Reasoning?
What Reasoning?
Have we forgotten how to reason? Or has what we take for reasoning actually become a form of marketing?
That’s the question that came to mind
this morning as I thought about the whole debate about tax policy and
the rich. At hand is the decision whether or not to extend the Bush
tax cuts for the rich or pare them back.
Those who want to retain those tax
breaks -- those who get them -- employ the following reasoning to support their position:
If we tax the rich we are taking away
money from the very people who invest in business enterprises,
startups and, thereby create jobs, they'll stop doing so. Why take
money away from those job creating machines just to give it to the government, which doesn’t
create private sector jobs? And at this moment, when we so desperately need job creation?
That’s their story and they’re
sticking to it. But there you are, that’s their “reasoning,” and
they want us to accept it at face value.
But it’s nonsensical on its face. I
mean, we gave the rich $1.6 trillion in extra dough over the past
decade and what did they do with it? Rather than create jobs the
companies they owned, the ones they purchased with their extra money, and the ones
they started up, boosted profits by shipping existing US jobs to
cheap offshore venues. And with the dough left over, they provided
fuel for the Wall Street derivatives bubble that later cost
additional millions of their workers their jobs and ordinary investors got
to watch their meager nest eggs become significantly more meager.
Oh,
and while the American worker was
down, out of work, and their labor unions neutered, those companies
owned by these rich "job creators" took the opportunity to renege on
pensions their workers had been paying into for their
retirements. The "reasoning" then will sound familiar: if these
companies were saddled
with all those pension obligations they would not be able to
compete in the a globalized economy. Then they'd go bankrupt and all
those workers would lose their
jobs. So, welching on those pensions was, by their "reasoning," a way
to save jobs. Making them pay would be a way to “destroy jobs.”
You know, the old “One move and the sheriff
gets it.” ploy
Now it’s not that the reasoning in an of itself was faulty. Not at all. It worked perfectly, for them. Not so much
for the other 98% of us.
The wealth of the top 2% jumped more
than 10% since the Bush tax cuts went into effect.
A 2009 report by University of
California, Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez concludes that
income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high,
surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression. The paper,
which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented
disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning
economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the
numbers "truly amazing."
The report shows that:
- Income inequality is worse than it has
been since at least 1917.
- The top 1 percent incomes captured
half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007
- In the economic expansion of
2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.
- The average
wage of Americans, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in
the 1970s.
- The minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than
it was in the 1950s.
- On the other hand, billionaires have
never had it better.
So, as I said, their “reasoning”
was spot on -- for them. Now let's look at how giving them that extra
$1.6 trillion in tax cuts worked for the rest of us. This from the US
Census Bureau:
“The U.S. Census Bureau announced
today that real median household income in the United States fell 3.6
percent between 2007 and 2008, from $52,163 to $50,303. This breaks a
string of three years of annual income increases.... The nation's
official poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, up from 12.5
percent in 2007. There were 39.8 million people in poverty in 2008,
up from 37.3 million in 2007.
Meanwhile, the number of people without
health insurance coverage rose from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3
million in 2008, while the percentage remained unchanged at 15.4
percent.
And about all that job creation we were
supposed to get for our money? Well, the official unemployment rate
is 9.6%. But the real rate, the real human suffering, is more like
17%, and growing.
Even those in Congress, the rich got
richer thanks to the Bush tax cuts they voted into law.
Sen. John Kerry, (D-Mass) saw his net worth jump $20 million last year.
Rep.
Jane Harman saw her family fortune jump by $40 million in just the
last year.
Rep. Michael McCaul, (R-Tx) saw his
piggy bank fatten by $25 million this year.
Even House Speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi,
(D-Ca.) saw here net worth jump a healthy $9 million last year.
(The full list of the top 50 richest members of Congress)
No wonder the Bush tax cuts are (yes, I
said “are”, not might) going to be extended before they expire in
January. It has nothing to do with jobs. It has everything to do with
the simple fact that people smart enough to get to Congress or smart
enough to get to the top in business, are not about to vote against
their own interests. (Unlike
the small army of morons they've whipped
up – read Tea Party – to do exactly that... agitate and vote
against their own and their children and grand children's best
interests. They're like a bunch of chickens taking up a collection for
a monument to Col. Sanders.)
So,
ladies and germs, as you listen to
all the "reasoning" behind extending the Bush tax cuts, remember all this.
There's nothing you can do about it. All that democracy
stuff doesn't apply here. But at least feel insulted that they'd
think you are dumb enough to actually believe – after all that's
happened over the last decade – that continuing to under -tax the
rich is just the medicine America needs to revitalize our working and
middle classes.
I mean, who you gonna believe -- them or
your lying eyes?
Can We Talk?
News For Real, Saturaday Aug. 7
I don’t Tweet and I only use Facebook to post things I think will
make people I dislike cringe with envy. So this is the only place I can
get rid of stuff that piles up in my head over week’s time. So, got a
minute? (Oh, BTW, be forewarned: if you’re looking for depth of
analysis, you won’t find it below.)
1)
First to all of you who replied to my email of Friday; yes dears, I do
know the difference in usage between “they’re” and “theirs.” Thanks for
letting me know I screwed up again. I am a careless writer. Daily
I do violence to the english language. So arrest me.
2)
Jesus H. Christ, what the hell is wrong with the Obama’s? I am speaking
of Michelle and No. 1 daughter’s vacationing for a week at a posh
Spanish resort at a cost to American taxpayers of upwards of a couple
of million bucks. (It costs $11,500 AN HOUR to fly Air Force II, then
there are the SEVEN bullet-proof SUVs that had to be shipped over there
for this trip, and the 70 Secret Service agents.. all paid for by us.
Talk about being tone deaf. Michelle’s White House flacks were quick to
reply that she is paying her own personal expenses, like hotel rooms
and meals. But this only made matters more annoying. She is staying at
a palace of a hotel where suites go for up to $6500 A NIGHT and where
she and hers booked 30 ROOMS. Holy stupid, Batman! With millions of
working class Americans living hand to mouth, millions losing the very
roofs over their heads to the banks their tax dollars bailed out, and
the Gulf Coast begging tourists to return, Michelle trots off to Spain
for a high-end vacation! She deserves all the misery she’s going to get
for this trip. And the same goes for hubby who seems to had have no
objection to it. He will. (I’m sure the folks in hard-hit New Orleans
or other Gulf Coast resorts would have loved a piece of that action.)
3)
Hey, look at this! Drought stricken Russia is on fire and Pakistan has
become Water World due to record monsoon rains. The commodities world
is all atwitter with talk of wheat shortages. Welcome to the opening
chapter of mankind’s next chapter: Living with Climate Change -- If We
Can. To those who still believe global warming is a liberal plot, go
tell it to the Russians and Paks.
4)
American men and women are dying in increasing numbers in Afghanistan,
not to protect that artificial democracy, but a guy running that place
who is so corrupt he must be channeling John Gotti. Read all about it.
Seriously Barack, how long are you going to play the sap to this guy?
Or, to paraphrase a young John Kerry: “What would you tell the last GI
to die for this crook?”
5)
Even Alan Greenspan believes congress should simply let all the Bush
tax cuts expire on schedule. But alas, when such a pot of money is up
for grabs, forget good public policy, there’s politics to be played.
Republicans are trying to keep their rich donors happy with the lie
that raising the marginal tax rate on the rich by just four percentage
points will cause them to shut off the trickle-down machine -- which of
course never trickled to begin with. The Dems are equally craven liars
as they are pretending that letting middle class tax cuts expire will
burden the already burdened. But those who are employed are just damn
lucky to be employed, and are likely still employed because of the
money the government borrowed to stimulate the economy in the first
place. So they can and should pay a bit more in appreciation. As for
those who are still unemployed, well they could care less what their
tax rate is because they’ve got no income to be taxed. So, come on you
duplicitous, lying, malingering, triangulating little bastards up there
-- just let the damn tax cuts expire. After all, in case you haven’t
noticed, we have a $14 TRILLION credit card bill that due.
6) Sarah Palin: Ugh. Just writing about that woman causes brain damage. So, nuf said on that.
7) Michael
Steele: May he live long and give more public speeches, like the one in
which he said Hillary Clinton should ride “in the back of the bus.” Is
Michael a DNC mole? Nah. The DNC isn’t that organized. Steele is just
either a freebie or evidence that God is a democrat.
8) Gay
marriage: Can’t everyone just mind their own freakin’ business? Really!
Recently some guy in Japan married a robot. Who cares. (And if any of
you answered, “Well I care,” I suggest you stop worrying what other
people are doing with their lives and get one of your own.)
9)
Google and Verison: Get your grimy, money grubbing hands little off our
bandwidth. If you’re running short of bandwidth, built it and we will
come. But don’t turn the Internet into just another Comcast where you
can divvy up bandwidth on the basis who will pay the most for it. Oh,
and Google… remember your own goddamn company slogan: Do No Evil.
Undermining net neutrality is about as evil as it gets in the digital
age. Got it? Geeezzzzz. Of all people, Google. And I thought Obama was
a disappointment!
10)
Finally this: I am absolutely certain that the copy above is chuck full
of syntax, punctuation and spelling errors. So, to you english majors
and frustrated hall monitors out there, keep it to yourself.
Thanks for letting me get all that off my chest. Have a nice weekend my friends. Steve
Secrets Kill Too
Part Two
"If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied."
Kipling
Much has been said this week about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the WikiLeaks Af/Pak war secret document dump.
Critics claim the exposure will cost lives. Supporters – count me one –
believe that history argues far more convincingly that millions of
lives have been lost because of secrets, that should never have been
kept secret in the first, because they were flawed, wrong or just plain
false. Keeping such secrets meant no one could vet them, no one could
compare them to the facts on the ground guaranteeing that even the most
transparent lies remained unassailable.
So,
for those whining about WikiLeaks spilling the beans on the Af/Pak war
fiasco I say, go ahead, show proof of all the dead informants you have,
And we'll produce historical records proving our contention that some
secrets are more deadly -- FAR more deadly. .
Oh look -- we win.
On your side you have the "possibility" that WikiLeaks might get --
what? -- a few dozen informants killed? On our side we have – oh gawd,
were to begin....Pick a date... pick a war. Here's a complete list. Knock yourself out.
Among
those wars on that list where false secrets played a key role in
getting all kinds of people killed -- unnecessarily – count the
1898 “sinking” of the US battleship, Maine, in Havana Harbor and the so-called Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave President Lyndon Johnson justification for ramping up the Vietnam War and, more recently, the Bush administration's BS WMD.
The 1971 leak of some 5000-pages that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. The leak revealed the utter bankruptcy of logic, morality and truth underlying the prosecution of that war.
Among
the documents leaked was a memo from the Defense Department under
Johnson listing the REAL motivation behind the war:
- 70% - To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.
- 20% - To keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
- 10% - To permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life
- - ALSO - To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.
Anyway,
ya'll know this stuff already. I only mention this because the
WikiLeaks document dump has finally kicked open the doors for an
intelligent and, for the first time, INFORMED debate on the wisdom, or lack thereof, of continuing this madness again. And that debate has begun.
Here
is some must-study materials that build on what we learned this week,
the lies, the deception of us and the willful self-deception of those
who deceive us.
Have a nice weekend.
Steve
__________________
First
a bit of history, just to give you that deja vu feeling as you read the
current stuff. Does any of this sound even remotely familiar? Over 170
years and nothing …. NOTHING... has changed except the faces:
By October
1841 disaffected Afghan tribes were flocking to the support of Dost
Mohammad's son, Muhammad Akbar, in Bamian. Barnes was murdered in
November 1841, and a few days later the commissariat fell into the
hands of the Afghans. Macnaghten, having tried first to bribe and then
to negotiate with the tribal leaders, was killed at a meeting with the
tribal chiefs in December. On January 1, 1842, the British in Kabul and
a number of Afghan chiefs reached an agreement that provided for the
safe exodus of the entire British garrison and its dependents from
Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the British would not wait for an Afghan
escort to be assembled, and theGhilzai
and allied tribes had not been among the 18 chiefs who had signed the
agreement. On January 6 the precipitate retreat by some 4,500 British
and Indian troops with 12,000 camp followers began and, as they
struggled through the snowbound passes, the British were attacked by
Ghilzai warriors. Although a Dr. W. Brydon is usually cited as the only
survivor of the march to Jalalabad (out of more than 15,000 who
undertook the retreat), in fact a few more survived as prisoners and
hostages. Shuja remained in power only a few months and was
assassinated in April 1842.
The
destruction of the British garrison prompted brutal retaliation by the
British against the Afghans and touched off yet another power struggle
among potential rulers of Afghanistan. In the fall of 1842 British
forces from Qandahar and Peshawar entered Kabul long enough to rescue
the British prisoners and burn the great bazaar. All that remained of
the British occupation of Afghanistan was a ruined market and thousands
of dead (one estimate puts the total killed at 20,000). Although the
foreign invasion did give the Afghan tribes a temporary sense of unity
they had lacked before, the accompanying loss of life (one estimate
puts the total killed at 25,000) and property was followed by a
bitterness and resentment of foreign influence that lasted well into
the twentieth century and may have accounted for much of the backlash
against the modernization attempts of later Afghan monarchs.
Source: http://www.afghanan.net/afghanistan/angloafghan1.htm
____________
The huge scale of Pakistan's complicity
The Globe and Mail, July 30, 2010
(Thanks
to WikiLeaks, the involvement of Inter-Services Intelligence in the
Afghan conflict is now obvious, argues Chris Alexander, Canada's former
ambassador to Afghanistan. )
Both
Afghanistan and Pakistan are now in the grip of a single escalating
conflict, punching eastward from Khyber Pakhtunwa (the former Northwest
Frontier Province) into Punjab's heartland, as well as westward toward
Kabul, Kandahar and Kunduz. .. As a direct consequence, reconciliation
has failed to get off the ground: the Pakistan-based Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan – the official name for the Taliban and its allies –
clearly prefer to fight. (Full Article)
_____________
Special Report
'The Sun in the Sky: the relationship between Pakistan's ISI and Afghan insurgents'
June 2010 -- "Taliban
commanders and a wider group of Afghans close to the insurgency believe
that the highest levels of Pakistan's government are actively involved
in protecting and sustaining the insurgency presents a great challenge
to senior Pakistani civilian and military officials to demonstrate
their commitment to reaching a peace settlement." (Full Report)
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier _of_ the Queen!
-- Rudyard Kipling
Too Many Disturbances
in the Force
A couple of years ago I was chatting
with a couple of Realtor acquaintances. I understand the real estate
sales business well, having been a real estate broker myself back in
the late 1970s. Realtor are natural-born optimists. They can find
silver linings in even the darkest economic clouds. When prices soar
they warn would be buyers not to “miss the boat.” When prices
plunge they warn would-be buyers … well, not to “miss the boat.”
So anyway, I was singing my usual
fiscal Chicken Little ditties to these two real estate agents, and
they were clearly not buying any of it.
“I had my best year ever,
last year,” one announced while pointing out her “Top Agent of
the Year” award hanging on the wall behind her. The other chimed in
that "real estate does well if no matter what the stock market does
because, as the saying goes, 'they're not making the stuff anymore.'”
As I said, having been there once
myself, I understood where these two “what me worry?” sales people were coming from. I knew that I was not only wasting my
breath.
So I just shook my head and asked them
if they'd seen the old Star Wars movies, and they had. “Well then,
I said, let me just say this. I understand that real estate has
weathered a lot of economic ups and downs over the past decades. But
this time is different. This time the world's economies are not going
to be just struggling against one 'disturbance in the Force,' but
many disturbances in the Force.. too many at once. This one is different."
And so it came to pass. Or has it? Or
has it just begun?
While everyone is
consumed with the
media's disaster obsession dejur – the ecological holocaust in the Gulf
of Mexico, or the two can't-win-can't-leave wars in the Middle East
-- the world
financial systems continue undergoing what can only be described as a
slow-motion train wreck of breathtakingly historic proportions.
All that's left now is to wait until
this massive pile up exhausts itself. Then, once the dust settles, things will get really
interesting. Something similar happened in 1917 in Russia, though on
a far smaller scale. This time it will be the entire developed
world looking for a new, more equitable, more sustainable economic
model.
I have no idea what
form it will take.
But most of us alive today will find out. My guess is it will be a
blend of free and government managed and regulated market economies.
There
will be a lot of socialism, a smattering of communism and a Renaissance
for small and owner-operated businesses. Local needs, products and
growth will be more
important than national or international. Public transportation will
supersede private. In short, if Tea Baggers hate the current system
what will replace it is gonna drive them even nuttier -- if that's
possible.
But that's just a guess. Between now
and then all we can do as individuals is to stay informed and remain nimble of foot.
Here's more on the same theme.
Steve
Gold’s 30% Surge Puzzles Bernanke,
But Not This Guy
Commentary by William Pesek
June 14 (Bloomberg) -- Alan Greenspan
had his conundrum. Now, Ben Bernanke has his enigma.
The behavior of long-term interest
rates had the former Federal Reserve chairman scratching his head.
It’s gold that puzzles the current Fed chief. Damned if Bernanke
and his fellow central bankers can explain the surge by a metal John
Maynard Keynes once dismissed as a “barbaric relic.”
“I don’t fully understand movements
in the gold price,” Bernanke said on Capitol Hill last week.
That shocks gold bulls like Johann
Santer, managing director at Superfund Financial in Tokyo. And it may
be awful news for the global economy that some investors are surer
than ever that the gold rally is just getting started.
It’s hard to decide what’s more
frightening: that investors are losing confidence in paper money or
that the shepherds of the world’s major currencies don’t get
what’s going on. Gold’s climb of almost 30 percent in a year
reflects fear, not just market concern over inflation or deflation
risks. People have lost trust in the global financial system.
As Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. was
crashing in September 2008, Superfund was loading up on gold. At the
time, Santer got his share of giggles and rolled eyeballs for
predicting gold would rise to $1,500 an ounce over the next two or
three years. With gold around $1,230 an ounce, no one’s laughing
anymore.
‘Black Swans’
There are many reasons why gold is back
in vogue, yet two in particular are worth considering. One is fear
about “black swans,” unexpected events that have great impact.
The second reflects how little gold many central banks in Asia and
elsewhere hold on their balance sheets.
A year ago, the idea of gold hoarding
struck me as odd. It was hard not to view fans of the precious metal
as akin to people standing on street corners with megaphones
predicting apocalypse. The world economy seemed to be on the mend, a
sense of order was returning to markets and doomsayers like Nouriel
Roubini were getting fewer headlines.
Greece’s unraveling was a sobering
reality check. It wasn’t that a fiscally irresponsible economy
smaller than Iran’s was stumbling. It was how, as in the case of
Iceland before it, Greece was cast in the role of canary in the
financial coalmine. European banking shares suggest a Greek debt
default may be just a matter of time.
Contagion’s Return
It was suddenly clear that the
contagion that emanated from the U.S. in 2008 had never really gone
away. Greece’s troubles cast a huge shadow over far more important
economies, like Spain’s. The idea that the 10th biggest economy,
one bigger than Canada’s, might someday renege on debt put an end
to hopes for a smooth 2010.
Perhaps the best explanation of these
all-too-tangible risks comes from Anthony Crescenzi, a strategist at
Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s largest bond-fund
manager. The question is this: As the U.S. is aggressively backing
its financial system, who is backing the U.S.?
Thinking back to the darkest days of
2008, few will quibble with government efforts to stave off
Armageddon. The promise was that if investors tolerated a surge in
debt issuance, capitalism and prosperity would be saved. As fear is
returning to the global economy, the worry is that industrialized
nations are out of ammunition.
‘Keynesian Endpoint’
Have nations reached a “Keynesian
endpoint” as exhausted balance sheets leave policy makers with few
options to bolster growth? We’ve known for years that the Group of
Seven nations were losing their ability to guide markets. Now,
they’re losing hope of shielding economies from them.
As all hell threatens to break lose
anew, are you going to buy stocks? Probably not. Bonds at a time when
no one trusts credit ratings? Doubtful. Euro? Nope. Yen? Risky.
Dollar? For many, the U.S. currency is the least ugly contestant in
this financial beauty contest.
A question here is what central banks
do. Many are sitting on too many dollars for comfort and upping gold
reserves may be the diversification move of choice.
“I believe the biggest customer base
will be Asia,” says Santer. “And if Ben Bernanke doesn’t see
why then we have even more reason to worry about the global economy.”
Gold Grab
South Korea, for example, is the 15th
biggest economy and gold accounts for just 0.2 percent of its total
reserves. If markets remain volatile and the dollar gyrates, it may
be among the Asian nations that move to buy more of the metal.
In November, India surprised markets
with a $6.7 billion purchase from the International Monetary Fund’s
bullion stash. India’s gold grab was the vanguard of central banks
more aggressively diversifying reserves away from U.S. Assets.
It’s not what the Greenspans of the
world envisioned 15 years ago. Back then, warehousing gold bars
seemed a bit retrograde. Central banks had gotten so good at whipping
inflation that paper money was just fine. Fort Knox was no longer
needed.
The post-Lehman world is dispelling
such notions and we may be on the cusp of history’s greatest gold
rush.
Bernanke and his peers would be wise to
contemplate why.
Lie-Of-Month
Well, there she went again:
Palin Claims Obama Would Ban Guns
AP - Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned NRA members Friday that President Barack Obama wants to gut the Second Amendment:
"Don't
doubt for a minute that, if they thought they could get away with it,
they would ban guns and ban ammunition and gut the Second Amendment,"
said Palin, a lifelong NRA member who once had a baby shower at a local
gun range in Alaska.
Before
the reader assumes I'm a shill for anti-gun forces, let me assure,
that's not the case. As a former US Marine I have fired, and even
admired, deadly hardware ranging from handguns to 106 mm
recoilless cannons. And I own firearms – plural. And, I don't believe
the “guvment” should be allowed to summarily show up at my door to “pry
them from my cold, dead hand."
Now that
that's out of the way let me say that little Ms.
Shoots-Small-Animals-from-Helicopter's claims that Obama would “ban
guns and ammunition,” is pure, steaming caribou crap. It's another page
from the Right's Scare-the-Sheep handbook.
What Obama, and any thinking person, would do is treat guns the same way we treat other potentially dangerous objects in our modern world.
 How
about cars? Do cars kill people? Or is it drivers who kill people? Who
cares. The fact of the matter is that cars and those who drive them are
regulated by "guvment," otherwise there'd be a helluva lot more
road-kill out there. Drivers are required to get driver's licenses,
showing they know how to drive. And the cars themselves are regulated,
both for safety and ownership records are kept.
Is all that
a set up for the day when the “guvment” decides that owning a personal
vehicle affords too much personal freedom and "they" come to “pry our
car keys from our cold dead fingers?” Or is it just good government and
good sense?
How about
airplanes? I'm in the process of getting a recreational pilot's
license, and the “guvment” is making me jump through more regulatory
hurdles than anything I've done in life. Good. Very good. Otherwise any Tom, Dick or Harriet would be able to climb into a cockpit and fly over my house -- or yours.
Aircraft and
pilot license regulations are an even more relevant example than auto
registration and driver's licenses. After all, while terrorists use
cars as car bombs, they're usually parked at the time. After 9/11
planes can be considered as deadly projectiles, bullets with brains, if
you would.
I'm new to the world of flying but I can tell you this, you will not find anywhere on this planet a more freedom loving bunch
than pilots. It's the reason they fly – to be free, to be above it all,
to be -- for a short period of time out of reach of “guvment”--
and for that matter, everyone else on the planet. But you won't find
many pilots who'd want the Federal Aviation Administration to lighten
up. Not even a bit.
Both autos
and planes are useful as hell, and dangerous as well. Both are
machines, and therefore prone to imperfections, breakdowns, design and
engineering mistakes (just ask Toyota.) And don't even get me started
on inherent shortcomings of the humans who operate cars and
planes. Which is why while cars, planes and their operators are allowed
-- even encouraged by government -- they are also regulated by
government.
But when it
comes to firearms, this solid, time-proven logic is rejected by gun
freaks and the right wing demagogues who, every election cycle return
to tickle gun freaks paranoia G-spots.
Okay, fine,
I get it. So let's see if we can break this cycle once and for. What if
those of us on the Left cut a deal with the Right on all this personal
freedoms and banning stuff business. Here's my deal:
-We
on the Left guarantee we will never propose any laws banning guns or
ammo or making either guns or ammo burdensomely unavailable.
And, in return,
-Those on
the Right promise to never again propose banning a woman's right to
choose an abortion or make such a choice burdensomely unavailable.
What? Oh get
outta here. Whatya mean they're different? Just how are they different?
The Right claims abortion is murder of the unborn. Why not the same concern for the already born?
The last year I could find for statistics on this was 2004. According to the Centers for Desease Control, that year 29,569 full-term humans were victims of very later-term “abortions” by gunfire – that's 81 a day, everyday, for 365 days. Another 64,389 were wounded by guns that same year or, 179 a day. (Full report)
Don't get me
wrong. I'm not just blowing off those gun deaths, any more than I just
blow off the 35,000 or so folks who die behind the wheel of car every
year, year in and year out. But life is inherently risky business,
always has been, always will be. Risks, even deadly risks, can never be
eliminated, only mitigated.
And mitigation is another word for regulation. Good regulation. Smart regulation. Be it for cars, planes, guns or … dare I say, offshore drilling rigs.
Curse of the Flat Learning Curve
The most depressing thing about getting
older is loss of innocence. I can no longer find comfort in the
belief that “those in-charge” must be smarter than the average
bear.
Not true. Not even close.
Where's my proof? Where's isn't it, is
more to the point. But let me point out just one example.
Smart people learn from their mistakes
and the mistakes of others. Now read the two paragraphs that follow.
One is from the past and one is from the present. I have deleted
identifiers from each:
Quote No. 1
“The condominiums stretched as far as
the camera could see, in two and three floor clusters, maybe 15
units per building. They were separated by stretches of arid, fiat
land. Many were only half-finished shells. Most were abandoned, left
to the ravages of the hot sun. ... the camera zoomed in on building
materials stacked rotting in the desert dust. Loose wiring and shreds
of insulation swayed in the warm, dead, quiet air. Siding had warped,
concrete cracked, windows broken. In many cases only the concrete
slab foundations remained – dubbed by locals, “Martian landing
pads.”
Quote No. 2
“Hundreds of miles inland from the
booming real estate markets of ….... and …. an unlikely
property fever is gripping this middling industrial outpost...Rows of
half-completed apartment buildings rise over former farmland, each
crowned with yellow construction cranes that seem to outnumber trees
in parts of this dusty city of 5 million residents.”
Give up? The first quote is from a book
I co-authored a quarter century ago – Inside Job: The Looting of
America's Savings and Loans. The quote describes hundreds of Texas
condominium units built with easy S&L money, most of which was
never repaid, fueled by Reagan-era thrift deregulation. That money
spawned America's first real housing bubble. Many of the condo's
described were later simply bulldozed as there never was any real
demand for them. That was – until now – the biggest US banking
bust, housing bust since the Great Depression.
Not to beat a dead horse, but clearly
American leaders who went on to create the housing bust of 2008
learned nothing from the 1980's S&L debacle.
But wait. You might be thinking that
the second quote is about that – America's current housing bust.
No. I wish it were that simple.
The second quote is from today's Los
Angeles Times describing China's now-overheated housing market.
“Taxi drivers (in China) boast of
owning multiple flats for investment. Billboards hawk developments
with names such as Villa Glorious and Rich Country. Frenzied crowds
pack sales events with bags of cash, buying units that exist only on
blueprints. Average home values in Hefei soared 50% last
year...China's real estate rush, once confined to a handful of
leading cities, has spilled into the hinterlands with a ferocity
reminiscent of American expansion into exurbs like the Inland Empire.
In
a country that economists say is
treading dangerously close to a full-blown property bubble, Hefei
represents more evidence of China's headlong embrace of housing to
power economic growth."Everyone in Hefei lives with the real estate
industry," said Guo Hongbing, a marketing consultant for several
developers. "You can't escape it."
"The situation in Hefei is a
symbol of the craziness in China's real estate market," said Cao
Jianhai, a professor of economics at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, a government think tank. "Prices in second- and
third-tier cities are increasing more dramatically than in the first
tier. It's very dangerous, and it puts local banks at risk."
Well! So much for the whole myth of
thoughtful, sage-like Mandarin wisdom. And there's nothing
“inscrutable” about any of this either. The Chinese failed – or
just refused – to learn from our two disastrous easy-lending
bubbles. Instead they did exactly what Reagan and Bush Jr. did –
throw open the lending window to any Tom, Dick and Hoo clutching a
roll of blueprints. Like the first dose of crack cocaine, the rush
all that easy money created – in the form of business activity and
jobs – encouraged officials to keep that window wide open in the
hope the rush would go on and on and on forever.
Not to beat an analogy to death, but
easy money, like easy crack, never creates the hoped-for
sustainable “rush.” It only creates dependence on more – more
lending, and more debt. 
It also eventually results in a death
spiral. Easy lending contains the seed of its own destruction,
because it creates surpluses. Surplus housing inevitably, drives
prices lower, and lower. As developers find it hard to sell existing
units at a profit their lenders, now on the hook for millions in
loans, are forced to prop up their loan-addicts with increasingly
larger doses of dough. Over time those developers have to devote
larger and larger portions of those new loans to service earlier
loans on projects developers can't sell because of excess supply --
even as they create more supply.
We know how it ends. And, one would
think the once capitalism-shy Chinese would know how it ends too by
now. How else to explain such self-destructive policies than to
conclude that leaders.. ours, theirs, the ones in Greece and
elsewhere, are not smarter than the average bears. All that separates
them from the rest of us is that they decided running countries would
be fun – oh, and almost always profitable, at least for them personally, at
some point either then or later.
They come and they go – our fearless
leaders. And when they go they always... not sometimes, but always...
leave messes behind the rest of us have to clean up. Sometimes the
clean up requires we open our wallets. Sometimes it means washing
crude oil off dying sea birds. In Ukraine it's a few thousand square
miles of uninhabitable land, farms and cities that for the next few
thousand years will glow in the dark.
I call it the flat learning curve. And
someday it could be the death of us all.
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English Majors: Watch where
you step
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