printStreamed into American living rooms, almost hourly, is an ad with MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow. In the ad, Maddow, whose version of a tinfoil hat is the hardhat, has taken up a position at the foot of the Hoover Dam. Face turned upwards, with childlike faith, she seems to be expressing hope that money will fall like manna from the DC heavens, and that the government will build another such giant dam. Rumor has it that the Messiah will deliver. Mañana.
More to the point, the American cognoscenti, monetary movers-and shakers included, are agreed: The make-work projects of a bankrupt government can cure a country’s economy. Perhaps they don’t know that the money to make work is either stolen (taxed), printed (theft by stealth), or borrowed (fraud if you can’t pay it back).
Among these people a consensus exists: National bankruptcy could never befall the US, because it has a printing press—a paper Pantheon where magic money is manufactured. And we are all expected to believe, based on the divination of the animal spirits, that an abundance of paper, and not production, will produce prosperity.
No less a moocher than the Greek Finance Minister seems to understand that to fix his country’s finances he must privatize industries, cut public-sector wages, and implement a range of labor-market reforms.
He gets it, but not Rachel Maddow. She’s waiting for BHO to deliver. Tomorrow.
UPDATE (Sept. 8): BUNK OBAMA. Please don’t expect a run-down of Zero’s latest plan to spend more money without incurring any more debt. That’s the administration’s claim for its latest political shenanigans.
I’ll be bunking Barack’s speech.
“Illinois Republican Rep. Joe Walsh was the first to announce his intentional absence last week, saying he didn’t want to act as a ‘prop’ for Obama’s speech.” Others have followed, including Ron Paul, who had set the precedent for skipping presidential extravaganzas.
How low have we fallen: The White House is touting
an enhanced live stream with charts, graphs, and quick stats at WhiteHouse.gov/live.” Yippee. ONLY NEXT WEEK will the president divulge how he intends to pay for the purported $400 billion in deficit-spending he will be proposing, shortly.
If the guy meant business, he’d repeal ObamaCare and all the thousands of pages of other regulation he has signed into law since his pox-full presidency began. He’d adopt flat, very LOW, corporate and individual tax rates. And he’d stop stimulating his package in public. It’s obscene.
Not too long ago Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe’s minister of finance, aimed a snide remark at the US treasury along the lines of “they warned us not to keep printing money because it would cause runaway inflation, yet now they are doing exactly that”. I can’t remember the rest of it, nor the context, but it is pretty dire when Zimbabwe’s minister of finance seems to have more sense than you.
Ilana, I believe it would be less costly, more quickly constructed, and more practical if private corporations would simply move all manufacturing onto the MOON. (See “THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS” by Heinlein.)
Here, on Earth, private industry faces the alphabet-soup of regulatory agencies, greenie-weenies who hate everything man makes, marauding politicians who will not approve anything unless the “proper amount of donations” has been deposited, and the usual sycophants who demand “equality” of employment regardless of education and skill qualifications.
Ms. Maddow should know that Japan has been building roads to nowhere for nearly 20 yrs – still stagnating! However, she should acknowledge that the HOOVER DAM was completed 2 years ahead of schedule…it’s been 10 years and the WTC is not yet completed.
I bet that neither BHO or Maddow know which end of a shovel is the “working end” and that neither of those two would be able to price a trench digging project of a 25 foot run.
Ya, manna, yo mamma! Manana!
It’s a shortsighted world without visionaries that takes its cues from history, human nature/action and remains enslaved to the basic laws of economics. Ms. Maddow is chump change as a visionary. Going beyond broken down broken windows theories here is JJ Jr. a thinker and problem solver for the ages – and “one of these days we’re going to get there” – and it’ll be Constitutional!
As normal, Obama is following in FDR’s footsteps, The Conservation Corps will only differ is that instead of labor camps, we have Union Camps. Get a book on the FDR years and you can predict the Obama administration’s next steps. The Socialist doctrine knows no deviation from past failures to future failures.
Yes! We can’t just blame people like Maddow for the “spend ourselves rich” theory, though. Most professional economists still talk this way – though, as far as I know, it has never worked.
She’s a sycophantic buffoon and a buffoonish sycophant.
If she wants to know more about crappy infrastructure and lousy public works, then she need look no farther than the Washington, D.C. Metro system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_DC_subway_crash
The same registered Democrats who voted the Magic Mulatto into office are the same morons who run the D.C. Metro.
No amount of our tax dollars can fix the D.C. Metro as long as registered Democrats are running it.
Ditto for the infrastructure of the Republic.
Obama has a priority in saving a Washington job – his.
As for INFLATION, Ron Paul’s comment in last night’s debate that a gallon of gas can be bought for a (silver) dime just shows he is “wacky” according to the mainstream media booboisie (a Mencken term of endearment) who have no concept of inflationary economics (or anything else):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/ron-paul-hi-ho-silver/2011/03/04/gIQAai9TCK_blog.html?hpid=z2
That idiot LANE should know that silver dimes lasted until 1965 – not just the 18th Century. In fact, we used to have LIBERTY on the dime until LIBERTY got replaced by FDR (figuratively, symbolically, and literally!):
http://www.usmint.gov/kids/coinnews/circulating/10centcoin.cfm
As for Presidents speaking to Congress, Jefferson ended to odious practice which reminded him of monarchy until it was revised by Woodrow Wilson (our worst significant president)
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/sou.php#axzz1XP8a6rIF
But, like Senator Vitter, I am all psyched for tonight. The New Orleans Saints are playing the Green Bay Packers. Meanwhile, it is raining like hell here in D.C. while our Teleprompter Messiah, “savior of jobs, hope, and change”, puts nearly 500 Congressional attendees into a deep snooze.
“Stop stimulating in public. It’s obscene” has to be one of the best lines ever.