Column by Seth Thomas

The inauguration has come and gone, and beside the fact that we now (thankfully) have a president whose IQ seems to rise above the mean, I still find myself wondering about all this change that’s supposed to be coming down the pipes. If you listened to President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, you heard him tell us that the question is no longer whether the government is too large or too small, but whether government works or not. If a program doesn’t work, then it gets the axe.

But is this the proper method to assess what role the federal government should take in our lives, that is, whatever it can do well it should do? It seems to me that Obama has essentially parodied former President John F. Kennedy’s words by saying, “ask not what you can do you for your country, but what your country is capable of doing well for you.” I would not be troubled by this sentiment if government’s long and inglorious history of failures were not all accompanied by false affirmations of success in its respective misadventures.

Indeed, if one were to realistically appraise our current situation, it appears rather certain under Obama’s proposed test that government must soon retract to a very minute size, due to its utter ineptitude in nearly everything in which it is involved. Case in point: The same guys who can’t run the Post Office at a profit and who were unable (despite an agency specifically assigned to such tasks — the Securities and Exchange Commission) to uncover Bernie Madoff’s 30-year Ponzi scheme, have been in the process of nationalizing the banks since last September.

Apparently the banker CEOs and hedge fund managers weren’t bad enough at their jobs, so the federal government had to step in to show them what real incompetence looked like. Need proof on that one? Hank Paulson, the former treasury secretary, spent $350 billion of Troubled Asset Recovery Plan I capitalizing (aka rewarding) banks that made stupid trades and yet the major indexes are as low as ever, and banks have been declared by many to be virtually insolvent. (TARP I is the first half of Congress’s $700 billion taxpayer funded giveaway to ailing banks). Thanks Hank, for your advice, and thanks to Congress and the Senate for signing another blank check without oversight to the Bush administration. Great job, guys.

But it’s not all bad news. We do have a new treasury secretary, albeit one who refused to pay his back taxes until prompted to do so by the incoming Obama administration in December. Also, in case you were worried that government would reduce spending in light of last year’s $1.3 trillion budget shortfall, have no fear, for Obama appears to be getting his way in the house and Senate for an $819 billion package to stimulate us all. I’d like to say that this stimulus package is taxpayer funded, but it’s probably more apt to say “taxpayer leveraged,” since the money will be either printed by the Federal Reserve or borrowed from China, leaving our children and our children’s children to pay it back. But really, who cares where the money comes from — let’s just get the spending party started as soon as possible!

So please forgive me if my hope does not overflow into jubilation in these first days of Obama’s presidency. Obama has potential (he’s begun closing Gitmo for one), but it’s going to take a lot more than lofty rhetoric for me to begin mentioning the federal government in conversation without defiling it with the most vulgar of insults.