I think what bothers me is the huge $ investment for:
radio and tv mostly dissipate’g to thin air in a moment
and newspapers to the recycle bin in a day
magazines in a week or month

unlike a song on CD or movie on DVD and books on shelves
or cars on roads driving to record stores and libraries

todays tv filling my head with those tax cuts the GOP wants – but there’s not enough time to discuss in the same paragraph the other side of the equation – spending cuts into a PayGo situation
or
todays tv filling our head that Gov Blago is gonna go on the talk show circuit tomorrow instead of being at his impeachment trial – a trial he is required to sit still and LISTEN only

a couple or three besides the facts

It seems unlikely that money velocity is anything but tanked well beyond the time the presses run overtime and stimulus spending delivers money in wheelbarrows.

Too much necessary “saving” or restoration of financial condition to acceptable levels will absorb whatever monetary success might have been hoped for.

The level of municipal and state debt that’s at the near default level cannot possibly supp0rt a healthy recovery.

Watch the stimulus plan and follow the money if you can and estimate the components that have the best hope of juicing money velocity. And watch where the rest goes.

The really bad deception going on is to try to stabilize citizen confidence without full disclosure of the entire dire situation.

There’s no way to predict the exact outcome, but when you see the efficiency of current government spending and how much of it goes into so few pockets before ordinary consumers see any, it’s safe to assume that 90% will disappear before boosting velocity.

We can limp along perpetuating a very, very sick system, or we can allow it to collapse.

The fundamental error in the newsletter is their confusing of the quantity of debt with the quality of debt. Start with Minsky’s three types of finance: Hedge (debt burden is less than the cash flow from the asset); Speculative (debt is less than cash flow plus asset appreciation); Ponzi (debt burden is greater than cash flow and appreciation). Fisher’s debt deflation occurs at the Minsky moment when the last dupe tries to sell his Ponzi financed asset and gets handed his ass instead. The realization that values are unreasonable begins to set in and the expectation of lower asset values takes hold, so that the speculative financed assets take the next round of hits. But notice that the pit is not bottomless. Those with hedge financing don’t depend on asset prices; they can just ride it out in the absence of personal tragedy that would force a sale (like the loss of a job or illness without health care insurance, etc). Notice it is the quality of the debt that counts. We now see that America’s Financial Innovation was patently Ponzi.

Which brings me to the tax nonsense. Krugman recently noted that fiscal spending provides a multiplier of about twice that provided by tax cuts. The idea is that a portion of a dollar spent on a project gets re-spent by a worker for lunch and re-spent by the deli owner for groceries, etc; while the first portion of the dollar spent on tax cuts goes into savings or to pay down debt before the remaining $0.50 goes for lunch, etc. Fifth grader logic tells me that if total debt were the problem, then just do what Bush 1 and Clinton did, raise taxes to cover the spending and reap the net multiplier gain. But that is not the current problem; the problem is the expectation of falling prices. The solution is to create the expectation of stable or higher future prices, while providing enough jobs for those with healthy financing and providing a better social safety net to those without health insurance, etc.

The Reagan tax cuts, military spending, financial innovation, deregulation, and the Contract with America are all examples of raids on the Treasury, so to hear about concerns for the magnitude of the debt from republicans is just absurd. On the positive note, however, the Democrats are already expected to tax and spend on everything from infrastructure to health care, so I think depression will be averted, but only if we are willing to trash the discredited ideas of the republicans and their nonsense that passes for economic analysis. Suffer the morons no more!

How can you address only the tax side of the equation without addressing the spending side? Remember that the real economy has to carry the weight of government on its back.

In my opinion, both taxes and spending are too high. Certainly, it is fair that those who derive the most from society ought to contribute the most to its maintenance, but we should all agree that the weight of a continually growing government is backbreaking.

When will these people give it a rest?! The conservative con job has failed. Right Wing control of the economy has bankrupted the economy. Tax Cuts have created the greatest deficits in our country’s history –just like last time (Gee What a Surprise, No One Ever Could Have Predicted This. Just like according to our editorial ‘No One’ discussed the effectiveness of a tax rebate in 2008).

Hey I’ve got an idea: Lets just make up what ever ‘information’ suits our political agenda, or private wealth aggrandizement strategy, and pontificate endlessly about how right we are, using our wealth and power to influence organizations and individuals to go along with us, until our agenda is enacted. Then we can use public money to continue the process of manipulating information and ideas to make sure that no one ever figures out who is responsible. It’s a great Plan — I’m glad to be a part of it!

It is OBVIOUS that ‘tax cuts increase revenue’ is AT BEST true only in some specific regimes of the various variables involved. Since people apparently don’t know this, lets prove it: at 0% tax rate how much tax is collected? Uh… Zero? Why yes, that is correct! The claim might be that as a result ‘everyone’ will go out and spend more and we will collect more in sales tax. An extravagantly unlikely claim. The majority of the people would have alittle more money, and so would spend a little more. The people who advocate for this change, the wealthy, already earn so much money that they can purchase consumer items at any time. The money goes into stocks and bonds, not consumption. Hmmm, maybe that’s why the capital gains tax got lowered too? History is extremely clear: income tax cuts lead to exploding federal deficits. Advocates of income tax cuts tell us this is because the ‘other side’ doesn’t capitulate on still more of its concerns. They tell us ‘the real problem’ is Social Security. Except they don’t seem to have any problem with spending triple, or more, on banks. The agenda is obvious: villify everyconcern that isn’t shared by the wealthy, turn the federal government into a single provider of military power to be used in enhancing the business prospects of corporations — multi-national corporations, and let the rest of the society go hang.

Unfortunately the reality is that an economy, like a society, and like the biospehere including the human race, is not succesful under this model. The economy is an ecosystem — if enough of the parts starve, the whole starves. The predators can’t kill off all the prey (and don’t worry, those of who these ideas are directed against recognize extremely clearly that we are being set up as prey) without also themselves dying off.

And that thar kiddies, that thar’d be your economic collapse of 2009.

The endless re-cycling of almost true ideas, and accurate facts, in pursuit of a selfish and destructive and short sighted, and fundamentally nasty ideology is impressive in it’s tenacity and resourcefulness, and utterly sickening in it’s twisted self destructive hatred.

Good Luck with following that voice.

We need all the jobs we can find, since automation and computers will increasingly perform the jobs you may consider “real”…this is the real challenge for our society, not debt levels.