08.25.10
“May have”
Legal Insurrection on the flawed assumptions and methodology of the CBO report on the stimulus.
08.24.10
Ridiculous, surreal, scary and shameful
I think John Boehner has the right prescription: He calls on the Most Equal Comrade to fire his entire economic team.
08.19.10
The term “unexpected” has lost all chuckle factor
S&P 500, Dow and Nasdaq composite index have each fallen 2 percent so far today.
Jobless claims highest in 9 months.
08.16.10
It requires drawing on one’s inner reserve of real humanity to clean one’s glasses and look squarely at the world
Two pieces appear around the Net this morning that point to a common theme. Kathleen Parker cites a study examining the differences in tuition and academic requirements between Harvard and Lamar University to ask about the real value of elite higher education. Mort Zuckerman looks at the role the dearth of skills relevant to the demands of the hiring marketplace plays in our current demoralizing ecenomic situation.
These times have given me ample opportunity to take a fresh look at a number of considerations, both on the personal level as well as an overall cultural level. I’m an arty guy by nature. My day job is freelance writing, equally divided between arts journalism, business journalism and slice-of-life features – with an occasional opinion column thrown into the mix. I also make some money playing jazz in wine bars, at farmers’ markets and at corporate events, wedding receptions and deck parties. I teach jazz history at the local community college. My occupational profile would not lead to the conclusion that I’m a conservative.
Lately, though, my interest in the very areas in which I’ve immersed myself for the last forty years has lost some steam. I hear about improvisation workshops, or new record labels starting up, or consortiums of musicians, poets, painters and such, and it excites me about as much as the phillips-head screw aisle at Menards. Between the way political correctness, adolescent emotionality, nerdy postmodernism and the need for subsidization have introduced an advanced state of rot to that broad area of human endeavor known as the arts, and the near-total absence of common sense in our society’s discourse about public policy and economics, I have lost the ability to muster excitement for those events and developments which used to occupy the entirity of my attention.
It’s not as if I’m having a road-to-Damascus epiphany that is driving me to apply to engineering school. As I say, my basic orientation as a “creative person” was established about the time Eisenhower was showing Kennedy around the Oval Office.
What I think is happening is that, along with the phenomenon of eighteen-year-olds swelling the enrollment numbers of arts-and-social-change courses and not so much those for analytical geometry, or even American colonial history, art has been so debased, its value so distorted, that it has assumed the status of convenience-store soda pop. It really boils down to the same problem as the dwindling numbers of advanced-science students: no sense that rigor is requisite to a real understanding of the subject matter. Music is now all about learning some chords and “expressing yourself,” rather than learning the major, lydian, mixolydian, harmonic minor, dorian minor, pure minor, lydian dominant, whole-tone, half-diminished and diminished scales, as well as times signatures, clefs and pitch and tone.
As I say, this gets into the realm of the personal for me. What it boils down to is this: For the first time in my life, I’m wondering if I’m a sufficiently serious person. Do I make choices with a proper respect for what is at stake? Is there an opportunity cost to opting for comfort? What indeed makes for a real man? Is it important to move the world as far as possible in the directions of one’s highest notion of the good, or are we to be given an understanding nod for getting tired and letting diversion and small personal pleasures fill more of our hours as we get older?
Such questions have always been around. It just seems that, in light of this summer’s daily relentless stream of dismal economic news, they’ve taken on a fresh relevance. We don’t move off of dead center without something being done differently, without some change in our perspective.
“Reality check” is a hackneyed buzzword, but that’s unfortunate. It’s a fine term, actually. There is after all, such a things as reality, and it ain’t always about unicorns and rainbows.
What, then, is to be done?
08.07.10
A failure by any set of criteria
A sobering IBD editorial, written after the release of today’s jobs figure, on just where we stand in this country.
08.05.10
They cut prices, but still showed dismal numbers
Retailers are having a bad patch.
The overlords are happy about this. Their plan is working.
07.21.10
Here’s where we really are
Markets take a dive on Bernanke’s dour assessment of the economy.
It stares you right in the face
Most days anymore, a glance at the news headline roundup demonstrates that reality connects its own dots for us. If you can’t see a pattern to the developments this morning, for instance, you must be trying not to.
There’s the fact that the Most Equal Comrade will sign the financial-regulation overhaul bill today, injecting exponentially more uncertainty into ourdepressingly shaky economy. The Senate will pass an extension of unemployment benefits paid for by borrowing yet more money. This one is really rich. At his Rose Garden appearance yesterday, MEC had three long-term unemployed people with him. It reminded me of the sick practice of highway beggar families in days of old that would pour acid on one of the children’s arms to evoke pity from passersby. Also, along with breaking records for deficit levels, we’re now breaking records for the duration of subsidized unemployment in this country. And, of course, there’s the sickening fact that all this is unneccesary. This situation could be turned around in a matter of weeks with tax cuts, repeal of FHer-care, NOT signing the financial-regs bill, shutting up about cap-and-trade, and seriously looking at privatizing Social Security.
How much more writing needs to be seen on the wall for even the most denial-besotted citizen to be convinced that this economic malaise is planned? You don’t get where we are through mere inept leadership.
Read. Think. Encourage everyone in your household to read and think. And vote. Your friends and colleagues, too. And forthrightly state everywhere they go what they see.
07.12.10
The mattress economy
Interest rates are super-low, yet houses aren’t selling. Businesses are sitting on piles of cash, yet they’re not hiring. Michael Barone says it’s not too hard to see why this is the case.
07.03.10
Distorting the free market with money we don’t have in the name of an obvious lie
The Most Equal Comrade, deliberately ruining America on a daily basis. Today, the front he acts on is solar panels.
07.01.10
Some Freedom-Haters are admittedly quite intelligent; then again, some of them are just plain idiots
Take Nancy Pelosi, for instance.
06.29.10
From fear to fire
The other day I heard my state’s governor (Mitch Daniels, Indiana) express concern that “this American experiment is at risk.” He’s certainly not the only one forthrightly expressing alarm, and that is alarming in itself – or, rather, should be. The last thing we can afford is to become inured to the growing recognition that America’s existence is in grave peril.
That’s why “So what? Public opinion fluctuates constantly on all manner of issues” is a whistling-past-the-graveyard response to the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index experiencing a ten-point drop in June. This drop covers people’s feelings about the economy’s current state as well as where it will be in six months. Fear is also behind today’s 235-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Another phenomenon that is becoming noted more frequently is left-wing disenchantment with TCM. Although they usually get the prescription wrong for where to go from here, and generally still hold to the belief that TCM has America’s best interests at heart, they are souring on his approach as fast as the rest of us now. Bob Herbert’s NYT column today is a perfect example.
The key going forward is to transmute our fear. The first step is to have genuine, gut-level faith that we can revive the United States of America. I’m not talking about stump-speech platitudes or smiley-face bromides. How this plays itself out in our real-time interactions with each other is conversations about first principles and the things of this life that are precious. Willingness to fight is key as well. If freedom, decency and common sense are precious, we must not be cowed in defending them.
Summer 2010 is only going to get hotter.
06.25.10
As long as lunacy is treated as a legitimate viewpoint, we’ll continue our slide into oblivion
Also, read his link to the post at Zerohedge on exactly where our economy stands – or doesn’t.
06.16.10
It means “make certain things more expensive and thereby distort the free market”
Chris Horner on what The Aquarian Totalitarian means when he says “make green jobs profitable.”
06.14.10
Exposing the “We inherited this mess from W” line of crap by letting someone espousing it run his mouth till he’s completely out of sense
CNN’s Candy Crowley, of all people, while mediating a clash of viewpoints between Mike Pence and James Clyburn, asks Clyburn, “When does the statute of limitations run out on blaming Bush for the current state of the economy?” Clyburn uses his response time to try to make tax cuts look silly, and winds up looking like the silliest ass on the planet as a result. A Freedom-Hater, and not too bright an FHer at that.
I’ll have to zip over to YouTube and see what Mike had to contribute to this circus.
November can’t come fast enough.
06.09.10
Somebody get Madame Secretary some up-to-date briefing papers
The H-Word Creature has been on this kick lately of exhorting various nations, certainly including the US, to raise their taxes. Pretty bizarre on a number of levels. She has recklessly careened into the area of faulty facts, however, by citing Brazil as a model for how high taxes in relation to GDP can turn a country into an economic powerhouse. Turns out, according to her own department’s (that would be State) findings, as well as the CIA World Factbook, it’s the same old story we find everywhere: taxation and regulation are hampering entrepreneurship and driving up the poverty rate in Brazil.
06.08.10
It’s really not rocket science
Great Heritage Foundation article on why the stimulus was a failure. It gets back to the First BN Law of Economics: The money has to come from somewhere. The dollars “injected” into the economy were not newly created wealth. They were merely redistributed dollars. That’s why, as the Heritage piece says, the private sector has gone on strike.
