DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ
As Published On
The Human Conspiracy Blog: http://www.jaygaskill.com/blog3
The Policy Think Site: http://www.jaygaskill.com
All contents, unless otherwise indicated are
Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 by Jay B. Gaskill
Please contact Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law, via e mail at law@jaygaskill.com
TONIGHT’S DEBATE –
---THE RACE FOR POTUS IS STILL ON
&
DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ
Including this, of course…
But note that the latest CBS poll now shows the race tightening up after the Palin-Biden debate. You remember that debate, the one that the mainstream media insisted Governor Palin “lost”. Here’s the CBS poll story link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/06/opinion/polls/main4504633.shtml .
What the American people are longing to hear is a credible plan, credibly presented for our economic recovery. They won’t hear that this evening. So, second best, they are looking for someone they can trust in this crisis.
On the first point, I’ll have more to say later.
For now, just remember that the entire capacity of government to write checks (without touching off a South American style hyper-inflation) is bit change compared to the monetary magnitude of the private finance sector. This crisis was set off by a lending spree fueled by misguided public policy and backed by inflated real estate portfolios. As a nation we have built about 650 billion dollars worth of homes, located in the wrong places and still overpriced by as much as another 30%. They were overpriced for one simple reason: Incomes weren’t high enough or stable enough in the “new economy” to support those huge purchase mortgages.
And hold this thought:
The key is not so much the employment/unemployment rate as such as it is ordinary American incomes.
Any effective recovery plan, other than one designed to support the banks and wait out the painful cycle of adjustment, will involved very carefully targeted investments in economic activities that generate new income streams for a whole lot of Americans who now are underemployed and whose talents and time are underutilized. This boils down to public/private investments in energy production and distribution in the near term, in American manufacturing in the mid term and in focused high-tech research into the foregoing for the long term. Every penny of public funds spent to subsidize failure is a penny wasted and every dollar spent to make it easier to buy stuff we really don’t need is inflationary.
More to come…
JBG
