Peace, Love and Capitalism: 2009

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics Series

Here are links to my seven part series on Swifteconomics.com: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

Part 1: A Primer: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/08/14/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-a-primer/

Part 2: Income Stagnation: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/08/18/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-income-stagnation/

Part 3: All Fiat Currencies Fail: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/08/22/all-fiat-currencies-fail/

Part 4: Iraq War Casualties: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/08/28/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-iraq-war-casualties/

Part 5: The Female-Male College Gap: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/09/18/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-the-college-gap/

Part 6: The Male-Female Wage Gap: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/09/21/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-the-wage-gap/

Part 7: Roger Maris' Asterisk: http://www.swifteconomics.com/2009/09/29/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-roger-maris-asterisk/

I plan to soon put these together, with a few other articles, and make an ebook. I will let you know when it is completed.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Best Posts from Swifteconomics

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Setting the Record Straight on George Bush's Conservative "Free Market" Presidency

Now I’m well aware George W Bush’s presidency ended over a month ago. However, given this is my blog’s kickoff, I would feel remiss if I were completely left out of the Bush bashing parade. There just seems to be a vacuum now that he’s gone, which leaves me in an awful nostalgic mood. As a matter of fact, the extraordinary decline in consumer demand for anti-Bush merchandise since he gracelessly left office is one fascinating theory of how the financial crisis got so bad in the first place. So hey, I’m just doing my part to prime the proverbial pump

I’m going to take a little different approach than most have and call Bush out for his distinctly free market hating policies. I think the idea that Bush was somehow fond of unregulated, dog eat dog, laizzez-faire capitalism in all of its creatively destructive glory is an extremely important myth to bust. Why? Well since our economy is crumbling all around us, people are desperate to run away from whatever we were just doing as fast as Keith Olbermann can decline a debate. Therefore, it’s critical to know just exactly what it is we were doing before we start running.

Unfortunately, the “Bush was a free marketer” myth is more or less ubiquitous these days. Barack Obama has repeatedly said in one form or another, the financial crisis “…is a verdict on the failed policies of the last eight years that said that we should strip away consumer protections, let the market run wild, and prosperity would rain down.” And many others have taken the baton and regurgitated that sentiment en masse (see here and here). But what were those horrible policies? Was the Bush administration really letting “the market run wild?” If they were, then maybe we should try big government again. However, if they were big government policies to begin with, maybe the free market deserves a first chance.

It is true that Bush has said some nice things about the free market, but since when do we believe what politicians say. If you really believe everything Bush says than you must think there are some WMD in Iraq and on another note I have some beach front property in the Mojave Desert you may be interested in. Oh but didn’t Bush cut taxes like three times? Well yes he totally did. He “slashed” the top income tax bracket from 39.6% to 35%. He also added a sixth bracket to our ridiculously complicated tax code. However that’s about where his free wheeling free marketing ends.

The media rarely blames the tax cuts for our financial mess though, instead it repeats ad nauseam that deregulation was the key to our current crisis. I’ll leave refuting this claim to another article, but the key here is Bush has not been a deregulator. The main piece of legislation proponents of the “deregulation theory of financial collapse” point to is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed much of the Glass-Steagall Act, effectively breaking down the barriers between commercial and investment banks. The problem is that this piece of partial deregulation was passed during Clinton’s presidency in 1998 (and voted for by Joe Biden by the way).

In reality, Bush’s presidency has been an eight year long string of red tape. The Bush administration added a staggering average of 76,526 pages to the federal registry each year. In 2002, he signed off on Sarbanes-Oxley, one of the most overbearing regulations since the New Deal. The SEC alone saw it’s budget triple over eight years, which of course wasn’t quite enough to catch a 50 billion dollar, decades long ponzi s cheme. The Bush administration increased

federal spending on regulatory agencies by 6.5% per year (adjusted for inflation) and staffing by 6.3%. That’s more than any president since Richard Nixon (another president bestowed with the “free market” myth).

Even more damning is the federal budget. Bush was the first president to ever push the federal budget over 2 trillion (yes trillion with a t) and then just to shatter the record Michael Phelps style, he was the first to push it over 3 trillion as well. In his first term Bush increased total budget expenditures by 25.3% and non-defense discretionary spending by 19.7%. Both were the largest increases since the Nixon/Ford presidency from 1972-76. Bush’s second term was no better.

In eight years, Bill Clinton only increased the budget from 1.41 trillion to 1.86 trillion, a 32.2% increase which is notably not adjusted for inflation. As a percentage of GDP the budget fell from 21.4% to 18.5%. Under eight years of Bush the budget increased from 1.86 trillion to 3.11 trillion, an uncanny 66.8% increase. However, that figure does not include either war or the 700 billion dollar bailout. If we include the wars and the multitude of bailouts, Bush’s budgetary madness parallels the eight years of New Frontierin’ in the Great Society under Kennedy and Johnson, which saw the budget increase 87.9%. As a percent of GDP, by 2009 the budget had jumped back up to 20.7%. In contrast, the highest percentage of GDP spending reached during either the Kennedy or Johnson administrations was 20.6% in 1968.

Source: Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2009

Fiscal conservatives should also hate budget deficits, but Bush sure doesn’t. The deficit may exceed a trillion dollars this year and the total debt has ballooned from 5.6 trillion dollars to 10.7 trillion dollars! Even more startling are the unfunded liabilities (what we would need to have invested in treasury bills to meet future entitlement obligations) which now stands at an incomprehensible 65.5 trillion dollars!

Source: Z-Facts Gross National Deficit

So how did he do get the budget so bent out of shape? Well with conservative things such as the biggest entitlement package since the Great Society in Medicare Part D. A piece of legislation David Walker, the former comptroller general of the GAO, called “a poster child for what not to do when considering new legislation .” Or perhaps it was doubling the size of the Department of Education, a department Reagan campaigned on abolishing. Or maybe it was two wars that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost the United States an absurd 2.4 trillion dollars (along with many lives) in economic output by the time they both end. Or just possibly it was his massive wealth redistributing, failure rewarding bailout of bankrupt financial firms. Or could it have been his end around Congress to bail out the auto industry. Hey, maybe it was his own 150 billion dollar stimulus package in 2007.

All this brings us to an obvious conclusion: Bush was not a free market president. This reality is confirmed by the The Fraser Institute, which releases country-by-country rankings for economic freedom every year with a 10 being completely free and a 0 being completely unfree. In 1990, the United States had a 7.8 ranking. After Clinton (albeit with a Republican congress most the time) the United States’ ranking went up to 8.6 in 2000. By 2006, Bush had let it fall back to an 8.0 and it will likely sink further after all this bailout mania. Canada, with all its universal health care, has an 8.1 ranking.

So how on Earth is Bush a fiscal conservative? How is he even conservative? Aren’t conservatives in favor of the free market and federalism while being weary of big government? Well empty suit, talking head, political hack Fred Barnes took up the issue in 2003. As he wrote in The Weekly Standard, Bush is “a big government conservative.” George Bush and his administration “simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means–activist government–for conservative ends.”

Ahh, big government conservatism: a delightful oxymoron akin to centralized federalism, Darwinian Creationism and environmentally friendly nuclear explosions. One simply can’t be conservative in any simultaneously American and non-Orwellian sense with out being pro-free market and one simply can not be pro-free market while massively increasing the size of federal government. There are many, especially on the left, who accuse Bush of increasing the size of government to simply ally with big business and rip off the taxpayers, but that is aside the point. Corporatism is not capitalism! So if you want to blame corporatism for the mess we’re in, that’s fine. But perhaps, just perhaps, capitalism, real capitalism is a better way out of this mess than big government. Big government is after all what we were just doing.

Monday, January 19, 2009

The Cult of Obama

I wrote in a previous post, and still believe, that Barack Obama is a good person and will be a major improvement over the disaster that was George W. Bush. His election is also great for race relations and surely means even more to many African Americans than I, as a white man born decades after Jim Crow ended, can fully understand. I still disagree with our President Elect on a lot of issues, especially his Keynesian stimulus garbage, but his tax and spend is better than Bush’s borrow and spend. What concerns me is this cult of personality that has sprouted up around Obama.

It’s almost like Barack Obama has been knighted as the Messiah of America. Conservative talk radio is often hyperbolic, but I think they got the mainstream media’s (other than the neoconservative Fox News) kids glove approach to Obama right. However, what’s more disconcerting than this media fawning is the millions of people who seem to just seem to fall heads over heels for him.

I’ve had a couple of friends on facebook constantly post pro Obama related material in their profile and there are currently 1,156,677 confirmed guests to Obama’s inauguration on facebook despite the fact that you can’t attend his inauguration via facebook. For the real thing over two million people are expected to attend the actual inauguration. I unfortunately missed the parties after he was elected, but I heard they were out of control.

Now, this isn’t necessarily bad, I mean it’s good that people are getting involved in politics. But there seems to be a feeling that his election will save us all from financial ruin, terrorism, war, greedy corporations, racism, sexism, crime, foreclosure, layoffs, bird flu and athletes foot. I mean look at all these Hollywood stars falling all over themselves for Obama in music videos like this one, this one, this one, and of course Obama girl.

What’s stranger and more disheartening are the youth choirs singing about how great Obama is. I don’t mean to compare Obama to Hitler, but I’m sorry the hero worship is just too reminiscent. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

It’s not a surprise that some conservative writers have picked up on this but even liberal economist Paul Krugman picked up on it during the primaries. Unbridled executive power is extraordinarily dangerous as we’ve seen in the fascist and communist states of the 20th century and we need to be very careful about how much power we allow our presidents to have. Bush, like many before him, increased executive power significantly which liberals have rightfully criticized. Now, however they’re jumping all over themselves for a president who will almost certainly expand the federal government.

We have to pull ourselves back from in this cult of the presidency in general and the cult of Obama in particular. The intent of the founders and the explicit language in our Constitution was meant to limit the power of the president. Hell, the original Articles of Confederation didn’t even have a president! Now there were problems then (think slavery), but a powerful executive is simply the antithesis of liberty and while it’s great Bush is gone, it’s time for Obama fanatics (and Obama himself) to relax.

Or we can just laugh at them.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Blogger Deleted My Post!

Wow, Bogger.com can really suck sometimes. So I write out this long post and all. Take a lot of time to do so. I linked some sites that I got information from and all. Then I highlight it to copy and paste it in a Word file. I do this simply because Blogger's editing tools are subpar at best. Well what happens... it deletes the whole thing and there's no undo or anything. Yeah, all I did was highlight it! Well, I don't feel like rewriting so if I have any readers out there, just know that Blogger.com just screwed you out of my weekly insight.

Screw you Blogger.

Monday, January 5, 2009

New Year's Resolutions

Making New Year’s Resolutions and then proceeding to break said New Year’s Resolutions seems to be an annual event for Americans and many others around the world. One survey of over 100,000 people in 16 countries found that 98.7% made one or more resolutions and only a shameful yet darkly humorous 3.1% actually kept them.

Aside by making fodder for bad stand-up comics, this embarrassing statistic begs the question; why do people still do this. A common definition for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well this one almost answers itself. No one is completely happy with himself, and so we want naturally want to improve. The New Year symbolizes a new beginning (although really it really represents nothing more than passing go with out the $200 of course), therefore it’s a chance to start anew more literally. To fix those problems we all know that we have.

Well unfortunately, people rarely change and never change easily. Alcoholics don’t just stop drinking, fat people don’t just lose weight, hippies don’t just start making something of themselves, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. A simple resolution will provide nothing more than a week or two of motivation.

Any serious attempt to improve requires time, goals and dedication. The best way I’ve found to do this is to create a plan. Compliment that plan with a schedule and goals and then meticulously keep track of your progress. For example, I looked to get back into shape so I created a work out plan. Then I created a schedule with goals for bench press, weight and run time. And so for I’ve had great results.

Now obviously this is no guarantee, but a plan and a schedule can help focus your effort unlike some vague resolution. In addition to the plan, involving a friend or at least telling people what you’re trying to do helps keep yourself accountable. You can really start this at any time, so the New Year might as well be it. But given the statistics, I wouldn’t call your goal a resolution.

Happiness and Success

At the end of every year I go through my stuff and my computer in a vain attempt to organize and clean it all up. This last year was no exception. While doing said tedious work I came across an interesting thing I wrote a couple years ago. I don't remember writing it or why I even wrote it but I liked it. While it had no title, it might as well have been titled "Happiness and Success." So here it is in its unadulterated form, a bit cheesy, yes, but also kind of deep. Well at least I think so.

The activities that will lead to success in the long term must be identified, accepted and executed in the short term for long term success to be possible.

Thus the short term activities that will lead to success in the long term are a means to an end (success/happiness).

However, if short term activities are only to gain long term ends (success/happiness), it could be implied that the short term (present) is devoid of those desired ends (success/happiness).

If the present is devoid of both happiness and success, then the next question is when do you reach the long term? When do you feel the fruits of success or happiness or both?

In addition, should success and happiness even be put together? They are not innately linked. Does success bring happiness, or does happiness bring success?

Regardless of which brings which, happiness is the greater achievement. Because your success is a purely personal representation of achievement (not social) it matters little to you if it isn't accompanied by happiness.

So happiness must be applied to the short term activities that will lead to success in the long term if achievement is even still desired.

If achievement is desired it is no longer and ends (happiness is) so is it a means?

Achievement at its highest level is an actualizing of personal ability. Happiness should (but not necessarily) make one want to achieve their best. Thus achievement is a means to no end.

The short term activities to bring long term success should be the short term activities that bring true happiness.

The short term activities that bring true happiness are the ends.

Happiness is an end in itself.

Peace, Love and Capitalism