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Saturday, May 8, 2010

Letterman Taught Lesson in Obamonomics

This blog's favorite object of derision, the feckless David Letterman, was surprised to find himself on the receiving end of some very useful economic information. It came from an unlikely source when his guest, NBC's Brian Williams came on and was asked to comment on yesterdays wild market swing, where the market lost a trillion dollars worth of value over a matter of a few minutes, later regaining much of its value later in the day. On Dave's invitation, Mr. Williams began to hold forth on the major ills that plague our current economic situation, namely America’s unsustainable entitlement programs and bloated public employee pensions, which promise to put us on the path to the sort of fiscal crisis we are seeing in Greece, Spain and Portugal today. A stock market drop of one thousand points in fifteen minutes is a scary thing, and Mr. Williams commented that watching it gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, a sense that the world was falling apart right underneath his feet, much as he felt when he watched three thousand people killed in the jihadist attacks of 9/11.

Williams noted the reports that attributed the afternoon free-fall to a trader error and programed trading, but correctly added that these still were a harbinger of market volatility. Williams noted that traders were influenced by violent rioting over in Greece over that country’s debt crisis, and that similar crises may occur in Spain and Portugal, spreading through the rest of Europe. And an economic crisis in Europe would lead to an economic crisis in America.
“the dirty little secret is: the world has no money and the emperor has no clothes.”

Let me spell that out for you Dave, in case the stage girls were a little distracting tonight. We don't have any money. We've spent it all. We've spent tomorrows money as well. It's gone.

Now, where exactly does that leave us?

The government has to either stop spending increases, or attempt to increase the Federal coffers. Increasing Federal funds can be accomplished in a couple of different ways. The conservative approach is to decrease taxes on income and capital expenditures to stimulate the economy and encourage economic growth. Higher economic activity will translate to higher tax revenue being generated.

Sadly, though it has a uniformly successful track record, that method is never considered by knuckle-heads like Tim Geitner or Barrack Obama. No, the Obamonomics approach is to tax the hell out of everything under the sun. He also would like to spread it around a little, and he is thinking you're being stingy if you are not all good with that. His other ace is to simply print more money, and I got to admit, the Federal mint is the only entity that can potentially keep up with this clown. Unfortunately, the effort would ruin the country as inflation would be driven to 15 to 20 percent.

As Margaret Thatcher shrewdly once said “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

True enough, and the trouble is, with the Obamonomics spending spree and political slush funding, that very day is fast approaching.

8 comments:

  1. Well, I guess we can hope that the young people who get all their news from the late night shows keep listening after the monologue.

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  2. the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

    Which perhaps explains that historically the end-harvest of socialism is corpses? For, once you've "redistributed" everyone else's money, the only way to continue the game of slicing the economic pie (in contrast to the "conservative" preference to bake a new pie) is to start eliminating players in the game.

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  3. Yeah, Dave was really surprised. He was joking about whether it meant that he was going to have trouble ordering a gyro, and Brian Williams replies that the stock market guys are watching it all on TV, people rioting and setting things on fire, and that it all comes down to the fact that there simply isn't the money to pay for what the government has committed to, and that the same is true here. One of the things the European nations attempting to bail Greece out have insisted on is that Greece privatize their healthcare (Hear that Mr. Obama - you are heading the wrong way. Turn around) And Dave becomes serious and then its time for commercial. Spanish and Portuguese bonds were rated high risk (junk bond rating). Who would want to buy them, when you know they are not intending to be fiscally conservative enough to buy them back?

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  4. @Ilion

    Yes, but often it is related to control. It seems one of the first things done when the 'people's army' overthrows a country is to kill a lot of people -political opponents certainly, but also doctors and lawyers, the educated of the land. That was one of the first things the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia, round up a bunch of innocent educated people and take them out to the fields to kill them, the bastards.

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  5. "The Terror" was just part of the effects of the French Revolution -- the revolutionaries depopulated an entire region

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  6. "In the Vendee, he writes, resistance against the central government was popular, a fight that the Vendeans saw, in Secher's words, as "a crusade for individual liberty, the security of persons and the preservation of possessions." It was, Secher suggests, in keeping with the Revolution's own declaration of the right to rebel against the violation of "the rights of the people."

    Revolutionary ideas were not considered something the people should possess - a dangerous counter-revolutionary frame of mind, or so they claimed. Do we not see the same general point of view today, with President Clinton and President Obama both speaking out against US citizens who long for the basic freedoms guaranteed in the US Constitution to still apply today?

    Great link Ilion!

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  7. "Great link Ilion!"

    That link was just one I randomly chose of those which came up when I Googled something like "French Revolution Vendee" (with <-- that search, the link is on the second page, but with whatever exact search I used the other day, it was near the top of the first page)

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  8. But, yes, your analysis connecting the attitudes of the French Revolution leftists with our current leftists is on the money.

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