Occupy Wall Street’s government problem
Entries Tagged as 'money'
The plague of smart
There is a nasty little radio spot airing nationally. It promotes “green” appliances and goods generally; swirly bulbs, “efficient” washers… that sort of thing although the specifics are tactically muddied. The ad pitches to a curiously young demographic. We’ve all met “Timmy”. Like Dickens’ Tiny Tim, Timmy is infectiously cute and contrived to pull at your major arteries. Timmy wants to go to the State Fair! Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know there was such a thing as a State Fair but the announcer, whose relation to Timmy is unexplored, asks him breathlessly, “Do you want to go to the State Fair?” Of course he does! Sorry, you can’t. You see, Timmy, your parents are NOT using green, energy efficient doo-dads but the old busted bulbs and machinery, causing them to spend more on utilities and draining their pockets of the gas and ticket money necessary. If only your folks had bought the new, government approved and promoted doohickeys they would have been able to take you there for candy floss and teacup rides, whatever those are. If they get on board today then you can go to next year’s fair. “But I want to go NOW!” Radio Timmy coaches Timmies across the land in whinery to cajole mums and pops into replacing their eight-for-a-dollar earth-warming heat globes with pigtail bulbs at $8 dollars or more a pop. Needless to say, this public service message was paid for by Your Federal Family which draws its budget from you. [Read more →]
A very metric Christmas
It was slow in coming but fast in going. If you blinked, you missed it: the Christmas Tree Tax. As government grasping goes, it was pretty thin sauce. The proposal was for a 15-cent levy on every cut Christmas tree sold, collected by the Dept of Agriculture and released to an as yet non-existent Christmas Tree Promotion Board or somesuch. Let’s not ponder overlong how it is that a government scarcely able to mention “Christmas” finds no issue of church/state separation in collecting the lunch money for the National Christmas Tree Association. Also we will ignore that the White House will never pay that fifteen cents since their trees are donated which is considered a high honor, if not a fine commercial, for the grower. And of course, as the resident gunslingers explain, this is not a tax and is being delayed with far more fanfare than which it was proposed. To next Christmas? They do not say. [Read more →]
The New Indentures
They are enthusiastically for elimination, these chilly, sodden folk who gather at my doorstep. Eliminate debt, eliminate taxes, eliminate property, eliminate poverty, eliminate wealth and the wealthy too and once in a while, publicly eliminate on the sidewalk. Who claims they lack coherence? They Occupy Wall Street and Main Street, meaning they reside there; sleeping rough, eating roughage and are roughly handled, so they complain, by the authorities, the media, the neighbors, business, academe and above all by harsh and increasingly cold Reality. I depart from most of the critics of the Occupiers however. No, their problems are not strictly speaking in their heads. There is, actually, an underlying, unifying rationality among the commies, hippies, dippies and loons. Finally polling has investigated our modern Bonus Marchers and found a diagnosable malady; not just debt but student debt. [Read more →]
Journal publishes obvious truth; repudiation by Journal editorial page due Tuesday
Reading the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page for insight into the economy, business or economics in general — or just about anything else except the arcane study of the Right Wing elite and where Murdoch’s head is at today — is a very strange exercise. It’s kind of like looking at a symposium on race relations and gender equitality chaired by an intern from World Net Daily where the participants are Louis Ferdinand Celine, Ian Paisley, John Hagee, Michelle Bachmann, the Grand Mufti of Teheran, Dennis Duke and Clarence Thomas. They may have a lot to say, but it will be either ignorant or just plain batshit crazy, with a tinge of duplicity and lies. Which they all believe. [Read more →]
Re-basing the currency
What would you think of a monetary system with NO borrowing, NO taxation and NO reserves? It is simplicity itself. When the government needs some dough to build a fighter jet or provide orthodontia to a retired race horse, they just print it up. All bonds will be retired, on schedule and as issued (except TIPS, we’ll have to do something about them) but no more will be sold. Taxes? A dusty anachronism. And since this is fiat money, not based on crappy Italian cars but rather on the forceful declarations of government, there is no need to keep gold or silver stocks as the US currently does. We will call this Infinity Money, an appealing brand name. Inflation? Oh hells yeah! Hyperinflation? Perhaps so but now in the computer age the handling of numbers forty digits long is no great chore and as in the Weimar Age, once the numeric string is too long and the tail end isn’t worth a single grape we just cut off a dozen or so zeroes from all accounts on a date certain, I’m thinking midnight every Friday so you can restart the melting of your valuables fresh on Monday. This solves many, many problems. For one, we are constantly told that the billionaires and krillionaires are maliciously keeping trillions in their vaults so they can lounge among the greenbacks and deprive Danish Lit majors of productive employment. No more. Anyone who hoards our un-earned money will see it evaporate like dry ice so high-risk, high-growth investments will be the only recourse. The consumer likewise will not keep his money in his pocket because his pocket (or more accurately, his card) now has an extra-dimensional rift within it that will empty out the value at the pace of a flushing toilet. Consumer spending spikes. Investment spikes. Savings? Well, there won’t be any actual savings but there will be investment in goods and services. It is said in Weimar Berlin that the streets were awash in cocaine and prostitutes of all descriptions. Now that is an enviably energetic economy! [Read more →]
A fortuitous burst of x-rays
Often, inside a fat guy abides a small man. This is the reality exposed to the nation last week by the antics of New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie. What else is there to make of that display? While the media and candidates are chewing their cuticles down to the nub, Christie prances in a gunslinger approved performance where he rattles the tools around in the back shed while telling the expectant world that he is not up to anything. And then, he really isn’t. Well, he’s not up to running but he IS up to a perverse faux obeisance at the Reagan Shrine, including some ritual canoodling with the widow Reagan, a pro forma popping of Christie ’12 balloons and then an immediate, fawning, truly disgusting appearance with Mitt Romney where they each break their own necks patting each other and themselves on the back. Noted expert on all things, Christie declares that no comparison of any kind can be legitimately made between Romneycare and Obamacare. Not suprisingly, he offers no foundation for his absolutism, simply a promise to write such nonsense out of sane discourse. Here, in a Mormon approved ceremony, Romney and Christie exchange lachrymose compliments and pledge until Death do They Part. Chris shows that he is down for the struggle with reason and perception and willing to endorse whatever inanity necessary to grease the skids for Mitt to the nomination and then the coronation. Christie might as well have simply announced while extending a signet ring: L’establishment de Republique? C’est moi! They say that Christie is conservative for New Jersey. Yes, and as a New Jersey native I can also inform you, he is quite fit. [Read more →]
The Chocolate Parachute
Duck Season couldn’t last forever, now it is Wabbit Season. We are on the hunt following the scent of money. Of course if we really COULD sniff out greenbacks we wouldn’t have to be out hunting but we are, searching for, as the plaintiff chants have it, our cars, our homes, our money, our jobs. They have been stolen. Well, if they haven’t been stolen at least they are not where we left them. Or where we want them. Good enough. If there has been a theft there must be a thief. The roving two-headed momba troll, Cornell Smiley is turfing over the land looking for someone to cuff up. Now, they can’t say what crime might have been committed and if they are asked just who did the committing, again, they cannot respond with a name or two but just a vague description of C. Montgomery Byrnes. It so happens that their tormentor does have at least one particular fellow in the stocks but Tavis and West are having none of that. Their response is instant and unequivocal…. Now, why you wanna hassle a brother? [Read more →]
A plausible candidate
Although there is feverish energy and tumult, there is also consternation. While everyone agrees it is time for heroics, we’re still holding on for a hero. So far, no go. The crowd searches each others’ eyes and scans the vids. It seems almost anyone would do, given the givens, but somehow every nomination inspires a plurality of objection so the top candidates rattle along on the shoulders and heads of the second tier-types while the also rans, run up behind. And the clock is ticking, no one can ignore that. Whom, oh whom will we ever find to send to the Head Office? Head Office, of course, is a fine American can-do euphemism for the latest French engenue taking Hollywood by storm. Not Anouk Aimee, the guillotine. [Read more →]
The plague of fools
Like frogs on the Nile, yes, fools are always with us but they do not always rain from the sky. Now they do. Unlike Pharoah we have no excuse to be surprised. Self-employed fool and liar Michael Moore gave us probably the earliest warning when he appeared on the Rachel Maddow show just in March with a pair of handcuffs pledging to slap them on some generic Wall Streeter and/or the lucky krillionaires of the Forbes 400. Did he not know that his good friend and ideological playmate Oprah is on that list? Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett are as well. Yes, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are there but are we really going to raid the blimp-born fortress of everyone’s favorite currency trader, George Soros? Doubtful. Moore isn’t merely offering up his friends and financiers though. With Steve Jobs death yesterday there is a solid chance that Moore has moved onto the precious pecking order. So I suppose Moore could surrender his wealth to himself, to be administered for The Good of the People, but will he also then run Oprah’s Book Club or Buffett’s trading empire? It seems that what he means is that the offending assets will be auctioned and the cash doled out on demonstrated need. Who would be bidding in such an auction is mysterious but with his self-indicting and incoherent rant he manages to claim the intellectual high ground amongst his peers.
We haven’t heard from Roseanne Barr in many a moon but she has decided to howl yet again. From her sprawling macadamia ranch in Hawaii she swarms in, having traveled on solar aircraft, naturally, to declare a nostalgic fondness for the guillotine. [Read more →]
A grim October
September ends the quarter. Many financial disclosures are made because of that. As we are heading into the Christmas season retailers are ramping up. We have to remember that the term Black Friday, meaning the Friday after Thanksgiving, is not called that because crowds of shoppers descend on poor little cashiers and blot out the sun. Black Friday is when the retailer, whether it is Nordstrom’s or Target, goes from debt for the year into surplus. Yes, for most sellers of paper towels, jewelry and Gameboys, their annual costs of payrolls, rents, medical, insurance, utilities, taxes, fuels and inventories are MORE than they are making until Christmas season begins in earnest and begins well. Those who earn their pay managing this delicate pivoting operation have made their sentiments known. The big retailers have announced their plans for the holiday shopping season just beginning and they will not, repeat not, be adding the usual part time and temporary jobs they need to handle the traditional Christmas rush. While their costs have all gone up the sales projections have all gone down and that is not all. What volume of sales they DO expect will be on much smaller margins, that is to say discounting will be extreme. You love that of course, but absent the profits, what is the point of opening the doors? Many many retailers are teetering on that fulcrum with only a massive spike in overall sales able to save them. Not likely. So Black Friday is destined to come and go leaving retailers AS A SEGMENT OF THE ECONOMY still in the red and mightily imperiled. I hate to be the one to inform the nation but as an economic event, friends, Christmas is canceled. [Read more →]
Waste and whimsy
Whether it was the blizzards of months ago or the hurricanes of weeks ago, we all know the drill. Head down to the supermarket and wipe them out of milk, eggs, bread and batteries. The FEMA types and Glenn Beck are in agreement. You should have three days of supplies for any emerging emergency and apparently the victuals of choice in a crisis is French toast made by flashlight (but you better have a gas stove). Three days of food. Three days of water. Some choose Evian. Some choose Wal-Wetter. In either case the retailer is pleased as water is always and everywhere the highest margin product on the shelves. Water amazingly carries an even higher added value than ice, the prime bill-payer of yesterday. We take water out of the faucet, add a bit of electricity and a couple hours of patience and voila! That will be $3.50, please. Sure, you could run your ice trays overtime before your cocktail party or killing spree, you’re running the freezer anyhow, but that smacks of effort. Not cool. [Read more →]
The Great Co-signer
We’re getting some funny reactions to the eclipse of Solyndra. One tactical dismissal is the old threatened filibuster; you want to talk about the money wasted on Solyndra? What about all the money wasted on coal, gas and oil? Hmmm? And it is a good question. The presumption is that while there may be ups and downs in the New Frontier of alt energy, we KNOW “fossil fuels” are obsolete or at least bad, so…. And all talk is smothered under a threat of a days long energy policy seminar for which you feel yourself ill-equipped. Underlying this threat is the certainty that nobody…. that would be NO body is going to simply say, okay, stop it all. Of course they are correct. If ethanol, which starves the world but enriches Iowa while costing the nation billions can yet hold together a coalition of granolas and agri-business, the Solyndroids have solid grounds for their conviction. Log-rolling is a most popular sport in political fields even if it is not yet in the Olympics. So the total Solyndra loss is not much at half a bil and is only 3.4% of the outstanding solar loan portfolio. Alright, we can wait on that point until losses are at 30% as it won’t be long. [Read more →]
Why the shit don’t work
Some pertinent facts seem to have been subsumed behind the New York Times pay wall, one wall I shall never breach, but my memory has not yet been degraded by the internets as badly as our ability to catch birds in flight has been dulled by the poultry industry. SkyNet Jr (Google) will not disgorge a story from 2004 about a team of mathematicians, two I recall, either at MIT or BU who eagerly participated in the race to develop statistical models that could predict elections. This is vital work as the one innovation that could solve all our problems; taking the citizen OUT of the electoral process, hangs on its perfection. These fellows had some pretty serious success as their program, held in utter secret, could reliably predict the two-party vote within two percent. At the time the question was, Will the fine, enlightened war hero, John Kerry, replace the drooling hand-puppet from Enroniburton? [Read more →]
The long-range forecast: no sun, no wind
How could ANYONE or indeed ANYTHING possibly go out of business just after a straight cash infusion of a half a billion dollars? Somehow Solyndra has managed it. This middle-sized firm with the maudlin name was never Too Big To Fail in its own right but it is exemplary. Solyndra is a “Green” business. You know that. And “Green” is the economic future. Green is clean. Green is keen. Green is nice, unlike those nasty cro-magnon energies like oil, gas and nukes. Even hydro power is in an infamous stink. That’s something of a puzzler, isn’t it? What could be cleaner than washing the whole landscape with cool, fresh creek water? As with so many of our current misapprehensions we suffer from Humpty-Dumpty-itis. Which is to say that the words you are hearing, Alice, do not mean what you presume they mean. Indeed, they are subject to revision or even flat inversion opportunistically by the eggshell sophists. In such an environment your most basic presumptions will fail you.
The bugaboo with this stuff is always CO2, carbon-dioxide. You are sitting in a vile cloud of it right now. Wait! Don’t go fleeing into the street. Out there is a dose of carbon-monoxide! Not an improvement and in any case the CO2 is everywhere on earth; a disgusting state of affairs. Most sadly its source, among others, is your two little nostrils. You breathe in 300-odd parts per million of this toxin and breathe out considerably more. This, the Green Advocates seek to stop. And so they should. A shocked humanity gazes in horror at its exhalations and wonders, what is this poison and how did it get inside my lungs? Was it Monsanto? Dow-Corning or Dow-Jones? Ah, it was Archer-Daniels, wasn’t it? Perhaps a blanket ban on hyphens would solve our crisis. [Read more →]
Winning the future with the metric system!
Warren Buffett has a complaint. He pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary, or so he claims, and this is a scandal. One might counter that since he meticulously games his compensation taking only a cool $100k in “income”; and the balance in capital gains he complains against himself. The simplest thing might be to alter his affairs so he draws his lucre in straight salary plus bonuses, eschewing the dance of trust payments and carried interest his genius accountants set up for him long ago but simplicity is not Buffett’s bailiwick. He is more into snapping up distressed businesses that are distressed because of their tax bill; usually the estate tax bill, and flipping them for gorgeous profits. Hmm. Maybe that is simple. No, Buffett, contrary to well-honed opinions, is not the beating heart of capitalism. Rather he has crafted himself a nearly uniquely safe and prosperous niche in the fiscal ecosystem. He is a buzzard. Not only is he a buzzard but he is a lucky, lucky buzzard; luckier or craftier than other would-be buzzards as he has found a lumbering omnivore that stomps its way through field and street twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and every damned day of the year. Buffett is a carrion crow with no need even to lazily glide about sniffing for the waft of rotten flesh. He sits on the shoulder of Leviathan; picking through the crushed bodies in its footsteps, nibbling at the gooey bits in its stool and when not feasting, whispers in its ear; This way. Not that. [Read more →]
Ebonomics in Atlanta
The Ebo or Igbo are a proud people, but then aren’t we all? They hail from modern Nigeria more or less, speaking a language you may have heard a time or two. You recognize it as if you try to duplicate its phonemes you will need a partner to perform helpful Heimlich maneuvers on you and manipulate your nostrils. Even then you will have a terrible accent. The Igbo are known as endemic traders. Yes, this included the slave trade which is about the only presentable explanation for their treatment by the Black Power Structure of Atlanta. [Read more →]
V
Supply and Demand collude or compete to produce Price. Any child fortunate enough to have run a lemonade stand before they were outlawed knows this. Since the Battle Royal between Reagan and Bush Sr we have heard Supply-side economics ever derided as “voodoo” since it was so denounced by W’s dad and that has proven the most durable of his utterances other than “Message: I care”. Supply-side’s competitor is often called Keynesian economics although since the sixties little has been proposed in the name of Keynes that the man would have supported. Tax-and-spend is probably the rough rhetorical equivalent of the disparaging “voodoo” but let’s keep things pleasant for all players and call it Demand-side. The divide between these two combatants is the divide between Right and Left. To a lesser extent it is the divide between Democrat and Republican so it should be well known. Basically the Keynesians assert not that a lack of Demand is the only problem in an economy but that most other problems can be swamped by goosing the economic call for goods and services and that this can be done by pouring greenbacks out the front window. On this premise is built all things called Stimulus. It would be a slander on John Maynard Keynes to say this was his opinion but his heirs have modified the doctrine to their own purposes. Like Keynes, the Voodoo Economists would ask, where does that money come from? Well, today it is printed, borrowed and taxed in descending order. Supply-siders will tell you that what ails the economy is that too much is taxed out of it. But tax rates are historically modest, you might say. [Read more →]
