Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Economics.

First day that Obama's in charge and it sucks about the economy. I liked Obama especially for his foreign policy approach, aka get the heck out of Iraq. I am not such of big fan of his Keynesian madness. It may get us out of this hole, but it's a huge risk. If it doesn't work, we are going to have a crushing debt that is only going to be solved by inflation. A lot of people that don't save money don't care about inflation. I want people to save more money so that they do care about it. I don't even think this recession is a bad thing. If I were spending twice as much money as I had, and then I stopped, I think that would be a good thing. Yeah, it's less than I was spending before, but all of that spending I was doing before was deficit spending, so it was hurting my future ability to spend. People get too focused on the metrics, like the GDP, which is a total bullshit number anyway. Our job is not to protect the GDP number that counts things like me borrowing money. The government needs to be creating the climate for jobs to be created and the country to actually produce things.

I remember when Walmart became the largest company in the US. My uncle cried. He worked for Walmart (as a contractor), but he said there is something incredibly wrong with the economy when the largest company is just a distributor of stuff that isn't made here. Wealth is just flowing out of the country. Now the Keynesians want to borrow more money from overseas (where people still save money) so that all of that interest we pay (currently a huge part of the taxes we pay) will continue to float overseas. This is insane.

I hope the one thing that this recession brings is the fall of Keynesianism. People still think that massive government spending got us out of the great depression. It didn't. It made it longer, because it took longer for the market to correct itself. All Keynesianism is good for is for preventing social unrest when the economy is weak. That is a worthwhile goal, to add some buffer to the drops, so that we don't get shocked into a revolution. However, to think that it actually has some positive effect on the economy as a whole is wrong. If you want to invest in the economy, you should spend the stimulus money on things that are going to make money. Factories, research, education, etc.

The simple fact of the economy is that real wages in the US and Europe have to drop to get closer to those in the rest of the world. We can't artificially pay people here more by borrowing money from overseas to drive up asset prices. It just doesn't work. That the solution to it is somehow to borrow more money from overseas...no way.

I'm wondering if I'll all be more productive after I read the new David Allen book.


I have to finish that one before "What Would Google Do?" is delivered.


I wonder how many more blogs I need to start making money? :-)

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