I’m not sure I understand where these conventions come from about when you are and aren’t allowed to question the good faith of powerful Washington figures. Scheiber has a sound argument here that Bernanke is behaving more like a reflexive opponent of change to the status quo than like someone with a well-honed concern for creating appropriate institutional arrangements. That seems like a pretty good reason to make it our working hypothesis that he is in fact more of a reflexive opponent of change to the status quo than like someone with a well-honed concern for creating appropriate institutional arrangements.That said, look at the politics. Obama will be able to whip most of the democrats, but Bernie sanders has pledged to vote no. That means Bernanke needs to get at least one, possibly a handful of republican votes.
You would expect a Bush administration economic policy appointee to be interested in reducing government spending, in creating a business-friendly regulatory environment, and in securing the interests of prosperous asset owners rather than poor unemployed people. And Bernanke is a Bush administration economic policy appointee, and those appear to be the things he’s interested in.
Senator Bunning to Bernanke "You are the definition of a moral hazard. Your Fed has become the Creature From Jekyll Island"That's a pretty bizzare statement. As far as I can tell the only Jekyll Island is a resort town off the coast of Georgia. Bunning needs to get his literary allusions straight.
Unlike social security and medicare, the money spent on defense goes to jobs, the income from which pays not only federal, state and local taxes, but also medicare and SS taxes. If you cut defense spending in half, please tell me where all of those unemployed people are going.Yes, Medicare and SS money does not go to "jobs" or taxable income. Rather, old people cash the checks and then eat the cash. Normally with some salt and pepper, but sometimes they'll use a nice vinaigrette. No doctors are paid by Medicare either.
Focusing only on the economic aspects,defense spending is nearly 5% of our GDP. Increases in defense spending in 2003 kept the country out of a recession that year.Obviously it would be impossible to spend that money on anything else.
The reason Bernanke is saying this is because the country cannot afford entitlements, interest on the debt, and defense.Only if by "Can't afford" you mean, "Can't afford without raising taxes on rich people". The government takes in something like $6T in revenue, and spends about $7T. For someone paying 30% in taxes, a 5 percentage point increase would probably cover it. (i.e. a 15% increase in the amount of revenue).
it's because we produce almost nothing that anyone else in the world wants to import. If we simply produced domestically all the vehicles, all the electronics, etc that we consume domestically, none of this would be an issue.Sure we do. We're just not allowed to sell it to them to very many countries because it's mostly crazy-ass space weapons. We do export a lot of military hardware, though.
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posted by shmegegge at 9:00 AM on December 4, 2009 [2 favorites]