Obama & the Gigantic Spending Bubble

Rush Pearl of Wisdom - 07 Jan 2009
“We are witnessing the growing of a massive government spending bubble. Now, we had the housing bubble just a few short months ago, and what caused that bubble to burst? Wasn’t it debt " massive debt that cannot ever be repaid? Such debt is a recipe for disaster, and yet we’re replicating it with Obama’s stimulus!”

“A true stimulus would shrink deficits. What Obama really wants to do is stimulate government " the same government that demanded a plan from the automakers before giving them the money, but wants us to give Congress trillions before they have a plan. Government did the wrong thing, and we have to pay for it!”

See also this today! Outside of trying to grok how much is being spent via concepts about the magnitude of a billion $$$ I would use this picture to get you started - unfortunately a bubble large enough would not fit on the same diagram. Just imagine a line tangent to the big green bubble that just barely begins to curve toward the bubble - that's a close to fit as we'll grok it before it all pops.

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Seth says

Bubbles are artifacts of a free market. When prices keep going up, inevitably they must come down. We have examples of true bubbles in the prices of internet companies in the mid 90s, recently the price of real estate, and of course the price of oil. All of those bubbles burst. With all due respect to Rush's wisdom, the massive increase in government deficit spending that Bush started is not a traditional free market bubble. Referring to it as such sure sounds like a category error to me.

Mark de LA says

What Obama is bubbling about is the opposite of a free market! It will burst when other countries like China refuse to absorb any more of our debt! Reduce capital gains & income taxes & get out of the way of private enterprise - that's the way to return to the market. Obama is moving in the absolute wrong direction. BTW, if financial institutions had been left to lending money only to those who could pay it back the mortgage bubble wouldn't have burst & the cascading effects wouldn't be affecting us all!

Seth says

It is interesting to note that the national debt is probably less than one year's GDP - and that would include the next stimulus package. I wish i owed less than one year's income. So our national debt may not be our biggest problem. You may want to read Krugman's article today - you could even open your mind and direct your usual hyperpartisan snipes at liberal NYT Nobel prize winners to dev/null. Fear of the national debt may just be an old idea - or not, i'm not a economist. I think that we can pay it down in good times and draw on it in stress. Thing is for those who are in fear of that debt to lobby to remember to pay it down when commerce is booming. We could use our oil reserves in a similar way. The governmen should be buying oil right now and increasing our reserves - then when the price of oil starts getting too high and hampering the economy, sell from the reserve. Let's start building a 21th century economy.

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-01-09 09:33:32 11237

There are nobel prize winners who are shit: Jimmy Carter & Algore are 2 of them. You can't just government spend your way out of a recession otherwise Russia, Cuba, North Korea & others would kick our asses economically speaking. The Chinese figured that out & became capitalists. The more the US owes the more it will have to adjust it's currency according to other countries & like a bad debtor (get a job i.e. raise taxes) or have it's credit limit lowered. That would mean that we would get a lot less from or overseas customers. Countries have gone into the shitter like Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union for trying to spend more than their GDP. Nobody wanted their money. We are in that danger now.

Seth says

M 2009-01-09 09:49:46 11237

seth 2009-01-09 09:33:32 11237

Yes i am failure with that mantra. The trouble with mantras is that they are so often repeated that the mind confuses familiarity with truth.

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-01-13 13:19:30 11237

seth 2009-01-13 13:00:17 11237

M 2009-01-13 12:42:49 11237

The Big Dipper Effect is similar to the RWG in that it is part of the machinery & programming of the physical brain.

Well yes that is pretty much true. Once you recognize a pattern it is pretty hard not to see instances of it given conforming inputs.

What is not wired in the brain is seeing a pattern where the inputs do not conform. But sometime we do see part of a pattern and then fill in the rest of it without bothering to parse the rest of the input. Which kind of suggests it is not a good idea to start innovative post with the same old shit if what you want noticed is the innovation.

Seeing patterns is hard wired into the brain. What you do with that pattern i.e. the semantics of it has some choice to it. Calling something the same old shit is the RWG.

Mark de LA says

The Big Dipper Effect is similar to the RWG in that it is part of the machinery & programming of the physical brain.

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-01-13 09:15:32 11237

M 2009-01-13 08:46:48 11237

seth 2009-01-09 10:00:21 11237

-snip-

Yes i am failure with that mantra. The trouble with mantras is that they are so often repeated that the mind confuses familiarity with truth.

Sometimes the prejudiced & partisan think they have read something & understood it when they have only speed read it at best and big-dippered it into their mental bit-buckets. See the big dipper effect.

Sphinctermindedness is the result!

Nope it's pretty easy to recognize the same old shit.

Yep! that's what the big dipper phenomena is all about! In a way you can't not look into the sky & look at the big dipper & not see it as the big dipper. And, you will always see it that way unless you do something change your pavlovian response.

Mark de LA says

WashPost: ... NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news -- especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill. And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday's required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

...

It's good once in a while to revisit 9027 just to remind yourselves how big a billion$ is & then notice that a trillion is a thousand billions.

Obama & the Gigantic Spending Bubble

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