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For a couple of months now I have been boring readers here with overly dry essays and blog posts about the importance of strengthening the dollar. Here's another one. The Wall Street Journal today contains yet another excellent essay explaining that restoring the dollar's strength is the key step needed to reverse our nation's current economic slide in the most orderly and long-lasting fashion. And the official WSJ editorial today makes the same point in passing, while doling out other good advice. And the excellent Wayne Jett weighs in as well.
Folks, right now, our struggling economy is, in historical terms, a minor speed bump. But everything the president and Congress and the Treasury secretary are talking about doing would make things worse, not better. And the Fed seems utterly confused. Failure to do the right things now -- floating the federal funds rate, steady strengthening of the dollar, and making the Bush 2003 tax cuts permanent while cutting corporate income taxes -- will surely turn the speed bump into a devastating pothole, ESPECIALLY if they exacerbate matters by panicky "stimulus" measures that do more harm than good.
This is serious, folks. We're facing stagflation again. It's Jimmy Carter 1979 all over again if we don't watch out. And, I repeat, a candidate who pledges a strong dollar policy will shoot up markedly in the polls. At the very least, these imagination-less candidates ought to test out the idea in some focus groups. I bet they'll find that with just a little attention to the right language, they will get an unexpectedly (by them, not by me) large, favorable response.

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