“America is very close to a destructive tipping point,” co-authors Glenn Hubbard and Peter Navarro warn in their new book Seeds of Destruction. “We must change how we conduct our politics and economics…or we will inevitably go the way of all once-great nations and suffer an irreversible decline.” — by Aaron Task

Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, joined Dan Gross and I to discuss the “major structural imbalances” facing America, chief among them being the government’s profligate spending.

Hubbard, you may recall, was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during George W. Bush’s first term. As you might expect, he is a strong advocate of smaller government and lower taxes. But Hubbard and Navarro, a business professor at UC Irvine, are also harshly critical of Bush’s “gross mismanagement” of the fiscal stimulus bequeathed to his administration by President Clinton. Specifically, Hubbard chastises his former boss for the creation of a new unfunded federal mandate, Medicare Part D.

But if Bush was a big spender, President Obama is “taking it to a whole other level,” Hubbard says, citing the familiar critiques of ObamaCare and Financial Reform and “excess government spending” in general.

In short, Hubbard believes Obama inherited a mess but has made it worse with nearly every one of his major policy initiatives and general governing philosophy.

The great contradiction of what is called a depression is that all the wealth and riches are there. In the great depression eggs were plowed in to the ground on one coast while people starved on the other. All the resources were there including the labour force. There was a failure in imagination. It is like a house with full cupboards where a mother failed to find a way to feed all her children but overfed one bullying overgrown giant nephilim of a child. That is not a wise strong mother or a good government. Riches, ignorance and greed stultify good conscience. Democracy is the worst form of human Government except for all the others, said Churchill. The blessing on the poor is co-operation in the good conscience of the kingdom of God.
Matthew 5:3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Another way to look at a depression is like constipation. A laxative word is required for the tightwads.
Deuteronomy 15:11 For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land. Democracy is the worst form of human government, except for all the others, but truth is divine government. The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.”
Winston Churchill Speech in the House of Commons (1916-05-17). Deuteronomy 32:4 states that “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.”