Category Archives: Economy

Steve Forbes: Johnny-Come-Lately To Gold

Debt, Economy, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Media, Ron Paul

The mummified media, the financial press included, called Rep. Ron Paul a lunatic when he explained again and again that “a return to the gold standard by the United States would help the nation solve a variety of economic, fiscal, and monetary ills,” created when President Richard Nixon abolished the Gold Standard.

“Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending. … With a stable currency, it is ‘much harder’ for governments to borrow excessively. … Without lax Federal Reserve System monetary policies that led to the printing of too much money, the housing bubble would not have been nearly as severe.”

You don’t say?!”

Actually, these are Steve Forbes’ words, not Paul’s. Forbes is currently singing from the Paul hymn-sheet, and it is music to the ear.

Of course, this is not to say one should embrace Paul’s political opponents, just because they’ve arrived at the correct economic conclusion, now that it’s probably too late.

Goldbugs know that gold is a necessary financial hedge in the survival on the road to serfdom.

Watch out! Gold is bad for government health. Remember Executive Order 6102? FDR, idolized by BHO and many a Republican alike—by almost all offshoots of the duopoly, in fact—forbade “the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates” at pains of punishment: a fine of “not more than $10,000, or “imprisoned for not more than ten years or both.”

UPDATED: Barnanke is Stealing Your Wealth by Stealth

Debt, Economy, Energy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

As Terence Corcoran of Canada’s National Post puts it, “The Fed’s claim … is that all that is happening in the world economy—rising commodity prices, a falling dollar, rising bond yields, price increases in developing nations and Europe—have nothing whatever to do with the Fed’s unprecedented trillion-dollar quantitative easings and monetary expansion.”

“The Fed has a bit of a credibility problem,” concludes Corcoran. My countrymen (I’m a naturalized Canadian) are known for the understatement. Corcoran continues:

It wouldn’t be the first time in economic history that growth and employment dragged while prices -due to monetary inflation -rose. This year, U.S. consumer prices in March rose at an annual rate of 6% and were 2.7% higher than a year ago. In a recent speech, Fed vicechairman Janet Yellin called the CPI gains “transitory” inflation. Meantime, producer prices are up almost 6% year over year and import prices -thanks to a falling dollar -are up almost 10%.
Despite this evidence, the Fed sees no real inflation and is waiting to see if price increases begin showing up in “inflation expectations.”

[SNIP]

The enormous increase in the stock of money—a deliberate and destructive policy pursued by Ben Bernanke, the man with the reverse-Midas touch—is responsible for the steady rise in the prices of all commodities, crude included.

Prices are rising because mounds of paper money are printed and credit expansion policies promoted in order to fund the government’s profligacy. More fiat currency in the system means that every unit is worth less. This is the essence of inflation—it is a hidden tax, another way for government to steal your wealth by stealth.

According to the post hoc illogic of others (Bill O’Reilly and Attorney General Eric Holder, for instance), you ought to blame gas speculators, “profiteers” or foreign producers for gas prices—anyone but your government. Apparently, they believes that the price of fuel is causing prices to rise.

This topsy-turvy chain of causality should not make a lick of sense to a sane individual.

UPDATE: Herschel, on Facebook, wants to know, “who has all this new money? Certainly not the people who are suffering under high prices.”

Exactly: When money markets are flooded, the first counterfeit down payment goes into the coffers of the selected government contractors and employees. And also to all the DC hacks. It spurs artificially created demand, causing suppliers to raise prices. It’ll take time, but the new money will generate price hikes throughout the economy. By the time you and I, politically unconnected suckers that we are, experience a meager rise in money income (but not in tangible wealth), rising prices will have obliterated the tiny gain.

Debunking The Debt-Default Hoax

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Politics, Reason

David Henderson of EconLog, for the Library of Economics and Liberty, debunks the nonsensical (and irrational) notion that not raising the debt-ceiling will result in the US defaulting on its debt. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner might be as gormless as his boss, since he has confused “debt obligations” with “other expenditures.”

As U.S. Senator Pat Toomey explained, in a January 19 Wall Street Journal op/ed, “the amount of money required to continue to make payments on all the U.S. government debt is a small fraction of the amount of revenue the U.S. government raises.”

Henderson again: “On car payments and student loan and credit card payments, Geithner is right. But on insurance premiums and utility payments, he’s wrong. Those are not typically debt obligations. Geithner is effectively saying that if the government wants to spend x and has only enough money to spend 0.67x, then not spending on the other 0.33x is a failure to keep an obligation. In a political sense, that might be: the government has made a lot of spending promises to a lot of people. But in an economic sense, it’s not. On the narrow issue of whether failure to raise the debt limit would necessarily mean U.S. government default on its debt, Toomey is right and Geithner is wrong.”

UPDATED: ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid’

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Reason, Socialism, Taxation

The following is from my new, WND column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid”:

“How stupid is President Barack Hussein Obama? Let me count the ways.

Judging from the philosophical pose he struck during Wednesday’s “debt-reduction” address, the president is so stupid as to believe that the “rugged individualism,” “self-reliance,” and “healthy skepticism of too much government”—all qualities he attributed to the American people in that speech — can survive in the shadow of his government.

During his two years in office, Mr. Obama has accrued more debt than any president in American history. Why, in the month of March alone, his souped-up civil servants spent eight times what they collected in tax receipts and revenues.

For every year their honcho has been in office, the Obama officials have devoured over a trillion dollars, and will put Americans in hock to the tune of $1 trillion in interest payments alone, by the end of this decade, if not sooner.

How stupid is our president? So stupid as to believe that the governmental juggernaut over which he presides is what connects us a nation, and ensures that “we … do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”

How stupid is Obama? So stupid as to believe that America became a great country in 1935, which is when the earliest of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements was signed into law. Dummy did, after all, declare yesterday that, “We would not be a great country without [these programs]”? …

… But, as Ron White, that great satirist from the great State of Texas, teaches, ‘You can’t fix stupid.’

‘There is not a pill you can take, not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.'”

Read the complete column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE (April 15): An Ivy-League education is increasingly not indicative of intelligence. What with affirmative action, one can hardly assume that Obama’s admission to these institutions bodes well for his IQ. It certainly does nothing of the sort for his wife’s; anyone who has read her graduation thesis will confirm what I’m saying. This effort is written on a high-school level. Obama’s transcripts remain well-concealed. Despite being appointed as an editor for the Harvard Law Review, Obama has never written a serious jouranl article for this publication.

Obama’s easy passage through this country’s finest schools shows just how worthless these once-proud institutions have become, and how worthwhile it is to be a privileged minority. (Or, in the case of Bush, McCain’s mindless daughter, and the likes—to belong to an American political dynasty.)

By the way, I agree that BHO has the cunning of a fox. But that’s a far cry from the brilliance with which he has been credited.