The Prodigal President (and the rest of us too!)*

*This article appears as an Editorial in July 28th edition of The Garner Citizen News and Times here.

I cannot recall the first time that I heard the story of the prodigal son. I know that I have heard this story at least once a year in church and I am sure it has been more than that. For the longest time I thought that “prodigal” meant that the son returned. So I thought that the title meant that the story was about a returning son. I could not have been more wrong. Recently, the true definition of the word “prodigal” was brought to my attention. According to Dictionary.com, the definition is “wastefully or recklessly extravagant.”

In other words, the story is about the wasteful son, who asks for his fortune upfront and then spends it all in a reckless and extravagant manner. What was known to the people that Jesus was telling the parable to, and unknown to me, was that being prodigal was acting sinfully. Every one knew that spending everything on trifles and then borrowing, spending that, and then trying to spend even more, was just flat-out wrong.

It is amazing how much the world has (and has not) changed. Today, Americans are encouraged to spend, spend, spend. We are encouraged to run up credit card debt and purchase luxury items like new TVs, stylish clothes and nice gadgets. The tax code is designed to discourage savings and thrift. It is designed this way purposefully.

The dominant economic philosophy that governs the writers of our tax codes is the Keynesian economic philosophy. In the Keynesian point of view, GDP and Aggregate Demand are everything. According to economists, Aggregate Demand is defined as the summation of Consumption, Investment, Government Spending, and Net Exports. The largest component in this list is consumption. Therefore, the government “encourages” us, by manipulating the tax code, to spend our money on consumer goods, especially in a recession.

The government wants us to be a “prodigal populace.” (I think that they have been largely successful.)

Continuing along the Keynesian train of thought, since we are in a recession, it can be concluded that there is simply not enough Aggregate Demand. Thus, we need to increase one of the variables to boost our GDP. The variable most easily manipulated is government spending.

The Congress has been more than a willing accomplice to increasing government expenditures. The Federal Budgets have been as follows: $2.7 trillion (2007), $2.9 trillion (2008), $3.5 trillion (2009), $3.7 trillion (FY2010). In less than four years, we have expanded the annual Federal Budget by another trillion dollars. Meanwhile we have increased the national debt to well over $13.1 trillion. Despite these record levels, there are many in Washington that say that this is not enough.

We are clearly living in an age of the “prodigal politician.”

Finally, we come to the piece of news that recently caught my attention. The White House announced that through the $862 billion stimulus package that was passed in 2009, somewhere between 2.5 and 3.6 million jobs have been “saved” or created. I have no idea how one calculates a “saved” job, but let’s assume that these numbers are true. In fact, let’s assume that the larger number of jobs (3.6 million) is the correct number. So, how much did we spend per job? (The math isn’t all that hard.) The answer is $239,444.44 per job!

We can easily see that this is a policy package that was created by a “prodigal President.”

Why? Because, the jobs created by the stimulus package must be some of the nicest jobs in the world. I think that I would like to have a $239,444 job. In fact, with all of this excessive, wasteful and reckless spending I’ve been doing recently, I think that a job that pays $239,444 is the only way I will be able to start to pay my bills. Then again, maybe I should just go ahead and spend it all anyway. But if I did that, would I then become a prodigal Paul?