Wet Dreams and Money

Many people, myself included, think that expanding the money supply is not the way to get this country out of its economic doldrums. The obama administration doesn't share that view. The most egregious indication of that (IMO misguided) belief is the Fed's recent repurchase of $600 billion worth of US government-issued bonds. Known as 'quantitative easing,' the theory is that this cash injection will stimulate the country’s ailing economy.

The mastermind behind this plan is Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Former house speaker Newt Gingrich, among others, opposes it: “I would say that Bernanke is fundamentally wrong. This economy lacks confidence in the government. It doesn’t lack cash.”

FWIW, I agree with Newt for a number of reasons. I'll skip the esoteric and mind-numbing theoretically-based economic arguments, and instead focus on one simple observation.

As my old First Sergeant used to say, "CenTexTim, you could screw up a wet dream." Similarly, the government has problems coloring within the lines.

Government Can't Even Print Money Properly

As a metaphor for our troubled economic and financial era -- and the government's stumbling response -- this one's hard to beat. You can't stimulate the economy if you can't print the money correctly.

Because of a problem with the presses, the federal government has shut down production of its flashy new $100 bills, and has quarantined more than 1 billion of them -- more than 10 percent of all existing U.S. cash -- in a vault in Fort Worth, Texas.

Officials with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve had touted the new bills' sophisticated security features that were 10 years in the making, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell, designed to foil counterfeiters. But it turns out the bills are so high-tech that the presses can't handle the printing job.

More than 1 billion unusable bills have been printed. Some of the bills creased during production, creating a blank space on the paper, one official told CNBC. Because correctly printed bills are mixed in with the flawed ones, even the ones printed to the correct design specs can't be used until they 're sorted. It would take an estimated 20 to 30 years to weed out the defective bills by hand, but a mechanized system is expected to get the job done in about a year.

Combined, the quarantined bills add up to $110 billion -- more than 10 percent of the entire U.S. cash supply, which now stands at around $930 billion.

The flawed bills, which cost around $120 million to print, will have to be burned.

Sigh ... where to start ... do I really have to belabor the obvious? If the government can't even print pieces of paper without fucking up, how on God's Green Earth can we expect them to manage the nation's economy?

Of course, one solution would be to rebrand the dollar bill with obama's image replacing George Washington.

In an added note of irony, the new botched bills are the first to include Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's signature. In order to prevent a shortfall, the government has ordered production of the old design, which includes the signature of Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

I can't wait to see how obama and the lamestream media blame this fiasco on Bush...