Will offers his view of the economic situation

COLUMBUS: Washington had good news this week for folks that like to spend and spend and put it on their credit cards. If you get behind and miss a payment or two, it won’t matter. The other card holders will carry you.

Secretary Geithner wants to put a cap on bankers’ salaries. When a man is borrowing half of all the money he’s spending, he probably shouldn’t rile the bankers. On the other hand it seems like a good idea; I’ve sure told my share of jokes on the bankers. And suppose they take this salary cap all the way to Hollywood. Whether Barbara Streisand or Tom Hanks could get by on $500,000 a year, I got my doubts.

A bunch of Chrysler dealers are being shut down. General Motors is closing a bunch more. I’m partial to Ford, but this ought to be a good time to buy a new Chrysler, and maybe a Pontiac. These dealers only have a month or two to get rid of the cars, so they’re dealing. Besides, with this new announcement from Washington you can put the full cost on your credit cards and maybe spread the payments over ten or twelve years.

This whole situation defies logic. If you want to sell more cars, give your customers fewer places to buy ‘em? But entice them with easy payments that can last way longer than the car.

Keeping Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo is looking like a better deal. Europe complained about the prison for years, but when European countries were offered a chance to take a few of the prisoners off our hands, they turned us down flat. When it comes to war, Europeans are good talkers.

If we’re forced to take those terrorists into one of our 50 states, I propose Nevada. I don’t have anything against Nevada; it’s a great state for gamblers, divorcees and wild horses. There’s no place lovelier than Lake Tahoe. But we have spent $10 Billion in Nevada, mainly tunneling out a huge storage space under Yucca Mountain for nuclear materials. Senator Reid says he will never accept a single pound of nuclear material, so I would propose a deal. Either give us back the $10 Billion, or take the prisoners.

It’s the cheapest place to store these terrorists. Build a steel gate across the entrance and put them in there. Once a week bring in a truck with plenty of food and water. Let ‘em take care of each other. No guards inside. Or lawyers either. Yucca Mountain was designed to hold nuclear waste for millions of years; it can easily hold these Gitmo prisoners for a hundred.

On our money problems,  we’re always saying this high debt will be tough on our children and grandchildren. But the way it’s going lately, it’s us, too. With this spending drunk we’re on, it won’t wait for us old folks to die off naturally. What inflation doesn’t take from us, higher taxes will.

Now I’ve always been an optimist. But it’s getting tougher when our leaders in Washington tell us the whole country ought to be like California.

Historic quotes from Will Rogers:

“Why don’t somebody print the truth about our present economic situation? We spent six years of wild buying on credit (everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not) and now we are having to pay for ‘em under Mr. Hoover, and we are howling like a pet coon.
This would be a great world to dance in if we didn’t have to pay the fiddler.” DT #1224, June 27, 1930

 “If you got a dollar, soak it away, put it in a savings bank, bury it, do anything but spend it. Spending when we didn’t have it put us where we are today. Saving when we’ve got it will get us back to where we was before we went cuckoo.” DT #1353, Nov. 24, 1930