For example, he developed the quantitative methodology to allow the adjustment in the price of eating meat, and therefore lower the cost of living, if you would merely assume that people would stop buying meat from butchers and grocery stores and would start, as an exercise in the substitution effect, slaughtering and eating stray dogs, which can be had very cheaply. And vegetables? Same thing! If you would stop the nonsense of buying fruits and vegetables from the grocer and start eating lawn clipping and getting lesser-quality vegetable matter from the dumpster behind a nearby restaurant, you would save big money every week! And, after utilizing both of these assumptions in his model, Boskin showed his government employers that the cost of living for us proletariat trash out here in the real world actually went down!
In short, substitute dog and cat meat for beef and pork, and move farther down the quality scale by eating actual garbage, and in this way you can show that the cost of living has actually gone down, and therefore you can eliminate cost-of-living increases from transfer payments to Social Security and welfare recipients, and keep inflationary assumptions from playing hob with your need to borrow enormous sums of money. THIS is the kind of silly crap these Fed and government jackasses and their willing whores, like Michael Boskin, do all day long, and who get paid with outrageous amounts of taxpayer money to do it, and which is why I actually go out of my way to heap scorn on them all.
It is true that Keynes famously quipped, when commenting about the short run and the long run, that "In the long run we are all dead." What he did not say, and what you should remember because it is implied, is that until that doleful day when you ARE dead, it probably matters a great deal to you whether or not you are eating good food in a warm place, or eating garbage in a freezing alleyway.
And to also realize that at every step along the way the government will try and statistically deceive you, using arrogant and evil guys like Michael Boskin to do the actual dirty work, that you are NOT eating garbage, and that the alleyway IS a home, and that you are NOT freezing but instead you are, quality-adjusted, relatively warm and cozy.
Cautious Optimism Debunked
- Jobs are still being eliminated left and right, and the latest report showed that somewhere between 44,000 and another 92,000 of them went "poof." And if there is one thing that I am pretty sure of, it is that people who do not have jobs or any prospect of getting a job are not going to be doing much spending for very long.
And on that very subject, Gene Epstein, the high-IQ guy who writes the "Economic Beat" column in Barron's, is struggling to exhibit a bullish pose, as is presumably required by his job, as in "Get in optimist mode, Epstein! People buy our magazine for good news as regards their need for greed, and not because they want to be depressed!" So he does what he can, I suppose.
For instance, he says that the oft-stated statistic that there were a half million jobs lost since January and 72,000 jobs lost in July was simply not true, and the reason is that the numbers are seasonally adjusted. And then he goes on to refer to charts, thoughtfully provided by him, that show both the nominal and seasonally-adjusted numbers.
This is when we are hit with so many disconnects. For one, the seasonally-adjusted payroll employment has, yes, been going down since January, and this is the half-million job loss that we were talking about.
Then, we jog down to the accompanying NOT seasonally-adjusted payroll, and we see that, yes, Epstein is right when he says that the line is always moving up and to the right, indicating that jobs were not being lost. Unfortunately, this last month's bad news data has wiped out HALF the freaking non-seasonally adjusted jobs that have been causing that line to move up and to the right. In one month! Half!
And Mr. Epstein only goes back to January, and does not bother to show that private-sector jobs have been disappearing for the last several YEARS in a row, but government payrolls have been steadily increasing, and so the piddly little slice of time since January of this year is not anywhere indicative of the longer, disturbing trend.
Agents in the field have filed reports that this is where I let out a high-decibel scream of stark terror that rattled teacups and nerves for ten blocks around, but he then says, as some calming explanation, like he is talking to some bozo children who aren't too bright, "And more than 90% of the fall in private sector jobs has been in manufacturing." This is to preface his remark that the recent pickup in the ISM manufacturing index in July portends some pickup in employment in that area. As if we are just so damn stupid that we don't know that jobs in manufacturing have been steadily disappearing for, oh, I dunno, like the last fifty freaking years in a row or something like that. But now, thanks to a tiny little one-off increase in the ISM index, suddenly, this was all that was needed to get employment in manufacturing back in the pink and now everything is going to be fine. Hahahahaha!
But no matter how critical I am of what Gene calls his "cautious optimism," there is a warm place in my heart for him, as anybody who despises John Kenneth Galbraith and that creepy little communist Michael Moore scores big, BIG points with me, right out of the blocks.
Egregious Errors
- Sean Corrigan, who is one of the intellectual superstars of Capital Insight, wrote a nice little article entitled "It's Dishonour, Sir!" He, like me, is increasingly dyspeptic about the dim bulbs and pea-brains that infest the Fed, except he does not overtly advise taking the obvious next step of locking all the doors and windows, drawing the curtains, turning off the lights, making a fort out of the cushions on the couch, sitting quietly in the dark, and seeking solace in the feeling of safety afforded by having a loaded high-powered handgun in each trembling hand. He writes, "The hardest thing about analyzing one of Cranky-Bernanke's headline-grabbing (and increasingly Greenspan-upstaging) speeches, is knowing where to start when dissecting out the tangled web of ill-formed logic and how many of his groundless suppositions and how much of his erroneous theorizing to refute, without either taxing the reader's patience or losing the will to live oneself."
To those of us who spend waayyy too much time thinking about the egregious errors made by the Greenspans and the Bernankes of the world, writing about the egregious errors made by the Greenspans and the Bernankes of the world, and predicting the well-deserved devastation and ruination caused by the egregious errors made by the Greenspans and the Bernankes of the world, this is kinda good, as it would be very difficult to maintain a high degree of acrimony if these people only did one stupid thing or believed only one stupid thing. But, fortunately, almost everything they believe, think, do, or say is unbelievably and irresponsibly stupid, or, as Mr. Corrigan says, which I probably quote completely out of context because that is the kind of low-life loudmouth plagiarist bastard I am, "... pseudo-academic, muddle-headed, neo-Keynesian bits of macro-economic hogwash."
By demonstrating that kind of keen, irrefutable insight, I recommend that all sentient beings strew fragrant rose petals in the path of Mr. Corrigan when he condescends to walk amongst us, as our humble way of demonstrating profound respect.
- Adam Hamilton is a guy whom I have never met but whose disrespectful attitude I find disturbingly similar to my own, writes in his essay entitled "Inflation or Deflation?" that I found on the 32lgold.com website, that, "Franklin Roosevelt was without a doubt the worst president in America's history. After destroying the solid golden foundation of the US dollar, he built the immoral foundations of the modern Welfare State which steals 50% of the income of the productive today to subsidize the lazy and unproductive in order to bribe them for votes. Almost all of the huge financial and debt problems America faces today would have never happened if Franklin Roosevelt hadn't betrayed the very US Constitution that he swore to protect. May history curse him and his blighted memory forever." I leap to my feet, shouting "Bravo! Bravo!" and clapping my hands together in wild applause. Yaayyy!
And the answer to the question that he posed in the title to his essay, namely "inflation or deflation?" is that the eye-popping explosion in the money supply automatically insures inflation.
And I will add, in that snotty, irritating and disturbingly childish way that I have, that while I also think FDR was the worst President in US history because he was a commie creep and was the antithesis of everything good and decent that made America a great nation, Greenspan is likewise the worst Fed chairman in US history, and that this whole deflation thing that he keeps yammering on about is a cheap trick to keep you from paying attention to the slow spiral of economic death that he has caused to whirl around us, on a par with "Hey! Look down! Your shoelace is untied!" When my wife pulls that trick on me, I always end up noting that my shoelaces are NOT untied and that I am soon going to get a whack on the head - bonk! - and when Greenspan says it, it means that he is going to hit everybody in the wallet with something equally as painful, only much longer lasting. Ugh.
--- Mogambo Sez: The Cryptoquote in last Saturday's newspaper was, "The market is a place set apart where men may deceive each other," which was identified as a Greek proverb. To the Greeks I say, "If only it was just the marketplace, dudes!" I cannot remember the last time that somebody WASN'T trying to deceive me about something! |
