Perhaps you could tell me how we're coming up with the figure that if you give some poor dude a dollar that it miraculously turns into 3. Is this in terms of how the dollar is spent/saved/invested? I've looked at the numbers. Every time the top marginal income tax rate has been cut, the economy grew, as well as revenue to the federal government. It happened under JFK, Reagan and Bush. What am I missing here?
"As for the efficiencies of markets- we have all seen how efficient the russian marketplace was when it was truly an unregulated free market (mob ruled.) and we are also seeing in the current financial crisis what happens when you fail to regulate the second critical aspect of any market - the equal access to relevant information. Gresham's law kicks in."
This misses the whole reason we're in this financial mess to begin with. It was government that pressured firms into giving these "community development" loans that had a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being paid back. I'm not saying that the corporations are totally without fault here. Yes, there was some greed involved as there usually is in business at some level. The point is that this practice really took off in 1995. Effectively, the standard rules for granting loans didn't apply. Application fees were called "racist" and other similar terms. One could argue that "regulation" would have prevented the crisis, but considering that it was government policy that caused it in the first place, pardon me for remaining somewhat skeptical.
From the global warming side, I don't have to be a scientist to know that the lowest measured solar wind in decades can and will cool the planet like it has every other time it's occurred. I'm not so steeped in the global warming hysteria that I can't compare current conditions with history. I'll use a different example. A warm-core storm with the highest winds and lowest pressures at the center, banding cloud patterns as a result of upper air outflow, closed rotary circulation, and gale force winds in at least one quadrant is called a "tropical storm," and it gets named. The system that hit the Carolinas in the last 24 hours, by definition based on the historical precedent, was a tropical cyclone. But, oddly enough, no name. Hurricane warnings from TPC, but no declaration of even a tropical storm nearby. Why? Somebody isn't using objective measures against historical data here. Now, by the paid shrills, do you mean the founder of the Weather Channel, Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi, Univ. of CO professor, Dr. Bill Gray, etc? Where is the bias in JB's column? I've been reading it for the last 5 years, and I have yet to see it. JB isn't the only guy I pay attention to, but the reason I cite him is that on his videos and in his column he consistently shows data, both model runs and historic analogs to show where the forecast (long and short term) are coming from. I guess I'm just being shrill, though.
