Will the President become CEO of California too?
President Obama has effectively made himself CEO of this and that by firing the CEO’s he doesn’t like or by dictating corporate policies from the White House. Will California be next? George Will discusses the defeat of the tax increases in California, the upcoming bailout of the state and the legacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor:
In a surreal attempt to terrify voters into supporting the propositions, Schwarzenegger (job approval: 33%) threatened to do something sensible: sell such state assets as San Quentin prison, which sits on prime ocean-view real estate. But Californians should now pay a real price, in realism about ways and means, for Schwarzenegger’s wasted years. His governance-by-attention-deficit-disorder has involved flitting from one trendy irrelevance (e.g., stem cell research) to another (e.g., cooling the planet) while the state has sagged. Fittingly, he was in Washington as his shambolic legacy was being defined by Tuesday’s defeat.
He was at the White House, applauding the Obama administration’s imposition of severe fuel efficiency standards on a dependent automobile industry that at least has a proven aptitude for its new task of building cars Americans will not like. Standing far from Tuesday’s repudiation, in the shadow of the president who may soon effectively be California’s governor, Schwarzenegger was the administration’s dependency agenda writ small.
It’s all such fun until the money runs out. Obama is spending like a drunken sailor, even as Schwarzenegger was doing. And it’s all fine until suddenly it isn’t, as the UK is apparently about to find out.
Meanwhile, Reuters, which last year was writing pieces about how the AAA rating of the US was in jeopardy, has changed its tune. Now Reuters reports: “U.S. AAA rating safe despite ugly fiscal picture…The United States issues bonds in its own currency and can always print more dollars — albeit at the cost of higher inflation — should it ever run into trouble making payments. That means unlike Japan, which lost its last remaining AAA rating when Moody’s downgraded it on Monday, a U.S. downgrade is an extremely remote possibility.” (Bill Gross disagrees, BTW.)
So the US could use hyperinflation to secure its AAA rating, is that so? Goodness how the media love this man and steadfastly refuse to notice that Obama’s numbers just don’t add up. Sooner or later it will become impossible even for them to deny.