The Czar is beginning to wonder what the Obama administration lacks more: basic financial competence or an interest in the American taxpayer. Each news story makes it harder to choose which evil is the greater one.

Here is yet another story—yes, one of those classic Obama “release this bad news on a day and time when no one is looking”that shows a pretty even balance between total financial ignorance and the net result on the American taxpayer.

The Obama administration seems hell-bent on wrecking the economy further. Despite chipper and eager news stories about manufacturing being up, and housing starts doing this, and the stock market doing that, two elements are inescapable:

1. If you continue to spend money on new programs, you continuously borrow money to do so. By injecting this borrowed capital, you increase inflation. Inflation, a concept that few Democratic economists graps, is like a cancer on the economy. It eats up everything useful until it kills. Like a cancer, it is not easy to remove or completely eliminate. Like a cancer, it affects decision making across the board: everything has to be viewed in relation to it. If you increase inflation, you kill the economy. The only historical response to high inflation the Democrats have ever had is to let the next Republican president correct it.

2. If you continue to sustain high unemployment, you lose out on tax revenues. Fewer tax revenues mean insufficient funding for existing programs, which of course means… you guess it, borrowing more money, and hiking inflation further. This of course increases the strains on businesses, who respond by laying off workers. Result? Higher unemployment.

Each feeds the other, and evidently our administration fails to understand this. To be fair, there is genuinely only so much a president can do with an economy as large and diverse as ours. But one thing that is pretty straightforward would be for the President to go live, on his beloved television, and say that enough is enough. We need to wait on some of these ambitious programs: healthcare needs to wait. Cap and trade needs to wait. Everybody needs to wait. He can even very truthfully say it isn’t his fault: he came into office with high hopes to change the world, but right now the economy is a pressing need that overweighs anything else. We need to pay down the deficit, start repaying our debts, and start cinching up the belt on government programs.

Then, he needs to stop stifling the business world. Regulations, pay czars, unionization efforts, and new corporate taxes need to be dialed waaaay back. This will energize business unbelievably, and large and small businesses alike will start to spend money on new efforts. The unemployment rate will dip below 10 percent, and continue to drop as new workers are hired. This will put more existing dollars back into circulation, reducing inflataion and increasing tax revenues.

Everybody wins. And if the process is so successful, maybe it could be sustained by leaving things the way they are for another year. Maybe.

Sure, there are plenty of readers here smacking their foreheads and saying “No kidding; this is obvious stuff!” Unfortunately, there are plenty of others, in key positions, who will argue that this isn’t nearly so simple.

But it is. They just don’t grasp it.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.