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Not Dead Yet (photo: IMF)
Senator Dick Durbin appears to understand that spending cuts affect the economy in the same way that tax hikes do: they reduce the amount of money going to consumption. Of course, tax hikes on the richest of us have practically no effect on consumption, and if the guy that owns 36 apartment complexes can’t have a new yacht this year, well, that isn’t quite like losing 37 teachers from the Detroit school system, is it?
Now that the idiot class has killed off Keynesian thought, the Idiocracy of the Tea-Zombies is bringing back the stupid tenets of supply-side economics. This is just a euphemism for the economic theories that led to the Great Depression, and now have led to the Lesser Depression. Keynes begins his great work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest. and Money with a discussion of Say’s Law (Prometheus Books, p. 26):
Thus Say;s law, that the aggregate demand price of output as a whole is equal to its aggregate supply price for all volumes of output, is equivalent to the proposition that there is no obstacle to full employment.
He proceeds to show that this is not the case, and that it is perfectly possible for an economy to reach an equilibrium point at much less than full employment. You don’t have to read the proof to understand intuitively that that is the case. We have reached an equilibrium now between demand and supply, but the economy isn’t growing and unemployment is miserably high, and this isn’t the first time that has happened. Say’s Law is unequivocally wrong.
Supply side theory tells us that if government quits regulating and stays out of business, business will grow jobs. That is the essence of classical laissez-faire economics. But that doesn’t explain how cutting regulations and reducing taxes on the decreasing number of people with jobs is going to increase demand. Absent demand, no one will make anything and there won’t be any new jobs. Supply-side economics offers no traction in the situation we are in now. It is just a way to grab the few remaining dollars from the middle class.
The idiots who got us into this gigantic hole have only one solution: keep digging. Maybe we’ll get to China and they will bail us out.
92 Comments
no, supply side doesn’t explain….
but that doesn’t mean that cutting taxes, especially on tapped-out and over-extended working class and frequently middle class families won’t help them repair their household balance sheets and also support aggregate demand.
The tax cuts aren’t enough to do that.
For instance the EITC. That tax cut comes out to something like $20 a week for a family.
How can that repair one’s balance sheet, if it’s not even enough to buy a tank of gas?
This is hardly the time to engage in austerity economics.
With 9.2%(U3), and 17%+(U6) unemployment/underemployment rate, with a 74.5% capacity utilization rate in manufacturing/mining/utilities, with two million foreclosures already, and two million homes in default, with eleven million homes (23%) underwater, with wages stagnant for over a decade, with a sizable trade gap, with state and local governments in deep trouble, and now with substantial cuts in federal spending, we desperately need a new, sizable fiscal stimulus to get the economy moving again, and bring down the obscenely high rates of unemployment.
In people’s everyday lives, the country is in disequlibrium, supply does not equal demand. Say was definitely wrong in his analysis, but Keynesian “equilibrium levels at a less than full employment” is language only an economist could invent when the economy is in a recession or depression. Keynes came a long way, but he couldn’t quite purge his background in neoclassical economics completely.
And cutting taxes alone won’t help them repair their household balance sheets and also support aggregate demand.;
Between 2005 and 2009, whites lost 16 percent of their median net worth, but Latinos lost 66 percent, black households 53 percent, and Asians, who had topped white households in 2005, dropped 54 percent.
Simplest case I can think of: single person,no dependents, earning minimum wage = Salary of $15,080, deduction of $9,350, taxable income of $5,730 and the tax on that is $573, 10 per cent(pretty nifty how they worked that out to be a ‘tithe’ huh?) No way that such will help ‘repair’ anything.
What REALLY needs to happen is proper ‘poverty guidelines’ be corrected and more than Alaska and Hawaii provided alternative baselines. And then a tax calculation that reflects such.
Currently the measure of poverty -pre tax- is $10,890, $4,190 less than just a minimum wage job for a single person.
For those more interested:
http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/faq.shtml#official
http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/figures-fed-reg.shtml
Note that the increase in 2011 from 2010 was less than ONE per cent.
“The idiots who got us into this gigantic hole have only one solution: keep digging. Maybe we’ll get to China and they will bail us out.”
Ouch
When the hell did supply-side voodoonomics ever go away. What, did you forget the de-regulation of the Clinton adminstration and the Bush administration crashed the world’s economies with their supply-side policies. Lest I forget, Clinton was the only Democratic president since Reagan, who started all of this madness, well that is besides the nominal Democrat Obama.
The country has moved so far to the right and the “electorate” has been so dumbed down, pacified and manipulated that the political class can do whatever they want without any fear of retribution. With “liberals” being abject failures at framing the issues and with no legitimate alternative there is a historical inevitability at what is playing out in D.C.
“Now that the idiot class has killed off Keynesian thought,. . . ”
I’d amend that to just leaving out the “Keynesian” part. I see no evidence of thought in any of government today, just bumper sticker slogans. And of course, you must assume good faith on the part of the leadership and not cynical ploys to conceal one’s true motives.
What I hear from people and read in the right wing fishwrapper from St. Paul is that “the rich are paying almost all income taxes and 40% don’t pay (income) taxes at all.” Then you hear about “my brother-in-law’s been collecting unemployment for two years” or “I know so-and-so isn’t working and has given up. I’m tired of paying for these people when I work 60 hours a week.”
Then all the right wing radio and TV BS. Keynes is positively counter-intuitive for most people who think of the government, when they can manage thought in these terms, as just another person only bigger. Oh, and controlled by liberals.
And, coming soon:
Massive education loan defaults by people who can’t find work.
I find it (cynically) interesting that my TeeVee is routinely blaring with all these ads by for-profit proprietary “schools,” from Phoenix to ITT to Le Cordon Bleu Academy to International Academy of Design and Tehnology etc etc.
A fucking men! I have been screaming this for years!!
Wheres the fucking Steam Shovels so we can pass through debacle much quicker than with mere individuals welding their spades???
I’ve never been sure how to read you, Bluetoe2, but you’re so right on this.
The “liberals” couldn’t sell icewater in hell because they can’t explain that it’s in the customer’s best interest. Instead, they let the right spread falsehoods and convince the country that white is black and black is white, and everything will be just right if we go back to ways that never were or never worked. I’m fed up with them.
People are welcome to call me a nihilist today. What we are seeing is the strangulation of the country by those with power and money. Funny thing is, our “advisaries” on the far right may find themselves being strung up, metaphorically, of course, along side us as they discover that they too, have no power.
All of this talk of a Super Congress. Where in G-d’s name is there any such institution in the Constitution, and where are the Constitution thumping far right demanding that this obscenity of a concept be crushed in it’s infancy? The question then becomes, what legal recourse do we have? Who has the right and jurisdiction to file suit against Congress for this gross abrogation of duty and concentration of power?
In two years, we can figure that the economy will be in a total stall. And the election of a republican will show that their “ideas” won’t solve the problem, but only aggrevate it. But by then it may be too late for all of us.
Damn, Keynes said that in an atmosphere of economic stagnation the government must spend to make up for the lack of spending by the private economy. It isn’t just taxes.
History is going to look back at this moment, and say “WTF?” The policies being chosen don’t make sense on a policy basis, and they don’t even make sense on a political self-interest basis.
Well, it appears it’s over. Now we get to watch it burn. Maybe something will rise from the ashes, or maybe not…
Keynesian economics is as alive as it ever was, but the US has dumped Keynesian policy in favor of Mellonism: liquidate labor, liquidate capital, liquidate agriculture, purge the rottenness.
Mellonists believe that suffering and unemployment are good things. They’re willing for the economy to shrink if they end up having tighter control of it.
Read Jarod Diamond’s “Collapse.”
Whatever piece of crap is passed and signed by the fraud it will be played as a grand and glorious “victory” of bipartisanship and the savior of the U.S. economy. The public will node in agreement not knowing any better. Months perhaps years down the road they’ll look out their window and notice that their neighbors are being thrown out on the street, that unemployment is nearing 20%, that suicide rates have climbed to the stratosphere, that crime rates are completely out of control while at the same time corporate profits are at all time highs. They’ll then ask themselves, what in the world is going on?
Perhaps some day the U.S. public will see Chinese troops on U.S. soil as an army of liberation.
“The public will node in agreement”
and move back to focusing their attention to Jersey Shore.
how could this have happened in 2years….oh nevermind
you have expressed exactly what has happened,applause
Hah!!!!
Actually, if we dilligently dig straight down we’ll emerge in the Indian Ocean midway between the Muaritius Islands and Australia … I checked that out when I was a kid … and, by the time we get there, if the digging is pursued seriously, the Islands will have a much higher per capita wealth than the diggers will have had for a very long time. As well, there might be a few very hot regions to maintain our collective cool through …
Excellent post, masaccio!
Recommended!
DW
I assume these too are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, or is that just the Sallie Mae federal loans?
Please get this piece of shit rat bastard off my teevee. I despise him with the heat of a million red hot suns. Thanks for the destruction of our country you complete piece of con dick.
We are in an age of great and terrible madness.
Even if a person defaults on their student loan, they will still owe the money, plus interest, until they die. You cannot erase a student loan via bankruptcy (thank you, US Congress). So student loan defaults will, like a broken record, make sure the bankers get paid – from taxpayer funds. Then the deficit increases by that amount and the government is now around your neck, going after your wages, your unemployment, your social security, etc. for the rest of your life
Keynes’s thought hasn’t been killed. Politicians can’t kill theories any more than the Catholic Church could kill heliocentrism. It’s being ignored to the detriment of the working class, elderly and poor.
Keynes’s economics, especially the principle of effective demand is alive and correct; it’s policy prescriptions just aren’t being followed.
Why would the Chinese need to put soldiers on the ground…? They could easily bring us to our knees economically…! They could call in the $13 Trillion in treasury bonds, and, better yet, halt all exports to the US…! Fancy that…!
add up payroll taxes and sales taxes. you don’t think that would help?
p.s. i’m not trying to suggest that tax cuts are enough (not by a long shot). we need a reconstructed financial sector (including major investigations and fair trials for fraud), per capita fed revenue sharing to the states, jobs programs, infrastructure investment, reconstructed energy sector, and a ton of other stuff too.
i just don’t think that tax cuts should get looked down on as a part of the possible policy options, just because they’ve been given a bad name by political opponents who who seem to want tax cuts only for the wealthy.
There’s an important piece missing from this critique of Supply-side theory.
The theory goes that you can create demand from supply when you consider price. That at a low enough price, there will arise demand to purchase the goods. Such as you may not previously have wanted to purchase my product at retail, but if I sold it to you for a nickel you’d almost certainly take it.
The problem is this, there are lower bounds on what a company can charge for its goods. Price elasticity is extremely far from perfect here. BMW can’t sell me a 740IL for a nickel for very long before it just goes out of business.
So unless the cost of production of all goods is zero and all sales are
100% profit, then its impossible for Supply-side economics to work even if you accept its premises.
Supply-side economics is a recipe for disaster on both sides of the equation.
Aye.
DW
It’d be a tough job in boring through that Iron core, tho…!
The Chinese hold 8% of the debt.
8%.
And let them halt exports. That would only hurt them and the Corps that have offshored there.
We’re truly f*cked…! Obummer just said the Catfood II Commission is on..! 8-(
Unless short-term artificial booms and long-term, very real, busts are yer preferred poison, Nathan.
DW
But he also asked for congressmen and senators to do the right thing.
Which would be to vote against this monstrosity.
Walmart, Target, ad nauseum, will screech to a grinding halt,and where do you suppose, and how fast do you think we could find alternate sources, kelly…?
Now, CTut, you cannot tell me that you are truly surprised?
“They” ARE going to do the SDPP (Super Duper Party Pooper).
The coup is well along …
(And hand-baskets are selling briskly, for some reason in hell.)
Looking forward to a Palestinian author at Book Salon, BTW.
DW
Didn’t even Stockman reject this stuff….I heard him the other day, and he seemed mostly reasonable…
If they did the right thing this shit sandwhich would go away immediately.
That’s the exact reason a Chinese halt will never happen.
My main point is while people like to vilify China, they do only hold 8% of the ~$14T out there. They do not “own” the US by any stretch; we do.
The biggest bond holder is us, via SocSec etc.
BHO went from Rock Star to crushed pebbles in2 years …nice
For the ChineseG, the Emperor system has never ended and the ruling junta within believes this is a continent full of inferiors.
“China meddles in Portland’s proclamation of March 10 as Tibet Awareness day” (Phayul.Com, March 09, 2010)
The USG may be bad but the ChineseG makes the USG looks like a puddy tat.
Laogai Research Foundation
Here’s my argument to micro-level supply-siders.
OK. We’re stuck. Consumers don’t have the money to increase consumption. Businesses are playing pattycake with paper assets. Government is being prohibited from spending. The balance of trade is in the toilet.
If you in your current financial position increased your production of goods and services, what would that look like and how would that put additional money into the economy from your business. So would you build up inventories of goods you cannot yet sell? Would you hire additional people to provide services to customers and pay them to stand around waiting for customers? If they are already doing that, would you hire more?
Or do you just want to get your greedy little hands on that tax money you have to send off to local, state, and federal tax collectors. And use it to play pattycake with paper just like the big boys? Or is your consumption going to single-handedly restart the economy?
Just tell me exactly how you are going to create jobs, job creator.
I’m not surprised, just pissed, DW…!
You have picked up a direct quote from BooMan. He says until 2014.
Are progressives beginning to get back on the same page? Strange.
Those whom you address are meditating, waiting for the sound of the Unseen Hand aclapping, TD.
It is a really, really deeeeeeeeeep philosophic thing.
Patience IS …
DW
Supply-side theory depends on a circulating deflation of factor costs to stimulate growth. Tell me empirically when in history that has ever worked. How the f*ck did Arthur Laffer ever get an economics degree?
Economics as zen. Who’d a thunk it? I just practicing for libertarian trolls who claim they are business owners.
We wanted an FDR and instead got a cross between Neville Chamberlain and Philippe Petain.
I say, “Is that the 7734 handbasket?”
Thank you for that tbsa-I couldn’t have said it better myself. Looking at ole Barry’s eyes he looks like he doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
This will be my answer then, masaccio when people ask me what’s wrong, what happened:
We can’t have half an economy with only the supply side in existence.
That is not an economy.
We must also have a demand side. And with no money, the whole mass of people cannot create a demand. No matter what is spent on ads or how new and shiny the new thing is, the supply side cannot create a demand on their own.
Obama is new breed of cat, that’s for true.
Max Baucus, Chair, Senate Finance Committee – can pocket any government finance legislation he doesn’t like
Kent Conrad, Chair, Senate Budget Committee – can pocket any budget and budget reconciliation legislation he doesn’t like.
It is no mystery why Max Baucus was part of the Healthcare Gang of Six and his legislative aide (a former VP at Wellpoint) wrote the legislation.
It is no mystery why Kent Conrad was on the Debt Ceiling Gang of Six and has been arguing for a deficit commission long before Obama was elected.
And it will be no surprise when Kent Conrad or Max Baucus or both show up on the Joint Catfood Committee.
They flexed their muscles like Daniel Patrick Monyihan did on Hillarycare.
Let’s make a distinction between the villains who promote supply-side theory and the useful idiots who watch Fox News and are persuaded by the villains’ sophistry. The idiots are hurt by the theory. The villains are enriched by it.
nondischargeable debts include debts to governmental units for fines and penalties and debts for most government funded or guaranteed educational loans or benefit overpayments
An MD education leaves a debt of $250,000 for many – who if they can’t for some reason – often Step 3 exam passing and/or the area they seek employment in – get employment, and who then find they have to leave the country to have a life, as bankruptcy is not an option.
They flexed their muscles like Daniel Patrick Monyihan did on Hillarycare.”
Monyihan – a history major/historian who said he was an intellectual and expert on economics and health and social security – and was none of those – and tried to cut social security as a parting gift. Thank God Clinton rejected him and Rubin and Newt and all the others pushing to cut Social Security.
I absolutely agree. Keynes changed economics and apparently a lot of the world never noticed.
That will happen anyway, when the price of oil goes so high that it is no longer profitable to ship all of those cheap goods from China across the Pacific.
But the Chinese won’t care. They’ll be just fine. They’re not stupid. Our leaders are, but theirs aren’t. That civilization hasn’t survived for 5000 years based on stupidity.
America’s been around for what, 350 years max, even including colonial times? We are toddlers to them, and our leaders are throwing a temper tantrum.
Just making my way through H.W. Brand’s “Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” An excellent read.
I especially like the part in which FDR chose to fight the conservatives in the Republican AND Democratic Party.
Trickle-down economics is nothing new, business has been signing the same tune for decades.
Clinton re-regulated taxes and the EPA and the NLRB – where was the de-regulation beyond allowing City Bank to merge with Travelers Ins?
Digital rules were indeed a bad regulation. But they were not a deregulation.
But Clinton hate by the left got us GW Bush and Obama sold it to beat Hillary – and history lessons will not change anything.
No need to insult Chamberlain. I’m no Chamberlain fan, but his economics weren’t THIS bad.
Sales taxes are a state revenue source, which is a whole other animal.
The payroll tax idea was something discussed here, and you probably already know the arguments. I know yours, and I respectfully disagree with them.
In order for the tax cuts to have a prayer of working, it would have to be on the people who pay the most taxes, not the least. We’ve been trying that approach for the last several decades, and it has been an absolute disaster…
I’m not for that approach simply because there is no empirical evidence that shows it works, and plenty of evidence that shows it makes other things worse.
B.O.:
going backwards
should be more fiscal, less QE
debt bubble
Most Colleges today are diploma mills.
B.O. = the smell of rotting lies and crushed dreams. If we don’t primary this pathetic excuse for a leader, what happens next is on us.
Just in from CNBC the Dow futures are up 172 points. See it works. (for a little while)
The idiots who got us into this gigantic hole have only one solution: keep digging. Maybe we’ll get to China and they will bail us out
Never, ever, before has this country been governed by greater idiots.
Yet many of them have lots of moola and advanced degrees.
What does that say about the state of American education?
-stewartm
please note i included a per capita ref revenue sharing to the states.
i don’t think so, why do you think that?
Of note, the ChineseG totally freaks out over Swiss-Tibetan rapper, Karma Emchi:
“Meat pastry rap threatens China’s security” (by Rebecca Novick, June 2011)
So they call in the Treasuries; what do they get in return? Dollars that pay no interest.
And if they halted all exports to the U.S. they would be doing us a favor.
1. i did not say “alone,” in fact i wrote just the opposite.
2. i did not refer to income tax — the examples i used were the two most regressive taxes i could think of: the payroll tax and sales tax. and neither one of them have a deduction. try the same calculation for a self employed person making $15,080
That’s why banks and businesses are sitting on so much capital. Waiting for the fire sale so they can swoop in and buy up everything at a discount.
“Senator Dick Durbin appears to understand that spending cuts affect the economy in the same way that tax hikes do: they reduce the amount of money going to consumption.”
This is wrong in a certain way as I will explain and the reason it is wrong is tied in with the misunderstanding of Keynes.
Tax hikes reduce the amount of money the Treasury has to borrow. The money gets spent by Uncle Sam instead of the taxpayer. What the taxpayer does not spend Uncle Sam does. Here comes the crucial part. If taxes are not raised then the Treasury has to borrow the money so not only does the taxpayer get to spend that amount, so does Uncle Sam. Do you follow?
It is credit which expands consumption. This is what Keynes knew. Most people sort of know it but it does not quite sink in. On the macro scale it is credit which determines economic growth. More credit means more growth. Less credit less growth. It is credit which is the primary systematic driver of consumption growth. The old fashioned business cycle was in fact always the credit cycle.
What is so misunderstood with what is called Keynesianism is that he was firstly talking not about spending growth but rather credit growth because credit must grow first to fund the consumption. Everyone thinks about the consumption but are sort of fuzzy on the credit part. What is counter cyclical in Keynesianism is government stepping in to increase total outstanding credit when other sectors are cutting back credit. For as I said it is credit funded demand which grows GDP.
Bank loans are down over $1 trillion since Q4 08. Credit in other sectors has shrunk as well. On the macro scale it is an absolute imperative that credit now shrink. For in fact a certain amount of outstanding loans can only be paid back with new credit. (this is the situation Uncle Sam is in which everyone decries but in fact it is true o the entire system) Any shrinkage in total systematic credit risks a deflationary debt collapse. The Depression was a deflationary debt collapse.
The governments mad borrowing the last 3 years was a systematic imperative for it sent just enough money into the economy to prevent deflation. Keynes cannot possibly be wrong because if he is then the entire edifice of economics is wrong. Of course the critics are all mixed up. They seem to think that the now 12% of GDP the government is borowing does not actually increase GDP at all, much less 12%. However as I said credit is shrinking or static at best in the rest of the economy so if Uncle Sam does not borrow, and spend, then nobody will. The measuring stick the critics use is weak growth from all that Keynesian borrowing and the growth has been week. The issue is however that without that borrowing we would be in what most think of as a Depression.
They’re not stupid, they’re malevolent.
That we continually shroud ourselves in the comfort of superiority while they pillage us is a habit we need to break. However, I have even less hope in that happening than I do in politicians suddenly becoming agents of altruism.
I’ve gathered that it must be some kind of coping mechanism.
Edit above,second to last paragraph
Bank loans are down over $1 trillion since Q4 08. Credit in other sectors has shrunk as well. On the macro scale it is an absolute imperative that credit NOT shrink.
A hot time in the old core … tonight!!!
Indeed they are. And largely because they run on a business model not an educational one. This is not entirely the fault of the educational institutions. Most publicly funded colleges and universities have seen an ever-decreasing percentage of their funding come from taxes in recent decades.
Thanks for another good one, masaccio.
You’re absolutely right, Mac.
Keynes’ ideas aren’t dead; it’s the democratic party that’s dead.
Why yes, yes ’tis, and a very hot little number it is.
Here are the keys, take it for a spin, hardly any mileage, belonged to a little old lady, passed a deener, poor old thing, quite misplaced her marbles, went out in a rowboat, both oars in the water, same side of the boat, unfortunately.
Gunwales, got her they say, in the end …
Now, you’ll note that this basket has the deelux handle, and special weaving, to avoid rush hour traffic and no sharp corners at all, why you can steer with the throttle, most of the time …
We’ll even throw in a heater, for when those low-down moments arise.
Now this baby performs really swell on highways paved with good intentions … by the way, and the nice thing about it is that it runs well on regular, ya don’t have to be a high-tested premiuem-type person, just yer normal kind …
I’d keep it myself, but it’s really a little too sporty for the neighborhood I live in, so I’m guessing we can make you an offer you simply won’t be able to refuse.
What do you say, it’s got a recent inspection sticker and the timing belt has just been replaced …
;~DW
One correction : the country didn’t move to the right – the elites did – a.k.a the Washington consensus. As for the peasants, we are still a center-left nation. Single payer healthcare ? check. Progressive taxes? check. Strengthen SS/Medicare/Medicaid? check. Govt need to more to help the poor? Check. Cut defense spending ? Check. No to foreign wars? Check.
Of course, the MOTU relentlessly resort to “truthiness” and confuse the people. Most recent example is the peasants starting to believe that cutting deficits leads to job growth. Partly because of the lamestream media and partly because of the bipartisanshit consensus on the same.
Selise -
It’s just basic numbers. If someone makes $1mm and pays 33% in taxes, that’s ~$333k to work with in potential tax cut stimulus.
If someone makes $33k and pays 33%, you’re talking only $11k. It’s off by a factor of 30; you’d need 30 low tax payers to equal a single high one.
And these days a million in income isn’t even that extreme anymore, the wealth inequality now is way more skewed than that.
In a $14T economy, raising or lowering taxes on low or middle income people isn’t going to raise much revenue, or provide much stimulus.
Chamberlain gets a bad rap. He gets blamed for doing what the vast majority of his people wanted. Obama, on the other hand, routinely ignores the popular will in order to serve the greediest and least patriotic of the rich. He does this in concert with his Republican allies.
I guess it all amounts to putting your money where your mouth is. If taxes were increased on the wealthy then an investment tax credit should be employed that gives them an option of investing money into businesses that create jobs. It creates incentive to invest rather than tax and let the government study shrimp on a treadmill. Spending should be targeted to best investments for the economy which would include R & D, education for future generations, small business financing, job creation. If the waste were cut out, the economy is moving through job creation then the tax base would expand exponentially and the debt could be reduced.
The full faith and credit of the US needs to be preserved and now is not the time to shrink an already shrinking economy. I completely agree there needs to be an expansion of business, money going into the economy through consumption and broadening of the tax base to grow us out of the pickle we find ourselves in today.
If Chamberlain were like Obama, he would not have signed the Munich Agreement ceding the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. He would have unconditionally surrendered the UK to Germany.
“Clinton rejected….pushing to cut Social Security”?? He wanted to start PRIVATIZING it, as a good l’il DLC, third-way banker shill should..the only thing that stopped him and his pal Erskine Bowles from beginning the gutting was a small problem with a person named Monica…see here:
http://firedoglake.com/2010/05/18/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security-clinton-gingrich-bowles-and-the-pact/
“Beyond allowing City Bank to merge with Travelers”..now THAT’s an interesting way to describe the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act..sheesh! Clinton was a triangulating, Corporate Dem of the first water, and “Clinton Hate” has nothing to do with an accurate description of his policies and politics.
FDR saved capitalism for his class…faced with Socialist, syndicalist, and anarchists strikes and revolts across the country, he saw the coming of a new type of economy and gave the peasants just enough to keep them penned.
What if instead of becoming economists, supply siders became cardiologists?
Put the heart into overdrive! Empty the veins of as much blood as you can! The arterial side is where the blood belongs!
Of course, this is a prescription for a stroke, or an economic depression.
There is far too much money ‘invested’ already. There are a couple of trillion dollars ‘invested’ in Treasury bills and notes at a negative real rate. Banks have $1.7 trillion of excess reserves’ invested’ at the Fed making .25%. Hundreds of billions are ‘invested’ in hedge funds and by the investment banks in pools of money that trade the stock market with black boxes on milli second time frames.
There is far far too much money in the financial sphere which mostly ends up either bidding up various asset classes, or trying to. Having nothing to do with the real economy and hurting it when commodities happen to be the trade of the moment.
That money has to be stripped out of the financial sphere and put into the real economy. This whole ‘more investment’ thing is a circular firing squad.