Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness

And We're Puttin' It On Wax... It's The New Economy!

Four and three and two and one...

Sultan of Brunei: rich

Eldrick "Tiger" Woods: upper-middle class

John and Cindy McCain: middle class [image from one of his incalculable number of houses taken from this heartwarming article]

Some preppie jerk: lower-middle class.

99.9973% of the rest of us: as poor as Kenny and Romanian opera company employees.

But don't worry, my fellow disgusting poor Americans: the fundamentals of the economy have been pronounced "strong" by our middle-class betters. Strangely enough, these fundamentals do not include the budget deficit, the trade deficit, wholesale prices, unemployment claims, foreclosures, and real wages. Much like the fundamentals of basketball do not include dribbling, shooting, passing, defending, hydrating, or signing shoe contracts.

UPDATE: I had no idea that they gave out actual houses in Viet Cong prisons*, spokesman Brian Rogers! Judging from from the rest of his response ("In terms of who's an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy headed professor-type..."), it appears that McCain press flacks are hired based on their ability to verbally imitate 80s teen movie antagonists.

* I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right!

Terror At Thirty-Five Pounds Per Square Inch

Merde!

About three weeks ago, I was filling up at a local station when I noticed that my front tires were running a little low on air. I was about to hand a dollar to the cashier for quarters for the air machine when I noticed he was quite possibly Persian, or Sri Lankan, or maybe a Turkman. As I was about to retract my dollar (fearing he'd use my dollar to buy a centrifuge and send it to Tehran), he informed me that he would switch on the air machine for free, as I had filled up. My eyes narrowed with suspicion... he WANTED me to be more fuel-efficient, despite his running a gas station? Was he bringing down Exxon from the inside? Were people like him the reason that this poor, besotted multinational corporation had only made $11.7 billion in profit for the last quarter, narrowly missing expectations and causing a short-term dip in their stock price? Was he, through his Machiavellian free tire-inflation scheme, causing Mittens Romney to go crazy in asserting that John McCain wasn't trying to give them a $1.2 billion tax break through a reduction in the corporate rate?

My mind reeled as I tried to formulate a plan to break free of the web of deceit when I noticed that some suspicious-looking 14 year olds were about to make their first adventure with a fake ID in attempting to purchase a six-pack of Miller Chill, which has the added flavors of lime, pomegranate, and the bilious excretions of an agitated bivalve. As soon as "Steve" Ahmadinejad's attention was diverted, I bolted out of the store, took off (tires squealing more than normal) in my car, and never looked back. Sure, my car can only hit 40 on the freeway, I wobble all over the place, and people are angrily and constantly honking at me, but I KEEPS IT REAL LIKE DAT! I DON'T LIKE PEOPLE PLAYIN' ON MY TIRES!

See also: MC Kevin McCarthy at 0:52 to 1:08...

I Could Carve a Better Presidential Candidate Out of a Mango

Children are so fat today! Isn't there some way we could make money off that?

I know that criticizing Republican economic proposals (especially those made in the heat of campaigning) on the grounds of unsoundness and stupidity is kind of like criticizing an actor in a set-up commercial (e.g. the guy who throws his Wii controller at a plasma TV, breaking it, before the Southwest Airlines voice-over guy queries "Wanna get away?") for being an annoying jackass. They are simply not serious ideas for adults:

“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

Maybe this resonates with a certain quadrant of the population who thinks that they make a cool four bits by having a $0.50 coupon off of a $2.50 box of dishwashing detergent, despite not owning a dishwasher. They then decide to use the detergent as a makeshift form of bubble-bath, causing one hell of a rash that they then treat with a $6.00 tin of Gold Bond Medicated powder (official medicated powder of this weblog). Eventually, the rash goes away, leaving a 91% full box of detergent and a 52% full tin, both of which have no further function. Oh, and you lost your at-will job at the Dairy Queen soft-serve counter because of the week you took off in order to treat the detergent-rash.

CONGRATULATIONS! You have improbably achieved twin victories over imprudent detergent purchases and self-inflicted rashes! Thanks to your creative accounting, negative externalities no longer exist, interest is not collected, and recessionary effects are ignored! Personally, I'd rather turn to that computer-generated fox who promises success through home-based business for rational deficit-reduction initiatives.

UPDATE: The untermango himself speaks; I didn't catch all of it, but it was something along the lines of "Heh, tough times, huh? I’ve lived through twelve recessions, eight panics, and five years of McKinleynomics. I’ll survive this."

Tell Them What They've Won, Don Pardo!

You gave my money to who?!?

Good news, everyone! We can start making the minimum payments on our national credit card in another five years if that pyramid scheme we enrolled in pays off and the car finance people forget that we exist!

The budget that President Bush will submit to Congress today shows the federal deficit falling in each of the next four years and would produce a $61 billion surplus in 2012, administration officials said. But to get there, Bush is counting on strong economic growth, diminishing costs in the Iraq war and tight domestic spending to offset the cost of his tax cuts.

Let's assume that this fairy tale is correct, although it relies on actions taken in the hypothetical future using the most amateurish of accounting tricks and assumptions so rosy (especially relating to ongoing military actions) that it makes Rosie Grier blush. This would put to an end the ten year budget cycle between 2002-2012, during which time approximately $3 trillion has been added to the national debt, or approximately $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in America (I didn't even need the Windows calculator for that one!). The debt clock shows that we're now at about $29,000 total debt per citizen.

For that indebtedness, which mirrors the nation's own negative savings rate, we get what, precisely? I think we've effectively turned into a national/homeland security state, although we can't seem to keep 130,000 soldiers in rotation in Iraq without breaking the military, nor are we achieving anything approaching passing grades in information, airline, port, or first responder security performance. We do, however, swarm all over Bostonian Lite Brites like a gang of Elvis impersonators on a fried banana and peanut butter sandwich.

I'm pretty sure that no long- or short-term problems with Medicare, Social Security, or health insurance have come close to being fixed. We're still at a historically high number of uninsured Americans, with no chance that whatever it was the President proposed in the State of the Union (I wasn't paying attention, naturally) will pass, and even if it did that it would make a fart's worth of difference. Thankfully, that's where the overwhelming compassion in the doctrine of compassionate conservatism kicks in:

The president's budget would also reduce spending for Medicare and Medicaid, the federal government's health programs for the elderly and the poor, by about $100 billion over five years. And it would provide insufficient extra cash to maintain coverage for poor children currently enrolled in the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Or not. I'm afraid that the con man has absconded with your $10,000, your infant's $10,000, and the $10,000 of that guy that sells barbacoa tacos in a cart on East Riverside Drive and directly deposited the funds in a Cayman offshore bank account belonging to guys like this (more scholarly and numbers-based commentary here, more shameful class warfare here).

Next Economics-Related Post: January 2007

A flaming bag, eh? Well, these new Italian loafers will make short work of it.

The playbook:

The Bush administration is planning to trumpet today a midyear revision of its budget estimates projecting that a recent surge in tax revenue will help to shrink this year's federal deficit below $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the estimates.

Of course...

The administration's estimate (of $420 billion) was widely derided at the time; budget experts said aides to President Bush were overestimating the red ink so they could claim credit later when the actual figures came in below forecast.

and...

"But in the long run, we probably can't count on those increases in revenue," said Mitchell, the Heritage economist. "And the fact that spending is growing at such an unsustainable, irresponsible clip has to be deeply troubling."

graphically reprented as (hit refresh for new, larger numbers)...

More budgetary information can be found here and here. So, in short, a problem that didn't exist when the Bush Administration took over but became a gigantic problem has became a slightly less gigantic problem in the extreme short term but the problem will again blow up to one of titanic proportions in the long term and we don't have any plan on the long-term except for the "leave a flaming bag of poo on the next Administration's doorstep" option.

So let's hold a nice tickertape parade and press conference that culminates in the friendly paddling of the director of the budget office. Does this pattern (anemic job growth, chaos in Iraq) sound familiar? And just think of all the self-congratulory press briefings (national health insurance coverage, chaos in Afghanistan, environmental decay, 100 other declining social indicators) we aren't getting! All right!

Stop Coughing Or I'll Give You Something To Cough About!

The first and last step in the GOP health care plan.

This category rarely gets a workout*. The primary question I have about capitalism in general is: how do a series of individually, monumentally irrational economic decisions lead to an efficient marketplace? Let's say that the good or service in question is political leadership, which is not so much purchased so much as one has an opportunity cost in voting for a particular party/candidate. Now let's consider these pocketbook issues:

(1) People seem to be hella-concerned about the doubling of gas prices over the last several years. If the average person consumes about 500 gallons of gas in a year, this would cost the consumer $750. Nothing to sneeze at, but some alternatives exist to driving your goddamned car a half-block to pick up a lotto ticket.

(2) However, people seem to accept as divine edict by the Germanic god Hayek that the loss of their family's health insurance should be seen as an immutable, imponderable by-product of our paper-shuffing economy. I don't think I need to tell anyone how much $750 gets you in your average hospital. Two bowls of gelatin, if I'm not mistaken.

Now, assuming that the development in part two is more catastrophic than the one described in part one, let's consider the following:

The percentage of working-age Americans with moderate to middle incomes who lacked health insurance for at least part of the year rose to 41 percent in 2005, a dramatic increase from the 28 percent in 2001 without coverage, a study released on Wednesday found.

and

About 45.8 million Americans did not have health insurance in 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Wouldn't it be semi-rational to think that a large portion of the population would be down with electing the party that logistically had an answer for such a problem? It even ranks at the top of the list of concerns that "greatly worry" the American voter, for shit's sake! Does the mere invocation of the exclamations "Socialist engineering!" or "Holy shit, them queers wanna burn the flag!" really enough to neutralize this?

Incidentally, 72% of Americans think that the economy is fair or poor, and Hale Stewart has the breakdown. Does the challenging of a non-Republican candidate's sincere desire not to make Iran uninhabitable for a century via nuclear hellfire make this go away as well? Of course, I'm asking this question at about the time Scary Movie 4 crosses the $50 million (7 million viewers) barrier.

* I got my B.A. in Economics in 1993, making me currently about as qualified as a mound of Rhodesian Ridgeback leavings to opine on the economy.

Time to Go To Work, Work All Night

Search for underpants, hey!

The underpants gnomes return with a vengeance on a national scale:

(1) Start with a budget surplus.

(2) Run up large deficits with freewheeling spending initiatives and tax cuts that disproportionately benefit business and the wealthiest 1%.

(3) Notice the large deficits several years later after claiming for years that they "don't matter."

(4) Take tax cuts for businesses and wealthy off the table.

(4a) Start slicing entitlements for children and veterans, thereby pushing their health care burden down on state and local governments.

(4b) Shake your tiny fist at another 150 programs you probably don't intend to cut.

(5) Claim to plan to cut the gigantic budget deficits that weren't around when you took office in half by the time you leave office. Make sure that the initiatives that further explode the deficit are like cherry bombs you flushed down national toilet before you clear out.

(5a) If necessary (and it will be), use accounting tricks, such as not factoring in the costs of ongoing wars, making tax cuts permanent, new programs and transition costs of programs that don't even claim to solve the crisis you manufactured.

(6) Claim that math is hard, or disarm reporters with a "it's clearly my budget, it's got a lot of bullshit in it" quip.

(7) Profit!

If you can come up with an all-encompassing analogy, substituting your personal finances for the national ledger, I would be most appreciative. Mine usually ends around stage 4b with somebody from Bank of America Mastercard breaking my kneecaps, and me having to transport myself to the soup kitchen on a modified plywood skateboard.

UPDATE: Invaluable commentor HWRNMNBSOL reminds me of another extended analogy (that nobody paid attention to) that I could have reprinted at no additional brain-cost.

I'm An Army of One, Not a Family of Four

Actually, clicking there doesn't do anything. Go ahead and try.

Has anybody else been getting unwanted, recurring charges on their credit cards? For a trial offer they rejected almost a year ago?

The $80 billion request will push funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to $105 billion for fiscal year 2005 alone, including $25 billion in emergency spending already approved.

That's about $1500 in expenditures this year for your family of four, and $4000 total for the your family of four so far for these military adventures (your family of four contributes nearly $7500 total towards the most wasteful organization on Earth per year). And we've only got two years at a minimum to go. Do I hear $10,000 in expenditures for your family of four?

Before the invasion, then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels predicted Iraq would be "an affordable endeavour", and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress: "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." When then-White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey estimated Iraq costs at $100 billion to $200 billion, he was derided by administration colleagues and later lost his job.

"That's why pencils have erasers!"-- the new poster starring Mitch Daniels and Paul Wolfowitz, coyly putting their hands to their mouths in an "Oops!" gesture.

"In a time of war, you have to be prepared for the unexpected and you have to be flexible enough to adapt," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

"Just look at our press office! They've managed to come up with 28 different raisons d'être during Operation: Shifting Rationale. I myself have been the very model of Reed Richards-like flexibility, offering up 118 different ways to sound like a stuttering jackass while not answering simple, direct questions!" When asked "Why are we still in a time of war, Scott?", he replied: "Probably because you keep questioning us."

By the way, your family of four's share of the projected 2005 deficit is about $6000 (to be fair, this includes the supplemental war funding, but not Social Security privatization.. er.. private personal accounts transition costs), and your family of four's share of the national debt currently stands at $105,000. Everyone getting their money's worth?

Let's Blow This Fascist Popsicle Stand!

Damn your eyes, Fidel! We could have used that money!

Today's Simpsons template (regular text): The Trouble With Trillions. Today's reality template (italicized): In Plan to Reduce Deficit, White House Turns to Old Projections.

Homer: (filling out return) Marge! How many kids do we have? Oh, no time to count, I'll just estimate! Uh... nine!

To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security.

Homer: If I don't hear you it's not illegal! OK, I need some deductions, deductions... ah!! Business gifts! (Homer grabs the boat painting from above the couch and hands it to Marge.) Here you go, keep using nuclear power!

To make Mr. Bush's goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall of $413 billion.

Homer: OK, Marge, if anyone asks, you require twenty four hour nursing care...

But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush's five-year budget window.

... Lisa's a clergyman...

As in past years, the budget will exclude costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could reach $100 billion in 2005 and are likely to remain high for years to come.

... Maggie is seven people...

The budget is also expected to exclude Mr. Bush's goal to replace Social Security in part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration officials concede that such a plan could require the government to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two.

... and Bart was wounded in Vietnam!

The Social Security and Medicare trust funds took in about $146 billion more than they paid out in benefits in the last fiscal year, which reduced the government's overall deficit to $413 billion from about $560 billion.

I keep telling everyone, Americathon is right around the corner.

Earn Your Associate's Degree In Hard Mathematics

It's clearly math. It's got a lot of shit I don't understand in it.

Shorter economic summit (Is summit the right word? No, I think it's circle jerk): "Immediate problems like the anemic dollar, weak job demand, and huge deficits/government debt are no problem at all. What we would like everyone to do, in a orderly fashion, is to start freaking out about the state of Social Security in the Year 2040."

Although this quote from the President is hubristically illuminating: You know, it's interesting, you talked about the Great Depression, and if I might toot our horn a little bit, one of my predecessors raised taxes and implemented protectionist policies in the face of an economic downturn, and as a result, there was 10 years of depression.

Seeing as there was only one decade-long Depression in American history, I am led to believe he's comparing his economic stewardship and the problems facing the country in 2004 to FDR and the problems facing the country in 1933, when he took office 3.5 years after the stock market crash. To which most historians would respond "Yeah, he's totally greater." and you wouldn't know whether they were being serious or not because of historians' famous dry wit.

In other money-related news, our President may have just cracked the code that has been puzzling econometricians and financial analysts for years: "That's easy to resolve," Bush said. "People can buy more United States products if they're worried about the trade deficit."

To which I supplied my own solution for other problems facing America in the comments: I've got a revolutionary new cure for our nation's competentpresidentlessness (a/k/a "the competence deficit", "the ability gap", or "waking up in bed next to Peter Boyle"), but it involves tickets to Greenland for everyone who thought that Saddam Hussein planned 9/11.

Do I have everybody sufficiently in check? OK then, peace out.

Communism Comes to Frogtown

Common good? That's crazy Commie muppet talk!

This is controversial? "Many of you are well enough off that... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

First of all, I think that this pretty bluntly states the concept of taxation and government finance as most everybody understands it from their high school civics book. Secondly, if she's talking about rescinding the top bracket's marginal rate reductions, I don't think she's going to get an argument from most of America.

However, I'm going to look at this through the narrow prism of our nation's fiscal health / indebtedness. In concrete terms, the debt has increased by $4,500 per person ($18,000 for a family of four, or $1.6 trillion in the last three and a half years) since Bush took office.

In speculative terms (using the CBO's projection), every person in America's share of the debt has experienced a $23,500 net increase because of the fiscal policies of this Administration. That's $94,000 for a family of four. Assume that a new Administration or a divided government can reduce that damage by half. Now we're talking only $47,000 of debt load for your family.

Now for our benefit because of these costs. According to tables too complicated to reproduce, taxpaying units making $30,000 to $40,000 a year, the average effect of the 2003 tax cuts was an $825 refund. For the $50,000 to $75,000 a year range, a $1,400 refund. For millionaires, an average $112,000 refund (obviously skewed by the multi-multi-millionaires).

Call it class warfare, I don't give a shit. The truth is, most everyone is getting a paltry cash advance on the national credit card while the underlying balance is skyrocketing. And the Bank of Incompetence wants to continue to up our limit.

I'm Leonard Smalls, And I Approved This Message

Price. Fair price. And that ain't whatever you say it is; fair price is what the market'll bear. Now there are people, mind you, there are people in this land who'll pay a lot more'n twenty grand for a healthy baby... Give you an idea, when I was a lad I m'self fetched twenty-five thousand on the black market. And them's 1954 dollars. I'm sayin, fair price.

Pay attention, black market baby-traffickers! There's going to be a glut of little pink bundles of joy named Cassidy, Jordan, Madison, Tyler, Dylan, Austin, Cameron, Connor, and Haley for your shadowy commercial enterprise. That, of course, will be the natural consequence if the United States Senate doesn't follow the House's lead and extend the child tax credit to families making up to $309,000 per year (currently, the limit stands at $110,000 and is unavailable to families making less than $10,500 per year).

Don't force these upper class families, who clearly haven't been able to make do with the disproportionate tax cut benefits they've already received, to have to make the most painful decision imaginable. We as a nation cannot abide the wholesale placement of cherubic proto-yuppies into a shady international baby exchange, just because a bunch of deficit do-gooders and "tax fairness" communists decided that they actually gave a shit about the nation's fiscal health. It's all just a bunch of soul-shattering class warfare.

Calling All Economists and Pseudo-Economists!

The new employment statistics for March have been released. A few follow-up questions:

(1) No jobs were added in February, but the unemployment rate stayed at 5.6%. 306,000 jobs were added in March, and the rate went up to 5.7%. What the fuck?

(2) 306,000 jobs were added, but total employment "held at 138.3 million", and the ratio of employed people stayed constant at 62.1%. Snuh?

(3) People wishing full-time employment, but having to work part-time, increased to 4.7 million people. Marginally attached people (kind of seeking work, but not recently) stayed the same at 1.6 million. I'm assuming these people don't figure into the main unemployment statistic, right? Close?

(4) I have a feeling this may have something to do with seasonal adjustments, and therefore the unemployment figures cited over the last 3-4 months were actually understated. Am I anywhere near being remotely correct?

(5) If I told you that one of my majors back in the day was economics, you'd pretty much think I was lying, wouldn't you? That's a rhetorical question.

Puff Tijuana Smalls, and Shake Hands With Debt

Going twice.. SOLD to the gentleman from the House of Saud!

FY 2000 Budget Surplus: $281 billion
FY 2001 Budget Surplus: $127 billion
FY 2002 Budget Deficit: $158 billion
FY 2003 Budget Deficit: $401 billion
FY 2004 Budget Deficit: $477 billion

FY 2005 Budget Deficit, according to House Republicans: $377 billion (probably optimistic, since the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are excluded and that whole Medicare prescription drug benefit cost thing hasn't been sorted out.) Bush congratulated the House for approving a "responsible'' budget.

Four years of fiscal stewardship by the Bush Administration, a minimum of $1.4 trillion of added debt, or about $20,000 per family of four. Everyone getting their children's crushing debt and Medicare bankruptcy's worth?

Or, to put it in terms cinephiles can understand, the Criterion Collection currently has 232 titles which you can get at DVD Planet for $26 each. You and your family of four could have bought all of these excellent movies and still had enough money for six 42" plasma televisions.

Or you could have bought enough Gay Penguin For America T-shirts to outfit 1,100 of your closest gay-penguin-obsessed friends.

Or a car.

Delusions of Job-Related Program Activities II

From the very latest Get Your War On, we can safely post a final exam about the New New Economy:

Working in the burger assembly line : manufacturing ::

(a) Stuffing envelopes with Bolivian gold mine pyramid scheme pamphlets : commodities trading;

(b) Playing in online poker tournaments : international banking;

(c) Operating a transparency copy machine at Kinko's : performing duties as a Senior Vice President for a Fortune 500 corporation;

(d) Reading lame script for Schlotsky's radio commercial : broadcast journalism;

(e) Deciding whether to eat or pay rent as you collect the final week of unemployment insurance : financial planning at Merrill Lynch.