"The president-elect, looking uber-cool with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing." -Reuters, 12/27/08
Huh and I thought the only people who looked cool in the backwards baseball hat were baseball catchers. To me, every other guy trying to pull off this look looks like a real jack-ass... shows what I know.
Gotta love the unbiased news reporting. Earlier we had to indure reports on Obama's sandwich (12-grain bread!), his $9mil vacation house being w/o power (along with 900,000 other people) and of course his shirtless antics (Pec-tacular!).
Ugh, I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle four (eight?) years of this media drooling love-affair with Pres. Obama...
That's a name you should get familiar with. He's the father of Keynsian Economics which is the theory that economic prosperity can be found by having the government borrow money, and then spend it through large public work projects and other forms of cash infusion. The recipients of this money will then spend it, thereby "priming the pump" and getting the economy flowing. His theory was the basis of the Great Depression era New Deal government growth and spending.
It's a nice sounding theory, but in practice it simply doesn't work. The main flaw is that, since the government can not make money on it's own, it has to raise taxes to take the money from the tax payers and filter it through the government bureaucracy, before then putting it back into the economy eventually back to the taxpayers. With all of this money in the hands of the government it is no longer available to invest in new growth of private enterprise, but is instead wasted on the government's overhead, pet projects and pork. The end result is economic stagnation, and increasingly massive government debt.
Keysianism failed to help the economy during the Great Depression and, in fact, helped make it "Great". More recently the theory was put to the test in Japan and resulted in a decade of economic stagnation from which the Japanese still have not recovered.
Right now, President-Elect Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Reed are all working on a new economic "stimulus" plan that is estimated to cost somewhere between $750,000,000,000 and $1,000,000,000,000. All of it is pure Keynsian growth and spending.
One of Obama's big plans is to throw billions of dollars into building roads, bridges, etc. He claims this will create jobs and such, but how? The jobs "created" by this plan will be filled by existing construction workers who are out of work due to a lack of private sector construction. Does he really expect that the thousands of MBAs laid off from the banking industry will go build bridges?
We're in for a wild ride... I wonder when the first breadlines will form.
I don't mean to be all baa-humbugie, but I sometimes think we've forgotten what Christmas is supposed to be all about. We decorate our malls, offices, and houses with secular symbol when this is supposed to be a religious holiday.
The South Park guys brought up this point in their own, unique, way:
I once heard a guy from Columbia (or was it Venezuela) exclaim 'It's so beautiful it makes my liver ache.' while he was admiring a massive yacht. I thought is was an odd phrase and asked him what he meant by it. He explained that it was an expression of a deep gut feeling that combines longing, desire, jealousy, envy, etc. I figured it just didn't translate well into English but seeing this new Z4 I think I understand what he was talking about.
Update: It's not out yet but Automobile Magazine is guessing the base price will be in the low $40k-range. Looks like I won't be able to satisfy that achy liver anytime soon.
