Sloganomics, not Economics!

Winning American elections is not about who has the better understanding or the better intellect or the better argument, It is about who has the better slogans.  Period.

"The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production."

Sez who?  Larry Kudlow, Phil Gramm or some other so-called economist from the right as they mechanically spout off their simplistic, one-sided and predictable view of the world?

No, according to an NY Times Magazine article by David Leonhardt (to be published Sunday), it is our presumptive nominee.  Senator Barack Obama.

My jaw dropped at first when I read that quote.  But one should not be so surprised.  

Since at least the onset of his current campaign, Obama has always come across as a pragmatist who would occasionally bow down to the almighty market.  "My core economic theory is pragmatism ... figuring out what works," he is quoted as saying early in this piece.  

His exposure to University of Chicago dogma (while teaching law there) was a big influence, and there could be a justifiable concern that such ideology has tainted his overall views.

But fear not.  There are many reassuring passages in this article.

There are apparently some liberals, and some Democrats, and some independents out there, who claim that the media is not only not "liberally biased," but that it in general slants its coverage in order to make the facts come across as less biased to the right and far right. (Most often accomplished, so this claim goes, by largely ignoring or glossing over them, but other times, by miscontruing them or simply parroting misleading arguments with little objective context.)

I recently posted the latest numbers showing the horrific 30-year rise in the federal debt caused by the wondrous Reagan Revolution (with only a brief respite under Clinton)—a debt built on the apparent belief among so-called conservatives that we can borrow and spend our way to prosperity.

It went from 34% of GDP in 1980 to nearly 70% today. Graph here.

McCain doesn't just want to continue that decades-long decline. The man who Republicans want as president wants to hit the accelerator on the way off the cliff.

The numbers are below the fold.

I've gotten tired of explaining why supply-side economics -- i.e., voodoo economics -- don't actually work. So I've decided to write up a quick-and-dirty version that I can just link to as necessary. This is not meant to be a definitive statement on the subject. It's not even an air-tight argument of the principles being espoused. It's just me pointing at some pretty fundamental absurdities in voodoo economics and saying, "Hey! Look! Have you even thought about this? It doesn't make any sense!"

You are going to have to do it yourself.

  The one thing I've consistently seen on the progressive web sites whenever someone points out an economic problem is an attitude of, "Just wait until Obama gets in. Then he'll fix this."

 This is delusional thinking! It's as bad as the mindless, head nodding of the Republicans when Bush told them that people hated America "because of our freedom."
 For instance, there is talk of a "New New Deal". Obama is promising universal health care.

Where exactly is this money going to come from?
  First of all, we need to get a grip on what we are facing.

If you're a good, right-thinking Republican, you have to at least pay lip service to the idea that there was a Golden Age in America, and it was back before FDR and Social Security and income taxes and gummint bureaucracies. If we could only return to those days, the story goes, our problems would magically dissolve away and we'd be back in some kind of pre-fall Eden. Everyone would work hard and not whine about being exploited victims, and we'd have no need for a socialistic safety net. We'd all be free, free, FREE! to enjoy the fruits of our own labor, and taxes would be really, really low.

Well, we know that this "Golden Age" never really happened, but the myth persists. And many people seem to believe that something like it could happen, if only, as St. Reagan said, the damn government would just get off our backs.

Sadly, it's all a pipe dream, and I can prove it. All it takes is a little simple math. The bottom line? It's the population, stupid.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until the chaos and economic implosion came home.

Mr. Janus and I had been doing fairly well in our respective jobs.  For the past few months I was aggressively paying down my credit cards, and I was feeling lucky we were in that situation as the for sale signs went up in our neighborhood.

Well, yesterday, the economic disaster just got personal.

How could a rightwing, economic moron turn gas prices into a wedge in his favor?

This post will go into why he is, and our friend over at 538 has a new article on precisely that topic.

A Government Accountability Office study due to be released today says that two thirds of US corporations and about 68% of foreign corporations doing business in the United States completely avoided any corporate income taxes between 1998 and 2005.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren't paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

Link to article

"The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower becomes the lender's slave."
 - Proverbs 22:7 New American Standard Bible

  On the night of July 12, Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Daniel Mudd was having a quiet night with his wife and a glass of wine when his phone rang. The person calling was Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and he was very worried.
  Fannie Mae, the biggest mortgage finance company in the history of the world, was in trouble. It's stock prices had dropped 45% since the start of the year. It's borrowing costs were rising as creditors became worried about the chances of Fannie Mae defaulting on its debt. "We're trying to solve a crisis of confidence," Paulson told Mudd after he explained the taxpayer bailout designed by the Bush Administration. "Would this do it?"

  It seems that Paulson's boss had called him just a few hours earlier and explained in no uncertain terms that America was in for an economic nightmare if the American taxpayer didn't backstop Fannie Mae.

  The problem was his boss in this case wasn't President Bush.
It was China.

Barack Obama's new policy of hitting McCain on local issues in battleground states is starting to come to full life.  First there was the DHL Job Losses in Ohio.  Next was his ad on Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Now we come to Wisconsin and the issue of...Harleys?!  That's right, Obama is taking on McCain with a new radio ad that uses one of McCain's quotes from the Sturgis Festival and turns it against him by painting him as anti-trade and anti-American industry (Harley-Davidson, of course, based in Wisconsin):

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (transcript below)

I would like to contribute so many findings (especially on the financial front) but gee whiz I just have no momentum.

The internet is frozen.
For some reason.
I wonder why that would happen.

I wonder why...

In reviewing the donations of ExxonMobil employees to the ongoing presidential campaign, I came across an interesting tidbit.  Obama has received more donations from Exxon employees than McCain.  He's raised more from the employees of every other major oil company as well.  Now, in and of itself, that is neither surprising nor cause for accusation against Obama.  Since an employee of an oil company is still a free citizen, and since Obama's entire fundraising operation has been geared to draw a high volume of small donations from such citizens, it stands to reason that Obama would be outraising McCain amongst the employees of any company.  Furthermore, Obama doesn't seem to have any sorts of problems with suspicious bundlers of oil co. employee money, which McCain certainly does.  As far as I'm concerned, that issue is a non-starter.

Join me below the fold for what may be a more substantive criticism.

It's a laugher, I gotta say. McCain starts off with the "celebrity" stuff again, but this time with a twist...Obama can't help you with your economic condition because his policies will hurt the economy.  Damn celebrities and all that.

First, the ad.  Click here to watch and check out around the thirteen second mark.

Transcription of the offending portion:

(Pics of Obama)

NARRATOR: Is the biggest celebrity in the world ready to help your family?

The real Obama promises higher taxes and more government spending.

So...fewer jobs.

August 6, 1945 was the horrible dawn of the atomic age at Hiroshima.

It's also the less well-known debut of an equally iconic, equally American killing technology:  the electric chair, which claimed its first victim on August 6, 1890 in New York's Auburn Prison.

This weird hybrid of penal reformism, naive techno-optimism and cutthroat corporate competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse made a nauseating botch of its maiden usage upon the person of otherwise obscure wife-murderer William Kemmler.

Cross-posted from Executed Today

Being a former Secretary of Labor, you don't get as much attention as former Treasury Secretaries or Fed Chairmen when it comes to economic matters.

But Robert Reich should.  In fact, the labor market is precisely the perspective we should bring to our present economic condition.  He wrote an excellent post recently summarizing, in very accessible, clear language, the major theme driving the various economic uncertainties people are facing in our country.

Sean Hannity, the elitist Republican snob just like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, pretends to promote an image of his upbringing that is quite different from reality.  The phony narrative goes like this.  

Sean Hannity grew up dirt poor, couldn't afford anything, dropped out of college 3 times because he had no money.  Hannity claims he was a Dean's list student earning almost all As who left NYU after a socialist professor gave him a C because he spoke out in favor of Ronald Reagan after Hannity was getting As the entire time throughout the class.  Hannity claims that he had to scrape by painting houses in Rhode Island and could barely afford a $200 car. He claims he worked construction in Santa Barbara where he was fired from a radio station because of a witchhunt against conservatives by a station with a zero tolerance policy for conservatives.

His narrative is designed to pretend that he is somehow in touch with ordinary people when he's nothing more than a prima donna Republican snob who once insisted on flying in a first class private jet just to give a speech at a college.  Hannity's narrative mixes in small grains of truth with a lot of balderdash.  Here's the real background.