On Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:42:13 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


wrote in message
...
On Mar 31, 2:52 pm, Hawke wrote:


When you look at the actual numbers, practically all of the Tea Party
economic myths collapse like a house of cards.
As does most of the economic/fiscal pronouncements.

Yes, but they do sound really good if you're a rube.

Hawke

So Ed and Hawke what is your solution for a government that spends a
dollar and sixty cents for every dollar of revenue?

Dan

Keep doing it until the economy turns up. Because, if it doesn't turn up,
we're screwed either way.
The problem here is that we have about maxed out the credit
cards. We can borrow some more from the leg-breakers and
knee-knockers, but the vig [interest] will be high and will
keep going higher. Because of the yield curve [short term
money generally costs less than long term] Treasury has
rolled over into shorter and shorter term securities, thus
when interest rates turn around [and these always do] we are
screwed with minimal time to refinance.

But put it all into unemployment benefits and infrastructure projects.
Just calling something an infrastructure project does not
make it one. Where are the coal liquefaction plants? Where
are the thorium reactors? Where are the REE/fissial
materials recovery from fly ash programs?

Before the recession hit bottom, serious economists were estimating that the
necessary stimulus was in the range of $2.1 trillion. Less than that, and
the most you could do is to keep it from turning into a depression. Which we
did, and it did.

As most of the bail-out money was "short stopped by the
banks or poured down rat holes like GM, this is a moot
point. Many of the infrastructure "improvements" were some
ones pet project and not economically viable, and appear to
have contributed little toward increasing the GDP beyond the
initial "investment," i.e. no ROI.

Oh, and the bank bailout should have been focused mostly on getting money to
the bank's ultimate customers, to keep consumption up and to keep people
from defaulting on their mortgages, not to feeding the banks' reserve
accounts. That was a major mistake.

Indeed, and some of the conditions for any bailout funds
should have been re imposition of Glass-Steagall, max limits
on size, possible 1% of GDP, and retirement/termination of
all directors and officers w/no termination pay and "claw
back" of any deferred earnings shown to be the result of
phoney baloney asset valuations/profits.

A small amount should have been set aside for prosecuting the banksters.
d8-)

Indeed, and a larger amount should have been allocated to
preserving the records, and getting these into machine
readable [database] format, particularly the
mortgages/tranches behind the CDOs. While minimal hard data
exists, it appears likely the same mortgage on a physical
property was used as collateral in multiple CDOs/tranches,
which accounts for multiple mortgage service companies
trying to foreclose on the same property.
-- Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).