March 9, 2009

Unemployment is up over eight percent. More than 650,000 jobs were lost in February. IRA accounts are losing huge amounts of money.

Government helped bring this crisis about. It wasn’t solely responsible, but it played a major role with mortgages going to people who couldn’t afford their houses and a lot of us spending and going into debt as if there was no tomorrow.

Now government, in the form of President Obama and his congressional Democrats, thinks it can fix the problem by more irresponsible spending. The private economy is disappearing and conservatives have forgotten how to defend it, as Dan Henninger wrote in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

What is going to happen? Folks, we are in deep financial trouble and that’s only part of it. We may also be in deep foreign policy trouble as the administration wants to play cozy with Russia and Syria. Do these people have a clue what they’re doing? Is there a unifying philosophy that drives whatever policies they are advancing? There is. On the domestic front it is socialism and on the foreign policy front it is appeasement.

Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C.