Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Confusion Abounds

Subtitled, "These people are really, really fubar."

Wall Street Journal at 9:16am EST, "U.S. stock futures rose Tuesday following data showing U.S. home prices rose in July from a month earlier, while investors were also encouraged by the U.K. economy's fastest pace of expansion in nine years in the second quarter."

CNN Money at 9:46 am EST, "U.S. stocks fell early Tuesday, as investors digested a report showing home prices rising for the fifth straight month but the growth rate slowing."

I haven't looked to see whether stocks actually did rise or fall, and it really isn't pertinent to my point here nor, really, to my confusion. I finally noticed that one was reporting on stock futures while the other was reporting current stocks, but note that one is focused on the "British fastest pace of expansion" while the other dwells on "American growth rate slowing."

So the same people who are thinking that stocks will be worth more in the future, because the British are growing, are selling them off now as being worth less because the United States is slowing down. Certainly, if I had something that I thought was going to be worth more in the future, I would sell it now if I thought its present value was... Whatever.

Meanwhile in politics, the President is excoriating the Republicans for wanting to extend tax cuts to the wealthy using $700 billion in borrowed money, but he is not batting an eyelash at extending tax cuts to the middle class using $3.5 trillion in borrowed money. Of course, he tries to make that sound logical by not admitting that his tax cut money is borrowed, while ranting endlessly about how Republican tax cut money is borrowed.

Republicans and Democrats both say we have to cut taxes because "you don't raise taxes in the middle of the recession," but the OMB says the recession ended more than a year ago and Obama and company says we are "in recovery" even if they admit it's a bit slow.

Sort of reminds me of the alcoholic who says that, "Other than that one time I got drunk last month, I've been sober ten years." There's something of a lack of contact with reality.

Obama accuses Republicans of giving deals to business and screwing the people and then stands there and says, "We've cut taxes for small business eight times." That could still manage to sound pretty friendly to the "little guy," except that Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, among others, have been ranting all last week about how "small business" actually means major, multi-billion-dollar corporations.

Finally, we had Joe Biden on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell last night saying that we we are going to take the $700 billion that Democrats won't let the Republicans spend on tax cuts for the wealthy and we'll use it to pay down the debt. He was straight faced and utterly sincere as he told us that he is going to pay down the debt using borrowed money.

1 comment:

  1. bruce9:13 AM

    And the public wonders why Washington DC is lower in the polls than ever...

    ReplyDelete