“That Mr. Obama had been sent by history to assuage the insecurities of the middle class with a “New” New Deal was always a tad detached from reality anyway. The reason is those giant legacies of existing New Dealism known as Social Security and Medicare, about which he was careful to say nothing intelligible during the campaign. These programs worked for a while too, but now their expected revenues are (in present value) about $99.2 trillion short of the expected outlays required to assure present and future workers their promised comfort in retirement.”
— Obama Hears a Giant Sucking Sound - WSJ.comAll of this so badly needed to be said. And repeated. And pounded into everyone’s heads over and over. Government intervention doesn’t work. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just impossible for our slow moving and politically motivated government to allocate resources and capital as efficiently as a free market. 6 billion heads are better than one (sorry Mr. President)
Please read this, even if you’re pro-big government. It’s not propaganda. It’s facts.
Excellent.
Nope. It’s propaganda. Or closer to it, at least, than it is to “just facts.”
[Fannie Mae’s problems are attributed to New Deal cooties, while AIG was”an otherwise healthy insurance company that went bust betting on housing debt”… ignoring that Fannie Mae was doing just fine too until the same financial crisis brought them both to their knees. The auto industry’s problems are laid solely at the feet of the UAW (because it was born in 1935). Really scary numbers like the dreaded $99.2 trillion in unfunded liabilities for social security and medicare that depend on using some unrealistic projections of growth over the infinite horizon and ignore how much of that is projected medicare cost increases due to the ridiculously inefficient health care system we have in this country, not to mention ignoring how little the projected timeline of solvency has changed over the past few years… And I’m sure that without the “legacies of New Dealism,” without the mixed economy it inaugurated, without the FDIC, without the SEC, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act and without Social Security, oh I bet things would be just dandy… etc. I stop now because I am endangering the integrity some blood vessels in my forehead]
De gustibus, I suppose. But this is very far from “just facts.” Or maybe it’s opposite day.
