What GOP Leaders deem wasteful in Senate stimulus bill, page 4

Originally posted by The Bald Champion

Ya D - but if spending freezes everything freezes - At least that has served true in the past.

Is freezing always the worst possible option?

What you are proposing actually has a name. "Bicycle theory" which is an economic theory proposed at a Trilateral committee meeting in 2000, or 199 I forget which.

The theory is, "well we dont know what to do, but we know if we stop we will fall over." (Like a bicycle that has ceased forward movement.)

However, what I thought at the time, and still think today, is;

"If you are headed for a bloody cliff, is falling over such a bad idea?"

So what if the economy freezes? It will suck, it will be hard, yes, I agree that is definitely going to be painful. But since "going forward" has gotten us into this mess, dont you think we need to STOP and make sure we arent headed for a cliff before we assume that forward motion is necessarily the best course of action?

Edit to add; Excerpts from that speech to the Trilateral Commission;

www.trilateral.org...

Second, the trading system has essentially been stalemated for several years. There are no new multilateral negotiations of any serious nature being conducted anywhere. The situation is very serious if, like me, you believe in the bicycle theory, which says you either move forward or you fall over.

The point is that there is a big backlash against globalization. We see it in the financial world. We certainly see it in the trading world as well. It’s much more fundamental than pure economics. We know that globalization does increase income and social disparities within countries. We know that globalization does leave some countries and certainly some groups of people behind. We do know that a lot of Europeans don’t want to eat genetically modified American foods and that adds to their resistance to globalization. We know that a lot Americans worry about races to the bottom—labor standards, environmental standards, and other perceived doubts about dealing with the rest of the world. We know that a lot of developing countries are raising doubts about the entire system, and such specifics as whether having agreed to the enshrinement of intellectual property rights is really in their national interest. (They would like to pull it back out of the WTO, having agreed to put it in five or six years ago.) So the list is long of the perceived intrusions of globalization into national sovereignties. There is therefore a backlash against it, which I think we have to take as an extremely serious economic, political, and social matter.

[edit on 3-2-2009 by Illusionsaregrander]