Bush Book Gives Advice On How To Grow American Economy – This Is Not Satire
Straight from the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-a-story-from-The-Onion file, George W. Bush has written the foreword to a new book being released today titled, The 4 Percent Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs. The book is co-authored by a roster of second-rate voodoo economists with supply-side axes to grind in the wake of a Bush-assisted economic disaster of epic proportions. The fact that such a text exists is mind-boggling, but who knows? Maybe there’s a market out there for books that inherently carry giant amounts of irony. In which case, Bush’s next project could be a dissertation on how to win the war in Afghanistan.
via George W. Bush Book Gives Advice On How To Grow American Economy This Is Not Satire.
Banks Seen Dangerous Defying Obama’s Too-Big-to-Fail Move – Bloomberg
Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy, sparking concern that trouble at a major bank would rock the financial system and force the government to step in as it did in 2008 with the Fed-assisted rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. by JPMorgan and with Citigroup and Bank of America after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history.
“Market participants believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact,” said Gary Stern, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
via Banks Seen Dangerous Defying Obama’s Too-Big-to-Fail Move – Bloomberg.
The Corruption of America
…our governments nominal GDP figures are greatly influenced by inflation. The influence of inflation is particularly pernicious in GDP studies. You see, inflation, which actually reduces our standard of living, drives up the amount of nominal GDP. So it creates the appearance of a wealthier country… while the nation is actually getting poorer.
The only real way to accurately measure per-capita GDP is to build our own model. The need to build our own tools tells you something important – the government doesnt want anyone to know the answer to this question. It could easily publish data far more accurate than the indexes it puts out. But government doesnt want anyone to know. And it wants to be able to say “those arent the real data” when studies like ours produce bad news.
Oliver Stone on Ron Paul
“There’s no way that we can continue this spending spree. In fact, I think in many ways the most interesting candidate – I’d even vote for him if he was running against Obama – is Ron Paul. Because he’s the only one of anybody who’s saying anything intelligent about the future of the world,” says Oliver Stone in an interview with RockCellar Magazine. Read the whole interview here.
Solving the deficit problem is a matter of incentive
Warren Buffett illustrates that the problem can be solved, it’s just a matter of incentive from the people who are in charge.
“I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than three percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Yeah, yeah, now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right? (Laughs)
So, it’s capable of being done. And they’re trying to use the incentive now that we’re going to blow your brains out, America, in terms of your debt-worthiness over time. And that’s being used as a threat. A more effective threat would be just to say, ‘If you guys can’t get it done, we’ll get some other guys to get it done.’”
via Warren Buffett’s 5-Minute Plan to Fix the Deficit – CNBC.
Congress Cuts A Fingernail
In a historic and shocking dedication to the Constitution and fiscal sanity, the 2011 budget plan that Congress will soon vote on will contain cuts to the archipelago of military bases straddling the globe, the occupations of foreign countries, nuclear weapons, corporate welfare, and the NSA, DEA, EPA, ATF, IRS, FBI, and all the alphabet-soup monsters of exploitation, spying, and theft that bury us and future generations in unsustainable debt. Not only are these programs unconstitutional, they are antithetical to a free society.
Oh wait, I must have read the story wrong; in bipartisan beauty, Congress will be cutting $352 million. If you’re doing the math, that’s 1/40,000 of the federal debt.
Out of the inconceivable amount of money that the US Leviathan has swallowed up and is currently devouring on a daily basis as the largest criminal syndicate that has ever existed, these cuts are akin to cutting the fingernail off a monster.
Barack Obama is the most pro-war president in decades
After getting the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama has gone on to become the most financially supportive president of war.
I should’ve listened when they said “hope is not a strategy.”