Showing posts with label reaganomics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reaganomics. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Bonfire of the Insanities


A photographer caught some wannabe jihadi jackwagon throwing rocks at the police and vandalizing property in Oakland while wearing a Palestinian-style keffiyeh.





Idiot's Intifada 

This just reinforces the stereotype of the "We are the World" American wacktivist wankers, imitating what they see on CNN, too lazy and too cowardly to put it on the line like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and others on the left did back in the 1930's.

The Socialists of the 1930's went to Spain and fought the fascists; today's leftists bleat on about the Palestinians, Colombian campesinos and oppressive Middle Eastern regimes, but they don't do anything about them.

Like a twisted Civil War reenactment club, they instead dress up as hippies and don costumes of their favorite radicals, and assault their urban environs with fantasies of Latin American Revolutions and Arab Springs dancing through their fluffy little brains.  Until the dingbat in the Palestinian headscarf heads to Gaza and starts throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, he's just another pantywaist playing dress up.

Latte Leftists

Our pampered populists are latte leftists playing dress-up, too scared to go fight any real oppression. So instead, they attack the America that swaddles them in comfort and modern bounty.  They trash the municipalities that host cell phone towers and free WiFi for their iPhones and laptops.  The disciplined and humane police forces provide additional incentive to protest here instead of abroad. Instead of being thrown head first into a fetid, dank gulag bloody and broken, they are escorted into a bright clean cell where they can sip publicly funded hot coco until a communist party lawyer, pockets stuffed with wealthy liberals' guilt money, comes down to bail them out.

Rage Against the Reagan Revolution


This is not about fighting oppression. This is the left's poop throwing primal scream against the greatest president of the 20th century and his lifting half a billion people out of poverty.

Three decades later, the triumph of Reaganism is remarkable. In the United States and Britain taxes shrank, regulation, especially of the financial sector, was pruned back, and state companies were sold off. Even Brussels was nudged toward liberalization.
The impact on the rest of the world was even more profound. Soviet Communism collapsed, China converted to capitalism and entered the world economy, India dismantled its protectionist License Raj, and many emerging market economies in Latin America and Africa embraced liberalization as the path to growth.
One result has been an unprecedented global economic boom. Its biggest beneficiaries have been some of the world’s poorest people, particularly in China and India: Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank have found that between 1981 and 2005, the number of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by 500 million. (Chrystia Freeland)
The screaming OWS drum beaters are frustrated because the tea parties already have the anti-crony crapitalism turf staked out...
Palin’s remedy to crony capitalism is to double down on the Reagan Revolution — lower taxes and shrink government further. Progressives have not yet come up with a solution of such seductive simplicity. Their standard prescription — higher taxes, more regulation, a stronger social welfare net, and more investment in education — may be sensible. But it lacks the rallying power of Palin’s call to smash crony capitalism by depriving the elites of their political tool — big government.  (Chrystia Freeland)
Freeland sneeringly calls the separation of Wall Street and State "seductive simplicity," but that is the key to pulling our economy and our federal budget out of the crony crapitalist quagmire.  The "standard prescription" of the progressives will only exacerbate our economic misery by encouraging even more state-sponsored crony crapitalism.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Mr Obama, You're No Reagan!


Deroy Murdoch, a most astute man, does us a favor by assembling a concise catalog of Obama's economic blunders...
"Under Obama, federal spending has risen from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product to 25.3 percent, Washington’s largest slice of apple pie since 1945."

"Obama’s spend-o-rama includes federally funded green jobs that Boskin dismisses as “the leprechaun economy.” The apotheosis of this blarney was last month’s $1.2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee to SunPower Corporation of Richmond, California. Its solar-equipment project promises 15 permanent positions. Cost per job-created: a staggering $80 million." (NRO-Deroy Murdock)
Reagan's Recovery vs. Obama's Sagging Non-Recovery
Boskin compared snapshots of Obama’s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recoveries, 27 months after each downturn hit bottom.

In September 2011, on Obama’s watch, non-farm payrolls had grown 0.6 percent, yielding 841,000 jobs since June 2009.

Under the tax-cutting, business-boosting Reagan, non-agricultural employment swelled 8.7 percent, generating 7.7 million new jobs. (NRO-Deroy Murdock)
How Mr. Volker Would Fix It

Reading that comparison reminded me how Obama, to much fanfare, brought the venerable Paul Volker on-board as a convenient counter-weight to his socialist advisers who were discomfiting those serious people not in a hopium-induced daze those first heady days of the Obama Presidency.

It calmed people down, and then Obama proceeded to completely ignore the former Fed Chair who tamed Carter's dreaded stagflation and ushered in the historically-unprecedented Reagan economic boom. Volker has offered his advice on how to fix this mess. It's too wonky to go into here, but it involved breaking up anyone too big to fail, no more government underwriting Wall Street gamblers, putting the different financial functions into their own boxes and jailing those who stray, among other things. You can read the whole thing here: Volker's Advice.

Free Market Ideas for Increasing Employment

For the libertarians among us, taking advice from a former Fed Chairman just won't do, so Reason Magazine has an article entitled Get a Job! that is chock full of free-market remedies sure to get people back to work.

The ideas are too simple-minded and timeless for the progressive eggheads powering Obama's economic failure: Less regulations, less government intervention in the marketplace, no more government bureaucrats picking winners and losers...

Free marketeers know that government cannot power the recovery.  The path to economic success begins with economic freedom. Bill Frezza explains:
Do you sometimes wonder why economists are accorded such respect and influence given the fact that they claim knowledge over the unknowable, promote theories that are untestable, and make forecasts for which they are never held accountable? Isn’t that the definition of a witch doctor?

If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid. But at least they would get to visit the White House.
This gets to the heart of why we should take all macro economic advice with a grain of salt.  It is a soft science, useful for gaining insight, but incapable of predicting market behavior.  Government-planned economies fail, free markets succeed. 
Have you ever watched engineers from different schools argue on Sunday morning talk shows about the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle or Ohm’s Law? No? Yet economists, like rival witch doctors, get red in the face promoting diametrically opposed economic remedies, sometimes sharing Nobel Prizes in the same year for theories that directly contradict each other. Take $2 trillion and call me in the morning. (Bill Frezza - Fundamental Fallacies of Macro Economics)

Friday, October 14, 2011

There They Go Again…


Desperate democrats have hijacked the legacy of Ronald Reagan in a vain attempt to save their skins

First they ridiculed him. Then he beat Carter and they reviled him. Now they are revising him beyond all historic fact in order to advance their sinking, discredited agenda. At long last, they have no sense of shame.

Any time you see conservatives do something to great effect, you can expect the libs will follow with their own twisted imitation...

Obama talked about “Cleaning up” after Bush because the Bushies talked loudly of fumigating the White House after Clinton’s many misadventures.  The Tea Parties begat the left’s Communist Kook Coffee Klatches (or whatever the failed project was called) and now the Occupy Wall Street human bowel movement is touted as the left’s tea party movement and Arab Spring all rolled into one.

Reagan and Kennedy:  Two Conservative Presidents

The conservative comparison that really burned the liberals' asses was that of Reagan and Kennedy’s tax and economic policies, complete with audio recordings of JFK touting free market principles that are anathema to the modern day democrat party.  Indeed, Kennedy sounds like a small government conservative tea partier.  And the left is struck dumb at the realization that their martyred hero is a Reagan doppelganger.

Finally, they’ve struck back.  They shamelessly ignore recorded history and turn Reagan into a compromising “fair share” taxaholic who enjoyed an era of unprecedented political goodwill.

Steven Hayward has written a comprehensive article debunking this Democrat party myth-making surrounding President Reagan.  They hated him worse than they did Bush, and Hayward puts the tax raising issue in its proper context, reminding us that the net tax cuts under Reagan were gargantuan, he doubled GDP and he saved Social Security for the next generation.

Go here to read the excellent article, The Liberal Misappropriation of a Conservative President.

See also: 
Reagan vs. Obama
Obama Compares Himself to Reagan...  Again

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Happy 100th President Reagan!

Ronald Reagan:  A Defense and a Criticism

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th Century.  He recaptured America's glory and global respect after the ham-handed buffoonery of the Carter years.  Yeah, FDR must be considered great for his fireside chats and WW II leadership, but his statist economic policies increased the country's misery.  Reagan, on the other hand, knew how to jump start an economy left for dead by liberal experimentation.

Nonetheless, liberal gargoyles like Paul Krugman love to blame all our ills on Reagan, the man responsible for the longest economic boom in our nation's history.  He was not perfect, but on balance, Reagan was a great president, but more importantly, he was a great man of rock-solid values who knew why he believed what he believed.  Here I offer a summary of Reagan criticism (some legitimate), and some links that defend his policies.


Paul Krugman is a dishonest, diabolical troll
Instead of using his education to enlighten Americans about the difficult and dismal science of economics, he chops up facts like firewood and serves up selectively sliced statistics in order to score cheap political points in an attempt to smear this great president.  Ignorant liberals lap it all up and regurgitate it on the rest of us, forcing us to do the homework lazy liberals just won't do.

Practitioners like Krugman use little funhouse mirror tricks to stretch and distort our view.  Yes, some conservatives do it too, but I don't listen to them or repeat their BS.

Most liberal writing on our economic mess is a hopeless tangle.  A typical writer will take crony capitalism, spending, deregulation, bubbles, and poverty, wad it all in a big ball and throw it in Ronald Reagan's face.  The logic is terrible and typically lacks cause and effect. 

Tis true, Reagan didn't shrink the government and he grew the national debt
In return, we collapsed the Soviet Union, freeing tens of millions of Eastern Europeans and got a well-respected kick-ass military to boot.

Add to that the regulatory reform that allowed millions of Americans to start their own businesses and brought structural unemployment to below 5%.  The result was the longest economic expansion in American history, thanks to President Clinton continuing Reagan's policies. What have we gotten for the trillions Obama has spent?  At least Reagan's spending produced results.

For a serious libertarian criticism of Reagan, see free-marketer Sheldon L. Richmon's article, or Murray Rothbard's excellent critique, The Myths of Reaganomics. Their main criticism is he did not roll back government and he spend too much.  These are not liberal screeds, but rather cold-eyed analyses of the facts devoid of any personal criticism of the man.

Reagan was a great man and a great president.  If you want to defend him, you must consider his record, warts and all (no one in the public arena is wart-free).  He did the best he could in an America remade by progressives.  FDR build a clanking, soul-destroying bureaucratic machine, and even the great Ronald Reagan couldn't dismantle it. 

The only way progressives can defend Obamanomics is to turn it all upside down, and that involves taking the success that is Reaganomics and convincing enough soft-headed people that the longest economic expansion in our history was really a failure.

For a serious defense of Reaganism, see the following articles.  There's a lot of liberal BS out there, you'll need to refer to them often:

Reaganomics - William N. Niskanen
Thomas Firey - There Krugman Goes Again
Max Barron - Chief Lib Propagandist Krugman
Reagan Did What? Fantasies of Paul Krugman
Donald Luskin - That Old Hack Magic
Robert Scheer - Krugman Ignores the Real Culprits
Stefan Karlsson
Nick Gillespie - Blame Reagan!
Krugman - Enron's Nobel Advisor