Comment Rescue

From Kavips:



Panic buttons often get pushed too early in the final analysis, primarily because they got pushed at all. Doing so, creates a rapid response that changes the course away from what could have happened had that panic reaction never occurred...


Fair enough, I'll agree that's one problem with reading tea leaves. It is, however, foolish to not prepare for the worst.



I think panic is a good thing; For one, I was never a believer in trusting self confidence... I only trust facts...


Except where those facts do not confirm his bias. He posted the other day about how things were going so well on all fronts there was nothing to blog about. If he truly believes that I don't know how we can possibly have a conversation. We're in the worst recession in 70 years, the market is weak and fluctuating, American diplomacy continues to be an abject failure, the oil spill threatens myriad more jobs, wildlife and on and on and on.


And all facts stack up to one conclusion... we need more government... all our problems, 1) wall street...2) health insurance...3) no oversight of BP ...were cause by Republican philosophy....a philosophy that stated, "don't oversee. Let businesses run themselves." For the Republicans to have a chance, even a remote one of winning, that secret, they they are the ones who cause all these problems, can never get out...


More government couldn't have helped any of this. Quite the opposite, it is government that got us into this in the first place.

1. Wall Street's problems were caused by Fannie and Freddie loaning money to people they knew couldn't pay and moreover, forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn't pay. That was not deregulation but misregulation. The loosely regulated hedge funds escaped this mess largely unscathed. Why? They can't count on a bailout like the big banks. The Too Big To Fail banks were counting on a bailout (not unlike the S&L bailouts which started on the Republican's watch) and they got them. Banks have successfully lobbied to get their losses absorbed by taxpayers and gains are kept private. How nice for them. They felt comfortable making insane gambles because they knew they'd be bailed out. Most of them were right. Also remember that it was Bill Clinton who tore down the wall between retail and investment banking. The idea was to give banks more stability as they typically perform as exact opposites in bull and bear markets. (FWIW, I think that was a good idea and I can tell you first hand that two of the Fortune 100 banks I worked for were carried by retail banking in bear years. They may not have had bonuses those years but they didn't have layoffs either)

2. Health insurance problems are caused, again, by regulation. Health care companies cannot compete across state lines which creates intrastate monopolies (like cable companies) both of which are overpriced and need not compete so their customer service is crap. Health care is the most highly regulated industry in the nation. More regulation is not going to improve it. Why are elective medical procedures flourishing? Healthcare, we are told, does not operate the same way as normal markets. Bullshit. It does and the massive growth of elective cosmetic surgery and Lasik and the like are proof. Wal-Mart is staring to put in medical clinics because they can do it better and cheaper than your average doctor's practice.

3. No oversight of BP. Simply not true. They are tightly regulated. This problem is a direct result of the ban on drilling onshore. The supermajors have been forced farther and farther off shore into mile deep ocean to meet the insatiable demand for oil. The Jones Act is preventing appropriate assets from coming to help. The Coast Guard is stopping reclamation vessels with safety inspections. The Dutch offered to help day one and were turned away. Hundreds of miles of booms are sitting in warehouses unused. There is no coordination of the containment and cleanup efforts. All of those unforced errors are government.

This "secret" that Republicans are to blame for all of this is no secret at all. Democrats have been blowing that vuvuzela for years. We've heard nothing but "blame Chimpy McHaliburton Bu$hitler" or "blame Darth Cheney". Blah blah blah, that dog don't hunt no more and the American people are sick of it. You can blame all of this on Republicans all you want but that won't get your friends elected and Keynesian economics is a proven failure. The stimulus that was supposed to lift us out of this mess was nothing but a payoff to government workers and unions.


It becomes harder to keep that secret hidden, once panic sets in on the other side...

That's why 'panic' is definitely a good thing for the American people....


The American people are panicking because they know the trillion dollar tab is going to come due. We're broke and we have lived beyond our means for years. Not just government but personally as well. We bought houses that were overpriced and cars that were leased and had too much credit and on and on. Government was even worse, they spent like crazy. I was sickened by the prescription drug plan. That was senior vote buying bullshit. I was outraged by the trillion dollar "stimulus". I wasn't the only one. That is what begat the Tea Party and may have awakened the sleeping giant of Middle America who has had enough not only of the endless rapacious hunger of government for their money but the ceaseless meddling in every facet of our lives. This far and no further. States are going to rightly be flexing their muscles. California is this close to telling the Feds to go fuck themselves and legalize marajuana. They'd be right to do so. The Federal government has no right to tell the citizens of California whether or not they can legalize this or that drug. I hope they do. I have no dog in the fight. I've never used the stuff and never will. I do, however, want to see the States standing up to the Fed and telling them it's time they took their proper place. That place is as the arbiter between the states and in charge of diplomacy, defense and national trade agreements. They need to stay the hell out of the States' internal affairs.

We're spending almost $12,000 per pupil on public schools. For what?

End Them, Don’t Mend Them | The Weekly Standard: "The Digest of Educational Statistics (read by Monday, there will be a quiz) says inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending increased by 49 percent from 1984 to 2004 and by more than 100 percent from 1970 to 2005.

Bell bottoms and Jerry Rubin hair versus piercings and tattoos—are kids getting smarter? No. National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test scores remained essentially the same from 1970 to 2004. SAT scores in 1970 averaged 537 in reading and 512 in math, and 38 years later the scores were 502 and 515. (More kids are taking SATs, but the nitwit factor can be discounted—scores below 400 have decreased slightly.) American College Testing (ACT) composite scores have increased only slightly from 20.6 (out of 36) in 1990 to 21.1 in 2008. And the extraordinary expense of the D.C. public school system produced a 2007 class of eighth graders in which, according to the NAEP, 12 percent of the students were at or above proficiency in reading and 8�percent were at or above proficiency in math."

Public schools are an abject failure. If you abolished the Department of Education tomorrow nothing would change. If anything, things might get better. All those bureaucrats who have spent their lives in the DOE would have to find real jobs.

I'm not going to go into my whole rant about how many government agencies could be eliminated but the simple fact is we're way way overtaxed and worse than that, we're overregulated. We don't have any respite from the oppressive hand of government. People are fed up and I pray they keep that anger going until we have a government of proper size and scope.

Comments

Hube said…
A thorough thrashing! Nicely done.

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