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04/17/2008: "Forget campaign promises. The next president will face a stack of unpaid bills."

Raising taxes in today's precarious business environment may only make a bad situation worse. The money will have to be borrowed or printed or both. Not a particularly good idea. Printing money, a modern form of debasing the coin of the realm, causes inflation, a subject none of the candidates is dwelling on but which they may have to talk about as the cost of everything continues its climb. Ben Bernanke has been pumping hundreds of billions into the collapsed veins of the financial system to keep the great banks and investment houses from dying.

The situation the incoming president will find him or herself in is not the same as the one that confronted Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. He was able to deficit-spend to his heart's content without causing inflation because there was so much unused capacity in the country. Factories were idle and fields were fallow, so printing money stimulated production rather than driving up prices.

[ There can be no doubt that America faces an unprecedented crisis which is being somewhat staved off until the end of Bush's reign. ]

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_04_07/cover.html