To Save the Economy Scrap the Keynesian Fantasy

To Save the Economy Scrap the Keynesian Fantasy - Forbes: "Many of the basic precepts taught today are wrong: Governments can stabilize economies; government spending stimulates economic growth, ditto easy money from a central bank; free markets are inherently unstable. John Maynard Keynes even propagated the pernicious notion that wasteful spending was better than no spending, when he talked about the virtue of paying people to dig holes and then fill them up. Moreover, most policymakers and economists don’t understand the basic nature of money: A currency facilitates transactions between two parties, alleviating the necessity of engaging in the cumbersome barter process.

Most governments still cling to the Keynesian fantasy, but reality is upending this deadening dogma. The western European debt crisis, led by feckless Greece, is continuing to have a profound and positive policy impact here in the U.S., to the point that even President Obama pays occasional lip service to restraining spending. We’ll still suffer from the prevailing yet wrongheaded economic theology, but profound reform is in the air."

The Way The World - And Free-Market Economics - Works

The Way The World - And Free-Market Economics - Works - Forbes: "So America suffers with a President who completely misconceives the foundation of the world leading prosperity of his own country, and the very source of its superpower standing, now rapidly declining under his misleadership. Exactly to the contrary, the free market is exactly what worked for over three hundred years to make America the richest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world, a veritable workers’ paradise in fact, until Obama came along, carrying the misconceptions of his father’s overt Communism, and his mother’s hippie anti-Americanism."

Dr. Coburn Releases New Report on Wasteful Government Spending in 2011: "Wastebook 2011"

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today released a new oversight report, “Wastebook 2011” that highlights over $6.5 billion in examples of some of the most egregious ways your taxpayer dollars were wasted. This report details 100 of the countless unnecessary, duplicative and low-priority projects spread throughout the federal government.

“Video games, robot dragons, Christmas trees, and magic museums. This is not a Christmas wish list, these are just some of the ways the federal government spent your tax dollars. Over the past 12 months, politicians argued, debated and lamented about how to reign in the federal government’s out of control spending. All the while, Washington was on a shopping binge, spending money we do not have on things we do not absolutely need. Instead of cutting wasteful spending, nearly $2.5 billion was added each day in 2011 to our national debt, which now exceeds $15 trillion,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Congress cannot even agree on a plan to pay for the costs of extending jobless benefits to the millions of Americans who are still out of work. Yet, thousands of millionaires are receiving unemployment benefits and billions of dollars of improper payments of unemployment insurance are being made to individuals with jobs and others who do not qualify. And remember those infamous bridges to nowhere in Alaska that became symbols of government waste years ago? The bridges were never built, yet the federal government still spent more than a million dollars just this year to pay for staff to promote one of the bridges.”

Examples of wasteful spending highlighted in “Wastebook 2011” include:

• $75,000 to promote awareness about the role Michigan plays in producing Christmas trees & poinsettias.

• $15.3 million for one of the infamous Bridges to Nowhere in Alaska.

• $113,227 for video game preservation center in New York.

• $550,000 for a documentary about how rock music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• $48,700 for 2nd annual Hawaii Chocolate Festival, to promote Hawaii’s chocolate industry.

• $350,000 to support an International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy.

• $10 million for a remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan.

• $35 million allocated for political party conventions in 2012.

• $765,828 to subsidize “pancakes for yuppies” in the nation’s capital.

• $764,825 to study how college students use mobile devices for social networking.

Read the full report: here

Government spending jobs myth

RAHN: Government spending jobs myth - Washington Times: "Government spending as a percentage of GDP almost tripled between 1929 and 1939 under Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, yet the number of Americans at work fell through this period despite a growing population. The percentage of growth in government spending was less than GDP growth during the period from 1983 to 2000 (Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton), and job growth soared."

Gallup: Under Obama, Growing Percentage See Big Government as 'Biggest Threat'

Gallup: Under Obama, Growing Percentage See Big Government as 'Biggest Threat' | CNSnews.com: "While President Barack Obama has focused his rhetoric in recent weeks on depicting a reckless Wall Street and insufficiently taxed "millionaires and billionaires" as threats to the American middle class, a newly released Gallup poll indicates that Americans apparently have been coming to a different conclusion during Obama's presidency, with fewer people now seeing big business as the "biggest threat" to the country in the future and more seeing big government as the "biggest threat.""

Testing the Waters of Economic Liberty

Washington State Ferry System

Testing the waters of economic liberty - George Will - The Washington Post: "How did America reach the point where aspiring entrepreneurs, seeking to improve their lot by improving other people’s choices, must approach government on bended knee to beg it to confer upon them a right — the right to compete? How did America stray from its foundational principle that government exists to protect preexisting rights, not to apportion such rights as it creates and chooses to bestow? Read on."

New Video Debunks Great Depression Myths

New CF&P “Economics 101” Video Debunks Depression Myths, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR

For Immediate Release

Monday, December 12, 2011

202-285-0244

www.freedomandprosperity.org

New CF&P “Economics 101” Video Debunks Depression Myths, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR

(Washington, D.C., Monday, December 12, 2011) The latest “Economics 101” video released today by theCenter for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation (CF&P), narrated by Michelle Fields, explains that most politicians have learned the wrong lessons from the Great Depression. Entitled, “The New Deal Was A Failure: Hoover and FDR Prolonged the Great Depression with Big Government,” the video illuminates, through a timely economic history lesson, the dangers of President Obama’s insistence on following in the footsteps of FDR.

The video debunks two prominent, Depression-era myths: 1) That Hoover was a free market ideologue, and 2) that the New Deal ended the Great Depression. Hoover, in fact, dramatically increased government spending and instituted many programs that FDR expanded into the New Deal, as admitted by a prominent member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust.” These programs, however, had the unfortunate effect of preventing a recovery and, according to two scholars, extending the Depression for an additional seven years.

The mini-documentary provides lessons for current policymakers. President Obama should pay particular attention, for instance, where it explains how Keynesian economists wrongly predicted that the economy would collapse after WWII, when government spending shrank. In fact, the economy rebounded precisely because politicians got out of the way and allowed markets to work.

“As George Santayana famously said,” noted CF&P Foundation President Andrew Quinlan, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Quinlan added, “Most lawmakers today are in desperate need of a lesson in economic history, but none more so than President Obama, whose free-spending, heavy-handed interventions are dangerously close to ushering in a new depression.”

“Like Bush and Obama today, both Hoover and Roosevelt were big spenders,” added Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. “The single most important lesson of this video, “ he concluded, “is that intervention didn’t work during the Great Depression, and it doesn’t work today.”

Executive Summary

This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation explains how the statist policies of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. The video also briefly explains how reductions in the burden of government spending helped the economy recover from a deep recession after World War I and to grow after World War II.

This new video is part of CF&P’s Economics 101 video series, which is designed to explain free market concepts, with particular emphasis on reaching students and young people. This is the sixteenth video in the series.

The other Econ 101 videos: The European Fiscal Crisis and Lessons for America, Free Markets, Not Redistribution, Is Best Way to Reduce Poverty, Seven Reasons Why Tax Increases Are the Wrong Approach;Tax Competition: A Powerful Force to Restrain Big Government; Four Reasons Why Big Government Is Bad Government; Keynesian Economics Is Wrong: Economic Growth Causes Consumer Spending, Not the Other Way Around; Indexing the Capital Gains Tax to Protect Taxpayers from Inflation; Repealing Obamacare and Restoring a Free Market in Healthcare; The Job-Killing Impact of Minimum Wage Laws; Deficits, Debts and Unfunded Liabilities; Cost of the Internal Revenue Code; Lessons Learned From Sweden; Government Monopolies; Moral Hazard; and Don’t Copy Europe’s Mistakes.

Web Page for Economics 101 Videos:

http://freedomandprosperity.org/videos/economics-101-series/

CF&P Foundation has also released more than four-dozen mini-documentaries since 2007. These videos include Tax Competition Primer, VAT-Hidden Tax, Global Flat Tax Revolution, Cutting the U.S. Corporate Income Tax, Promoting Prosperity, Obama’s So-Called Stimulus, Obama’s Deferral Proposal, Case Against Class-Warfare Tax Policy, President Obama’s Dishonest Demagoguery on Tax Havens, Six Reasons Why the Capital Gains Tax Should Be Abolished, a three part series on the Benefits of Tax Havens and another three-part series on the Laffer Curve.

Link: http://freedomandprosperity.org/videos/economic-lessons-series/

Web Links:

Youtube

http://youtu.be/xWAgt_YCNuw

Dailymotion

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx4vo_the-new-deal-was-a-failure-hoover-and-fdr-prolonged-the-great-depression-with-big-government_news

Blip.TV

http://blip.tv/economics/the-new-deal-was-a-failure-hoover-and-fdr-prolonged-the-great-depression-with-big-government-5814506

For additional comments:

Andrew Quinlan can be reached at 202-285-0244, andy@freedomandprosperity.org

Dan Mitchell can be reached at 202-218-4615, dmitchell@cato.org

Regulation for Dummies

Regulation for Dummies, Wall Street Journal: "The evidence is overwhelming that the Obama regulatory surge is one reason the current economic recovery has been so lackluster by historical standards. Rather than nurture an economy trying to rebuild confidence after a financial heart attack, the Administration pushed through its now-famous blitz of liberal policies on health care, financial services, energy, housing, education and student loans, telecom, labor relations, transportation and probably some other industries we've forgotten. Anyone who thinks this has only minimal impact on business has never been in business.

Mr. Obama can claim he is the progressive second coming of Teddy Roosevelt as he did in Kansas last week, or he can claim to be a regulatory minimalist, but not both. The facts show he's the former."

Five Big Lies in Obama's Economic Fairness Speech

Five Big Lies in Obama's Economic Fairness Speech - Investors.com: "Fact: the federal income tax code is now more progressive than it was in 1979, according to the Congressional Budget Office. IRS data show the richest 1% paid almost 40% of federal income taxes in 2009, up from 18% back in 1980."

It's the Regulations, Stupid!

Despite Naysayers, Regulations Are Eating Into American Economy, Killing Jobs - Investors.com: "During the last deep recession of the early 1980s, President Reagan slashed red tape. His regulatory reform, in contrast, encouraged competition and innovation, and helped trigger a hiring boom.

Real economic growth soared an average 7% during the recovery years, while employers churned out an average 350,000 new jobs a month. That compares with this recovery's anemic 2.5% growth and sub-100,000 new jobs.

It's the regulations, stupid"

Jim DeMint: How the U.S. Can Help Europe: Just Say No

Jim DeMint: How the U.S. Can Help Europe: Just Say No - WSJ.com: "The very problems that have roiled Europe's economy are coming to a slow boil in the U.S. Just as European leaders must limit deficit spending, reform unfunded entitlement programs, and resolve the underlying systemic problems in their financial systems, so must the politicians in Washington. Yet the Obama administration is burning taxpayers at each end of the dollar by bailing out failed socialist policies abroad and, at the same time, forcing them into place here at home."

Jim Rogers: "The government lies about the numbers that they put out"

Famous commodity investor, Jim Rogers, tells Newsmax.com that the government lies about the numbers they put out. 

It's the Tyranny, Stupid

It's the Tyranny, Stupid | The Augusta Chronicle: "Since taking office, Mr. Obama and his friends on Capitol Hill have deigned to order us to purchase health insurance, while reserving to themselves the right to prescribe what it includes and what procedures will be paid for; bypassed Congress to regulate carbon emissions with an eye toward refereeing nearly all business activities; gone to court multiple times to block states from protecting themselves against illegal immigration; passed the most strangulating financial regulations in American history, in the Dodd-Frank bill; nationalized two-thirds of the U.S. car industry as well as the student loan industry; tried to block non-union jobs in South Carolina at a time of record-high unemployment; installed a shut-off valve on American energy production; and much more.

All of these things have a deleterious effect on our fiscal fortunes, to be sure, but they are much bigger and more important than even the world’s biggest economy. They do unmasked violence to the very nature of what it means to be American."

Drop In Unemployment To 8.6% a Statistical Fluke

Drop In Unemployment To 8.6% In November Is Good, But Not As Good As It Looks - Investors.com: "The number is derived from a huge survey of 60,000 households the government takes each month. In November, the survey showed the labor force shrank by 315,000. That shrinkage makes the unemployment rate look a lot better than it is.

This is questionable because in the previous three months, the labor force increased by 323,000 workers on average. Statistically, a one-month reversal in the size of the workforce of more than 600,000 people just doesn't make sense — unless an awful lot of people threw up their hands in disgust and quit looking."

The Economy is Choking on Obamacare

Choking on Obamacare - George Will = The Washington Post: "According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, by 2008 the cost of federal regulations had reached $1.75 trillion. That was 14 percent of national income unavailable for job-creating investments. And that was more than 11,000 regulations ago."

85-year-old woman may sue TSA after being strip searched at JFK Airport

85-year-old woman may sue TSA after being strip searched at JFK Airport - NY Daily News: "An 85-year-old Long Island grandmother says she plans to sue the TSA after a humiliating strip search on Tuesday by agents at JFK Airport.

Lenore Zimmerman, who lives in Long Beach, says she was on her way to a 1 p.m. flight to Fort Lauderdale when security whisked her to a private room and took off her clothes.

“I walk with a walker — I really look like a terrorist,” she said sarcastically. “I’m tiny. I weigh 110 pounds, 107 without clothes, and I was strip-searched.”"