Monday, March 23, 2009

Do not read this post

That's right, I am asking you to ignore this post entirely. It's not really important. This post is just an anchor that I can refer to in the future when I say "I told you so." You can just file it away. I'll point out when you can read it later.

The lead in story on today's NBC Nightly News was that the government will team up with hedge funds to buy up bad debt.

This reveals the following predictions:

  • borrowing money to pay off bad debt is bad and is generally done by poorly educated people with little or nothing to lose. See payday loans.
  • when the government encourages stupid spending and it crashes the economy (and is blamed on money grubbing capitalists) then the answer to fix this is NOT to encourage stupid spending and investment by money grubbing capitalists.
  • when this fails, it will be blamed on evil money grubbing capitalists. It won't be the fault of the government or that it was a bad idea.
  • selling something that is worth less than nothing is a scam and a bad idea and is only legal if you are the government
  • no person will ever find a clause in the US Constitution that allows this to happen

Note that I have created a Nostradamus sporktag for this and similar future entries.

3 comments:

Chris said...

There is a proper way to do this, like the Swedes did back in the 1980s...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502785.html

Spork In the Eye said...

Even the socialists are better socialists than we are.

I vaguely remember this... and I also remember that during the crisis mortgage rates there were around 30%. (My timeline may be off... but I remember that around 1990.) We, of course, keep them low. More debt fixes everything.

...but there's a lot wrong with Sweden too. I've spent my share of time there. They get paid much less than we do, have higher costs of living and pay higher taxes. Hell, even they're parking space at work is considered "imputed income" and gets taxed.

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