Last week, Plosser (Philly Fed) began mouthing off about the weak consumer spending. My heart sank, but I put it down to Plosser’s own stupidity. Well now Bernanke is feeding us the same stuff, so the Fed has chosen its political stance here, which is to support what the Democrats want to do anyway. Bush had already thrown in with them on this stupid tax-rebate scheme.
Tax-rebates! What idiocy! It’s a sop. $100 billion is nothing in this economy. It’s just smoke and mirrors to make it seem like Washington is doing something. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop a bear market in real estate or in stocks.
Is Bernanke a hypocrite or a nincompoop or both? He sounds like an imbecile to me, talking about a tax rebate to boost the economy. It simply means the deficit goes up and more debt is issued that is financed by the Fed. Whoopee.
He’s also an idiot to warn about raising the long-term structural deficit. A cut in tax rates is the boogie-man here. Democrats don’t want this, and Bernanke is kissing tuches (Yiddish for ass.) But marginal tax rate changes do have larger effects as the supply-siders say they do, and they do pay for themselves in terms of the benighted Congressional paygo scheme.
Behind all of this blather is the idiotic notion that Washington runs the U.S. economy or stabilizes it or provides insurance against downside risks as Bernanke would have it. How it is that printing green pieces of paper insures anything is beyond me.
12:13 pm on January 17, 2008 Email Michael S. Rozeff
