Sunday newspaper reading is always fun on a snow-bound morning. Amazingly my newspapers arrived on the driveway, except for The Washington Post which I had to drive to WaWa to buy.
Of course, my mind is filled with the musings of Baconauts on Baconomics, which is actually a fairly simple body of knowledge.
All you have to know are that deficits are awful and we Boomers are facing Armageddon worse than the biblical type because wild-eyed liberal Barack Obama and his Congressional cohorts are loading us up with lots of deficits. This school of thoughts tips its hat at the excesses of George W. Bush, but, mind you, the Baconauts were silent when “W” was loading us up with debt (where were they, anyway?)
Another theorem of Baconomics is that free markets and deregulation are the life-giving milk of any economy and that government and its read tape are the enemies.
So,I was pleased to read two of my favorite columnists this morning.
The first one is Frank Rich, you actually ran a little alternative newspaper in Richmond back in the day. His New York Times column quotes Obama during the State of the Union as noting that:
“..most of the debt vilified by Republicans happened on the watch of a Republican president and Congress that never paid for “two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.” The president’s indictment could have been more lacerating. “
As for the real roots today’s deficits, consider this:
“Crunching Congressional Budget Office numbers, David Leonhardt of The Times calculated that of the projected $2 trillion swing into the red between the Clinton surplus and 2012, some 33 percent could be attributed to Bush legislation and another 20 percent to Bush-initiated spending (Iraq, TARP) continued by Obama. Only 7 percent of the deficit could be credited to the Obama stimulus bill and 3 percent to his other initiatives. (The business cycle accounts for the other 37 percent.)”
So how come the Baconauts are always saying that it is Obama’s deficit spending that is the problem?
The second column has to do with Davos, the Swiss gala where the George Soros types of the world gather and think the Big Thoughts. I have always wanted to go to Davos and hob-nob with the mighty, but none of my past employers was willing to foot the bill.
Even so, David Ignatius of The Washington Post has an interesting view of “globalization,” which means that’s perfectly OK when thousands of textile or silicon chip jobs are lost in Danville or Eastern Henrico County because some stateless board of directors of some multi-national company has found better cost synergies elsewhere. Here is his opinion piece:
“Americans need to understand that the 2008 financial crisis proved a point that many Europeans and Asians have been arguing for decades: Economic “liberalism,” of the sort found in Britain and the United States, creates a dangerous over reliance on the market. During the boom years, their complaints seemed like just so much whining. Not anymore.”
Interesting reading.
Peter Galuszka
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