In America’s Vancouver, the big talking points in the mayor’s race often wind up being about stuff the city can only control on the margins. Like jobs.
(In case the link won’t load, it’s a link to a final Columbian article where challenger Tim Leavitt and supporters accuse incumbent Royce Pollard of wishing small business and jobs and anything good would rot and die, and Pollard says “No, no,” and the simple truth that national policies are responsible for the horrendous economic disaster is not really mentioned. If nothing else, Leavitt gives good press conference.)
At any rate, it’s possible a winner will be declared tonight!
It’s also possible that things will be too close to call, and weeks and weeks will go by, as a virtually tied race is slowly, slowly updated, day after painful day, until nobody, not even the candidate’s families and pets, really cares any more. People will still be losing their homes and jobs, and since mayors are not the Federal Reserve, it will still suck.
And then it will be 2010, an even-numbered election year! Yeah! At any rate, today is “Election Day.” You’re smart enough to figure out what to do with your ballot.
“since mayors are not the Federal Reserve”
The Federal Reserve isn’t, either. The Fed is currently pursuing an expansionary policy, but with interest rates essentially at zero, its only option is to print money. By and large, an economic convulsion — like a bad cold — has to run its course.
Some economists and business observers argue that businesses reduced inventories too much and laid off too many people, and will be forced to start hiring soon. Shortages are appearing in some sectors, and surveys indicate some businesses expect to begin robust hiring by next spring. This group feels the economy has bottomed and is on its way back up. This belief is what fueled this summer’s strong stock market rally.
However, others argue the signs of an improving economy are illusory. They point out that this year’s profit gains came from cost cutting, which can’t produce sustained profit growth; for that, you need sales growth, which isn’t there. They argue most GDP growth this year resulted from unsustainable government stimuli such as the housing tax credit and cash for clunkers program. This kind of thinking is what’s behind the stock market pullback of the last couple weeks.
There is universal agreement among economists and business leaders that the aggressive government interventions by Bush and Obama staved off a catastrophe. Nearly all competent opinion holds that a hands-off policy, such as advocated by conservative laissez-faire “free market” advocates, would have thrown the entire world into a deflationary spiral and put the world in a 1930’s-type depression. So the backstory is not how bad things are but how much more worse they could have been — and nearly were. Meanwhile, the braying jackasses of the right verbally pound on Obama for not doing the wrong thing. Thank God that realists, not these maroons, are running the economy right now!
It’s ironic that people who ceaselessly remind us that government can’t create jobs and we must depend on private business for jobs and economic growth — which supposedly justifies all the special perks, tax breaks, and subsidies that businesses enjoy (and wage earners don’t) — are criticizing governments from city halls to Congress, and politicians from mayors to the President, for not creating jobs. Hellooooo?! You told us that isn’t their job? So which is it? You can’t possibly have it both ways.
Me, I’m of the school that private enterprise is the indispensable job-creating engine of our economic system, but that government has a vital role to play in regulating and referring markets so they don’t blow up, because capitalism left to steer itself will always sail onto the rocks.
Another popular sport among conservatives right now is decrying the deficit spending that is absolutely necessary to head off a deflationary spiral.
Let’s skip over the fact these bleating jackasses didn’t have any problem with deficits when Republicans were doing it to finance their warmongering and give themselves tax breaks. Entertaining as it is, that’s a sideshow, not the center ring.
What it boils down to is the dumbshits screeching about “inflation” don’t know a damn thing about economics or what’s actually happening to the economy.
First of all, there’s two kinds of inflation, real and monetary. Real inflation occurs when the actual costs of economic inputs rise. An example is when you’ve depleted the cheap oil and must use oil that consumes more economic resources to obtain. Monetary inflation occurs when the money supply increases faster than output of goods and services so that you have relatively more dollars chasing the things available to buy. The two are not linked.
What the idiots of the bleating right overlook when they wail about the Fed’s injection of $1.5 trillion of cash into the economy is that far more cash than that has been withdrawn from circulation. For example, investors have parked over $3 trillion of cash in zero-interest Treasuries alone. That money is not in circulation and is not doing anything. Far from increasing, the money supply has shrunk drastically, which sets up a deflationary situation — the opposite of inflation. This is why you see wages (and, in some cases, prices) falling. The economists monitoring the situation argue the economy needs more, not less, cash infusion from the Fed. But the Fed, a politically sensitive institution with an arguably irrational fear of triggering inflation, is taking it slow. This is one of the reasons why the economy isn’t recovering faster. Yes, there will come a time, several years from now, when the Fed has to take that cash back out of circulation to prevent inflation. That will happen when the trillions of dollars that private citizens have withdrawn from circulation are put back into the economy. It’s critical not to make this adjustment too soon, because that would result in a severe contraction of the money supply and push us back into recession or worse.
correction @1 refereeing, not referring
3 posts by Rodent and no one else until I come along at #4. Talking to your imaginary friend again Rodent? Seek help, and good luck.