Two great excerpts on Obama economic Voodoo!
U.S. is now led by a bevy of talking head water Boys,
Cheerleaders running to and fro twixt media Newscasts,
Public relation stooges who can take flack and keep Smiling,
A President who believes back pats and a smile is Bipartisanship,
Countless followers who think a positive attitude will end Recession,
All these loonies back a one man team leader and his Voodoo Economics,
That Will Give Temporary Relief and Cheering but Will End in Chaotic Disaster!
February 18, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Having lived through three wars, a depression, and some ten Presidents, I thought I had seen everything in Presidential and Congressional acrobatics, but the current administration is about to fix something that should be left to fix itself, by adopting the old adage, ‘we’ve got to do something even if its wrong.’ President Obama has loosed upon the American public all the participants of his folly, some of which are listed above with colorful descriptions of their particular roles in this fiasco. Man’s guile and greed in high places in government, industry, management, and the labor unions caused this recession, not the system of capitalism itself. We should have let the problem fix itself! Sure, it would have been very painful, but if you think the current witchdoctor economic stimulus will solve it, let me advise you that following a period of temporary relief, it will be ten times worse than if we had done nothing.
Do you really think these men and woman, full of greed and guile, have all been cleared out of the system? Some of them are the ones we are providing with bailout funds to do the same thing again! They would have been cleaned out naturally if we had simply lef their organizations get rid of them for their failures. And if you say, well, Congress will monitor them now, and that will get rid of them.
Did you fall off a turnip truck on your head? Don’t you realize a new bevy of crooks are waiting to replace them in the wings of Congress, Industry, Business, and Wall Street?
The only good thing about all the increasing economic, tectonic, pestilence, famine, hatred, war, and multiple other elements of world chaos, is that it lets me know the Second Advent of Christ is not a far distant event, and he is the only one who can end this mess man’s guile and greed has created. The mess that was supposed to come in the last days is here as is outlined in Paul’s prophecy in II Timothy 3:1-7. It was created by the characteristics of this world’s last days leaders.
II Timothy 3:1-7 – This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. [2] For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, [3] Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, [4] Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; [5] Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. [6] For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, [7] Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
America, wake up and realize our current economic crisis was caused by an ever increasing epidemic of leaders who possess the characteristics Paul described above. This will not change until Christ comes to heal the epidemic. What individuals need to do is to be more concerned about their spiritual condition than their financial condition.
Begin Excerpt 1 from Creators.com via World News
Obama’s Voodoo Economics
By Paul Craig Roberts
Who remembers economists’ hysteria over the “Reagan deficits”? Wall Street was in panic. Ronald Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility was bringing the end of the world.
The fiscal year 2009 federal budget deficit that Obama is inheriting, and adding to, will be 10 times larger in absolute terms than Reagan’s biggest and a much larger share of gross domestic product in percentage terms.
Yet, economists are sending up no alarms.
Paul Krugman, for example, couldn’t damn Reagan’s puny deficits enough. But today he thinks the deficit can’t be large enough!
The central issue of the stimulus and bailout plans is how to finance the massive budget deficit. This issue remains unaddressed by economists and policy makers.
As far as I can tell, the government, its advisers and its cheerleaders think financing the deficit will be a cakewalk, like the Iraq War.
I am tempted to claim that economists’ nonchalance about the massive deficit is an indication that Krugman and the whole lot of them are converts to supply-side economics — “deficits don’t matter.” I triumphed, and economists have become my acolytes. The Nobel Prize will arrive tomorrow.
Only we supply-side economists never said that deficits don’t matter. We said that deficits have different causes and consequences. Some are problematic. Some are not, or are less so.
Obama’s deficit is problematic.
It is a massive deficit, far beyond anything ever before financed on planet earth. It is arriving at a time when pressures on the dollar as reserve currency have mounted from decades of rising trade deficits. The deficit is hitting the financial markets when the rest of the world is in turmoil from ingestion of toxic Wall Street financial instruments. The United States must service massive debt when the U.S. economy is hollowed out from the offshoring of manufacturing and professional service jobs. The Obama deficit is a far more serious deficit than the “Reagan deficits.”
As President Reagan’s first assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy, my job was to find and implement a cure for “stagflation.”
“Stagflation” was the word used to describe the worsening “Phillips curve” trade-offs between inflation and employment. The postwar policy of Keynesian demand management relied on easy money to expand employment and gross national product, and used recession and unemployment to cool down inflation when it got out of hand. Over the years, the trade-offs worsened. It took more inflation to get the economy going and more unemployment to cool down the inflation.
This problem worsened during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Reagan used the “misery index,” the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates, to boot Carter from office.
Keynesian economists concluded from the Great Depression that the way to maintain full employment was for the government to manage aggregate demand. If the sum of consumer and investor demand was not sufficient to maintain full employment, government would step in. By running a deficit in its budget, economists thought that government could add enough additional demand to bring employment up to full.
The way this policy was implemented was to use easy monetary policy to stimulate demand and high tax rates to restrain excessive consumer spending that could push up inflation. The Keynesian economists did not understand that the high tax rates contributed to inflation by restraining the output of goods and services, while the easy money drove up prices.
Keynesians had no solution for the problem their policy had caused, so Congress and President Reagan turned to supply-side economists who offered a solution: restrain demand with tighter monetary policy and increase supply with greater after-tax rewards. Supply-side economics reversed the policy mix of demand-side economists. Instead of easy money and high tax rates, there would be tighter money and lower tax rates.
This change caused consternation.
Keynesian economists, who sat atop the profession, bitterly resented the dethroning of their orthodoxy. They turned on supply-siders with a vengeance. We were “voodoo economists,” “trickle-down economists,” “tax cuts for the rich economists.” Keynesians had been the great defenders of budget deficits, but Reagan’s were intolerable.
They forgot their own Kennedy tax rate reductions. Supply-siders were bringing the end of the world.
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was part of the problem. Volcker had limited economic understanding. He did not comprehend the worsening boom-bust cycle that the Keynesian policy had set the Fed upon. He viewed the Reagan tax rate reductions as a Keynesian stimulus to consumer spending that would worsen inflation, the subduing of which he saw as his responsibility. He feared that the tax rate reductions would cause inflation and
that he would be blamed.
At the Treasury, we had weekly meetings with Paul, attempting to bring him into an understanding of what it meant to reverse the policy mix. We patiently explained the importance of the Fed bringing money growth down slowly as the tax rate reductions came into play in order to avoid a monetary shock to the system.
Volcker just couldn’t get it. He thought the Reagan Treasury consisted of dangerous inflationists.
He went home to the Fed and turned off the money supply, reasoning that if there was no money growth he couldn’t be blamed for the inflation that Reagan’s fiscal policy would cause.
Volcker’s fears were reinforced by his advisors. As the Treasury’s representative at the Fed’s meeting with its outside advisors, I heard Alan Greenspan, Volcker’s successor, tell Paul that in view of the Reagan tax rate reductions (which Greenspan also saw as a demand stimulus), “monetary policy was a weak sister that at best could conduct a rearguard action.”
It was amazing to us at Treasury that the Federal Reserve chairman could not understand that monetary policy controlled inflation and that fiscal policy, or the right kind of fiscal policy, helped control inflation by increasing the output of goods and services.
But this was over Volcker’s head. Instead of giving us the gradual reduction in the growth of the money supply, he slammed on the brakes. The economy went into a serious recession just as Reagan’ s tax cut
s passed.
The embittered Keynesians wanted to blame the recession on
the tax cuts, but that was inconsistent with their own analysis. So they seized on the deficits that resulted from the recession and blamed the tax cuts. This was also inconsistent with Keynesian analysis. However, they used writings by people who had popularized supply-side economics. Some of these people made claims that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” In other words, there would be no deficits.
No supply-side economist ever said this. And neither did the Reagan administration.
The Reagan administration used static tax analysis and forecast that every dollar of tax cut would lose a dollar of revenue.
The forecast went wrong for an entirely different reason. The Keynesian orthodoxy of the time was that it was impossible for the economy to grow without paying for it with a rising rate of inflation. Yet, the supply-side position was that by reversing the policy mix, the economy could grow while the rate of inflation fell, which is in fact what happened during the 1980s and 1990s.
As economic forecasting was locked into the “Phillips curve” — the belief that inflation was the price of full employment and that unemployment was the price of lower inflation — the Reagan administration’s budget forecast was restrained by the “Phillips curve.” Orthodoxy would not permit us to forecast the extent to which a supply-side policy would bring down inflation as the economy grew. Even if we had been able to disregard forecasting orthodoxy, our forecast would have been off, as Volcker brought money growth in below target.
The “Reagan deficits” thus resulted from the unanticipated collapse of inflation. As inflation came in below forecast, nominal GNP came in below forecast. Thus, tax revenues were less. But appropriation bills are in nominal dollars, which meant that real spending was greater than intended because inflation was less than forecast.
Wall Street believed that the “Reagan deficits” would cause inflation, but of course, they did not cause inflation, as they were the consequences of the collapse in inflation.
This shows how totally wrong conventional opinion can be even when it tries to think. Today, no policy maker or establishment economist is thinking at all.
The “Reagan deficits” were neither financed by printing money nor dependent on recycling of surplus dollars by trading partners. The deficits were no threat to the dollar, which was thought to be too strong. The increased after-tax return on investment reduced the flow of U.S. capital abroad, and we financed our own deficit.
This brings us back to the original question: How is the Obama deficit going to be financed?
To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
Begin Excerpt 2 from Creators.com via World News
Obama’s ‘Stimulates’ His Political Buddies
By Ben Shapiro
President Obama says the “stimulus” package is designed to save the economy. He says the “stimulus” package contains no earmarks. He says “government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.”
He’s lying. This “stimulus” package and Tim Geithner’s associated bailout scheme aren’t aimed at helping private industry recover. They’re aimed at putting cash in his friends’ pockets and shaping a new big government majority for decades to come.
Obama’s basic economic philosophy seems to be distrust of private business. He characterizes tax cuts as “government spending,” as though allowing people to keep their own money were an act of government largesse. And according to Obama, tax cuts aren’t just “government spending” — tax cuts actually “helped lead us to the crisis we face right now.” Cutting tax rates stifles the economy, in Obama’s view.
Americans can’t handle their money; once the economy stabilizes, Obama states, “we’re going to have to start thinking about how do we operate more prudently.”
Americans don’t resonate to this sort of thinking. So Obama will simply scare us. Hence Obama’s extreme rhetoric. We’re not just worried about the economy, we’re experiencing a collective “loss of confidence.” We’re not merely in a recession, we’re “sink(ing) into a crisis that … we may be unable to reverse.” We’re not simply in an economic downturn, we’re on the brink of a “catastrophe.” And Obama and government are the only ones who are “thinking about you and your lives.”
There’s only one problem: Americans don’t believe Obama. So Obama will make his threat a reality by deliberately taking measures that
will hurt the economy, all the while blaming private industry and paying off his political allies.
Recovery from this recession will require Americans to spend less and save more; Obama’s plan pushes them to spend more and save less. Banks are short on cash because not enough Americans are saving; credit card companies are cutting credit lines because people can’t pay their current bills. And yet Obama wants to spend billions on make work projects with the stated goal of “getting people spending again.” Risky loans and stupid spending caused this crisis — and Obama is pushing both.
Recovery from this recession will require antiquated businesses to fade away, and new enterprises to take their place; Obama’s plan subsidizes bad businesses and penalizes solid businesses.
It pays off unions and other political allies. Obama’s 15-member Economic Recovery Advisory Board reads like a who’s who of the incompetent, the overpaid, and the Obama donors. It’s a group of money-leeching companies and union leaders
who all pay political fealty to the President.
First, Obama’ s campaign crew.
The Board includes Penny Pritzker, the Obama campaign’s National Finance Chair, a woman who was largely responsible for the collapse of the Superior Bank of Chicago — Pritzker pushed for that bank to invest heavily in subprime mortgages. Mark Gallogly, the founder of Centerbridge Partners, a private equity firm, joins Pritzker on the board
— and yes, he’s a former Obama fundraiser. Robert Wolf of UBS is another former Obama fundraiser and another board member.
Then there are the union leaders. Richard Trumka is secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, an organization largely responsible for the collapse of the manufacturing industry in this country. The AFL-CIO is the largest advocate for Obama’s “card check” legislation, which would allow unions to bully nonunionized workers into joining up.
And yes, the AFL-CIO spent $53.4 million on the Obama campaign.
Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, also sits on the board — and the SEIU spent $85 million in support of the Obama campaign.
There are also incompetent business leaders. Jim Owens of Caterpillar sits on the board. It is no coincidence that as Obama heightened his rhetoric on the economy, Caterpillar laid off 20,000 workers worldwide — and it is no coincidence that as Obama trumpets his economic plan, Owens has pledged to rehire some of those employees.
Obama was running for re-election from the moment he took the inaugural oath. He believes he can enshrine his name on our coinage by creating a cycle of government dependency: government intervention, economic downturn, further government intervention. The bigger government gets, the fuller his political allies’ pockets grow. That’s the Chicago way.
Ben Shapiro, 25, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. He is the author of the new book “Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House,” as well as the national bestseller “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com
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