Just going to do a quick run-through of Ben Stein’s “How To Sound Like A Crazy Street Person” “How To Ruin the U.S. Economy.” This is crap, so I’m going to treat it as such.
1) Have a fiscal policy that creates immense deficits in good times and bad, burdening America’s posterity with staggering burdens of repaying the debt.
Okay, fair enough.
2) Eliminate regulation of Wall Street and/or fail to enforce the regulations that already exist, instead trusting Wall Street and other money managers and speculators to manage other people’s money with few or no regulations and little oversight.
Holy shit, you’re sounding intelligent. Who are you and what did you do with Ben Stein?
3) Have an energy policy that disallows producing our own energy and instead requires that we buy energy from abroad, thus making our oil prices highly volatile and creating large balance of payments deficits, lowering the value of the dollar and thus making the problem get progressively worse.
Oh, there you are. Funny, I thought we did produce some of our own oil. So does the Department of Energy, for what that’s worth. Unless, of course, you’re talking about energy policies that discourage research and development into renewable energy. That I can agree with, but you’d need to state it a bit more clearly – assuming that’s what you mean. I sure as hell hope you’re not talking about corn ethanol subsidies, though. Oh wait, you don’t give a shit about anything that isn’t oil.
4) Have Congress mandate that banks and other financial entities lend money to persons they know in advance to have poor credit ratings or none at all.
Sorry Ben, that never happened. Not once, and not in any way. From The Big Picture, we have a thorough takedown of this myth that must be read in full to be appreciated.
5) Allow investment banks, insurers, and banks to bet their entire net worth and then some on the premise that borrowers known to be improvident will in fact repay those loans.
Okay, so you’re against deregulation, and apparently for regulation of the “shadow banking system” that is the CDS markets.
6) Allow the creation of large betting pools called “hedge funds” that can move markets and control the outcome of trading, thus taking a forum for savings and retirement for families and making it into a rigged casino game that exists primarily to fleece suckers like ordinary working men and women.
I’m going to take a guess and say that you might think short sellers are a Terrible Evil that Must Be Stopped, too. The fact that you say nothing about the ratings agencies which freely slapped tip-top ratings on every bit of Big Shitpile it could find (which were as big a part of this crisis as the also-unmentioned Alan Greenspan in this horrible mess) makes it seem like you’re after everyone but the actual culprits. And those hedge funds that you so freely put in scare quotes are actually a mixed bag; it’s not known exactly what effect they’re going to have yet, or what’s going to happen to them.
7) Have laws that protect corporate officers from being sued for misconduct but at the same time punish lawyers in the private sector who ferret out such misconduct and try to make accountable the people responsible for shareholder and investor losses. If one of those lawyers gets particularly aggressive in protecting stockholders, put him in prison.
I’d really like to know if this is happening, because it would be an outrage. I do know that executive compensation is currently structured to insulate the the corporate officer from consequences, which does suck.
8) Appoint as head of the United States Treasury Department a man whose whole life was spent on Wall Street, who became fantastically rich through his peddling of junk bonds at his firm while the firm later sold short those same sorts of bonds.
You forgot Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Just sayin’.
9) Scare Americans into putting up $750 billion of their hard earned money to bail out the billionaires and their friends who created the market for loans to poor credit risks (The “subprime” market) and the unbelievably large side bets on those loans, promising that such a bailout would save the retirement savings of Americans, then allow the immense hedge funds to make the market crater immediately afterwards.
You REALLY don’t like hedge funds. You also seem to have the same love affair with the word “crater” that David Letterman does, but you don’t carry it as well.
10) Propose to save the situation by surtaxing the oil industry, which is owned by our fellow Americans, mostly in their retirement plans, thus penalizing Americans for investing in companies that efficiently and legally produce an indispensable product.
What? First of all, how does proposing something damage the economy??? Second, what’s the problem, when they are making the biggest profits EVER (okay, not so much now with the high price of oil curing itself through demand destruction), and also when what we want to do is eventually get *away* from oil as an energy source? Also, how about addressing the ways we use it in EVERYTHING else from prescriptions to plastics by researching other alternatives, or even synthetics? Since when is that unfair?
11) Insist that the free market requires that banks and insurers with friends of the Secretary of the Treasury be saved but allow other entities not so fortunate to fail, thus creating total uncertainty and terror among financial institutions, and demolishing all of the confidence built up in financial circles since the days of FDR.
Okay, throwing Lehman under the bus to the benefit of Morgan Stanley does stink on ice – but we have never, EVER had a free market in this country (nor should we, or corporate takeovers would be decided by who managed to hire Blackwater for the fight).
12) Then have the Republican candidate say he would keep on the job the Treasury Secretary who facilitated the crisis, failed to protect the nation from the crisis, got the taxpayers to pony up to save his Wall Street buddies, and have the Democratic candidate, as noted, say he would save the day by taxing the stockholders of energy companies.
Seems like a lot of this is just people saying they’d do stuff. If the economy is that fragile, then people talking is not the problem, period – it’s time to have serious discussions about throwing out big hunks of the underlying structure and building something sustainable.
There, that should do it.
You are, as always, a rambling tool.
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