Let alone stay there…
Let’s ignore the fact that there is nothing in the Constitution about the president as “financial-advisor-in-chief.” His moronic and repeated bashing of Vegas is not only digging a deeper hole for his water-carrier in the Senate, but almost guaranteeing that he himself won’t be winning Nevada in 2012.
I need to write a longer post on this, but the notion that this man or his advisors are political genii is pretty laughable at this point. The only reason he won is that a) the Dems weren’t that thrilled about Hillary, b) he has charisma for people susceptible to such emotional nonsense, c) McCain was a lousy candidate and ran a lousy campaign and d) the media was totally in the tank for him and refused to run anything negative and e) almost any Dem was going to win in 2008.
His luck has run out.
“I gotta tell you this, everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I gotta tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner.”–Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman
ROFL! So is Mayor Goodman going to send an apology to Tim Shriver?
This is the first time I’ve read the phrase “…his failed economic policies” associated with Obama. I’m so used to hearing it out of his mouth (when describing almost everyone else who has ever governed) that I want to wretch. This usage doesn’t have quite the same effect on me.
Gosh, it’s too bad these Dems can’t set aside their petty grievances and accomplish something. It must be the GOP’s fault!
@Titus: So is the GOP the new Isreal?
I want to see detailed stats comparing these:
1) Gambling in Vegas.
2) US Budget.
Even blowing cash in Vegas seems better than sending it to DC.
THe nice thing about Vegas, or the Lottery, for that matter, is that nobody puts a gun to your head and demands you throw a coin in the slot. Unfortunately, that is what happens on Tax day. Pay up or else. I guess the other difference between DC and Vegas is this: at least in Vegas, for the average guy, there is at least a mathematical chance of leaving with more money than he came in with.
Obama seems to have a decided lack of understanding of his own personal gravitas in the position of the President of the United States. The man needs to stop giving stump speeches and get to work. At this point he’d probably see a rebound in his poll numbers if he’d just STFU!
I’m sure your right about that, Josh, but his problem is that he’s too much of a narcissist to ever shut up about anything, even if he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
It’s pretty clear that he’s not intending to bash Las Vegas in particular, he’s just using it as shorthand for “blowing money frivolously.”
It almost seems like he only regards “Las Vegas” as a symbol and forgets that it’s a real place with real people working there. It makes me wonder if he thinks similarly about “Wall Street”, “Middle America”, and so forth.
Before our resident authorities on these matters weight in to correct my erroneous thinking, my gripes run along these lines.
Heaven knows that the banking industry needs reform, perhaps along Paul Volcker’s ideas. Even the WSJ was sympathetic to some of the broad concepts.
It is just that the President comes out and simply Talks Too Much with all of this populist and Jim-pleasing rhetoric, and the stock market takes a dive.
Or the revenue-raising budget and tax proposals past the Dec 2010 expiration of the Hated Bush Tax Cuts.
So, the President is true to his campaign promise that anyone making under 250 K (where did the under 250 K == poor, over 250 K == stinkin’ rich come from? That the Obamas were spending every dime they made pre book deal (I know, I read their tax returns, I am not an accountant but an engineer, and I have a pretty good engineering sense about what is lacking from your Schedule B says about not having a dime to your name)?)
So po’ folk will see the Evil Bush Tax Cuts extended. Rich folk will see their taxes go up, but the WSJ says it is no big deal because rich folk are already hit with the AMT, so what the rich are actually paying may not deviate from the regime of the Evil Bush Tax Cuts.
Capital gains rates will go up from 15% to 20%. In the words of Don Novelo, “Bihg Dihl!”
The one single provision of the Evil Bush Tax Cuts that is going to change, however, is that stock dividends will see their tax rate go up three-fold.
Way to go Mr. President. That will teach those rich people. It will also teach everyone with money in a 401K plan, a pension plan, a university with an investment portfolio, etc., etc., etc., etc. The Bush Tax Cuts were Eeeevilll don’tcha know (My demands are that you give me, One Meeeleeeon Dohhhlarrrsss!)
OK, I spoke my peace. Jim, Chris, you can now reeducate me if you so choose.
I take the long view. Obama is probably an inevitable consquence of demographics, and a proof of the existence of God’s very ironic sense of humor.
See, our largest demographic bulge is the boomers, yes? Folks who have been lately in their 30s and 40s, peak earning years, and years of accumulating assets (houses, stocks). They’re hoping, naturally, to trade the value of those assets for a life o’ ease in the golden decades — and they do intend for there to be decades — of retirement. Work hard, relax, you’ve earned it, yay!
Well…except they didn’t. Really, no one can. You can’t possibly work from age 22, after graduating college, until age 62, a mere 40 years, and accumulate enough wealth to pay for another twenty years of living a life of ease plus have top notch medical care to stave off your inevitable death as long as possible. I mean, not unless you were miser supreme, and squirreled away at least half your pay. Which they didn’t do.
So how does this play out? It plays out, first, in a powerful demand for assets during the last 20 years, and a wildly optimistic over-estimate of the ultimate value of those assets. In other words — asset bubbles! So we’ve had dot-com bubbles, real estate bubbles, and now we’re having a bit of a government-service bubble. (This is a more complicated scam than your typical late-night TV advertised lakefront real estate scheme, where you believe investing money in government services of some kind will give you an abnormal rate of return; for example, I pay the same low low health insurance rates my grandparents paid, and if I pay it to government, I can still get the kind of superduper high-quality healthcare available in my grandchildren’s day. Yippee!).
But the party is nearing its end. The demand for those assets crapped out, as it ultimately had to, and boomers are facing retirement right now, and realizing with a bit of a fright that the math just doesn’t add up. The house isn’t going to pay for an annual three weeks snorkeling in Grand Cayman. The stocks are not going to allow them to update their HDTV and iPod all the way into their 80s. And health care! My God, who knew it was going to cost so damn much to cheat the Grim Reaper as long as possible? What’s with all these doctors and nurses wanting to be paid well? And those wretched engineers — why does all this fancy medical equipment have to be so damn expensive? Can’t you make it out of plastic or something, assemble it in Indochina with child labor? Yeesh.
So, Obama. The anger, the sense of entitlement (always a boomer speciality), the refusal to accept the grim dictates of fate, the paranoid suspicion (also a boomer speciality) that it’s some God-damned conspiracy somewhere that is preventing heaven on Earth…and we’re going to find it and smash it and make them pay.
And…what does economics and plain common sense tell us about the boomer retirement fantasy? Essentially that it’s just not possible. The number of people who want to stop working over the next 20 years is simply unsustainable. Society cannot function if they do, not at the same high level. So, they must be prevented. They will be prevented. It’s as ineluctable a result as the law of gravity. And how will it happen?
Two ways. Either assets (the IOUs the boomers hold) must horribly deflate, so they can’t buy nearly as much of the labor of the young with them, or the real wages of the young have to rise considerably, so that the same thing happens.
When you look around you — at the massive wealth destruction implicit in the Obama Five Year Plan — and at the probability created by the Fed of a sustained inflation the lies of which God himself has never seen — and keep in mind the person least affected by inflation is the young wage earner, without any assets to have destroyed — it’s hard not to conclude that Obama himself is one of the engines by which the wealth of the boomers is going to be reduced to the value necessary to keep them working and working.
And who voted Obama in? The exact people whose dreams he is destroying. Isn’t that delicious irony? Never say God doesn’t have a sense of humor. It’s just a little…black.
Nice bunch of generalizations about Boomers. Too bad that you’re very full of shit about millions of us.
Tsk, Larry. I’m a boomer myself, although on the late edge. Why would you assume what might be true in general is true for you in particular? I don’t. Conversely, to assume that what is false about you in particular must be false for everyone in your birth year seems a little iillogical, does it not?
Practically any statement one makes about an entire generation is going to be full of shit for millions of people. Doesn’t make it false.
When you so sloppily construct your criticism of Boomers, you neglect to mention that:
1. Not all of us were hippies. Hippies were dregs of society and smelled bad.
2. Not all of us protested against America. Millions of us (myself included) served in the military.
3. Not all of us squandered our money. My wife and I have been saving over 1/3rd of our income for retirement for years. We paid off all our debt years ago. We don’t count on getting a dime from Social Security, either.
Sure, there are Boomers who didn’t do any of those things. And there are a lot of Boomers who did the things I listed above, too. You generalize too much to be useful.
Argh, Larry, read what I said. Any statement that begins “Not all of us…” is irrelevant, because I didn’t start any statement with “All of you…”
Lighten up. My mother-in-law lived in Berlin until 1949, and three of her brothers died in the Wehrmacht. Do I flip out everytime I hear The Nazis were bastards because they did such and so forth, knowing as I do that my mother in law and her brothers had zip to do with any atrocity? I do not. If the shoe fits, wear it. If it doesn’t, be calm and recognize that if one had to add footnotes for exceptions to every statement, we’d never get anything said.
Now if you think the generalizations are wrong — if you think I’ve not described the behaviour of this — our — generation accurately, well then, make your case.
I’m a Boomer myself (probably atypical, granted), and I find that much of what is generalized about the Boomers doesn’t much apply to anyone I know. Much of it does seem to apply to the plastic-hippie-turned-plastic-yuppie segment of the Boomer population, which I’m guesstimating comprised only about 15% of the Boomer population, if that.
I’m at the beginning of the Boomer years. For years I did save at the maximum. Then I got fired from Goddard Space Flight Center by a manager who seemed to regard marriage, sex and families as unhealthy distractions from work.
I found out a few years ago that 40% of people in their 50s were losing their jobs and most were never recovering. Friends advise me to find part time work — when that is possible.
Work until I am 80? Sure. But doing what? Greeter at Walmart? Live in a group home?
We’ve been through an epidemic of narrow minded control freaks who have done enormous damage to our country while claiming to make things better. This is not a government versus private enterprise issue. This is a cultural issue.
Oh — and those of you who condemn the “damned hippies” should learn a bit more about such people. You are letting the control freaks set up a group different from you as scapegoats for the control freak failures. Your typical “damned hippie” had a job and a family. They just had somewhat different amusements than you did.
Now I must go back to trying to find work that is at least tolerable.
“My mother-in-law lived in Berlin until 1949, and three of her brothers died in the Wehrmacht.”
Carl, you have any first-person accounts of Germany in 1946-47?
There is an emerging picture of the early phase of post WW-II Occupation resulting in near-crisis food insecurity — a number of 1000 calories per person in 1947 has been cited.
My poppa was Yugoslav refugee living in Germany in 1947 (Austria prior to that), and he didn’t seem to indicate that things were more grim than living in German-occupied Croatia and later Serbia in the war years, but he was a refugee with a somewhat favored status by the Allies and not a German civilian, and he may not have caught the brunt of it.
Any corroboration on what the situation was in Germany during those two years before the occupation policy turned course?
I think the us spends to much money on wars and foreign affairs. There should be more for the own country and its problems, for example the health care.