Funny how George W. Bush is now a liberal. John McCain too. Republican Senators Lamar Alexander, Bob Bennett, Tom Coburn, and Saxby Chambliss and many of their supply side brethren. William Buckley's son is voting for a progressive. The Republican Treasury Secretary's more of a socialist, of course. He's really out there. Hell, even the Democrats are moving left.
Yes, good old big government is back. Funny how "conservative" capitalists scurry to the collective when their survival's on the line. Now, they say, we should all hang together. Now, they say, Americans should bail them out. Now, they say, we should all rally to the exchange and the ledger book and the bond rating. Regulation is back in vogue. Centralized economy is the big hit of the fall season.
Supply side manque Ronald Reagan is now a dusty discredited ghost of a failed economic jester, a gimmick-embracing old fool with no understanding of true American values. Sure, Sarah Palin still uses the old reprobate's name - but hell, that tells you something right there, doesn't it. Wink.
No, on the Dow of dead presidents only one stock is rising - that of the true blue chip liberal of the last Great Depression, the political stud named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And let's hope there's a little FDR in the skinny Senator from Illinois, who has his work cut out for him starting in January. The markets are eating their young, destroying their own super-leveraged brand of unregulated capitalism - but the effects will go far beyond the exchanges. Are we ready for double-digit unemployment, shortages, bread lines, Reagan Towns and Bushvilles, and lots of grass growing through highways and parking lots and strip malls filled with empty stores and abandoned automobiles?
On television - which, saints preserve us, might survive to entertain us all in our poverty - the endless pimping of the good life hasn't quite caught up with the economic storm front. Ads for luxury cars, retirement schemes (what a crock "retirement" turned out to be), high-end travel, glorious clothing and beauty products, and - I swear I'm not making this up - financial advisers who counsel a buy-and-hold strategy for "long-term security."
It hasn't sunk in yet, but it's all headed down - the world we knew for the past thirty years is fading away. "Supply side" is the synonym of anti-Americanism. To espouse that failed economic theory is to hate your country; to act on it is treason, soon to be against Federal law. The great deleveraging is here. And we're all liberals now.
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How soon before Paulson calls for the proletariat seizing the country's means of production?
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bush. Has a certain sort of ironic ring to it.
Posted by: Slappy | October 10, 2008 at 09:14 PM
This is nothing new. Corporations have hand their hands in the treasury cookie jar since they were formed. I am surprised you didn't mention Milton Freidman. He was the guru of supply siders for the past 30 odd years. Let's face it, his theories have been totally discredited. But those who follow him are so dedicated, they will advise more of the same to get us out of the mess. I am not so optimistic that they are going away any time soon.
Posted by: Ralph DeMarco | October 11, 2008 at 01:40 AM
A major cause of America's economic decline has been the $700 - $800 billion a year trade deficit. The significance of this deficit is simple but somehow has eluded most intelligent people. As a country, we are living "beyond our means" year in and year out by 6% of our national income. As T. Boone Pickens has pointed out, this results in the greatest transfer of wealth in world history.
The trade deficit cannot be separated from fundamentals of the "real" economy that have metastasized since the Reagan era. These include the "deindustrialization" of the economy, which deprived us of the ability to offer a vast array of products for sale on the international market; the "financialization" of our economy, where the financial services sector takes on a larger and larger role, at the expense of "real" sectors (Kevin Phillips has written eloquently on this issue); the increase in a largely unsustainable military budget; the vast increase in debt in every sector of the economy; and the stark increases in inequality.
The current financial crisis is a reflection of the problems that have mounted over years in the "real" economy. Instead of generating wealth through overall productivity, producing products and services that can be sold on the world market and generating well-paying jobs for Americans, we have relied on increasing amounts of debt ("leverage"), generated in increasingly complex ways, to give the appearance that everything is ok. This resulted in one bubble after another, the most recent and largest being the housing bubble, now bursting and igniting the crisis in the markets and the financial sector. None of these bubbles produced real wealth.
The false prophets of the new economy have told us for decades that we will make up for our inability or unwillingness to offer products for sale with offering "intellectual property" for sale. Let's see how that works out. For example, look at the vast increases in wealth of China as a nation vs. our steady path to impoverishment.
People get confused between the Federal budget deficit and the "current account" or trade deficit. The Federal Budget deficit represents the profit/loss on an annual basis of the Federal govt. The "current account" (trade) deficit represents, more or less, the profit/loss of the COUNTRY. They are related, but the latter is more important and underlying.
As one of many important steps in rebuilding, the government should nationalize General Motors and over a period of five years restructure it so it is a world leader in clean cars.
Posted by: bruce b. | October 12, 2008 at 03:22 PM