In his address to Congress and the nation last week, President Barack Obama assured us that the government is working aggressively to ‘restart lending.’ Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Senate that he was ‘committed to using all available tools’ to ‘unfreeze the credit markets.’

Just one question: why in God’s name would we want to do that?

Obama explained that ‘the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy.’ Evidently, he wants Americans to be able to borrow even more money so that they can buy more houses they can’t afford, additional cars they don’t need (and again, can’t afford), and begin once again to put to use the nine credit cards the average American possesses. This is ridiculous.

Sometimes credit is good, of course. But in recent years, and with regards to this economic crisis specifically, credit has been the cancer of our economy rather than the lifeblood. Debt has been the cornerstone of American capitalism for too long. Too much easy money; credit and debt are exactly what got us into this mess. Why would the government be encouraging more of it?

Everyone agrees that lax lending policies helped realize the financial crisis. We hear all about the predatory lenders that made bad loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back. But now, in a flush of nauseating irony, the do-gooders and master planners in our oversized government of ineptitude are incentivizing ‘- by law ‘- more irresponsible lending.

Will they be ready to accept the blame the next time the financial market crashes because of too much debt? Or will they still blame the evils of Wall Street, despite their own culpability?

Actually, encouraging excessive credit and huge amounts of personal debt has been the de facto policy of our government for quite some time now. If we were spared artificially low interest rates provided the Fed,’ government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration and certain subsidies built into the tax code, we might have avoided all that predatory lending which hoisted us into this slump.

Through Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, all of these pro-credit, pro-debt and anti-saving governmental inducements towards destruction will balloon in size, scope and influence. In such hardship and economic misery, it literally baffles me that Americans turn to those in government for guidance and assistance when all they offer us is more of the problem.

The national debt now stands at $10,894,989,984,415.97, not including all the future liabilities for which we’re responsible. Since September 2007, the debt has increased an average of $3.62 billion every single day.

Is it at all responsible ‘- or even honest ‘- for the government to continue to take on unprecedented levels of debt in this crisis? We’re told things would be worse without government assistance. Really, we would be better off in the long run if they stayed out of the damn way.

Racking up debt hasn’t just been done on the part of government. Even now, in this terrible credit crunch, individual Americans have way too much debt and use credit much too permissively. Americans used to save about 10 percent of their income each year. Now the average is less than 1 percent.

How can we keep buying houses, cars, flat screen televisions and all the rest of the luxuries we enjoy if we only save 1 percent of our income? How can we not expect to get foreclosed on or to file for bankruptcy when we live like this?

More importantly, how can we ever expect to get out of this ailing economy when these clueless morons in government continue their despotic, populist pleas for more of what got us here?

The underlying assumption in this massive government response to the economic downturn is that, if the federal government puts itself even deeper into debt and makes up the difference by printing money and pumping it into the system, everyone will start borrowing again and buying more stuff, ultimately stimulating our economy back to normalcy.

This whole mindset is flawed.

What really stimulates economies in the sustainable long term is savings. Once there is enough of that, people can start to invest. That is the engine of economic growth.

None of this can happen unless we get out of debt and the government and consumers stop borrowing.

That’s right. Stop borrowing.

Stop bogging us down in unpayable amounts of debt. Stop devaluing the currency. Stop enticing banks to lend. Stop.

Back when the housing bubble initially burst, everyone seemed to agree that this bubble was dangerous from the beginning. We should have avoided the bubble caused by easy money and lax lending, they all said. How our enlightened government proposes to fix things by re-inflating that bubble, I just don’t understand.

John Glaser is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].