Obama's stimulus promotes inflation.

• Position: Economics - Barack Obama

The so-called stimulus bill demonstrates a stunning ignorance of how business works and how jobs are created, maintains Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring USA, Philadelphia. For example, in its more than 1,500 pages, there is not one single mention of increasing profits in American businesses, yet any business owner knows that sustained profits are the sole way that businesses can expand and create new jobs. Without that clear focus, the long-term result of a huge increase in government spending only can mean one thing: staggering inflation.

In addition to the numerous economic issues, this massive inflation stimulus also raises three major moral hazards:

* Tens of millions of citizens who have retired on fixed incomes will see their purchasing power erode severely and their financial security collapse. Do we want to bear responsibility for breaking trust with our retirees who have worked so hard to achieve financial security?

* At the other end of the age spectrum, tens of millions of young people will find their future dreams thwarted by an oppressive tax system burdened by repaying billions of dollars of debt incurred just this year. Economists say that this unprecedented public borrowing could "crowd out" private capital that otherwise would be used to expand existing businesses and start new ones, thus shackling the next generation with no-growth prospects.

* Pres. Barack Obama's pledge of transparency in his new Administration is rendered meaningless by exempting this bill from the budget disciplines and cost disclosure requirements of all other legislation. By allowing House and Senate leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to assemble this bill the old-fashioned way--larding it up with economically unsound projects cynically included to buy votes--the new President risks breaking faith with the American people on a matter of moral as well as political integrity.

"The bill ... is entirely government-centric," laments Hanna. "It assumes that government is the best or only financial actor capable of addressing the politically-motivated overextension of credit crisis and a housing market breakdown. Absent are incentives for the private sector to inject new capital into the economy...