There Is No Plan

Cool it, Cassandra.

So let me get this straight.

The President and a bunch o’ pundits said that if we defaulted on the debt ceiling we would have been downgraded, and cried catastophe whenever they got the chance, with Geithner,  Goldman Sachs’ favorite bagman, leading the chorus of Cassandras.

Putting aside the fact that the debt ceiling was a technicality and that our bills would have continued to be paid over time, we didn’t miss out on the debt ceiling – and we were still downgraded.

So the President’s Debtageddon scenario came to pass.

And what happened?

The markets plummeted – mainly because of some bad economic numbers and the Euro Debt Crisis – and then bounced right up again. Stocks are pretty much where they were. And most importantly – the yield on a 10 year note hit its lowest point in history, as everyone flooded into ‘downgraded’ treasuries.

Moody’s and Fitch’s Rating Agencies ‘shrugged off’ what their buddies at S+Poorhouse decided to do, which is bad news for S+P, who now look like outliers (with the accent on the ‘liars’).

It’s becoming increasingly clear that there would have been no debtageddon, and the President’s use of the threat totally backfired. Read the rest of this entry »

I got your back, you old redneck.

Thereisnoplan Prediction: Tom Coburn will unlock the Deal on the Debt Ceiling and help Obama get re-elected.

It was such a romantic moment. Obama’s first speech to a joint session in ’09. He walks down the aisle of the chamber of the House of Representatives and saves his biggest hug for one of the most conservative senators in the GOP line-up. Tom Coburn, Junior Senator of Oklahoma.  Turns out they’ve been firm friends since Barry first showed up for Senate Orientation back in ’04. They worked together on aisle-crossing bills and helped establish Barry’s bipartisan bona-fides.

Cut to now.

Grover Norquist is frothing at the mouth at the idea that Tom Coburn is in favor of rolling back individual and corporate deductions to help reduce the nation’s massive debt, and go the ball rolling with a handy victory in the Senate on Ethanol subsidies. Old Grovey knows that if Coburn buckles to new taxes, his whole No Tax Pledge in blood deal isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s printed on – and as an added (and thoroughly welcome) aside – he finally gets exposed as the malevolent Kook that he truly is. It won’t be government that’s small enough to be drowned in a bathtub – but his whole cockamamie movement.

Coburn hasn’t made a big deal of the fact that he’s buddies with Barack because that wouldn’t be good for business in today’s supercharged world of political silliness. No doubt the President suggested in the strongest terms that Tom keep their affair on the down-low, for the benefit of both of them. Read the rest of this entry »

a brand new bridge. this one's in france

Things are turned way around when Liberals are agreeing with quirky, flat-tax Steve Forbes, but when called Hank Paulson the “worst Treasury Secretary in living memory” there are few diehard progressives that would disagree.

But old Hank has at least done us one big, big favor. By steamrolling through the TARP at a cost of $700 billion and then doing precisely squat with it, he turned $700 billion into the new $7 billion. Suddenly, with the exception of the bailout for the once mighty now hopeless auto industry, fears of excessive spending seems petty next to the cost of TARP, the Citigroup, AIG, and Fannie and Freddie bailouts. We’re awash in borrowed money, and nobody seems to care. Another day, another dollar, or a hundred billion of them. Whatev.

So when Obama announced his massive public works program (let’s call it the New New Deal or NND) and didn’t even bother to mention a pricetag, the only Cassandra was the ever-predictable American Enterprise Institute. With the economy losing half a million jobs a month, the American people are ready for it. So don’t expect the whining from Club for Growth knuckle-draggers in Congress to be anything more than mumbled griping at worst. Read the rest of this entry »

feed me

There’s something diabolical about a creature that consumes itself. It seems so profoundly irrational, so utterly insane. We file stuff like that in some ‘unspeakable’ part of our minds.

Except that we live it every single day.

Capitalism is a great system in many ways, but it has a tendency to destroy itself if left unchecked. We’re seeing that all too clearly right now. There are two areas where capitalism is profoundly cannibalistic. Read the rest of this entry »

hi, i'm the system

Back in the eighties there was an awful lot of talk about the nefarious “system”, a deep and dark conspiracy of the powerful to keep down the powerless. Before resentment became a tool of the right, it was a clarion call of the unreconstructed left, a youthful, incoherent, but somehow meaningful rallying cry that drove many a drunken, sophomoric conversation. You don’t hear too much about “The System” these days. Nobody seemed to care anymore, when “The System” was delivering them flat screen TVs and great opportunities to flip condos.

But it seems to me that it’s time to revive talk about “The System” because it’s become very clear what it is.

Undiluted socialism for the rich and influential, and the legal and enforcement system to protect it. Read the rest of this entry »

Man With Plan

After nationalizing Fannie and Freddie, then letting Lehman Brothers die for no apparent reason, then bailing out AIG to the tune of $85 billion (now around $150 billion but who’s counting), Hank Paulson sat back to watch the credit markets unfreeze. But instead they just froze up some more.

Hank was totally bummed. “This job totally sucks”.

“The credit freeze just keeps on freezing”, he said to his posse of former Goldman Sachs hacks. “What the frick do I do?”

“You need one big plan”, said Neel Cash and Carry, “not just a whole bunch of little plans stuck together”. Hank nodded furiously. “Yes, yes, that’s right”. After scribbling a few notes on the back of a dry cleaning bill he looked up. “I’ve got it”. Read the rest of this entry »