What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

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Paul Krugman of the New York Times is the grand poobah of modern liberalism, and he has a Nobel Prize to prove it. His article in Sunday's Times titled "Europe's Economic Suicide" is yet another of his many attempts to convince unwitting readers that Europe will go down in flames and take the rest of the world with it if Europeans have to live within their means. More than any other modern liberal with the possible exception of Barack Obama, he has made contemporary liberalism his crusade. His mission in life is to create a Marxist/socialist system that he and other "liberals" like him believe is the solution to the world's problems. Below is an excerpt from that article:

In a way, it doesn't really matter how Spain got to this point - but for what it's worth, the Spanish story bears no resemblance to the morality tales so popular among European officials, especially in Germany. Spain wasn't fiscally profligate - on the eve of the crisis it had low debt and a budget surplus. Unfortunately, it also had an enormous housing bubble, a bubble made possible in large part by huge loans from German banks to their Spanish counterparts. When the bubble burst, the Spanish economy was left high and dry; Spain's fiscal problems are a consequence of its depression, not its cause.

So if European leaders really wanted to save the euro they would be looking for an alternative course. And the shape of such an alternative is actually fairly clear. The Continent needs more expansionary monetary policies, in the form of a willingness - an announced willingness - on the part of the European Central Bank to accept somewhat higher inflation; it needs more expansionary fiscal policies, in the form of budgets in Germany that offset austerity in Spain and other troubled nations around the Continent's periphery, rather than reinforcing it. Even with such policies, the peripheral nations would face years of hard times. But at least there would be some hope of recovery.
Notice that Krugman didn't say anything about the willingness of Spanish homebuyers to borrow more than they could afford to repay to purchase bigger houses than they needed during a hyper inflated housing market. In Krugman's world, German and Spanish banks were responsible. And what is Krugman's solution? More easy money and more government spending. Ironically, it was easy money and excessive government spending that created the problem in the first place, but that doesn't matter to Krugman and other modern liberal savants. They think that more government spending and extracting more tax revenue from the so-called "rich" is always the right thing to do even though we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that that approach does not work.
Neil Snyder


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012...lands_18th_century_leaders.html#ixzz1sg8gEKqg
 
Trump to Barry:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Friday that President Obama’s 2013 budget will hurt the economy in the long term, arguing the larger deficits it would produce would reduce the amount of capital available to businesses.

After five years, the CBO says, the Obama proposals would reduce economic output by between 0.5 percent and 2.2 percent.
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/04/20/secrets-of-the-soft-core-obama-supporters/?singlepage=true



YOU'RE FIRED!
 
In 2007, pay attention troll, the devout Catholic and the wild-eyed cultist took over Congress...



Then they went to war on the economy in the name of fairness...




Raised the minimum wage...




Passed THEIR budget...
 
Another one of perg's truths where ALL economists agree that the government "saved" the economy...

Contrary to Bernanke, we suggest that his loose monetary policy of August 2007 didn't save the US economy but saved various bubble activities that had come under pressure from the previous tighter monetary stance.

Note the loose monetary stance has been aggressively diverting real funding from wealth generators towards bubble activities, thereby weakening the wealth-generation process. The only reason why loose monetary policy supposedly "revived" the economy is because there are still enough wealth generators to support the Fed's reckless policy. Also, note that all the gains from the previous tighter stance have now been wasted to support bubble activities.

As long as the pool of real savings is still growing, Fed policy makers can get away with the illusion that they have saved the US and the world economies. Once the pool of real savings starts stagnating, or worse, declining, the illusory nature of the Fed's policy will be revealed — note that the economy follows the state of the pool of real savings. Any aggressive monetary policy in this case is going to make things much worse.

The actions of Bernanke to revive the economy run contrary to the basic principles of running a company. For instance, in a company of 10 departments, 8 departments are making profits and the other 2 losses. A responsible CEO will shut down or restructure the 2 departments that make losses — failing to do so will divert funding from wealth generators toward loss-making departments, thus weakening the foundation of the entire company. Without the removal or restructuring of the loss-making departments, there is the risk that the entire company could eventually go belly up. So why then should a CEO who decides to support nonprofitable activities be regarded as a failure when Bernanke and his central-bank colleagues are seen as heroes who saved the economy?

Bernanke is of the view that by pumping money he has provided the necessary liquidity to keep the financial system going. We suggest that this is false. What permits the financial sector to push ahead is real savings. The financial sector does not have a life of its own; its only role is to facilitate the real wealth that was generated by the wealth producers. Remember that banks are just intermediaries; they facilitate real savings across the economy by means of money (the medium of exchange).

By flooding the banking system with money, one doesn't create more real savings but, on the contrary, depletes the pool of real funding. Most commentators are of the view that in some cases when there is a threat of serious damage to the financial system the central bank should intervene to prevent the calamity, and this is precisely what Bernanke's Fed did.

We suggest the severe threat here is to various bubble activities that must be removed in order to allow wealth generators to get on with the job of creating wealth. If a lot of bubbles must disappear, so be it. Any policy to support bubbles, be it large banks or other institutions, will only make things much worse. As we have seen, if the pool of real savings is not there, a central-bank policy to prop up bubbles will make things much worse. After all, the Fed cannot generate real wealth.

Bernanke's policy — which amounts to the protection of inefficiency, i.e., bubble activities — runs the risk of generating a prolonged slump with occasional rallies in the data. It could be something similar to the situation in Japan (which Bernanke has in the past criticized).

Summary and Conclusion

We can conclude that, contrary to Bernanke, his loose policies didn't save the US economy from a depression but have instead damaged the process of real wealth generation.

Bernanke's loose policies have provided support to bubble activities, thereby destabilizing the economy. So in this sense his policies have saved the bubbles, thus undermining wealth generators.

We suggest that the more forceful the Fed's response to various economic indicators is, the more damage this does to the pool of real savings. This runs the risk that at some stage the United States could end up having a stagnating or worse, declining, pool of real savings.

If this were to occur, then we could end up of having a severe economic slump. If anyone needs examples in this regard, have a look at countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal.

Over a prolonged period of time the policies of these countries (an ever-growing government and central-bank involvement in the economy) have severely damaged the heart of economic growth — the pool of real savings.

Again, if the pool of real savings is to become stagnant, or worse, starts declining, any attempt by the Fed to make things better is going to make things actually much worse by depleting the pool of real savings or funding further. If the pool of real funding is stagnating, then no matter how much pumping the Fed does, banks will not be able to lift lending. Remember: without expanding real funding any expansion in credit could lead to financial disaster.
http://mises.org/daily/6011/Did-Bernanke-Prevent-Another-Depression


You might want to click on the link, it's full of charts and graphs...
 
Baby, my Cash Money!

Grope and Change
By Mark Steyn, NRO
April 21, 2012 4:00 A.M.

http://www.whatsontianjin.com/news_images/9c8c805cbe3a35d0d16b_Dania_Suarez_1.jpg

Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Alas, young Miss Suarez, just 24 and with a nine-year-old son and a ravenous pimp to feed, didn’t care for the cut of her Secret Service man’s jib. He made the fairly basic mistake — for an expensively trained government operative — of attempting to pay a prostitute in the hotel corridor, and Dania caused an altercation whose fallout has brought the Secret Service to its knees. Which isn’t how these encounters usually go.

..

What we know so far is this: All eleven Secret Service men and all ten U.S. military personnel staying at the Hotel Caribe are alleged to have had “escorts” in their rooms that night. All of them. The entire team.

Twenty-one U.S. public servants. Twenty-one Colombian whores. Unless a couple of the senior guys splashed out for the two-girl special. “Some of them were saying they didn’t know they were prostitutes,” explained Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“Some are saying they were women at the bar.”

Amazing to hear government agents channeling Dudley Moore in Arthur: “You’re a hooker? I thought I was doing so well.” It turns out U.S. Secret Service agents are the only men who can walk into a Colombian nightclub and not spot the professionals. Are they really the guys you want protecting the president?

Congress is not happy about this. “It was totally wrong to take a foreign national back to a hotel when the president is about to arrive,” said Representative King.

It’s wrong to take a “foreign national” up to the room, but it would have been okay if she’d been from Des Moines? We’re all in favor of outsourcing, but in compliance with Section 27(e)viii of the PATRIOT Act this is the one job Americans will do?

With respect to the congressman, sometimes it helps to step back and consider the bigger picture. Why were 21 officials of the United States government able to enjoy a night of pleasure with 21 prostitutes, whether “foreign nationals” or all-American? The answer isn’t difficult. Indeed, one retired agent spelled it out: “They just didn’t have anything to do.”

So they did Dania Suarez and her friends instead.

...

I’ve written before about the U.S. government’s motorcade culture. Just last month, it cost U.S. taxpayers half a million bucks to fly Obama and David Cameron to Dayton, Ohio, to pretend to enjoy a basketball game. I’ve attended previous “Summits of the Americas” and G7 meetings and other international confabs, and always heard the same story wearily retailed by representatives of the host nation — that the money-no-object Yanks are flying in a bigger and more disruptive presidential entourage than everybody else put together. At this point, the local official usually rolls his eyes, and mostly, but not always, leaves the thought unspoken:

“Americans! What do you expect?” The Queen routinely turns down requests from visiting U.S. presidents to reinforce the garden walls and replace the windows of Buckingham Palace — for an overnight stay. When the U.S. was the richest country on earth, the mad excess used to impress in a crude kind of way: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Now it’s the Brokest Nation in History: America hasn’t got it, but still flaunts it. Which is kind of pathetic.

Does more equal better? No. All eleven Secret Service johns had their “security clearances” canceled. That still leaves over 4 million Americans (or about 2 percent of the adult population) with “security clearances,” and, according to the director of national intelligence last October, just under 1.5 million federal employees with “top secret”clearances. Which helps explain why one army private was able singlehandedly to download bazillions of (admittedly mostly worthless) “secrets” for WikiLeaks. Imagine the entire population of New Zealand with security clearances, and the entire population of Philadelphia or Phoenix with “top secret” clearances.

And yet the more guys on the payroll, the less anyone does. For all the hooker-cavorting among a bored entourage with time on its hands, there was no one to proofread President Obama’s speech. So he stood up in public and attempted to pander to the Latins by referring to the sovereign British territory of the Falkland Islands by the designation of its temporary Argentine usurpers 30 years ago: “Las Malvinas.” Except that his writers got it wrong. So the president of the United States called it “the Maldives,” an entirely different bit of British Commonwealth real estate half a world away in the Indian Ocean. Were the speechwriting staff also face down in the hooker bar? “Jush a minute, baby. Hic. The preshhhiduh wansh a couple rewrites. ‘I call on London to return British Columbia to Colombia.’ Thash should do it. Lesh go back to my room and I’ll show you my prompter.”

...

It’s not just the entitlements. Everywhere you look in the bloated federal Leviathan, all is waste, all is excess. But the absurd imperial presidency is a good place to start. The next citizen-executive of this republic would be sending a right message were he to halve the motorcade, halve the security detail, halve the hookers.

Otherwise, America’s foreign creditors will start to figure out that another half decade of U.S. spendaholism and they’re likely to wind up like Dania Suarez: You loan the U.S. government $800 billion, and come the due day the treasury secretary reaches in his pocket and says: “So how about we call it 28 bucks even?”

I want my cash money back.

Serious!

:mad:
 
Spamming the same NRO bullshit in multiple threads?

Shame on you. You bring dishonor to yourself, your family, your tribe and your "daughter".
 
A 50-State Tax Lesson for the President

Over the past decade, states without an income levy have seen much higher growth than the national average. Which state will be next to abolish theirs?

By ARTHUR LAFFER AND STEPHEN MOORE

Barack Obama is asking Americans to gamble that the U.S. economy can be taxed into prosperity. That's the message of his campaign for the Buffett Rule, which raises income-tax rates on millionaires to a minimum of 30%, and for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. He wants to raise the highest income tax rate by 20%, double the rate on capital gains, add a new 3.8% tax on all capital earnings, and nearly triple the dividend tax rate.

All this will enhance "economic efficiency," insists a White House economic report. As for those who disagree, says President Obama, they're just pushing "the same version of trickle-down economics tried for much of the last century. . . . But prosperity sure didn't trickle down."

Mr. Obama needs a refresher course on the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s and even the 1990s, when government spending and taxes fell and employment and incomes grew rapidly.

But if the president wants to see fresher evidence of how taxes matter, he can look to what's happening in the 50 states. In our new report "Rich States, Poor States," prepared for the American Legislative Exchange Council, we compare the economic performance of states with no income tax to that of states with high rates. It's like comparing Hong Kong with Greece or King Kong with fleas.

Every year for the past 40, the states without income taxes had faster output growth (measured on a decadal basis) than the states with the highest income taxes...

The balance of the piece can be found @

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432704577349860656569348.html
 
Nothing is more politically volatile than monkeying with the health insurance of seniors, who aren’t too keen on confusing upheavals in their health care and are the most diligent voters in the land. This could make the Tea Party look like a tea party.
Making matters even more politically dangerous for Obama is that open enrollment begins Oct. 15, less than three weeks before voters go to the polls.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.

This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.

Obama can temporarily prop up Medicare Advantage long enough to get re-elected by exploiting an obscure bit of federal law. Under a 1967 statute, the HHS secretary can spend money without specific approval by Congress on “experiments” directly aimed at “increasing the efficiency and economy of health services.”

Past demonstration projects have studied new medical techniques or strategies aimed at improving care or reducing costs. The point is to find ways to lower the costs of Medicare by allowing medical technocrats to make efficient decisions without interference from vested interests.

Now Obama means to turn it on its head — diverting the money to a blatantly nonexperimental purpose to serve his political needs.

A Government Accounting Office report released this morning shows, quite starkly, that there simply is no experiment being conducted, just money being spent. Understandably, the GAO recommends that HHS cancel the project.


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinio...on_trick_ImTBFfz7MeuZLJY7JzXEIJ#ixzz1srUYzOIa
 
Like the United States, the Soviet Union is a nation founded on a distinct ideology. In the case of America, the ideology was fundamentally Lockean liberalism; its best expressions are the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The Ninth Amendment, in particular, breathes the spirit of the worldview of late-18th-century America.[2] The Founders believed that there exist natural, individual rights that, taken together, constitute a moral framework for political life. Translated into law, this framework defines the social space within which men voluntarily interact; it allows for the spontaneous coordination and ongoing mutual adjustment of the various plans that the members of society form to guide and fill their lives.

The Soviet Union was founded on a very different ideology, Marxism, as understood and interpreted by V. I. Lenin. Marxism, with its roots in Hegelian philosophy, was a quite conscious revolt against the individual rights doctrine of the previous century. The leaders of the Bolshevik party (which changed its name to Communist in 1918) were virtually all revolutionary intellectuals, in accordance with the strategy set forth by Lenin in his 1902 work What Is to Be Done?[3] They were avid students of the works of Marx and Engels published in their lifetimes or shortly thereafter and known to the theoreticians of the Second International. The Bolshevik leaders viewed themselves as the executors of the Marxist program, as those whom History had called upon to realize the apocalyptic transition to Communist society foretold by the founders of their faith.

;) ;)
 
Building on the work of Michael Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises, Paul Craig Roberts has demonstrated — in books that deserve to be much better known than they are, since they provide an important key to the history of the 20th century[4] — the meaning of freedom in Marxism. It lies in the abolition of alienation, i.e., of commodity production, production for the market. For Marx and Engels, the market represents not merely the arena of capitalist exploitation but, more fundamentally, a systematic insult to the dignity of Man. Through it, the consequences of Man's action escape from his control and turn on him in malign ways. Thus, the insight that market processes generate results that were no part of anyone's intention becomes, for Marxism, the very reason to condemn them. As Marx wrote of the stage of Communist society before the total disappearance of scarcity,

freedom in this field can consist only in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.[5]
The point is made most clearly by Engels:

With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of the product over the producers. Anarchy of social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround men, which ruled men up until now comes under the dominion and conscious control of men, who become for the first time the real, conscious lords of nature, because and in that they become master of their own social organization. The laws of their own social activity, which confronted them until this point as alien laws of nature, controlling them, then are applied by men with full understanding, and so mastered by them. Only from then on will men make their history themselves in full consciousness; only from then on will the social causes they set in motion have in the main and in constantly increasing proportion, also the results intended by them. It is the leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.[6]
Thus, Man's freedom would be expressed in the total control exercised by the associated producers in planning the economy and, with it, all of social life. No longer would the unintended consequences of Man's actions bring disaster and despair — there would be no such consequences. Man would determine his own fate. Left unexplained was how millions upon millions of separate individuals could be expected to act with one mind and one will — could suddenly become "Man" — especially since it was alleged that the state, the indispensable engine of coercion, would wither away.

;) ;)
 
I cannot wait for him to begin bragging about how proud he is to pay the new, higher tax rates on his earnings AND dividends...



What I would like to see would be him bragging about he figured this year's taxes at the higher rate and sent a donation into the IRS.
 
In 2007, pay attention troll, the devout Catholic and the wild-eyed cultist took over Congress...



Then they went to war on the economy in the name of fairness...




Raised the minimum wage...




Passed THEIR budget...

A less-than-.50 raise in the minimum wage caused the housing market to collapse?

Please explain how THAT one works...

:rolleyes:
 
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