According to The Washington Post, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks that the United States government should reduce the federal deficit.
Bernanke, originally appointed by President George W. Bush (R) and recently reappointed by President Barack Obama (D), is a bit perplexing as the new cheerleader for reductions in the federal deficit. Bernanke was one of the architects of last year’s bailout bonanza, where the federal government wrote billion-dollar checks to all sorts of random financial and automotive businesses, seized control of banks, shredded the United States Constitution, and more. After he and other officials from the Bush and Obama administrations created the largest deficits in the history of the United States—four times larger in 2009 than the previous record [from last year]—now he says large deficits are a bad thing.
This is reminiscent of when Bush, fresh off of ‘saving’ the auto industry [which went bankrupt anyway a few months later] with 10 billion dollars of your and my dollars, told foreign leaders not to abandon the free market economy. He had just abandoned it himself! Like Bush had no right to talk about the value and importance of the free markets that he spent his last three months in office trying to dismantle, Bernanke has no right to talk about how bad federal deficits are when half of those deficits are, at least in part, his fault.
Of course, we all know now that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Bernanke lied to us about last year’s bailouts, and we all know that the new administration (which came in promising ‘change,’ remember?) immediately accelerated the same mindless spending (and reappointed Bernanke). How long do Obama and Bernanke and others in this administration expect us to keep believing them when they say they don’t believe in deficit spending or government waste?
Bernanke is right, of course . . . we do need to reduce the federal deficit, and we need to do it now. But where was this Ben Bernanke last year when he was running up the deficit he now decries?