2004 Candidate Economic Analysis
Posted by Moonage on 02 Sep 2004 | Tagged as: Politics
1. The depreciated US$ is the answer in this debt repayment scenario, a la Germany in 1927-29 (tho NOT to the same extent); couple this with hyper inflation, and you’ve solved the repayments problem externally. You pay off the “creditors” with value-less fiat currency. The cost however is internally, higher interest rates AND depression, decreasing public spending, but without increasing the tax burdens, corporate or personal. That’s what current policy is doing to us right now.
2. It is not in our best interest, at least in the next 10 years or so to “balance the current budget”, I just wanna cut the 445 Billion deficit down to something around 175 Billion or so. At the same time I wanna see “more” products/services produced locally. In place of shipping our jobs and our production wealth overseas, I want to retain, most production if not all of it, here, within the USA.
3. “Free Trade” as currently practiced has been an abysmal failure, wither WTO or NAFTA. This needs to change, and fast. While the US can afford a budget out of balance by about 1.5% of the GDP (11 Trillion), we can NOT afford to couple that with a trade imbalance of 4% (550 Billion) of that same GDP. The credit markets won’t stand for it.
As debt abrogation? Could happen, but it would be the start of WW-IV, which we would lose imho, and so would the EU. You’re correct. The Western mind can NEVER understand enough, or successfully negotiate with the Eastern (Asian) mind.
IMHO, there’s not a “Good Candidate” out there…..not enough in the mid term cycle. So I’m looking for the one, that should imho, do the least amount of damage in the next 4 years.
We already know GWB’s record, and have a good handle on what he will do next. I’ve no wish to continue on this present course.
Nader, a joke still standing……
JFK? Well, he ain’t even close to perfect, but from what I’ve read and see of him, I suspect he’s got a better grasp of the problems then the other two. And that’s a start. Will he solve it? Don’t really think so, we’re in too deep…..but imho, I don’t think/believe that he can make things ANY worse in four years and that’s gotta be good enough for me for the moment, to give the “Ball to Mickie”.
And who knows, he might actually be able to make a few items on my list of horrors, go away for the next neocon Re-pug cycle, to screw up yet again.
SSDD…..I assume y’all know what that means?
So I’ll vote for JFK, to give the other guys the ball for awhile, and see what they can do with it. They can’t possibile do any worse then the “Devil I Know”. It’ll hurt me less in the coming 4 years then continuation of the last 4 years with the current team. Like I said, I know their “play book”, and I don’t like it one damn bit!
Besides, there’s no way we’ll see both a Dem WH & a Dem Congress. Give me a split government ANY day. At least the damage will be minimal. “Beltway lockup”….now there’s a political catch phrase for you.
KBM (still political after all these years)
2 Comments »
on 13 Oct 2004 at 8:02 pm 1.kentm401 said …
Nicked from Mish on the Misheldo’s Board off TMF….he gave aggregate permission to use his stuff.
This is a Northern Trust economic report regarding the “controversy” surrounding my own least favorite economics commentator….”Larry Kudlow”, of CNBC and of “Kudlow & Cramer”, same channel.
The “differences of opinion” to be kind about it, are striking!
So without further ado……the piece…
Notes: It’s a pdf file so be ready for it.
Kentm401
“Author: Misheldo Number: of 119950
Subject: Let The Facts Speak For Themselves, Mr. Kudlow Date: 10/13/04 7:44 PM
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Let The Facts Speak For Themselves, Mr. Kudlow
[The Northern Trust Blasts Bush's Job record and economic expansion - Mish]
http://www.northerntrust.com/library/econ_research/daily/us/dd101304.pdf
Mish”
on 14 Oct 2004 at 12:10 pm 2.kentm401 said …
Author: kentm401
Subject: Re: Façade Date: 10/14/04 9:01 AM
Thinking Forward
Just read an interesting article in “Time” magazine today (Forward Thinking by Lev Grossman) that got me into thinking about the future.
I’ll quote the opening paragraph that started all this:
“There’s nothing like the passage of time to make the world’s smartest people look like complete idiots.”
“Albert Einstein remarked in 1932 that there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.”
“Thomas Edison thought that alternating current would be a waste of time.”
“Franklin D Roosevelt once predicted, when he was assistant Secretary of the Navy, that airplanes would never be useful in battle against a fleet of ships.”
“In 1883 Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society and no mean scientist himself, predicted that X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”
“In 1938 Gary Cooper turned down the “Rhett Butler” role in “Gone with the Wind”, and is said to have remarked, I’m just glad it will be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face, and not Gary Cooper.”
“Everything that can be invented, has been invented, announced Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the US Patents Office, in 1899.”
“And in 1966 Coco Chanel said, on the mini-skirt: It’s a bad joke that won’t last. Not with winter coming.”
So, if history repeats, why is predicting the future so damn difficult? Shouldn’t the future be “more of the same”, over and over again? Like a “one-way flow of time”? Do we not, (the editorial we), “look at the present, and see the present, in the future”?
Well, in a word, yes!
But is that correct? Is it even reasonable to predict the future course of events based on our “understanding of the ebb and flow of the history of our own experiences”?
Humans, by nature, tend to “gamble” on the odds of “events over-taking predictions.” But were not stupid. Rather we’re “odds makers”. We want to know what the odds are of a specific event happening to us, or around us, in-spite of us. And we “place those bets”; based on our own understanding (and experiences) of history, in the sciences, in the arts, in politics, in everything we “know to be true”.
BUT IS IT? True I mean. Are we extrapolating the “past” into the future, and not allowing for variations and events, akin to “Occam’s Razor”? Are we “placing our bets”, without really knowing the odds? And the “odds” are unknowable, and un-calculable at best.
Take the election this year. All of us, it would seem, base our political perspectives on what we “know”, or rather think we know, of each candidate’s history. We base our decisions on “the record”, as if that record means anything at all, to the future course of events. How do we “know” what Mr. Kerry’s response would be to another 9-11 type event, or, Mr. Bush’s response for that matter? And what in the world gives us the perception that there will ever be another 9-11 type event anyway? When history has shown us over the last 10 years that the terrorist threat mutates each time into something new and different and often, un-imaginable in it’s scope.
Alan Greenspan is my own favorite “prognosticator in chief”. Though-out his career, lasting 4 decades; he has been seen to “hold his finger up in the air, trying to divine the economic future of the Nation”. Economy up, economy down, raise rates, lower rates, stock market up, markets down, fortunes have been made and lost on Mr. Greenspan’s “judgment” and decisions over that 40 plus years. But what IS his method? Is he a prognosticator or a futurist? Can we trust him tomorrow, knowing the history of yesterday?
Mr. Greenspan once told the Senate Banking Committee that his priority “Was understanding the many sources of risk….quantifying them…..and assessing the costs associated with each.” Which to my mind, places Mr. Greenspan in the “odds maker” category, if not a “bookie”, taking bets and issuing “odds” that we market players (aka gamblers) can play with.
And so back to politics:
ALL of us, me included, are subject to staking out our own political positions on “personal histories”. All of us, extrapolate, history, in the case of the two candidates at issue into the coming four years.
But who can say, that the coming next four years will be “like the last four years”, or twenty years for that matter? Does it really matter what happened to each, in 1969, or 1972, or 2001?
We are “placing a bet” assessing the odds and picking a candidate to support as if we knew what was going to happen in the next years and we can not know can not predict the future it is just not possible in the normal course of human events
And so it goes: “Sometimes the simplist explanation is the correct one.”
KBM (thinking out of the box)