As our economy continues to struggle, with both parties in our political structure pointing the finger back and forth, I thought it might be helpful to dredge up an old article I wrote back during the 2008 Presidential campaign season (located on my previous blog, "Austrian School"), titled "Your Presidential Candidate Doesn't Matter (Subtitle: You'll Be Worse off Economically in 2016 No Matter Who Gets Elected)."

Now, I hate to jump the gun by five years, but I'm starting to feel like I was more right than I even imagined in the first place.  I suspect that if you had read this article of mine when it was first published, at the very least you were a bit skeptical...but now here we are, worse off than we were then, and all signs pointing downward.

While I encourage you to read the whole article, I did want to share and comment on a couple of excerpts here.  To begin:

To quickly summarize: when inflationary policies are instituted, and money is created out of nothing, that money flows to entities that can utilize it before its price-raising effects seep into the larger economy. These entities (investment banks, corporations, the wealthy) can invest it or capitalize it in a fashion that is advantageous to them, such as by investing in real estate, stocks, derivative investments (options, collateralized debt obligations), or anything else for that matter. Then when the added money trickles down to the consumer (read: you and I), we are left with one thing: higher prices. Less purchasing power. Smaller paychecks. Whatever you want to call it, it's not good.

I like this paragraph because it captures, in essence, this prescription we've received of more government borrowing/money printing/spending (through Quantitative Easing I [February 2009], Quantitative Easing II [November 2010], and Operation Twist [September 2011]), which so many of us take for the beginnings of an economic recovery.  Unfortunately, it is actually the poison that will eventually do us in.  It LOOKS good -- "Great! The government is actually doing something, they're helping us out."  It SOUNDS good -- "This government spending will create more construction/infrastructure/etc jobs."  It FEELS good -- "We've GOT to do something, we can't just do nothing."

But it is NOT good, and it will turn out very badly as time goes by.  Briefly said, it will ultimately achieve only the following:

1) Add to the national debt, burdening us with increasing interest payments over time in order to service that debt.
2) Contribute to devaluation of the currency, weakening the value of each dollar, lowering our purchasing power, and leading to a lower standard of living.
3) Crowd out more jobs than it creates; for every job created by the government, the fact that it had to borrow/spend to create it destroys 1+X jobs (we'll never know what the X is).

I also wanted to highlight this excerpt, the closing paragraph of the August 2008 article:

Allow me to proclaim with even more emphasis the following: no matter who becomes President - Barack Obama or John McCain - your economic situation will be worse after the presumptive two terms that individual will serve. By worse, I mean some combination of the following conditions: less home equity, devalued investments in stocks and bonds, lower purchasing power, less available savings, more reliance on credit to buy the essentials, you name it. It won't be pleasant.

Gloom and doom.  Yeah, I know everyone is tired of it, but it's way past the time to face facts.  The government does not have a shred of a clue how to fix the economy, aside from their misguided appropriation of our wealth and the subsequent redistribution of it.  And we see where that has gotten us today.

Actually, it's got to be somewhat unnerving for those who have put so much faith in the government's ability to aid an economic recovery, to see the ineffectiveness of these policies.  I honestly don't know how anyone could actually believe at this point that the government has a viable approach for fixing the problem.  Every policy has failed, and indeed has worsened the conditions under which we're subjected to economically (rising inflation, higher national debt, etc.).

I hate to say it, but at this point in looking ahead to the 2012 election, it really matters not who ends up President.  There is no political will nor ability to compromise on the big issues and problems to suggest that the economy will once again prosper and thrive.  The election season and campaigns will roll on with theatrical flourish, and you and I will continue to witness a declining standard of living.