It may be the only consistent line of substantive defense of his record that Barack Obama has come up with in almost four years; “it’s Bush’s fault!”.
And according to a Fed economist, it may not be true.
12 thoughts on “Time To Retire The Chanting Point?”
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(MITCH WRITES: Ears’ pointless comment excised. Not because I’m in the habit of removing comments – I’ve removed maybe 10 in 10 years – or even because I don’t like being insulted in my own online house. I do object to stupid, pointless insults, though).
What i up with your banner?
That should be: what IS up with your banner?
Followup question: is it really a threadjack when no one has posted a comment yet?
It looks like Mitch was up until 4AM upgrading WordPress.
Terry got it right. Upgrade at 5AM, followed by me not looking at blog until I was at work.
From whence i can not access the blog’s control panel.
Grrr.
New header is fine for now, until something else strikes your fancy. Lileks changes his like underwear so that’s precedent if you need it. Earwig should be blocked more often, don’t apologize for sanitizing the blog of troll poop.
But no, they cannot retire the chanting point. It must go on forever, like the green bus. never park the bus. never retire the chanting point.
When atomic bombs rain on humanity, it will be Bush’s fault. As long as they have breath in them, it’s Bush’s fault. If Romney wins, it will be Romney’s fault. Get used to it. The MSM needs villains. We’re it. Wear the label proudly because persuasion will never move them from their perch.
From whence i can not access the blog’s control panel.
https://secure.logmein.com/products/free/
Been using it for 6 years now, and not a single communication from them asking me to upgrade to a non-free service. Just about every day I have worked in the last 6 years, I have had a logmein client window open to my home PCs. Works flawless. Can connect to multiple PCs at once too.
“it’s Bush’s fault!”
You just knew that this was going to be the “old reliable” excuse for at least a couple years when you first heard it. You also knew he’d try to stretch it out longer if he needed to as well.
You probably hoped, as I did, that he would not _need_ to stretch it all the way up until the next election because it would mean we would be in many kinds of trouble. And he would have done a crap job as President.
And so here we are at the Keynesian definition of “success”: high unemployment and low expectations. I guess we should hope for change.
The problem is that this guy doesn’t appear to have any fabulous insight or additional data — and the overwhelming majority of credible economists don’t support his position.
He’s something of an outlier.
The Bush Tax cuts were disastrous, as were the other Bush failures.
There were some other conservative horrific blunders earlier than that though, including doing away with Glass Steagal. Lack of regulation during the Bush years didn’t help.
The reality is that there is very little that supports the theory of the Austrian school; it’s pretty much just theory without practice to test it.
On the other hand, Keynsian economics has a much more significant track record of success, notably the applications to both Japan and Sweden during their economic crises.
I will admit to being a Keynsian; I grew up around economists like Walter Heller when he was at the U of MN, as chair of the department. I think I was all of 9 or 10 when I first had to sit through one of his talks on economics.
The intersection of Hayek and Keynes over the years is fascinating, beginning with their correspondence around the WW I, and spent a certain amount of WW II together.
Sorry, but Keynes while not perfect has a more impressive record of practical success than ol’ Hayek, who was a bit of a hypocrite — including wanting his free government health care, LOL.
To quote Heller from an opening joke to one of his U of MN macroeconomics lectures, if you laid every economist in the world, past and present, end to end around the equator, they still couldn’t reach a consensus. (some version of the joke substituted solid conclusion for consensus).
You can find someone who has some sort of economics credentials to support all sorts of nonsense. It doesn’t make their assertions true.
I think I’ll treat myself to an hour of reading the history of hedge funds Laci recommended to me; did you know they used to be called the more correct term Hedged Funds? The change to Hedge Funds really irritated some of the major players from the early days.
One of the more intriguing observations in the book is that people who are successful, including hedge fund managers and investors who were sometimes hugely successful during the 20th century, are often incorrect about why and how they are successful. It puts Mitt Romney’s assertion that a a hedge fun manager (and notably NOT as a governor of MA) that he understands how to create jobs and grow the economy. Except tht in the executive role in government he didn’t know how; his performance in MA was pretty poor.
The same premise, that we don’t accurately know what succeeds and what doesn’t quite often, is the center of Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist and economics Nobel prize winner 2002, Daniel Kahneman (behavioral economics).
It throws a healthy dash of cold water on all the claims by experts and pseudo or sort-of experts of ‘I know how/why’ of economic failure.
This guy is no Heller, Kahneman, or Keynes.
The problem is that this guy doesn’t appear to have any fabulous insight or additional data
Translation: At no point does his information match what “ThinkProgress” and “MediaMatters” have said “the truth” is.
I live to serve.
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