As I said in another thread, Obie's massive tax and spend bill is not a job creation program or a "stimulus" program, because the gov't can't do either of those things. It's like an allergic man has been stung by a bee, and in order to save him, you draw blood from his leg in order to inject it into his arm and thus "stimulate his immune system." That's what the gov't is doing, and it's just more idiocy. It takes $1.3 trillion or so from people, out of their lives, their homes, their labor, their mouths, their business, out of their hides. Then, it wastes a bunch of it on bureaucracy, regulation, enforcement, ineptitude and $500 dollar hammers. Then it gives people $800 billion of their own money back, and tells them that that's a stimulus. That doesn't get people working and paying taxes or businesses to start hiring. It's just a waste of time, effort, and money, and the net result is that the economy ends up being worse than it was.

Why? Because like the blood that was already in the allergic man's veins, that $1.3 trillion was already in the economy, being used efficiently as people thought best, to make their lives better. Not, as noted below, by paying people to pound nails into siding at public schools.


Obama's Wealth Destruction
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

President Obama is under the impression that history owes him $1 trillion right now to spend on whatever he wants. His language is strident and full of irritation that anyone would question his right to live out his personal dream of being Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush's Hoover. This, he says, is what the election was all about.

The arrogance reminds me of George Bush after 9-11, who similarly believed that history owed him a gargantuan war in the tradition of FDR. And look how that arrogance led to disgrace and loss, as he unwittingly presided over the destruction of American prosperity while searching for bugbears abroad.

It just goes to show you that the presidency is something like a drug. It makes people lose all connection to reality. Part of the reality that Obama needs to recognize is that the New Deal was a calamity far worse than the initial market downturn that began it. He needs to stop basing his policies on dumbed-down civics texts versions of events and consider the economic logic.

With his rhetoric and policies, he has decided to demonize private enterprise, just as FDR did, as a way to present government as the great savior. Now, think about this. If there is a way out of the recession, it will have to be provided by private enterprise. It will come by new businesses, business expansions, entrepreneurship, new technology, and this will be the source of lasting jobs and prosperity.

You cannot make a country rich by looting taxpayers and paying people to pound nails into siding at public schools! These activities amount to capital consumption. They are not sources of investment. You can say that they are stupid tasks or wonderful tasks, but it is not a matter of ideology as to whether such public projects will make us all wealthier. They will not. They drain the sources of wealth from society. They represent a cost, not a blessing.

That was also true of Bush's dumb stimulus program. He was only bailing out his friends at our expense. The effect was to give a little longer life to institutions that were failing anyway. It's pathetic that the Republicans ever went along with it. You will notice that the scheme didn't actually work.

Well, Obama is doing the same thing, though rewarding a different set of friends. This is not wealth production. This is wealth consumption. Do enough of this nonsense and you can destroy the livelihoods of an entire generation.

Americans are proud of their system of government, but consider what it has given us this time around. We had an outgoing president who thought it was his right to grab as much as he could while leaving. Now we have a new president who thinks that the election entitled him to grab as much as he can, right from the beginning. We get looted by the state coming and going. It all amounts to one massive war on prosperity and freedom.

Particularly culpable here are the official historians who have for generations heralded FDR as the great savior. It is a case study in how a civic lie can appear and fester for decades. The fact is that the New Deal did not work. It prolonged what might have been a troubling two-year downturn into a horrifying blow to world prosperity that ended up in a war that killed countless millions. It was one of the greatest acts of wreckage in world history.

And Obama is inspired by this? He wants to repeat it?

I'm not so cynical about human affairs that I believe that errors must be endlessly repeated. Obama can put a stop to his madness. He needs to know — someone must tell him frankly and openly — that his current path is going to lead not to recovery, but to an extension of suffering, and untold amounts of it.

The biggest threat facing the American economy right now is rarely even discussed. It is the massive buildup of paper bank reserves in the last quarter of 2008. This was Bush's doing. He ordered the Fed to print like mad. Fortunately for us, the banks are still holding on to these reserves. When they start lending again, the result could be hyperinflation of Confederate-dollar proportions.

Hence the priority of the Obama administration should be to first do no evil, and second to find some means for withdrawing those reserves from the banking system before they wash through the economic structure and destroy the dollar. There is still time. He must act. Yes, that will lead to bank failures. That's good! It will lead to business failures. That's good and essential too.

There simply is no choice. If he acts now, he could find that recovery will come before his second term. This is precisely what happened with Reagan. He was fortunate to have advisers who insisted that he let the liquidation happen rather than attempt to fix the recession of 1981–82 with huge new government spending programs.

In any case, the hardest work to do here is intellectual. Obama's head is filled with myths and lies, not only about FDR and the New Deal but also about the government's power to repair the existing economic problems. With this model in his head, he can only do evil. This must change.

Nothing is inevitable. He can turn on a dime. The main message: do not repeat the actions of FDR, lest you destroy what is left of American liberty and prosperity.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

. . . hear! hear!

what's up mate - Hope Your New Year's comin' along well and Thanks for the Informative Post [seriously]

---

BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Rock solid source there

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Rock solid source there

Unfortunately Rush sources usually lead back to the Austrian school of economics. I suppose there is some consistency there..

---

Rock solid source there

Exactly.

The story is online at http://mises.org/story/3331#.

At the bottom it notes, "Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of The Left, the Right, and the State." I should have put that on there, but I didn't look for it in time.

Of course, everyone should take what he, or anyone else, says with a grain of salt. But if you actually had a point you should present it. Demonstrate where he is wrong. Demonstrate where Obie's tax and spending plan isn't a leg to arm transfusion. Note where Lew made some glaring errors or something.

Just noting what everyone knows or can find out, and what he would probably tell you about himself isn't an argument for or against anything at all.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Unfortunately Rush sources usually lead back to the Austrian school of economics. I suppose there is some consistency there..

"Unfortunately?"

But you are right, almost universally I am writing from the Austrian perspective, sometimes from the Chicago perspective, but the differences generally aren't worth noting.

Not that the particular school has any real bearing on the point being made, or on Lew's points above.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Excellent thread Rush! We should all urge our congressmen to reconsider this bill. Public support is faltering, hopefully this will convince Obie to listen to the people.

"The so-called stimulus bill may not do much for the economy, but it's certainly stimulating a lot of laughter, as its supporters are reduced to arguing essentially that it would be irresponsible not to waste boatloads of taxpayer money. We do not exaggerate. Consider this article by Michael Hirsh of Newsweek: 'Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted" -- among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts that will prompt immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.' Who is this Michael Hirsh, who has elevated unrestrained spending of the people's money to a high principle? Here's his bio: 'Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for Newsweek, reporting on a range of topics from Homeland Security to postwar Iraq. He co-authored the November 3, 2003 cover story, "Bush's $87 Billion Mess," about the Iraq reconstruction plan. The issue was one of three that won the 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.' The bill for 'Bush's mess' is less than the margin of error in reckoning the cost of the 'emergency' legislation about which Hirsh now chides lawmakers for 'nitpicking over efficiency.'" --Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto

"On page 151 of this legislative pork-fest [the 'stimulus' bill] is one of the clandestine nuggets of social policy manipulation that are peppered throughout the bill. Section 9201 of the stimulus package establishes the 'Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research.' This body, which would be made up of federal bureaucrats will 'coordinate the conduct or support of comparative effectiveness and related health services research.' Sounds benign enough, but the man behind the Coordinating Council, Health and Human Services Secretary-designate [since withdrawn] (and tax cheat) Tom Daschle, was kind enough to explain the goal of this organization. It is to cut health care costs by preventing Americans from getting treatments that the government decides don't meet their standards for cost effectiveness. In his 2008 book on health care, he explained that such a council would, 'lower overall spending by determining which medicines, treatments and procedures are most effective-and identifying those that do not justify their high price tags.' Once a panel of government experts decides what is and what is not cost-effective by their definition, the government will stop paying for treatments, medicines, therapies or devices that fall into the latter category. ... Mind you, they are not simply looking to exclude treatments that don't work, but to exclude treatments that are effective, but whose cost, in their opinion, does not justify their use. You, the patient, and your physician don't get a vote. This would make the federal government the single most important decision-maker regarding health care for every patient in America." --public affairs consultant Douglas O'Brien

yep can't wait for prices to fall futher and unemployment to hit 10+% we'll show those darned liberals how Supply side really works.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

yep can't wait for prices to fall futher and unemployment to hit 10+% we'll show those darned liberals how Supply side really works.

This stuff does make me laugh. Were you ever planning on demonstrating exactly how Lew was wrong? Or how blood from the leg, injected into the arm, is a stimulus?

I, unlike you, LOVE when prices fall. It means that I can afford a better standard of living. It means that that the less fortunate can afford a better standard of living for themselves. It means that their limited resources go farther. It means that less resources are being used in the production of goods and services. It puts downward pressure on the price of similar products. It means that goods and services are being produced more efficiently. It puts pressure on producers to give you more for your money.

Those things are all awesome.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

If you change everything he said from a negative to a positive then thats my arguement. I realize that saying something with bitterness and anger sounds good but for what its worth and simply put his argument is at best the rant of a person that isnt in control and little else. I pity anyone that feels the need to smash and dash over someones work when the person he replaced did such a poor job that it will take years for our Current Prez to undo all the messes W created. I dont intend to annotate or list all the errors, mistakes, misquotes, verbal blunders, international laws being broken. Wanna read a history on W? Read anything by Molly Ivins. Perhaps Bushwhacked. or Shrub.

Had we not been handing out huge/massive tax breaks to the 1 percenters perhaps we wouldnt have such a huge debt and huge problems we have.

As far as $1 trillion for stimulus, lets look at what we gave the banks and the mortgage industry through fannie may and freddie mack under the Bush admin... Hmmm $750 billion + $11 trillion thats a crap load more than $1 trillion. Perhaps this bozo could take the advice richard pryor gave to eddie murphy about Bill Cosby, " have a coke and a smile and shut the f*** up."

better put, If you have a working solution that doesnt include doing nothing or doing what W did then spit it out. I realize he's a libertarian but at heart most libertarians are ultraconservatives who want the wild west when it comes to capitalism.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

If you change everything he said from a negative to a positive then thats my arguement. I realize that saying something with bitterness and anger sounds good but for what its worth and simply put his argument is at best the rant of a person that isnt in control and little else. I pity anyone that feels the need to smash and dash over someones work when the person he replaced did such a poor job that it will take years for our Current Prez to undo all the messes W created. I dont intend to annotate or list all the errors, mistakes, misquotes, verbal blunders, international laws being broken. Wanna read a history on W? Read anything by Molly Ivins. Perhaps Bushwhacked. or Shrub.

Wow. No argument whatsoever. No insight. No analysis. No depth. Just a bunch of cuz you sez sos. And you figure what, that cuz you sez so, everyone should just take your position at face value?

You could make the argument that we CAN make a country rich by looting taxpayers and paying people to pound nails into siding at public schools. That such activities DON'T amount to capital consumption. That such activities ARE sources of investment. You can make the argument that such public projects DO make us all wealthier. You could make the argument that withdrawing blood from the leg and injecting it into the arm IS a stimulus.

Whatever position that you're taking would be greatly served if you actually made an argument for it instead of just making empty proclamations like "Molly Ivins is jeebus!"

Had we not been handing out huge/massive tax breaks to the 1 percenters perhaps we wouldnt have such a huge debt and huge problems we have.

A) That's just history. Democrats, Republicans, they all do it. They always have. They always will. B) Massive taxes don't raise much income. As I said before: Both Kennedy and Reagan knew that if you take 90 cents of every dollar, or if you take 25 cents of every dollar, or if you only take 10 cents of every dollar, people will work hardest to make to make many many more dollars where they keep 90% of them, and they will hardly work at all to make dollars where they keep 10% of them. By extension, by taxing people 10% you'll have lots and lots of dollars to tax, and by taxing people 90% you'll have very very few dollars to tax.

As far as $1 trillion for stimulus, lets look at what we gave the banks and the mortgage industry through fannie may and freddie mack under the Bush admin... Hmmm $750 billion + $11 trillion thats a crap load more than $1 trillion. Perhaps this bozo could take the advice richard pryor gave to eddie murphy about Bill Cosby, " have a coke and a smile and shut the f*** up."

It's not stimulus, anymore than giving the banks money saved the economy. It does neither because it just rewards the worst performers instead of letting them fail. That doesn't make any sense at all.

As far as it being "a crap load more than $1 trillion," you're right. But none of it is a stimulus. It was drawn from the leg to be injected into the arm. That's just a waste because the money was ALREADY in the system, just like the blood was already in the body.

better put, If you have a working solution that doesnt include doing nothing or doing what W did then spit it out. I realize he's a libertarian but at heart most libertarians are ultraconservatives who want the wild west when it comes to capitalism.

The working, and only, solution is to do nothing because that is the only thing that will weed out the chaff, dead wood, bloat, massive salaries, waste, stupidity and inefficiency, as worthwhile assets are removed from failing enterprises and are put to effective use.

What libertarians want is for corporations, banks, the NEA, the CIA, and all the rest of the idiocy that will receive the bloat and spending to sink or swim on their own because they realize that it is gov't running around spending and regulating like drunken sailors on shore leave. They do not want some insane wild west characterization.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Obie was on TV again. Maybe if he makes enough appearances and sez the same thing over and over you'll believe it. The status quo is alive and well!

---

me@rescam.org

Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans
by Naomi Klein, The Nation, February 5, 2009

Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles back in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina."

Its message was simple enough. You—politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit—are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn't know the half of it). We—the rabble outside—are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, "¡Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!") and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model—this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.

The stoic Icelandic matriarchs beating their pots flat even as their kids ransack the fridge for projectiles (eggs, sure, but yogurt?) echo the tactics made famous in Buenos Aires. So does the collective rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and they ruined it."

Another echo: in Reykjavik, the protesters clearly won't be bought off by a mere change of face at the top (even if the new PM is a lesbian). They want aid for people, not just banks; criminal investigations into the debacle; and deep electoral reform.

Similar demands can be heard these days in Latvia, whose economy has contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the government is teetering on the brink. For weeks the capital has been rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on January 13. As in Iceland, Latvians are appalled by their leaders' refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

Something else Argentina-esque is in the air. In 2001 Argentina's leaders responded to the crisis with a brutal International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity package: $9 billion in spending cuts, much of it hitting health and education. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Unions staged a general strike, teachers moved their classes to the streets and the protests never stopped.

This same bottom-up refusal to bear the brunt of the crisis unites many of today's protests. In Latvia, much of the popular rage has focused on government austerity measures—mass layoffs, reduced social services and slashed public sector salaries—all to qualify for an IMF emergency loan (no, nothing has changed). In Greece, December's riots followed a police shooting of a 15-year-old. But what's kept them going, with farmers taking the lead from students, is widespread rage at the government's crisis response: banks got a $36 billion bailout while workers got their pensions cut and farmers received next to nothing. Despite the inconvenience caused by tractors blocking roads, 78 percent of Greeks say the farmers' demands are reasonable. Similarly, in France the recent general strike—triggered in part by President Sarkozy's plans to reduce the number of teachers dramatically—inspired the support of 70 percent of the population.

Perhaps the sturdiest thread connecting this global backlash is a rejection of the logic of "extraordinary politics"—the phrase coined by Polish politician Leszek Balcerowicz to describe how, in a crisis, politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular "reforms." That trick is getting tired, as South Korea's government recently discovered. In December, the ruling party tried to use the crisis to ram through a highly controversial free trade agreement with the United States. Taking closed-door politics to new extremes, legislators locked themselves in the chamber so they could vote in private, barricading the door with desks, chairs and couches.

Opposition politicians were having none of it: with sledgehammers and an electric saw, they broke in and staged a twelve-day sit-in of Parliament. The vote was delayed, allowing for more debate—a victory for a new kind of "extraordinary politics."

Here in Canada, politics is markedly less YouTube-friendly—but it has still been surprisingly eventful. In October the Conservative Party won national elections on an unambitious platform. Six weeks later, our Tory prime minister found his inner ideologue, presenting a budget bill that stripped public sector workers of the right to strike, canceled public funding for political parties and contained no economic stimulus. Opposition parties responded by forming a historic coalition that was only prevented from taking power by an abrupt suspension of Parliament. The Tories have just come back with a revised budget: the pet right-wing policies have disappeared, and it is packed with economic stimulus.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

This article was first published in The Nation.


Greece
Watch footage of the December protests while a student organizer discusses the demonstrators' demands. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/11/greek_uprising_protests_riots_strikes_enter

See Greek farmers blockade one of the Greek-Bulgarian border crossings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpiKN8wrXk

South Korea
Watch legislators get tear-gassed, view the furniture barricaded against the door in Parliament. http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=TqvdJSO6Ssc

See 200 security guards storm Parliament and brawl with protesters.http://english.ntdtv.com/?c=151&a=6819

Iceland
Watch protesters banging on pots, pans, windows, & drums, and see some of the Icelanders' demands.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmKPEQLpATo

See more footage of the "Saucepan Revolution" in this Reuters segment.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-COMGdVYpM

Latvia
Watch raw footage of the January 13 protests in Riga.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TNr1OVVrA

I think ... The "leg to arm" analogy is a bit flawed...

It's not. The money is being taken from one part of the system and being injected into another part of the same system. Which is exactly the same thing as blood from the one part of the circulatory system being injected into a different part of the same circulatory system.

This crap you post is really hard to follow.

There could well be a "sweet spot" between government and private control
of all aspects the economy, but neither governments or the private sector
have demonstrated any real ability to deliver.

That's funny. AT&T says it will sell you a mobile phone. And guess what? It does. Dell says it will sell you a computer, and guess what? It does. Mortgages. Delivered. Milk. Delivered. Derivative to extremely savvy, sophisticated investors and anyone else who wants to throw their money in. Delivered. Drugs. Delivered. Dry wall. Delivered. Food. Delivered. Movies. Delivered. Homes. Delivered. Electricity. Nearly every single possible item, service, utility, ANYTHING is delivered by private enterprises. It ain't provided by the gov't.

So who pays for this stimulus?

Well the stimulus package is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 Trillion.

Total income tax paid 2006 $1.023 Trillion.

Top 5% paid 60 .14%.
Top 10% paid 70.79%.
Top 25% paid 86.27%.
Top 50% paid 97.01%.

If you made more than $64,702 you were in the top 25% of AGI.
If you made more than $31,987 you were in the top 50% of AGI.

So to boil it down, those in the top 25% of AGI will pay ~86% of the present stimulus package.
This should go a long way towards restoring "Public Confidence" in the economy,
..."the realized social system of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods a
and services", and in the long run maybe everyone will benefit.

A) It's not a stimulus, it's just another status quo spending bill riddled with pork barrel spending. B) The comments above just address income tax and not the total tax burden. While those numbers seem right for who pays what percentage of income taxes, they do not address the total tax burden which affects everyone. Sales tax, property tax, utility tax, sin tax, accounts receivable tax, capital gains, cigarette, unemployment, usage, tolls, gas taxes, and on and on and on and on and on and on. Many of these are rolled into the price of the goods and services you buy, driving prices up, and, as usual, costing those that can afford it the least, the most. C) But that doesn't really matter to the analogy, regardless of the tax rates or the total tax burden, the money in question IS ALREADY IN THE SYSTEM. It has ALREADY BEEN EARNED BY THOSE WHO WILL PAY IT. So, like the blood from the leg, the money is taken out of the system. Then like the injection into the arm, much less of the money is replaced in the system.

The analogy stands.

WB: The answer is nobody knows. The economists don’t know. All you know is you throw everything at it and whether it’s more effective if you’re fighting a fire to be

concentrating the water flow on this part or that part. You’re going to use every weapon you have in fighting it. And people, they do not know exactly what the effects are.

This is funny. What he actually means is that Warren Buffet doesn't know. Economists know full well how economics work, they know full well that taking money from people and giving less of it back to them is not a stimulus, it's just depriving them of the use of it, and making sure there is less for them to use. That's not a stimulus.

Economists like to talk about it, but in the end they’ve been very, very wrong and most of them in recent years on this. We don’t know the perfect answers on it. What we do know

is to stand by and do nothing is a terrible mistake or to follow Hoover-like policies would be a mistake and we don’t know how effective in the short run we don’t know how

effective this will be and how quickly things will right themselves. We do know over time the American machine works wonderfully and it will work wonderfully again.

Heh heh. Economists haven't been wrong, gov't policies have been wrong. Any economist who has taken Economics 101 knows what the effect of any given gov't policy will be. What they disagree about is the relative importance of particular ideas. They all know that if you tax someone 90% of what they earn, the person will not try to earn very much. They all know if you tax someone 10% of what they earn, that person will earn a whole hell of a lot more. Even Paulsy Krugman gets these simple things. He just ignores them to write populist Barbra Streisand.

SG: But are we creating new problems?

WB: Always"...PBS

At least he got that part right.

I think a more appropriate analogy than the "leg to arm transfusion" one is ..
"bypass surgery to restore circulation to the lower body".

It's not. The analogy stands for the reasons noted above.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Blood drawn from a leg to be injected back into the arm is just stupid. Why take blood from a system with good circulation and equal pressure throughout?

Unless, of course, the leg is so grotesquely swollen with more blood than it can possibly use or need in a hundred lifetimes and the arm has had it's blood supply strangled off to the point where it is unusable and suffering damage due to loss of nutrients and oxygen.

My diagnosis:
Cut off the leg to save the arm.

Now you don't have a leg to stand on and I can still wave bye bye to you.

yep can't wait for prices to fall further and unemployment to hit 10+% we'll show those darned liberals how Supply side really works.

This stuff does make me laugh.
[snip]
I, unlike you, LOVE when prices fall. It means that I can afford a better standard of living. It means that that the less fortunate can afford a better standard of living for themselves. It means that their limited resources go farther. It means that less resources are being used in the production of goods and services. It puts downward pressure on the price of similar products. It means that goods and services are being produced more efficiently. It puts pressure on producers to give you more for your money.

Those things are all awesome.

I couldn't agree more Rush. I don't think supply side ever really worked for most people and the soon to expire tax cuts for the rich should be allowed to expire(die). But then before Bush came the economy was doing good and such, during Bushes term(now expired, along with a lot of Bush jokes, He was good for that) going towards disaster, afterwards rack and ruin to recover from.

---

The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans
by Naomi Klein, The Nation, February 5, 2009

The target was the dominant economic model—this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.

Their idiocy at the causes notwithstanding, they have no right to decry gov't meddling. That's what they beg for at every waking moment--and never seem to realize that politicians do meddle, incessantly, but those same politicians don't care what people think, the pols do as they wish.

So does the collective rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and they ruined it."

Well, Guddy, if you don't trust the gov't, banks, or political parties and the IMF, maybe you shouldn't be begging them to meddle in your lives? Think there might be a lesson there?

Another echo: in Reykjavik, the protesters clearly won't be bought off by a mere change of face at the top (even if the new PM is a lesbian). They want aid for people, not just banks; criminal investigations into the debacle; and deep electoral reform.

Ah, they haven't learned: "They want aid for people," never quite realizing that such meddling brought them to the brink of disaster. There are rarely, if ever, criminal investigations because except in cases of fraud, the principals involved are usually adhering to gov't regulation.

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

And yet no one seems to notice that the free market doesn't make policies. It doesn't pay attention to politicians. People simply invest money where it makes sense to invest money (money flows in), and they stop doing so when those investments become stupid, say, for example, when "plenty" is "diverted to political pockets" (money flows out.) I mean, you are welcome to keep your money in systems that just line the pockets of politicians, but no rational investor is going to do that. They take their money out. Fast. Faster than it went in.

But of course that is true. Duh. Good investment opportunities are good investment opportunities. But when the gov't starts meddling with the system and lining their pockets, the goodness ends, and the money leaves.

Latvia's other choice, as very nearly a third-world country, is to forgo foreign investment altogether and just stagger along, stagnant, and with negligible growth.

Perhaps the sturdiest thread connecting this global backlash is a rejection of the logic of "extraordinary politics"—the phrase coined by Polish politician Leszek Balcerowicz to describe how, in a crisis, politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular "reforms." That trick is getting tired, as South Korea's government recently discovered. In December, the ruling party tried to use the crisis to ram through a highly controversial free trade agreement with the United States. Taking closed-door politics to new extremes, legislators locked themselves in the chamber so they could vote in private, barricading the door with desks, chairs and couches.

Yep. Politics as usual. Keeping in mind of course, that these aren't free trade laws. A free trade law is very very simple: The state shall create no taxes, regulations, or hindrances on the free passage of goods and services across its borders.

These "free-trade" policies, which they aren't, are thousands of pages of the regulation of free trade, NAFTA alone, was some 1000 pages or so of regulations, if I remember correctly. That's not free trade, that's massive gov't regulation.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

She does the same thing that some people here do. They call a change in regulation "deregulation" which it is not because all it is, is a massive re-regulation. Then, because those silly regulations fail, and cause problems, they claim that the "free market" was to blame, not the regulation.

More brilliance.

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

The parade of idiocy continues. Now it's up to 2.5 trillion in good money, thrown after bad.

So let's look at that. Let's just round to 3 trillion because rest assured, the gov't is lying about the costs. So: 3 trillion dollars, the cost of the spending bill, divided by 300 million, the number of people in the United States = $10,000.00. With this stupid spending bill, the gov't could give every soul in the U.S. 10 grand. For a poor family of four, that would be forty thousand dollars. Forty thousand dollars. It's still not a stimulus per se, because that money was already taken from the people who earned it and who would have spent it as well, but at least it's an illustration of what a waste the spending bill is.

From the NYT:

Bailout Plan: $2.5 Trillion and a Strong U.S. Hand
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and STEPHEN LABATON
Published: February 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — The White House plan to rescue the nation’s financial system, announced on Tuesday by Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, is far bigger than anyone predicted and envisions a far greater government role in markets and banks than at any time since the 1930s.

Administration officials committed to flood the financial system with as much as $2.5 trillion — $350 billion of that coming from the bailout fund and the rest from private investors and the Federal Reserve, making use of its ability to print money.

Mindful of previous financial crises at home and abroad that became protracted because governments moved too slowly, Mr. Geithner pointedly criticized the Bush administration for not acting boldly and quickly enough.

But the initial assessment of the plan from the markets, lawmakers and economists was brutally negative, in large part because they expected more details.

Basic questions about how the various parts of the program would work, especially those involving the unsellable mortgages that banks are holding and preventing home foreclosures, were left for another day. Some Wall Street experts criticized the plan for relying too heavily on the same vague solutions proposed by the Bush administration.

The stock market, propped up for weeks on the expectation that Washington would finally deliver a comprehensive rescue plan, dipped almost as soon as Mr. Geithner began speaking in the morning. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 382 points, or 4.6 percent, by the time the market closed. Yields on Treasury bills jumped, indicating a flight from stocks to the safety of government bonds.

While traveling in Fort Myers, Fla., President Obama welcomed the news that the Senate voted 61-37 to approve its $838 billion economic stimulus bill Tuesday, but dismissed the market reaction to his bank rescue plan.

“Wall Street, I think, is hoping for an easy out on this thing and there is no easy out,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with ABC News.

Many of the vital details of the program remain unsettled and are the subject of an intense behind-the-scenes debate.

The president himself had built up expectations that the plan would get ahead of the crisis — and not lurch from pillar to post as the Bush administration did last year, often in partnership with the New York Federal Reserve under its then-president, Mr. Geithner.

A central piece of the plan — and the one item that investors most craved information about — would create one or more so-called bad banks that would rely on taxpayer and private money to purchase and hold banks’ bad assets. But the administration provided the least amount of details about this part of the plan.

Another centerpiece of the plan would stretch the last $350 billion that the Treasury has for the bailout by relying on the Federal Reserve’s ability to create money, in effect, out of thin air. The Fed’s money will enable the government to become involved in the management of markets and banks in ways not seen since the Great Depression.

In the credit markets, for instance, the administration and the Fed are proposing to expand a lending program that would spend as much as $1 trillion to make up for the $1.2 trillion decline between 2006 and last year in the issuance of securities backed primarily by consumer loans.

The plan’s third major component would give banks new helpings of capital with which to lend. Banks that receive new government assistance will have to cut the salaries and perks of their executives and sharply limit dividends and corporate acquisitions.

They will also have to make public more information about their lending practices. A Treasury fact sheet said that banks would have to state monthly how many new loans they make, but stopped short of ordering banks to issue new loans or requiring them to account in detail for the federal money.

Mr. Obama, in the ABC News interview, suggested that banks would be required to reveal more about their mortgage holdings.

“Essentially what you’ve got are a set of banks that have not been as transparent as we need to be in terms of what their books look like. And we’re going to have to hold out the Band-Aid a little bit and go ahead and just be clear about some of the losses that have been made because until we do that, we’re not going to be able to attract private capital into the marketplace.”

The day was the first big test of Mr. Geithner as Treasury secretary, who has one of the toughest sells in America: convincing lawmakers and taxpayers that they should again bail out the very banks whose mistakes contributed to the loss of more than three million jobs and caused acute financial pain.

It was clear during the hours he spent before the cameras and lawmakers that he was well-spoken and thoughtful. But his career until now had played out behind the scenes as a civil servant and a central banker. He occasionally lapsed into financial jargon and struggled to connect to a broader public audience.

As the day wore on, Mr. Geithner faced growing skepticism from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, many of them channeling deep voter disgust with the way the government has handled the bailout over the last nine months.

Even Democrats who are supportive of the administration said that it had failed to provide more information about how it would be spending the remaining money in the bailout program.

“We need more details from Treasury on how exactly it plans to remove bad assets while protecting the taxpayer,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee. “We have zombie banks that are weighed down because their liabilities exceed their assets. Without a precise mechanism for addressing toxic assets, it will be difficult to increase lending.”

The pessimism seemed to indicate that Mr. Geithner missed the mark with one of his shorter-term goals — to quickly instill confidence that the Obama administration has a coherent approach to the banking crisis and that the transparency and oversight of the new program will differ markedly from the Bush administration’s management of the first $350 billion that Congress authorized last year for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

“The spectacle of huge amounts of taxpayer money being provided to the same institutions that helped cause the crisis, with limited transparency and oversight, added to the public distrust,” the Treasury secretary said, in a clear swipe at the Bush administration.

“We will have to try things we’ve never tried before. We will make mistakes. We will go through periods in which things get worse and progress is uneven or interrupted,” Mr. Geithner said.

Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, criticized the Obama administration for not putting out more details and said it should commit more than $50 billion to avert home foreclosures.

“The secretary said the administration would present details of their foreclosure reduction plan in a few weeks, which is too much time,” Mr. Frank said.

Appearing on Tuesday afternoon before the Senate banking committee, Mr. Geithner vowed to move quickly to provide more details. But Republicans were skeptical.

“Is there a concrete plan here?” Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the committee, asked Mr. Geithner point blank, after noting that Mr. Geithner had been part of the leadership involved in last year’s bailout efforts. “What is different about the process that you are offering here to devise your plan such that we should have confidence that it is well thought out?”

There was also withering criticism from Wall Street. Ethan Harris, co-head of United States economics research at Barclays Capital, said the program was “shock and uh.” He said the Treasury made a “tactical mistake” by building up expectations about a plan before it had much to announce.

“What’s striking is that these are not new issues that they are facing,” Mr. Harris said. “These are the same issues that the Treasury faced last fall — how do we price the assets? The fact that it’s so been so difficult to figure out the answer may tell you something about whether it’s worth doing or not.”

Mr. Harris warned that setting up a so-called bad bank would be very expensive, as Mr. Geithner himself acknowledged when he set the goal of creating a fund that would reach $1 trillion. Frank Pallotta, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley and a veteran mortgage trader, said the gap was so wide between what banks were valuing their assets and what investors were willing to pay that the government would attract investors to buy only if it provided a subsidy of one form or another.

“Right now, the banks aren’t selling anything,” said Mr. Pallotta, now a consultant to both buyers and sellers of distressed mortgages. “You have Chase thinking that its assets are worth 75 cents on the dollar, and Joe Hedge Fund who thinks they are only worth 45 or 25. There is a huge gap, and the government has to find out if there is some middle point where they can get in.”

Mr. Pallotta said he did not fault the Treasury for failing to offer specifics yet, but he said it could not delay for long. “If we don’t hear in the next 30 days about how this thing will flesh out, then I would be upset.”

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

the main problem I see with diatribes is that they provide a person with an excuse to rant and rave about how inappropriate or dumb political solution may be. As much fun as that is it doesnt give an alternative. And by alternative I dont mean doing more of whats already been done(W's Tax cuts to the Rich). So be Rooseveltian and find a solution to a massive depression before you get into the Depression. Some states are already at 10% unemployment and many are to follow.

It still irritates me to the Nth degree that the Republicans were all onboard to had Big banks free money with little more than a handshake and a slap on the back. But when we talk about real problems like real people losing everything they've ever had.

The argument that they should have invested more wisely is pointless. Had the average worker the resources given to top executives they'd be investing wisely as well. But we know that the working class fool is the last person the Corpoate executive thinks of when it comes to money.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

"Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it." --John Adams