Transfusions

Member Group : From the Kitchen Table

The patient was wheeled into the emergency room. The paramedics who brought him
filed a report describing that he had been weak and lethargic. They had been unable to revive him at home, and had decided that he needed hospital attention. The emergency room staff took his vitals, and set him up in a treatment room.

The attending physician arrived, looked over the chart, and ordered a transfusion, telling the family that the patient needed a blood transfusion to help stimulate his recovery. So the nurse came in to hook up the IV lines for the procedure. She began by inserting one end of the line into his leg, carefully testing to ensure that she was drawing blood from the vein. Then she clamped the line. Next, she took the other end of the line and inserted it into the patient’s arm. Finally, she opened the clamp so the blood would flow from his leg to his arm.

The doctor entered, checked the arm, and cheerfully announced that all would be well.

It sounds like the plot of either a Marx Brothers’ movie or a cheap horror film,
doesn’t it?

It’s not. It is the method used by the federal government to "stimulate" our
economy.

Earlier this year, Washington politicians decided that they needed to help stimulate an economic recovery. So they passed a stimulus bill with a price tag of nearly a trillion dollars. They told us that they were pumping money into the economy to revive it. But Washington doesn’t have any money, and there was no outside donor.

The only place Washington could get the money to pump into America’s economy was
FROM America’s economy. So they took money from one sector and put it into another sector of the same economic body. It’s like the patient above who had blood taken from his leg and inserted into his arm.

With two important differences.

The IV tube didn’t keep any of the blood. It all got moved from one part of the
patient’s body to another. The patient may not have been assisted by the
transfusion, but he didn’t lose anything either.

That is not true for the economic transfusion. The government kept the largest
portion of the money they "moved." So America’s economy was stimulated by having the federal government remove money from the private sector, retain over half of what was taken, and then replace what was left. This was not a cash transfusion, it was a cash transfer from the private sector to the government.

Second, the patient’s body would re-circulate the blood back to the leg almost
immediately, so the movement caused by the transfusion was temporary.

But the federal government not only kept the largest portion of the money, it
restricted the owners and uses of the part that did eventually get re-inserted into the private sector. Those who created the wealth being transfused never got it back. They suffered a permanent loss.

It’s as if the patient’s arm kept the blood inside it. Not only would the leg die from blood loss, but the resulting disease would eventually kill the arm, and therefore the patient, as well.

America’s economy does not need, and may not survive, any more of Washington’s
stimulation. America’s economy needs the real stimulus that only the growth of
business can provide. And that growth requires Washington’s economic physicians to get out of the emergency room and let those who can actually make the patient better do their jobs.