Chanting Points Memo: The Draft Horse Pulling A Surrey Full Of Ponies

I was out the other night at a local restaurant with my friend Moonbeam Birkenstock, a guy who’s out on the far-left fringe of the DFL.

He’s been having financial trouble.   We got to talking about it.

I suggested the usual stuff – cut back on  nonessential expenses, shop at Aldi instead of the organic section at Kowalski’s, find cheaper phone service, turn off the lights – y’know, the  normal stuff people do to trim the fat around the  house.

He nodded repeatedly as I talked and he ate his dinner.  Then he chimed in.  “I have a better idea.  I’m going to buy a big-screen TV”.

I cut up a cod fritter on my plate.  “Um, a big-screen TV?”

“Yep”, Moonbeam said, beaming.

“Why?”

“Because if we have more stuff, we’ll have more impetus to earn more money to pay for it all!”

“Um, you don’t have the money for that.  I thought we were clear on that…”

“I know”, he said, munching on a piece of deep-fried breadfruit.  “You need to buy it for me”.

I stared at him for a monent, and finished eating without a word.  I wound up picking up the check.  His card wouldn’t go through.  Something about being five billion dollars overdrawn.

———-

The DFL and their messagebloggers are still at it.

“Where are the jobs? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? You’ve been in office two months, and you haven’t solved the recession like you promised!”

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius is, naturally, one of them:

The MNGOP told us they’d be all about jobs, jobs, jobs. But time and again, they keep proposing cutting jobs and cutting wages for the middle class.

Wow.  Did they pass a law telling employers, in and out of the public sector, to trim their payrolls?  Maybe an across-the-board ban on companies – everyone from Target and Medtronic to the Caribe Bistro on Raymond – from hiring?

Well, no:

Yes, they’re going after public employees again. And although they don’t have the power to mandate this, they want you to know that they’d really like the University of Minnesota to cut its wages too:

The salaries of all employees in the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch are decreased by six percent…. The University of Minnesota is strongly encouraged to comply with this section as if it were subject to it.

…Somehow, cutting wages for the middle class is all part of the GOP’s jobs agenda.Once again, I find it mind-boggling that conservatives tell us we need to pay CEOs for performance, but they think everyone else needs a pay cut.

Every time I put off my “Logic For Leftybloggers” series for another month, I read something like this, and think “maybe April really is the month to tee it up again’.

Government employees are not “the middle class”.  Oh, in places like Saint Anthony Park and the Midway, with their block upon block of university employees and teachers and government employees, they might be mistaken for it.  And at the DFL caucuses and conventions and functions that seem to define the parameters of Moonbeam and Jeff’s worlds, they probably correspond pretty closely.

But they’re not.  Most of us in the  middle class, even here in Minnesota (where three of the top five employers are the State, the Fed and the various cities) toil away in the private sector.  We find our own jobs, we save for our own retirements, we cover our own copays.   And when business turns down, we work harder and produce more with less and, sometimes when worse comes to worst, take our skills and start over in different jobs and fields to pay the bills.

And just as regular commenter Terry so concisely asked about pensions “Why should I be required to work until I’m 70 so you can retire at 55”, one might also ask “why must I be pay  more taxes to make your job sacrosanct when I’m scrambling to make ends meet myself?”

Because that’s what Jeff and the DFL are demanding; that we, the private sector, dig deeper to keep the government fat and happy, and just shut the hell up about unemployment, layoffs and our own stress.

I’ll say it again and again and again. How do we get the economy going? Consumer demand. We need money in the hands of the lower and middle classes — the people who will actually spend it. All this shortsighted, petty bill would accomplish is to increase income inequality while depressing our already struggling economy.

Where do we start with this?  It’s wrong on so many levels:

Picking Consumers And Victims:  Jeff is focusing on a smallish sliver of consumers – government employees – and the ideal of propping up consumer spending…by taking money from all of us private-sector consumers!  Just like Moonbeam picking out his big-screen TV on my credit card! Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

He Who Forgets History Is Condemned To Repeat It As A DFLer: Did we learn nothing from the mortgage bubble?  If you “create wealth” that has nothing underpinning it, all you get is a bubble; when that bubble deflates, it’ll cause more pain than if it’d never existed.

Creating “consumer spending” by taking money from the private sector – reducing the private sector’s ability to create and maintain jobs, say nothing of “consumer spending” – works, sort of.  Until we in the private sector run out of money, anyway.

The only sustainable way to grow consumer spending is to grow jobs.  And growing government jobs without growing the private sector enough to not only support but justify it – creates yet another bubble, a government spending bubble.  It’s a bubble that’s bursting in Portugal and Greece and Ireland now, and will burst across the EU, and California and Michigan soon, and that strenuous efforts may keep from bursting in New Jersey, and which may yet blow up across the entire US…

…and for which we in Minnesota, right this moment, face a time for choosing.

9 thoughts on “Chanting Points Memo: The Draft Horse Pulling A Surrey Full Of Ponies

  1. Useful idiot Jeffy boy acts like a typical trustfunder. Knowing that he’s set because of someone else’s work, he whines about the evil GOP screwing the middle class with budget balancing measures. He further illustrates his own idiocy by conveniently and deliberately ignoring the fact that his economically illiterate heroes in the Dumb Freaking Libturds party were the ones that screwed it up in the first place.

    Man Jeffy, it must be nice to be so perfect. Fool!

  2. In the words of Saturday Night Live (when it was worth watching): Jeff, you are an ignorant slut.

    And obviously you’ve never taken an economics course. If you did, get your money back. Although, lobotomized students probably can’t expect their money back.

    In Jeffy’s World, re-distributing wealth from those GREEEEEEEEDY rich people (which Governor Moonbeam seems to think is anybody who makes more than about $65,000 a year) to the poor and “middle class” will solve all the problems. WRONG.

    What will they do with the money? They will SPEND it. Ok, you WILL see a spike in some areas of the economy and yes, you will see some industries. But the spike will be a SPIKE, and will return to normal levels, UNLESS Jeffy wants to constantly take more and more and more and more money from the “rich” to ensure the spike doesn’t receed. Hey Jeff, the cow eventually runs out of milk.

    So let’s say you actually do this. Jeff further assumes the EEEEEEVIL rich will just sit there and take it, not moving money out of state or finding some tax haven to hide it. Ask Ted Kennedy’s family about the offshore trust funds they have. Ask Governor Moonbeam about his South Dakota trust accounts. It is a fact that when you jack taxes, you get less money as people find ways to avoid the tax.

    So after you redistribute money from and working people to Jughead Jones, and he blows it on a Toshiba bigscreen…what do you get? Well, considering many hightech consumer goods are made in CHINA or JAPAN…I’m sure all those new jobs for the spike in comsumer purchasing will be appreciated over THERE! Meanwhile in Minnesota…no jobs.

    Lastly, Jughead Jeff is under the impression that the EEEEEEVIL rich stuff their money into their bedroom matressses. How ignorant are you? While some “rich” people might keep a portion of their money in cash, the VAST majority INVEST it…or SAVES it….either one provides additional capital for companies to invest in infrastructure or for banks to be able to lend (assuming they aren’t under a 5,000 page book of idiot regulations where they fear government attack).

    Hey Jeff…stick to smoking your bong…leave the real work of surviving the Obama recession to the smart people.

  3. Well to an extent Jeff has a point. A very perverse point. The largest employer in Minnesota is the state government, followed closely by Hennepin County.
    I know, it’s upside down and backwards, but it’s the result of 40 years of DFL addiction to government growth. Like all addictions, it will be painful to recover from. Or it will kill you. Take your pick, Minnesota.

  4. Hey wingnuts/teabaggers/mitchkateers (PTR) – stop harshing my mellow!! I am pushing for the position below to be created in Minnesocold so my spouse can have a 6-figure payday for a job she has mad skillz for…

    “The Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs needs someone to run the Facebook page for the Dept. of the Interior and they’ll pay up to $115,000 a year.”

    …and the way the government around here looks the other way at nepotism (Mondales, Humphreys, etc.) my kids can get the gig after their Mom retires and double dips as the manager of the BIA’s Twitter account.

    FACTCHECK RESOURCE:
    http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/23/uncle-sam-shelling-out-big-bucks-for-government-jobs-gop-says-time-to-cut/

  5. Mitch actually bought his friend Moonbeam Birkenstock(!) a big screen TV – a 42″ Plasma. Birkenstock budgeted for a 50″ TV though. So Mitch cut Birkenstock’s TV budget by 16%. Mitch = Greedy, Heartless, Re-thuglican.

  6. Bad news, Seflores: at the Indian Law Conference in Hinkley last month, the speaker proudly announced that they had adopted an All-Indian hiring policy.

    You can’t work for the part of the federal government that manages Indians unless you, yourself, are an Indian who is acknowledged as such by a tribe.

    Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse, not to mention equal opportunity.

    .

  7. Nate – That reminds me of a guy I knew that was a salesman for my company’s distributor in the Pacific Northwest. We passed a beautiful casino south of Seattle and the guy told me his wife worked for the tribe that owned the casino. He told me that his wife was the office manager but the tribe wouldn’t let her have the word “manager” in her title as only Indians could be “managers”. The Chief, being wise, paid her like a manager and treated her like a manager because she got the job done better than anyone they ever had do the job. But politically, he coudn’t have a white person with a title over someone in the tribe.
    PS: I know Discordian Stooge doesn’t like me relating personal anecdotes as facts, so you’ll have to take my word for it that this happened. Hopefully, because Disco is a new Dad, and his site longer looks like he’s about to put a gun in his mouth, my personal anecdote will be okay.

  8. In a sense, the confusion (I’m trying to be charitable) suffered by Jeff and his friends is a classic example of cargo cult science. http://bit.ly/fL6I0t
    In brief, they observe that in periods of high economic activity, government hires many workers and pays them lots of money and benefits. Thus, they reason, during recessions, raising salaries and benefits of government workers ought to create prosperity for all.

    Mitch, you have your work cut out for you.

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