economy

How Lucky Can We Get?

February 27, 2009

Someone asked me a question this morning in the locker room of the YMCA. As I was responding, someone else chimed in that the cause of all of our economic problems was that FDR had abandoned the gold standard. I tried to come up with as humorous a retort as I could that early. It […]

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Let Them Eat Cake

February 5, 2009

Have you watched television lately? A survey showed that the economic do-dos have received more than twice the air time on news shows as those who have advanced to at least the early 20th Century. Watching these twits I sometimes find myself laughing, until I remember how much power they have to screw up any […]

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GOP Missed The HMS Beagle

February 2, 2009

Do something. If it doesn’t work, do something else. No idea is too crazy. Jim Hightower There are social conservatives. There are national security conservatives. There are fiscal conservatives. There are ideologues who call themselves conservative but are really either lemmings or traitors. For those who might not remember everything they learned in their ninth-grade […]

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Wall Street Is Dissing You

January 13, 2009

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. – Samuel Johnson Saving America is decidedly not a priority of Wall Street. That sentence has an intentional ambiguity. America is widely famous for having the lowest savings rate in the developed world. Why? The reason is shoved in our face with some regularity. The problem is […]

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Bury Reagan

December 15, 2008

Many will consider this post sacrilegious. They are merely the deluded, the Kool-Aid drinkers. Reaganism has become a religion. Let me be the bearer of bad news. Reagan is dead. Every Republican candidate for president in the recent campaign tried to outdo his rivals in their claims to the mantle of St. Ronny. Now congressmen […]

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Guess Again

November 17, 2008

Are you getting a little dizzy? I think Hank Paulson was sober at his little press conference but I could be mistaken. Sober or stoned, it doesn’t really matter. He will hold another press conference as soon as he hears another ‘solution.’ The ‘Smartest Man in Washington’ has changed his mind again. Of course that […]

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Missing in Action

November 11, 2008

Strange Bedfellows. A major battle has been going on and we didn’t even realize it. And coming to the rescue is that card-carrying member of the opposition: Bloomberg News. Who woulda thunk it? Bloomberg News has filed both a request under the Freedom Of Information Act and a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve. The issue […]

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The Worst is Yet to Come

November 5, 2008

We’ve been sitting around stunned by the financial crisis. What to do? We don’t trust the experts, and rightly so. They lurch from one answer to another. There is little confidence that they are doing anything more than thrashing around, grasping at straws. Actually, since their starting point is their religious belief in a simplistic […]

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Get Real

September 24, 2008

Well, here comes another defense of the indefensible. No. Not from me. It is the subject, the target of my post. I wish I could remember when I first found the limits, the real limits of ideology. Was it difficult? Since I did it so long ago, it probably wasn’t that deeply ingrained. I imagine […]

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Responding to the Financial 9-11

September 22, 2008

Did we learn anything from 9-11? Apparently not. Here we are in a financial 9-11 and everyone in Washington is reacting the same way. Is it possible that future candidates will wish they had refused to join the herd? Will they say that they voted for it but now are against it? All of a […]

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