The Obama Administration’s aggressive and seemingly frantic pressure to get a health care bill passed over the next few weeks (a virtual impossibility) brings back memories of sixteen years ago, in 1993 when the newly inaugurated Clinton Administration tried exactly the same thing. And it was that very aggressiveness on the part of (most particularly) Hilary Clinton that (thankfully) ultimately doomed the project. I predict the same thing will happen again in 2009.

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With Chrysler and General Motors in bankruptcy and under the ‘de facto’ if not ‘de jure’ management of the U.S. Government, the hue and cry emanating from the pundits and politicians and television journalists and on and on wails, “What is left of the American auto industry?”

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Lo and behold a couple of weeks ago, some of the channels on my TV stopped working. I realized it when I tried to watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a simply must have for me first thing in the morning – great guests, good politics and economics and lots of humor. Clicking around, I realized that I had also lost a lot of other channels and none of them did I think of as premium rate channels. They included A&E, Lifetime, Bravo, the History Channel, C-Span and some silly paid programming channels. I couldn’t make rhyme or reason of the selection, but one thing was certain – I am sure that those channels come with the basic coverage. The odd thing was that a couple of other televisions I have did not have any missing channels. But I’m not a big TV watcher, so I didn’t pay much attention to this difference in reception.

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Or put another way – Saving is the new spending in the United States.

After several decades of Americans being the world’s consummate and most profligate spenders, we appear to have developed (all of a sudden in just the last few months) a serious fancy for saving. This phenomenon is most evident in the Baby Boomer generation, those of us who were reared by frugal parents who themselves were reared during the Great Depression by parents, many of whom themselves were truly struggling to survive.

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President Obama promised CHANGE in his campaign for President, and after 100 days in office, it is easy to give him a grade of A++ on keeping that promise. I must leave it to historians to gauge whether or not his first 100 days will take the top prize in terms of changes instituted in this country, but for sure he will get honorable mention.

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I never thought I would find myself in the same camp as the self-acclaimed “democrat socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. But last evening on the Kudlow Report he made a very legitimate case for Government capping interest rates on credit card balances.

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