Today I will talk about what Obama can do to boost the economy in both the long term and the short term. In the last two blog posts I have made I have outlined a very happy economic scenario and a very grim economic scenario. I think it’s worth pointing out that both scenarios were very extreme and while the economy may end up being close to one of those scenarios it will probably be over a much longer time frame. Something like two years instead of six months. So in this post I will be talking about what Obama should do and shouldn’t do to prevent the bad scenario from being out our future.
Some key things Obama could do tax wise is raise taxes on the super rich, raise taxes on companies that ship jobs over seas, cut taxes for the middle and lower class and raise taxes on gasoline and cigarettes. He should also institute a new tax on things like fast food and soda. Obama should also invest in a green future for our country (see last blog post). He could do this in a variety of ways both on the large scale and the small scale. Some large scale ways he could invest in a green future for our country is by increasing federal funding for green research, build more green power plants, which would include wind mills, hydroelectric power plants, geothermal power plants, and perhaps most importantly solar power plants. Some small scale things he could do is give cash incentives to people who buy green technology and give tax breaks and stimulus to companies who make and sell green technology. But that alone will not save our economy from a double dip recession, not even close.
If we want to have a good and prosperous future than we are going to have to find some way to repay our mountain of government debt. The most logical first step is to stop spending in the first place. Now, I am not proposing an across the board freeze on spending but rather a slow waning of spending in some areas and some minor increases spending in other areas (such as green technology). For the most part I like how Obama has run the country so far but there are some areas that I don’t see eye to eye with him on. One of them is the war in Afghanistan. Though only history will be able to tell us whether the war in Afghanistan was a good thing or not, my opinion is that in the short term it is a waste of political resources and more importantly, in bad economy, money. The big problem is that I don’t see the middle east being a peaceful and prosperous region for at least another ten or fifteen years and in the mean time we’re putting money into something that we really won’t see much return on in the short term and only minor return in the long term. Normally I might agree with the president’s view on the war in Afghanistan but in tough economic times we simply can’t afford to be waging a war that’s costing us trillions of dollars.
In conclusion I mostly agree with Obamas economic policy but there are some areas I think he could be doing a little bit better. Areas like renewable resources, green technology and the war on Afghanistan. He also needs to start a national initiative to go green (maybe starting town and city composting sites or spreading the word about bringing your own canvas bags to go shopping). In my next couple of blog posts I will be talking about the 600 billion dollar second round of quantitative easing recently instituted by the fed and what I think about Obama’s economic policy in his first two years in office.
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