Regarding Paul Krugman's October 12, 2009 column:
Professor Krugman must address the fact that the US implicit fiscal policy remains High Supply Side-ism. All fiscal structures are still rigged to channel wealth to where G~d and providence deign it to go -- into the hands of the top one percent. Nothing has changed in this equation, and yet it can be shown empirically that if you give the top one percent a $1.3 trillion tax break sop, they create market conditions that destroy somewhere from $4 to $10 trillion. This we now know, but if Congress were presented with the same plan tomorrow, I'd wager the same would do the same. No amount of debate around the margins on the impact of monetary policy will have any impact as long as the fiscal policy is -- implicitly, never explicitly -- set in this way.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
In response to Paul Krugman's latest blog entry:
Corporate America is hooked -- badly -- on the globalization of labor markets. It's gutting its domestic workforce by offshoring what it can. More significantly, it's gutting the goodwill and marginal capacity to invest in the greater good exhibited by its workforce -- "workplace engagement" as measured by Gallup has plunged unprecedentedly over the past 24 months. The resulting zombie corporations are following the lead of the financial services companies, serving.mainly as hollow shells to be bailed out. This seems to be the abiding strategy in much of corporate America. I think this spells a much harder crash looming -- consumer spending will depress another 10 percent, dragging the fragile CRE market down with it. This facilitates another credit seizure, at which point the Chinese central bank asserts "Who's your daddy?" The corporatist right will then use this to provoke war rhetoric against the Chinese, as the prevailing historical model is that "we need a war to pull us out of this" echos from the first half of the 20th century
I can't envision any virtuous upward spiral that prevent this. What Professor Krugman failed to note in his magazine opus from a few weeks back is the utter lack of an explicit Fiscal policy in the US, and that the implicit strategy remains Supply Side-ism. The economy remains bent on redistributing all wealth upward, and that program is running quite well, thank you. The Rightist principle of gutting the middle class will achieve some sort of denouement, and the private domestic militias that the right has been fomenting will be ready t mop up the opposition. At that point, we finally will have achieved the wet dream of all extant demon spawn of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand -- the Banana Republic of America.
Corporate America is hooked -- badly -- on the globalization of labor markets. It's gutting its domestic workforce by offshoring what it can. More significantly, it's gutting the goodwill and marginal capacity to invest in the greater good exhibited by its workforce -- "workplace engagement" as measured by Gallup has plunged unprecedentedly over the past 24 months. The resulting zombie corporations are following the lead of the financial services companies, serving.mainly as hollow shells to be bailed out. This seems to be the abiding strategy in much of corporate America. I think this spells a much harder crash looming -- consumer spending will depress another 10 percent, dragging the fragile CRE market down with it. This facilitates another credit seizure, at which point the Chinese central bank asserts "Who's your daddy?" The corporatist right will then use this to provoke war rhetoric against the Chinese, as the prevailing historical model is that "we need a war to pull us out of this" echos from the first half of the 20th century
I can't envision any virtuous upward spiral that prevent this. What Professor Krugman failed to note in his magazine opus from a few weeks back is the utter lack of an explicit Fiscal policy in the US, and that the implicit strategy remains Supply Side-ism. The economy remains bent on redistributing all wealth upward, and that program is running quite well, thank you. The Rightist principle of gutting the middle class will achieve some sort of denouement, and the private domestic militias that the right has been fomenting will be ready t mop up the opposition. At that point, we finally will have achieved the wet dream of all extant demon spawn of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand -- the Banana Republic of America.
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