Since our foreign creditors have already swallowed massive tax cuts, a costly war, out-of-control entitlement spending and the running tab on the GOP’s House o’ Pork, far be it from me to suggest there going to rebel now over a little hurricane spending. But if the bottom (such as it was) really has fallen out of "small government" conservatism, then we’re on the road to a future national bankruptcy, since even if the Democrats get back into power, I doubt they’ll have either the political muscle or the will to impose another round of Rubinomics.
Back to Main
September 15, 2005
WB: Tom Foolery
Comments
For Econ101, you want to dial into Brad DeLong’s
blog, although all Dr. DeLong can do is wring his
hands, chafe at Mr. Greenspan, and ask, how much
longer, oh Fed, how much longer? Who knows?
Peak Oil is now pushed out from next summer to
some time in 2015, although recent estimates say
the Saudis are over-pumping and ready to crash,
and we are *already* past Peak Oil. In the end,
all anyone can say is the standard deviation in
accumulated knowledge to build a prediction is
greater than the range of possible outcomes.
Global Warming is now pushed out to the end of
the century, although recent speculation about
the North Sea and Gulf Stream drifts suggest
that climate can flip at any moment into another mini-Ice Age, and even if we give up our cars
tomorrow, there’s enough carbon dioxide and
latent heat to swell the oceans up over 12 feet.
In the end, all anyone can say is the standard deviation in accumulated knowledge to build a prediction is greater than the range of possible outcomes.
So economics, as Einstein said, is relative.
Economic energy is equal to population times flow of money squared. At some point it goes critical.
All of which won’t mean a thing to our children,
who will already be wearing choke collars, ear
tags, tooth bar-codes, and working cradle-to-
grave just to pay the interest on our deficit,
while the principal portion is bought up in Treasuries and real estate by the oil shieks,
and WA DC is moved to a suburb of Riyahd.
There’s a word for this somewhere, oh, Hog Farm.
Upton Sinclair. All animals are equal, but some are more equal. Yeah, and then there’s all of US.
Oil chattel. You get what you pay for.
Posted by: Terry Michaels | Sep 15 2005 5:52 utc | 1
President Bush will call tonight for an unprecedented federal commitment to rebuild New Orleans and other areas obliterated by Hurricane Katrina, putting the United States on pace to spend more in the next year on the storm’s aftermath than it has over three years on the Iraq war, according to White House and congressional officials.
Washington Post
Washington urged to give Tehran last chance
Pakistan Dawn – 2 hours ago
VIENNA, Sept 14: UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei has urged the United States to give Iran one last chance to halt suspected weapons-related nuclear activities, rather than demanding immediate UN Security Council action, diplomats said on …
Retro 2003, and it’s still only Bush II +5.
So we’ll be spending $2,000,000,000 per **day** in Iraq, $1,000,000,000 per **day** on Katrina, now another $2,000,000,000 per **day** in Iran,
all of which is totally unfunded in tax receipts and must add to our, what $7,000,000,000,000 budget deficit? That’s $50 **A DAY** for every working American, with $3,000 interest per year on the deficit, forever. $21,000 a year. Poof!
That’s nearly equal to average American income.
And you want to know why? Because Iran has the lowest percentage of external debt to GDP of any nation on earth. Put another way, Iran is the most fiscally-conservative nation on the globe.
Rolling that up, Iran has the third largest pool of oil extant.
Oops! Did I say oil? I meant, they have some really scarey WMD’s and we better move fast!
—
Cripes, St Peter, the NeoCons are ripping play- book pages right out of Clausewitz and Hitler!
If you can’t see that huge tear in the side of
the US Titanic, then play Nearer My God to Thee.
Posted by: Lash Marks | Sep 15 2005 6:21 utc | 3
Same piece as above:
The White House has declared 41 states and the District of Columbia either major disaster areas or in states of emergency, allowing federal aid to flow to any state that takes in an evacuee.
That hurricane was much bigger than I thought …
I ask: who here, seriously, doesn’t believe the US is fucked? Irremediably.
I don’t know the exact “whens” and “hows” but I’m totally convinced that within 5 to 10 years tops (and I’m usually wildly optimistic about such things), America will look like a cross between Argentina and Russia with a dash of Nairobi thrown in.
And that’s the best-case scenario IMHO.
Posted by: Lupin | Sep 15 2005 6:38 utc | 5
Lupin:
I think the phrase that we’re trying to settle on is
Sometimes you’re fucked
It’s a little indeterminate who or when or why but it will cover all contingencies.
The exact origins of the phrase where at the Juan Cole site specifically about our stance in Iraq, but the universality of it is becoming quickly apparent. Probably NASA next week will discover an asteroid that will land say, next to Cape Cod, so those liberals are definitely fried. But the W will put on his decisive leadership costume and plan accordingly till then.
Posted by: christofay | Sep 15 2005 6:59 utc | 6
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_11.php#006541
Josh Marshal concurs.
You judge the fruit by the tree. FDR created his huge social program to save the nation. This president has unleashed the floodgates to save his party’s hold on congress and HIMSELF. This is a total violation of the public social contract. The fact that this happening without even the semblance of legislative discussion, puts the lie to every “Republican policy” and every “Republican think-tank” ever.
The Republicans can no longer be considered a political party. By tomorrow’s actions they will prove clearly to the world at large that they are nothing more than an organized crime syndicate, for this new larger relief package will be nothing more than a colossal public theft. As such they should as a whole be given no quarter until the lot of them are removed from power. Failure to do so will guarantee this nation’s permanent status as a third world power. Can anyone doubt that large portions of this relief bill will not end up coming back as political donations to the party? Does anyone wonder about the wisdom of giving the current and every following holder of the executive office operating in this newly re-minted system of total corruption and total control, the power to decide soley on his own disgression when to pre-emptively exercise the full use of our military powers abroad and now domestically? Can anyone doubt that New Orleans was not so much incompetence as a trial run, much like the US involvement in the Balkans was effectively a pilot program for Iraq?
How has this disaster been sprung? Decades of conscious substitution of direct involvement in the decisions of government by the people governed, for a system of privately controlled corporate reporting on those decisions. The modern “right-wing” talk radio/tv/internet machine is just the logical conclusion of this process.
How are we able to even discuss this, how are you the reader able to even read these statements? You are looking at the last vestige of both truly public journalism and truly public discourse that only non-corporate controlled media make possible. Billmon and his like are the true heirs of public broadcasting tradition, and the only remaining avenue for the public to be honestly informed of the details and implication of the events of the world.
Sneaking details into the middle of corporate media articles so that the attentive segment of the public has a breadcrumb trail to the truth is not journalism. It’s a cry from help from inside the orwellian fortune cookie factory. This technique of sneaky passive resistance was not enough to educate the public in the run up to the Iraq war, and it’s certainly not enough now. The cynic among us may wonder if the owners of the NYT are not charging for web-access to their “newspaper” to make money, as much as they are attempting to deny the public sphere, currently sustained by the internet, the support found in the weekly discourse of Paul Krugman, who is one of the few journalists left operating in the corporate world?
We as Americans have truly become a people without a nation. Mourn for us. Mourn for the unholy monster we have birthed upon the world.
Posted by: patience | Sep 15 2005 7:36 utc | 7
Okay, so what’s the Barfly consensus on this? I posted Kwiatkowski’s take on another thread – she said it was to get Iran & Iraq fighting each other to keep Iraq from unifying & kicking out xUS. Is the consensus here that it’s to threaten them w/Hell unless they recycle their PetroProfits through NY as the Saudis so obligingly do/did? Or, are Homo NeoNuts just psychotic killers? Maybe some nukes need testing? Or all of the above? And what American city will be sacrificed to create the appropriate state of mind in the populous?
Posted by: jj | Sep 15 2005 7:37 utc | 8
The opportunists (which means virtually every Republican actually involved in the dirty business of electoral politics) either understood this all along, or have figured it out along the way.
Understood this all along! All the political philosophy is after the fact justification for bald greed. Always has been.
Our hope is that a flood of honest ciizens, realizing that the mess is accelerating out of control and that things can always get worse as long as we allow them to, run for office themselves and unseat a majority of the present corrupt political class.
That will not foreclose the disaster that’s to come, no matter what; but it will put in place the first responders we’ll so desperately need when the house of cards does come down.
I’m afraid that’s no more likely to happen than were the measures that would have saved so many lives in New Orleans.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 15 2005 7:42 utc | 9
. . .there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget . . . Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, “Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good.
This is precisely true from their own frame of reference, as you pointed out yourself, Billmon. All money that was going anywhere other than to line the pockets of their cronies and apparatchiks and fuel the spin machine has been removed from the budget by now.
“Even the legally blind can see the Rovians are serious about the essential functions of government. It’s just that in their value system, funneling federal money to sympathetic interest groups while simulatenously redistributing the tax burden away from those same groups are the two essential functions of government.”
And “Katrina” in their language means another blank check. How good can it get?
And all who could not sink or swim were simply left to float…
Posted by: PeeDee | Sep 15 2005 9:00 utc | 10
There will be no flood of honest citizens, because there never is, never was.
Regimes like Germany and Japan had to be bombed to destruction; Italy conquered; the USSR and Rumania totally collapse under their own corruption and incompetence; Franco had to die; Pinochet and Peron and Marcos to become empty shells…
There will be NO return to the past, the golden age 90ies, our Victorian/Edwardian era of modern times; the best one can hope is a Democratic Yeltsin, but that will not stop the downward slide.
Posted by: Lupin | Sep 15 2005 9:14 utc | 11
A bit of levity:
Q: What’s Bush position on Roe v Wade?
A: He doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans.
Posted by: Lupin | Sep 15 2005 9:24 utc | 12
What we are witnessing is the first ever transmutation of a liberal democratic society into a feudal system.
It could get so bad we could see the day that it becomes illegal for anyone under a certain income level to actually try to have a savings account or own their own home free and clear, or at least impractical to even try…
Posted by: bcf | Sep 15 2005 12:40 utc | 13
@Billmon
As you know, I’m a big fan of your econ charts. Could you please do one that graphs All Govt Expenditure as percent of GDP, say from 1970 to date? ‘All Govt’ means fed + 50 states + local + regional = total ‘public sector’
Thanks.
Posted by: Wolf DeVoon | Sep 15 2005 13:25 utc | 14
We are pleased to present the full text of president bush’s speech. To be given tonight in memoriam Of the victims of Hurricane Katrina:
Blahblahblah… axis of evil… blahblahblahblah… with us or against us… blah blah blah… stay the course …blahblahblah….Iraq doing great…blah blah blah …confirm Judge Roberts… blah blah blah… eliminate the estate tax…blahblahblahblah….reform Social Security….blahblah blah…attack….blahblah…. Iran, Syria, Venezuala, North Korea….blah lahblah….maybe Cuba…blahblah….tactical nukes…blahblahblah….It was all local, state and the democrats…blahblahblah…fault …as usual….blahblahblahbblahblah…TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR TERROR……
Estimated run time 1 minutes 37 seconds
NO questions to follow
Wasn’t that great folks? What a wonderful, wonderful leader.
Posted by: Liberal media | Sep 15 2005 14:42 utc | 15
@Wolf DeVoon – check here and this chart though the tone of that site is libertarian, the charts are fine.
You know, Billmon, that Grandfather’s charts and analysis might be disturbing if the sources of those government revenues had remained the same over the last fifty years, but they haven’t. During the period 1945 to 2005, individuals have shouldered a much larger burden of the taxes paid than corporations for those benefits which individuals receive.
Much of that increase in government expenditures has been driven by Medicare, Medicaid, and public education (primary, secondary and higher). Even other expenditures have seen advances in quality, like highways, when accompanied by increases in costs. In other words, individuals have been forced to pay for more benefits which corporations have appropriated to themselves, since businesses get subsidized in their use of public highways by individuals.
And it’s libertarian fools like Grandfather who have supported this looting of the public treasury since they can’t understand the charts they produce. All they understand is they don’t like paying taxes themselves, period. They should be invited to leave the country, since they don’t care one whit about the nation.
Posted by: PrahaPartizan | Sep 15 2005 16:13 utc | 17
b, so if 41 states are declared national emergency, and Bush issued a proclamation that prevailing wage is suspended in states declared as national emergencies, (LA, MS, AL) did Bush also expand prevailing wage proclamation territory to 41 states, or is that just a given?
Has Bush declared Iraq a national emergency, or mission accomplished?
(in that Iraq is now a national emergency and oil flow is cut off)
Do you think Bush will declare a national emergency for the airlines,
and suspend all union pay contracts? Will Bush eliminate prevailing
wages and minimum wages entirely? Will the Fed devalue the $, and
the seize all privately held gold and silver? Will there be a Fed
surcharge on County property tax, like the Fed surcharge on phones?
Will money be recalled, and we’ll go to food stamps and ration books under a new Homeland Security Department of Price Administration?
Will we go back to the even name-odd name gasoline rationing weeks?
Will “A”ime be first in line, or last in line? Ah,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha.
Posted by: tante aime | Sep 15 2005 17:17 utc | 18
@ readers – in case you did not follow up Billmon’s reference to dialectics –
he was linking to a great old post, where he put a lot of work into an elegant explanation of 227 years of American political history, The dialectics idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in history is somewhat similar to the pendulum concept of history, but allows for very irregular swings in magnitude and time.
I would love to see an update. I wonder, though, if current US history might be better explained by referring to the plot of “The Godfather.”
The Dao of American Politics, Part I
The Dao of American Politics, Part II
Anyway, go and read — you will be very impressed.
Posted by: Owl | Sep 15 2005 17:55 utc | 19
@Lupin:
I think there may still be a chance for the U.S. to repent, perhaps as a consequence of some as-yet-unforeseen event. Who knows what the future holds of marvel or surprise? E.g., what effect the pending bird flu pandemic may have in various places?
Posted by: mistah charley | Sep 15 2005 21:57 utc | 20
@mistah charley
Or perhaps, the missing Mice Infected With Bubonic Plague .
Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 15 2005 22:18 utc | 21
@ tante aime:
When I heard that Oregon and Washington had been declared Federal Emergency areas, I had some of the same paranoid thoughts. Then I went to the FEMA webpage. The first time I looked, all I found was a simple press release, and figured, “oh, it’s just a way to release federal money. no reason to get nervous.”
I dug a little deeper today. Here’s the relevant page for Oregon. And here’s the Stafford Act. Interesting, the Stafford Act was written in 2000, pre-Homeland Security. However, if that’s what all FEMA documents look like, no wonder they can’t get anything done. I didn’t find anything authorizing martial law, but I found these lovely gems:
§ 5141. WAIVER OF ADMINISTRATIVE CONDITIONS {Sec. 301}
Any Federal agency charged with the administration of a Federal assistance program may, if so requested by the applicant State or local authorities, modify or waive, for a major disaster, such administrative conditions for assistance as would otherwise prevent the giving of assistance under such programs if the inability to meet such conditions is a result of the major disaster.
§ 5148. NONLIABILITY OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT {Sec. 305}
The Federal Government shall not be liable for any claim based upon the exercise or performance of or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a Federal agency or an employee of the Federal Government in carrying out the provisions of this Act.
So, if them Iranian proxies are bold enough to try out their WMDs on some as-yet unnamed US city, rest assured, no matter where, FEMA is already authorized to step in with that most reassuring of lines “we’re from the government; we’re here to help you.”
Posted by: catlady | Sep 16 2005 0:36 utc | 22
The economic bit that has most amused me this past week is hearing about states suspending gasoline taxes, to help out citizens facing high prices.
Now ain’t that just a sweet re-distribution of wealth? Let the oil companies gouge all they want, and cut your own revenue that might actually go into the local economy.
Windfall taxes, anyone?
Posted by: catlady | Sep 16 2005 0:52 utc | 23
“Probably not, although anyone with a dialetical sense of American history should recognize the synthesis of old-style GOP corporatism and New Deal activism.”
is one fucking great sentence, which defines a project no one is at work on: What is the other civic choice today to the synthesis of old-style (though I think it is a quite new and unaccountably incompetent style)GOP corporatism and the New Deal fourth branch of government (Scalia’s speciality) as well as modern media manipulation and universal consumerism?
The follow on sentences
“Conservative legal idealists (like John Roberts?) may still dream of their “constitution in exile,” but it was never in the cards for the true disciples of St. Barry to roll back the 20th century, or dismantle the federal edifice we inherited from it. If 9/11 hadn’t come along to justify a return to big government (and big budgets) something else — like Katrina — would have.”
lets go when it invokes St. Barry, because St. Barry was much much closer to the critique that is emerging here than, for example, any of the powerful Democratic senators. Know your friends and your potential allies as well as your enemies.
Another fucking great sentence is
“In a sense, what the Rovians have created is a parallel government, in which the real channels of power run through the party apparatus, not the organizational charts of the various departments and agencies.”
which suggests the work that needs to be done is to end party apparatus control of the State. Yet not one American in 100 will understand any of this. Including most “progressives”. The civic vocabulary is of Intelligent Design quality these days, on the left as well as the right and center and front and back.
There is a thesis vacuum. The thesis vaccum is kept a vacuum by the non competitive and worthless democratic party apparatus.
Thesis vacuums are easily filled. See, e.g., Martin Luther, King or not.
Thesis vacuums are easily preserved: hot air about how New Orleans is about racism.
I was heartened today when a black acquitance today voluntered he was fed up with the racism story there and it has become a litmus test that he is losing friends over. Vacuum preservation stuff when there is work that needs to be done.
Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 16 2005 4:06 utc | 24
I tell people that in a few years the US will look like the movie Bladerunner only a lot worse!
Posted by: R.L. | Sep 16 2005 4:46 utc | 25