Barack 'Santa' Obama

Here's the new and positively hilarious cartoon from Kal, the cartoonist for The Economist magazine. I thought I really should share it, as it brilliantly summarizes why I'm still not completely a fan of Barack Obama, although the man certainly has a lot going for him. Trouble is, compared to the outgoing president, almost anyone would look good-even myself and whoever will one day be my mother-in-law.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that Barack Obama has a good personality and is willing to listen to other people's points of view. Also Mr Obama does not despise Europe and the rest of the world and he has just picked a Nobel prize-winning physicist, Dr Steven Chu, to head his Department of Energy, which bodes very well for his environmental and scientific policies.

However, when it comes to his strategy to revive the U.S. economy-and the economy supposedly is the strength of the Democrats-I do remain more than a bit skeptical. First Mr Obama said nothing to criticize, even constructively, Henry Paulson's plan to bail out Wall Street bankers by directly  buying bad mortgage securities. Now he has approved another $800bn to inject into the consumer credit market and he is also readying what is reportedly another trillion dollar so-called 'stimulus' package to be spent on building projects, education and other popular-sounding job creation schemes.

All of a sudden a trillion dollars has become the new billion dollars.

I would definitely be more than a bit cautious about engaging America so emphatically into a direction of bottomless government spending, which basically has all the appearance of America attempting to lift itself up by pulling its own straps. This is the kind of gravity-defying stunt that could very well end up making the lives of my generation of workers extremely miserable in the long run, all the more since America is already heavily in debt. And that precisely is what worries me most: America has a mountain of debt, its economy is suffering its worst recession in perhaps thirty years and that could last the entire length of Mr Obama's tenure and yet the President-elect is enthused by the idea of spending trillions of dollars without an afterthought.

Supposedly Mr Obama's economic team of advisors, headed by Larry Summers, are great academics and financiers who are the best of the best. Fair enough, but at the end of the day economics has a lot more to do with common sense than academics and technical competence. Unfortunately, more often than not common sense and intuition is what great academics and former bankers tend to lack completely. And my own common sense tells me that George Bush and Barack Obama are both setting America on a course that may very well trade an economic and financial crisis for another crisis, of a fiscal nature this time, that might potentially bankrupt the U.S. Federal government altogether.

Then in the event of a real emergency, such as a catastrophic bird-flu pandemic, an 8.0 earthquake in Los Angeles or even a group of islamic fanatics from Pakistan or Iran stealing and then detonating a nuclear device in some Western capital, America would have no money left to respond in an effective way...