22 thoughts on “As The Euro Collapses”

  1. The US national debt exceeded $15 trillion last week. The Eurozone is in serious trouble. China has issues of its own. It seems the global political class has spent itself in bankrupsy while buying votes and enriching itself and their cronies.

    This isn’t going to end well.

      1. Those budget surplusses under Clinton (no small thanks to the Republicans who controlled Congress and forced him into balancing the budget, BTW) were also examples of typical government shell game accounting. The national debt still increased every one of those years when the budget was in surplus. That’s because they used accounting tricks, such as borrowing excess Social Security tax collections (replacing them with Treasury Note IOUs) to balance the general budget. Any corporation that did that would be shut down for accounting fraud but the government doesn’t have to live by the rules it writes for everyone else.

        The tax cut during wartime was to stimulate the economy after the double hits of the Dot-Com bust and the aftereffects of the 9/11 attacks.

        1. Yes, you have the radical right Republican myths down pat. Pity they don’t agree with what the folks who were there, like Alan Greenspan, describe in their autobiographies. But then we all know Ayn Rand’s favorite economist is a back slider 🙂

          BTW for a great book that outlines how the Republicans became so radical that Presidents like Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower wouldn’t recognize their party I recommend

          The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America

          by Jonathan Chait

          http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003IWYL4S/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0385495382&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1ZHKZAQ1SZYYNS3PGNT9

          It documents well how the baby boom generation got brain washed by some clever folks on K street looking to enrich themselves.

          I know the Tea Party folks will close their ears to it, but for the rest its very enlightening book. And buying it through Rand’s site will help him 🙂

          1. Hey, look at that, Matula is now an advertising spam bot. Anyday now, he’ll be providing as advice ED treatments he uses.

          2. And you’re still a moron whose political insight is rather limited. Still finding Birchers under every Tea Party napkin?

      2. Wasn’t that surplus also a projection based on estimates of tax revenues that turned out not to be so accurate with the dot com bubble burst and the recession in 2000?

        People were mocked by Futurama for buying stock in Amazon and losing money. Kinda strange watching those reruns today.

      3. Its amazing how a tax cut during wartime, to buy conservative support, was able to steal the economic future of America.

        That explanation doesn’t make sense and doesn’t explain what actually did happen. For example, the Bush tax cuts didn’t lead to the financial crisis. They didn’t force Obama to run up trillion dollar deficits for three years in a row or implement business-hostile policies.

        1. Actually they did in that the deceits are a consequence of the crash from the bubble that President Bush created with them and his bailout of the Banks under TARP.

          But then I am not surprised as the radical right also blames the Depression of President Roosevelt instead of Presidents Hoover and Coolidge who enable a similar bubble to be created in the 1920’s.

          2. the radical right also blames the Depression of President Roosevelt instead of Presidents Hoover and Coolidge who enable a similar bubble to be created in the 1920′s.

            What new lunacy is this? Hoover created the Depression, Roosevelt prolonged it.

          3. And Hoover created the Depression by trying to fight a deficit caused by a recession with massive tax increases aimed at the rich, which is not exactly a Republican plank these days. The DNC, on the other hand, are really keen to go for Hoover 2.0

          5. Actually they did in that the deceits are a consequence of the crash from the bubble that President Bush created with them and his bailout of the Banks under TARP.

            So that explanation explains FY 2009, maybe (though I see no connection between the tax cuts and the bubble/TARP). How do you explain subsequent budget shortfalls? Or FY 2012 for that matter. I’ll be very surprised, if the budget is only a trillion dollars in the red.

            My view is that you haven’t though this through.

        2. Rand,

          Yes, I forget. The Republican Right has thrown President Hoover under the bus so they would not have to explain why his policies of mass deportations of illegal immigrants and cutting taxes, policies they now advocate to “fix” the economy, failed to prevent the Crash of 1929 into turning into the Depression. Instead they focus on programs he started LATE in his administration out of frustration as the cause of something that happen when in was only in office a few months…

          1. Thomas, are we on the same planet? Hoover didn’t cut taxes, he increased the tax rate of the top bracket from 25% to 63%. He increased corporate taxes. He doubled estate taxes. He massively increased tarriffs by signing Smoot-Hawley to “protect American jobs.” He sided with labor instead of business. He was a proud progressive.

            He didn’t do anything significant prior to the crash of 1929, as he was sworn in on March 4, 1929 and the market crashed that October. Yet during the first year after the crash, before many of his fixes, we had largely recovered from the crash, with unemployment dropping back to 6.3%, lower than it’s ever been under Obama.

            If Democrats disagreed with any of Hoover’s policies, why did FDR double down on them?

          2. George,

            You must be on the Tea Party Planet.

            What you are referring to is the Tax Revenue Act of 1932, passed during the LAST year of the Hoover Administration. President Hoover was an engineer. After spending years doing what business recommended he do to solve the Depression (protect domestic industries, keep taxes at the low level of the Coolidge Administration, don’t providing public relief nor bailing states out so workers would be glad to take lower wages, begging business and banks to work together to create jobs) he realized that those policies weren’t working and were only making things worst. So like a good engineer he tried new solutions, like the TVA, Hoover Dam, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But it was too little, too late, not only to win re-election but to reverse the Depression the Coolidge Administration had created with lax regulation and business policies.

  2. It sort of takes the steam out of the look how well Europe is doing argument in defense of Democrat aspirations.

  3. When did we recover from the last recession?

    On another point of economic troubles, it is =going= to be painful for the dependent class. I see no way to avoid that. The question is how much pain is imposed on the productive class, which will rebound as more pain on the dependent class when the economy further stumbles.

    1. Not saying it will happen here (and not saying it won’t), but that’s the point where your typical Communists will begin ruthlessly confiscating from the “haves”, which they term “hoarders”.

      1. Let them try and ruthlessly confiscate from me. To quote one of my favorite Westerns: Buzzards gotta eat, same as the worms.

  4. And I can still remember being told how crazy we were for not wanting to be more like Europe. Sadly, what the press isn’t saying is how much of this collapse is because European production can’t pay for European social programs.

    The US may not be able to add much to its gold reserves, but we have plenty of untapped minerals to prop up our economy. All we need is a President interested in our economy.

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