Weekly Comments Archive
Archived Issue
Sunday, April 5, 2009
ISSUE #545
#545 April 5, 2009

Weekly Comments: Will has more faith in Detroit than in Washington

COLUMBUS: Congress passed what they humorously called a budget. It says we will spend $3.5 Trillion of the $2.5 Trillion we take in. Where else could you call a spending plan with a Trillion dollar deficit a budget, except maybe on Wall Street.

Actually Congress didn’t pass the budget, the Democrats did. Republicans may as well stayed home.

By coincidence, President Obama went to Europe for a series of conferences. First, he and Mrs. Obama met the Queen. Then he conferred with the leaders of 20 countries. Everything was going smooth, they all liked him, right up to the minute he asked ’em to loan him a Trillion dollars. Then his popularity sorta waned.

He went on to more conferences in Germany and Prague, and suggested all nations with nuclear weapons should give them up, and everybody cheered. That is everybody except the nations who have nuclear weapons. You know, even if we got rid of the nukes, we would have to dig up another Albert Einstein to invent something just as good.

That G-20 conference in England got off to a rocky start. The hooligans heard G-20 was coming to London, thought it was a soccer team, and started a riot. Did you see it? They hurled insults, bricks and empty beer bottles. (An Englishman, even an ignorant hooligan, would never throw a bottle before emptying it.)

For years we’ve heard, “As General Motors goes, so goes the nation.” Well, that pretty much explains the hole we’re in today. For close to a hundred years, we put our faith and our monthly payments in the automobile industry. Every time we bought one, we hoped the payments would stop before the car did. Then about ten years ago Congress, Fannie Mae and the bankers said, “Put your money into housing, even if you don’t have any, because a house always goes up, not down like a car.” So we did. We bought a house and a car, sometimes two or three of each. But houses dropped faster than cars and now nobody is buying either one.

So GM is broke, our President fired their president, and says he’ll run it from Washington. Chrysler is gonna be paired up with Fiat. An earlier deal with the German company, Daimler-Benz, ended in divorce, so this time she is to be married off to an Italian. If you wonder what a bright European company would see in this ugly step-sister, well, you haven’t seen the dowery. President Obama is playing father of the bride and giving Fiat $6 Billion.

Personally, I would have put GM and Chrysler together. Instead of turning it over to Wall Street bankers and Washington lawyers to run, bring in a president who knows how to build the best “vehicles” in their industry. I would suggest the president of John Deere, the president of Caterpillar, or the president of Harley-Davidson. Either hire one of them, or Lee Iacocca.

Word leaked out that the President’s economic advisors recently got big payoffs from Wall Street and the bankers. Larry Summers collected $5 Million for giving them advise. If his advice is worth $5 million, why did stocks drop 50 percent? Why would we think his advice to the President is any better than it was to Wall Street?

Historic quotes from Will Rogers:

“The budget is a mythical beanbag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, and then tries to reach in and pull real beans out.” DT #2047, Feb. 24, 1933

“Popularity is the easiest thing in the world to gain and it is the hardest thing to hold.” Radio, May 18, 1930

“America, a funny thing about us, we never was very good in conference. We have a unique record. We never lost a war and we never won a conference. I think, without any degree of egotism, we can say, with our tremendous resources we can lick any nation in the world single-handed. And yet we can’t confer with Costa Rica and come home with our shirts on.” Radio, April 6, 1930

 

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