THE PEOPLE'S BUSINESS
By The Mogambo Guru
Greenspan dragged his filthy fat fanny to Capitol Hill
again a week back, plunked himself down in the seat,
adjusted the microphone, and with that patented Greenspan
monotone lectured to the House about how the Congress has
to finish killing the American economy from the fiscal
side, as he is doing everything he can to destroy us from
the monetary side, but the damn economy just won't die.
The crux of his message was, get this, that he was no
longer content to destroy retirees and the small savers of
the country by forcing interest rates down below the rate
of inflation, year after year after year, thereby
encouraging more idiotic debt accumulation by over-extended
borrowers, who are borrowing the money and credit that he
so generously creates for them. So he is actively
destroying the dollar, and now he wants Congress to destroy
the Social Security and Medicare program by curtailing
those benefits, too! Richard Benson of Specialty Finance
Group encapsulated the whole thing with his essay entitled
"The Federal Reserve's Policy: Punish Savers and Rob the
Retired."
But that's not all. The Fed chairman also wants to come up
with some new way to statistically massage more inflation
out of price increases, so that the government can screw
retirees out of more money and benefits. This is the
natural expansion of the work done by the horrible Boskin
Commission, who are the nasty lackey bozos who came up with
the methodology of doing that to the CPI, namely turning
raw numbers into lies. The ludicrously low inflation
figures that Greenspan and that whole lying crew constantly
refer to, that are now the butt of jokes, are the result of
that Boskin bunch of lying creeps doing the dirty work for
the Fed and Congress.
Boskin and his puerile posse of putzes invented the concept
of adjusting prices for "quality" and the equally infamous
"substitution effect." In short, if ordinary food is up
100%, but hay is still cheap, then you, trying to feed your
family on your pathetic budget, will substitute hay for
Oreo cookies. This is the infamous "substitution effect."
And if hay has less cow manure in it than usual, then the
"real" price of hay is lower because the quality has gone
up!
And therefore, and I hope you are still following this,
because it is the essence of the Boskin system of lies,
food is actually cheaper! They have completely eliminated
inflation in food, although prices are up 100%! Now he
wants to do the same to Social Security benefits! I was
hoping that Ron Paul would leap over the dais, grab that
little twerp Greenspan by the throat, screaming, "You
filthy little bastard!" But he did not, even though that is
what I would have done, and that is why Ron Paul is in
Congress and I am not, I suppose.
And it's not just the money!
I mean, the money is plenty, and by "plenty" I mean that if
it was piled up in front of your house, it would literally
blot out the sun and you would think it was nighttime and
then you'd get undressed and ready for bed and people would
laugh at you and say, "Hey! It's only three o'clock in the
afternoon, jerk!"
But think of the veritable army of faceless government
employees who need empires of fawning underlings to
administer the programs, and more empires to check up on
the programs, and those that monitor the programs, and all
their little sub-programs, and all the more government
employees it takes to regulate all those people, and how
they all need offices and desks and humongous salaries
because they are now allowed to unionize, and like all
unions have taken to gouging for more and more money and
benefits as a full time job-on-the-job, and their defined-
benefit retirement programs that are so richly generous
that there is literally no equivalent in the private
sector, and nothing that even comes close, to tell the
truth.
And there is a large spillover into the private sector, as
all that money from the programs and the salaries of the
government employees gets spent and reverberates throughout
the economy. And I will go farther than that and say, with
a completely straight face so that you know that I am
serious, that the combined local, state and federal
governments ARE the damned U.S. economy. And Greenspan
wants to rein in THAT ravenous beast? Hahahaha! The man IS
a fool! Hahahaha!
If you don't think that the government IS the economy, then
listen to a guy named Steve Meyer, who wrote to the Wall
Street Journal and told how his job paid $68,000. After
paying state and federal taxes, including the Social
Security/Medicare bite, he took home $32,878, which means,
by simple arithmetic, that the governments took $35,324.
Who's in charge here?
One other guy who is probably in agreement with me,
although I am pretty sure he is not, like me, confined in a
straightjacket and screaming out obscenity-laden threats
against the government and trying to jam a full clip of
armor-piercing ammo into an assault rifle with his teeth,
is Carroll Cox, editor of the Pioneer newspaper in
Snowflake, Arizona, who writes: "In my county of Apache,
Arizona, 2/3 of employed people with full-time jobs work
for some level of government and education. In the
neighboring county of Navajo, close to half of people are
employed by government." So, this demonstrates that my
original argument was correct: the government IS the
economy.
And not only that, but Cox also bolsters my original
complaint, that allowing government employees to unionize
was a big, big, BIGGGG mistake, as there is no
countervailing force against their rapacious greed, as he
demonstrates when he writes, "We determined that the
average government job (in these two counties) pays $7,000-
$10,000 more annually than the average private sector job,
not counting benefits." When you DO count benefits, which I
do, since I have to pay for them out of my taxes, then
government employees are ludicrously overpaid.
"Once created and funded, how many government programs have
gone away?" asks Strategic Investment's Dan Denning. Then
he answers rightly: "Very few. These programs develop a
constituency of bureaucrats whose paychecks depend on them,
and/or taxpayers on the receiving end of the wealth
distribution."
So cutting down the size of government, no matter how right
it is, ain't a-gonna happen. The morons in Congress, as all
morons in all governments, see it as their sacred duty to
spend as much as they can in exchange for the votes of the
electorate, who are, in effect, grubby little prostitutes
who trade their mindless vote for money and benefits. And
government employees vote, too, and since there are so dang
many of them, their voting block is a powerful
constituency. So allowing government workers to unionize is
a one-way ticket to economic hell.
In fact, it was the loathsome Clinton administration that
actually said, in so many words, that passing more and more
laws and spending more and more money was, and I quote,
"the people's business," which is a phrase that will
reverberate in infamy, although for the nonce it is only
reverberating around in my head, going "Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!"
as it careens off one synapse and then another, until it
finally smashes into that nerve center known as the
Bottomless Well of Anger of the Mogambo.
But I will agree, and it really galls me to agree with
Greenspan about anything, that reining in the out-of-
control Social Security and Medicare monsters is necessary.
But it is already too late to do that without enormous
pain, I am sorry to say. It is too, too large, and too, too
intertwined in the very fabric of the economy. Any attempt
to enact changes, much less sweeping changes, will
necessarily collapse the whole economy. That is why it is
so necessary, so vitally crucial, that you NOT get into
that filthy, bankrupting business in the first place.
And this is the same doofus Greenspan who just the day
before made the extraordinary speech that Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac ought to be reined in, lest their monstrous
book of mortgages, estimated at about three-fourths of all
mortgages in the country, have some unexpected reversal,
and thus caused systemic economic damage! Where in the hell
has HE been the last decade or so, while that gigantic book
of mortgages was being assembled?
This Sir Greenspan-the-Clueless is, as I understand it,
completely unaware that his unprecedented creation of
colossal amounts of money and credit worked their way
through the economy, and ended up in mortgages and the
other bubbles, including the bubble of massive and
suffocating, pervasive government spending! Can he be so
stupid? Can one ignorant old man be so preposterously
inept?
The answer is, I am sorry to report, yes, as evidenced by
his actually going before the House and telling them that
THEY need to cut spending! And where did all the money come
from that they are spending? From him! He creates oceans of
money and credit, which goes out into the economy, driving
up prices, and then a bunch of it ends up in the hands of
Congress, who spend it, permanently increasing the size and
expense of government, and then he has the gall to tell
them that they should cut spending!
So the next time you are in Washington DC, please stop by
the Federal Reserve and disregard the knot of security
guards who are wrestling the Mogambo to the ground for
daring to even show his face around there, after being
warned what would happen the next time he did that. When
all of them are busy teaching me a lesson that they hope I
will not forget anytime soon, it will be easy for you to
sneak into the Federal Reserve building, and you can inform
Alan right to his face that he can make the government cut
back on spending anytime he wants to!
All he has to do is stop creating the money and the credit
necessary to fund the Congressional spending! That's it!
That's all he has to do! Then, when the massive spending
bills passed by these boneheads cause massive increased
demand for borrowing, which must now come from real
savings, versus a static supply of loanable savings, this
will cause interest rates to spike through the roof!
In one stroke he can cancel government spending, and
dissuade them from trying that crap in the future, too! All
it takes is a guy who is not so gutless, so inept, so
ignorant, to just get up and do it. And then, maybe, the
next time he parks his fat worthless patootie in front of
the microphone to testify before Congress, I will not be
throwing Cheeze Doodles at him and screaming obscenities at
the TV screen... and that will make my wife happy, too.
Regards,
The Mogambo Guru,
for The Daily Reckoning |
