Published Letters from Baltimore County Members

February 2009

Planting dimes to grow nickels

Date: February 2009
Publication: Submitted to the Catonsville Times, the Jeffersonian, The Baltimore Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and the Baltimorereporter.com
Author: Harry Korrell

Our national government, by virtue of its ideological and inept interference created conditions that perturbed free market forces and allowed a periodic down turn to become a growing depression. What in the name of common sense allows one to believe that government has suddenly become competent to reverse the current trend?

What logic supports a plan to spend our money in such a way that each job created would cost in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars? Even though it is a simplistic notion, why is it not better to give our money back to us? Can we not be trusted to spend it at least as wisely as any government, and if not why not? Is ours not a government of the people? Why do we allow and cheer a plan which plants dimes to grow nickels?

Do we not see that the fumbling and contentious debate over how to triple the national debt is causing each of us to postpone any economic decision we can delay in order to see where the capricious meddling of the Congress and President will focus? Is this delay on the part of many not the force holding the economy from rebounding in its naturally cyclic way?

Isn’t the government’s approach to the economy a bit like the approach it longs to take toward changing the cycles of the earth’s climate?

I think the moral of the tale of Chicken Little applies to both.

Harry Korrell - Catonsville, MD