Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
Today is Presidents’ Day, the day we commemorate two great men – George Washington and Abraham Lincoln – and the 44 other presidents, most of whom have worked tirelessly, defying all odds, to leave our country in measurably worse condition than when they took the reins.
It’s not easy being the president, particularly today.
Apart from the usual palm greasing, backroom deal making, and pretending to genuinely care about the people, the modern president must also find ways to fritter away a $6.1 trillion budget while somehow finding time to vigorously tweet hot takes on issues one might normally expect to be below the dignity of the office.
So, let’s pay tribute to all commanders in chief, past, present, and future… and consider why we deem it worthy to close all banks and government offices on this cold Monday in February.
We’ll start with the current occupant of the White House.
President Joe Biden inherited the largest budget deficit in history. But rather than make any attempt to reimpose post-pandemic fiscal sanity, he picked up the deficit-spending football and ran it into the end zone. What’s a couple trillion more when you already owe more than $30 trillion?
Attaboy, Joe.
And then there was his predecessor, the ever entertaining Donald Trump, who holds the distinction of being the only president to date to run a budget deficit of over $3 trillion.
The man who pledged to “drain the swamp” of government corruption also had no problem allowing his son-in-law’s hedge fund to receive a $2 billion bribe… ahem… “investment”… from the Saudi Arabian government.
I guess that swamp draining will have to wait for his second term, which, I can only assume, will include a third or fourth impeachment. If at first you don’t succeed…
Next, cheers to Barack Obama,who gave us the Affordable Care Act. Far from making healthcare more affordable, that little gem somehow doubled the cost of individual health insurance plans and, against all odds, made a horrendous health system even worse.
In pursuing Saudi-born terrorists hiding in Afghanistan, George W. Bush appeared to take a wrong turn and invaded Iraq. Maybe he was holding the map upside down?
The good news is that we won that war, only to eventually hand control of the government over to our archenemy Iran via their Shia proxy in Iraq.
Just brilliant!
Bill Clinton actually ran budget surpluses for a few years, chipping away ever so slightly at the national debt. I’ll resist the urge to roast him over the meaning of “is” because, however small the baby steps might have been, we at least approached something resembling fiscal responsibility for a brief time under his… er… leadership.
Of course, it’s not just recent presidents who have a knack for really making a mess of things…
Over the loud protestations of virtually every living economist of note, our wise friend Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. The resulting collapse in global trade caused an already rocky U.S. economy to slide into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Lyndon B. Johnson was a real class act. When asked by reporters why the United States was at war in Vietnam, he unzipped his pants, grabbed his manhood, and replied “This is why!”
And let’s not forget our favorite – Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick was forced to resign to avoid impeachment over his use of government agents to spy on political enemies, forever making “Watergate” synonymous with scandal.
Come to think of it, maybe we should change Presidents’ Day in its current form to a new federal holiday honoring President William Henry Harrison. He was only in office for 31 days before dropping dead, so he didn’t really have time to screw anything up too badly.
Or better yet, why don’t we scrap Presidents’ Day altogether and replace it with Entrepreneurs’ Day?
It seems a little counterintuitive to take a day off work to honor workaholic business founders, but I’d prefer to honor risk takers with skin in the game than political grifters with grand ambitions to spend other people’s money getting other people’s sons and daughters killed in other people’s countries.
Hey, a day off work is a day off work.
Enjoy this Presidents’ Day with your families and raise a beer while you remember what exactly it is we work for. We’ll be back in the office on Tuesday.
To life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth.