Talk About No Clue, Obama & Small Business

With the painfully obvious need to try and shine up his image, Lord Falderal takes a trip up to Nashua, NH and tells small business how he is going to save them from the disastrous situation he has created by proposing a new and improved disastrous situation. As usual, the proposed solutions have nothing at all to do with what small business is actually concerned with and include a whole new set of flawed equations.

What Falderal told small business owners is that he will lobby Congress to free up $30 billion to loan out to banks sporting assets under $10 billion dollars with the proviso through a slew of incentives, the money be funneled to small business owners in the form of easily obtained low interest commercial notes. Kind of like what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did for homeowners before they tanked.

Yippee.

That would be great except for two things:

1.      Small business does not currently give a rat’s ass about favorable interest rates, or financing in general. According to the National Federation of Independent Business it ranks a lowly second to last in favor of more immediate needs, you know, like staying in business in the first place! Something this faltering economy of Falderal’s is not making easy. Going into further debt at any interest rate is not something responsible business owners, the cornerstone of American business, are interested in. But, of course, Falderal or any other Democrat for that matter, couldn’t possibly relate to that notion.

2.     
 The second and more telling problem (since we know Falderal can’t understand basic business models) is where the $30 billion is to come from. Falderal intends on using money paid back from Wall Street bankers who took TARP funds. Remember, a lot of those guys were forced to take the dough against their wishes. Current estimates say that TARP will have ended up costing taxpayers close to $115 billion when the chips finally fall. I say double that since those are government estimates and they use the “new Falderal math” in their calculations.

Let’s think about this for a minute.

Taxpayers give $700 billion in TARP money to what essentially are the bad guys. The program fails miserably but we regain an estimated $585 million, a loss of $115 million. (Man, even my financial guy did better than that last year!) Then we take $30 billion of that repaid money bringing our immediate loss to $145 million and loan it out to some more scum bag banks in the hope that they will do the right thing. Unlikely. For the most part Falderal is taking a failed program and reinvigorating it although on a smaller scale, with the same tax dollars, your tax dollars. Does this make sense?

Meanwhile, to ensure Wall Street actually does pay us back, Falderal would like to institute a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee (FCRF). Isn’t this fun all these acronyms? Falderal is really good at them. This is a fee, or basically a fine imposed on all the institutions that took TARP, including those who didn’t want to in the first place.

Here’s the $30 billion dollar question.

Just who or whom, does Falderal think is going to pick up the tab on those FCRF fees? Us, that’s who, because in a capitalist society, when costs increase to the merchant they also increase to the consumer, or at least that is what I learned in business school. And, that just ain’t good for anybody!

Make no bones about it, those FCRF fees (the ones we are going to pay for) are not intended to help cover the costs of TARP, they are a slush fund for the Falderal Administration’s gigantic new spending spree.

The Federal Government is about to become the largest in the history of the United States. The White House states there will be 2.15 million workers in the Federal Government by the time Falderal’s budget passes.

We are completely screwed.

Until Lord Falderal takes a basic course in math and civics (to learn what the word Capitalism means), he would do well to stay away from taking meetings with actual business people and consider carting his Teleprompter to garden club outings. Or, maybe just keep touring the country campaigning with that same recycled bullshit he used for the State of the Union and give up attempting to be an actual President. He is a much more convincing campaigner and that might work a lot better for us.