has become harder to accomplish in the face of rising college and housing costs.

She argued that wealthy people “get to have all kinds of tax incentives to save, but most people can’t afford to do that.”

Yeah. I like the idea of “giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account,” too. Except for the pesky detail of from whence comes that $5,000. You can bet your ass it’s not coming from cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.

Here’s an estimate: 4,000,000 babies x $5000/baby = $20,000,000,000. That’s $20 billion. Clearly, H-rod is not smarter than a fifth grader. The “tradition of saving,” meanwhile, is always about foregoing current consumption in favor of future consumption. But this is hard to do when the government taxes the bejeezus out of your income, and decimates the rest of it through inflation. Rising college costs are directly correlated to the governments involvement in the student loan market, without which it’s almost impossible to afford a four-year degree anymore, unless you’re already wealthy. The dastardly rich, who “have all kinds of tax incentives to save” are not the problem. Instead, it is the unscrupulous tax disincentives that are continuously piled on the working stiff. The single greatest impediment to the poor is likely the OASDI/SS portion of their tax withholdings, but the fact that personal expenditures on future care and health insurance are not tax deductible doesn’t help, either.

Because the government produces nothing of value, anywhere, ever, but instead is solely a destroyer of wealth and products, what is almost certain is that this “baby-bond” will be in the form of an IOU from the federal government, to the federal government, financed by future taxes.

For the children.

no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics