Dismal Science

Sometimes I wish I was a Lexis-Nexis subscriber. Today I would like to see how often terms such as “economy,” “recession,” “bank failure,” “forclosure,” and “bail-out” are appearing in news reports. Sure seems to be a rash of them.

I’m not a big investor, and I try to practice the “couch potato” management method, but all this titillation has me reading the business section like other guys read the sports pages. Maybe a better analogy would be reading the gossip pages
to learn all about the latest celebrity train wrecks.

Regular readers may be sick to death of me citing Princeton Economist Paul Krugman, but he was right on the mark again when he said that none of the presidential candidates has offered any constructive ideas on what to do with the Bush economy, which is currently circling the drain.

He chides Obama for blaming the current crisis on war spending, -the war is a stimulus in the short term, until the bills come due; and points out that some of the de-regulation of financial markets happened on Bill Clinton’s watch, -and that the Clintons were never shy about taking campaign money from Wall Street.

The real shocker to me was when he looks at John McCain, “who has both admitted not knowing much about economics and denied ever having said that.” Krugman says that “if McCain makes it to the White House, his chief economic adviser is former Sen. Phil Gramm, a fervent advocate of financial deregulation. In fact, I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Gramm to make this crisis possible.”

That’s right folks, our very own Phil Gramm, that Georgia transplant who flunked the third grade twice, became an Aggie Professor, a party-jumping Congressman, whose wife Wendy sat on the Enron Board of Directors while they cheated and lied their way to collapse, and now is Vice President of UBS Financial Services, an outfit he used to oversee as a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Gramm was behind Rick Perry’s scheme last year to privatize the Texas Lottery and was godfather to that awful bankruptcy “reform” passed by the last Republican congress at the behest of the credit card mongers.

Can’t you just see this beady-eyed Gramstander as Treasury Secretary in a new Republican administration? We might as well elect Montgomery Burns to lead us forward into the nineteenth century.