Thursday, July 10, 2008

Phil Gramm was right

Today's political roadkill is Sen. Phil Gramm, an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain.

McCain's opponent Sen. Barack Obama is having a field day stomping on Gramm for things he didn't say and extrapolating his misquotings beyond all reason, a commonly used political tactic.

Here is Obama:

Gramm actually said:

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. "We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet."

This is undeniably true. If we actually fall into a recession, the crybabies will go into full freakout. Just look at what they are doing now, while we still have economic growth. (That means the economy is better now that it have ever been in our history, a much-ignored fact.)

Gramm is also being excoriated for saying this:
"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline" despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said."


Notice that Obama has to make up the "figment of your imagination" part and that his conclusion is "it isn't whining to ask government to step in and give families some relief."

Obama's premise that the current economy is wiping out innocent families betrays the folly of his contention that many of us aren't whiners and his definition of "some relief" would be tough for our government to finance under current economic circumstances, much less if things were to really get tough.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is whining if you haven't really taken the initiative to take care of yourself before 'expecting' a handout. It is finger-pointing if your solution is blaming someone else for something rather than taking accountability and coming up with a real solution for it. We are becoming a culture of finger-pointers. Just look at the example set daily by the politicians.

Huff7Bill said...

Whoa!

We-the-people elect'em!

Those elected stewards go off to do our business but we-the-people lose interest until we're adversley affects.

Then, when our elected stewards have 77 lobbyists for every one of them telling them what their owners want, we-the-people do not get heard because we remain silent, hoping 'the other citizen' will speak on our behalf.

Most of us are whiners and when it comes time to stand up and be counted we quickly become the "silent majority" as President Nixon said.

dash



Otherwise,

Anonymous said...

Gramm neglected to point out that the "whiners" are the large corporations who want government handouts in the form of tax credits, depletion allowances, government money to locate off shore to avoid paying taxes and to relocate businesses where cheap labor, child labor and slave labor is available.

The whiners are also the corporations that want government to stifle and eliminate competition so they can have monopoly control of the market place. Hence, hemp is illegal as it is a potential source for cheap, renewable and sustainable fuel not dependent on foreign sources.

Hemp is likewise a threat to the pharmaceutical drug cartel because many of the cannabinoids of the hemp plant have high potential for treating serious diseases such as cancer, MLS, Alzheimer's Parkinson's to name a few.

The whiners are the wealthy who pay a disproportionately lower share of their income in taxes and other sources of income that avoid taxes altogether.

The whiners are the American banks that launder up to $1.5 trillion a year in illicit drug money. They want the war on drugs kept in place to protect this economic advantage that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke won't address.

The whiners are the banks who made bad business decisions by making variable rate loans to people who could least afford them and who least understood them nor were they adequately explained of the risks involved. Banks want the taxpayers to bail them out for their bad management decisions.

Gramm himself is chief among the whiners. He wants his cake and wants to eat it too. Any movement in the direction of fairness he sees as a threat and feels justified in whining about it.

Anonymous said...

Whiners??? Maybe someone ought to ask Phil Gramm why people in the US are “whining”.

In 1999, Gramm successfully undid the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, removing the decades-old “fire-wall” between commercial banking, which was heavily regulated, and investment banking, which was not. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not extend significant new regulation to investment banking.

And so… today, because of this piece of bad legislation that heavily favors the banking industry, we are left with what has become known as the “Housing Crisis”.

And where is Gramm employed today?

Why he is a lobbyist for UBS (Swiss Bank) of course!!!!

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