Comments on: The Dems Are Killing the Dollar

By: dclamage

dclamage — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:14:10 +0000

People in Detroit, MI are lining up by the tens of thousands for their Obama Money!

None of them understand where the money is coming from. They just know it’s a free handout.

By: Dan Perrin

Dan Perrin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:52:27 +0000

Obama is doing them: like appearing on the cover of Men’s Health and winning the Nobel Appeasement Prize for doing nothing.

He is making our dollar a joke and he is making the Nobel a joke.

By: vortigernpendragon

vortigernpendragon — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:00:55 +0000

Government spending is going to destroy America. I believe drastic action is called for. I set-up a webstie, spendenforcer.com, but in an attempt to increase exposure, I recently made a video and posted it on Youtube. Please visit it and pass it on if you agree with this strategy. Thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-fdvepD7C4

By: johnt

johnt — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:54:43 +0000

it is quite fashionable to say that there is no difference between parties and spending/taxes. But I trust you can and will tell the difference between a high point of $468 billion deficit under Bush and a then Democrat Congress and a current deficit of $1.4 trillion.

I will pass on further commentary except to lament on the idiocies of Glen Beck, who can’t tell the difference between warm water and boiling hot pitch. His word does seem to spread.

By: Richard Mullins

Richard Mullins — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:47:26 +0000

this spending twice as bad as before. They couldn’t keep their promise to cut spending. By 2001, they were already spending like drunken sailors. Maybe we can primary the spending congresscritters and replace them with ones that will not spend alot.

By: Richard Mullins

Richard Mullins — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:43:37 +0000

I don’t know why it won’t work well for the Federal Government. Sometimes I think that there should be a penalty for any congressman to start lots and lots of spending bills and earmarks.

By: Robert A. Hahn

Robert A. Hahn — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:37:37 +0000

When people get to DC, they join the “political class”.

That's why we need term limits. The Executive Branch consists almost entirely of career civil servants. The Judicial Branch consists entirely of appointees-for-life. If the Legislative Branch also fills up with government lifers, there is no constituency for limited government.

By: Achance

Achance — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:47:26 +0000

for retirement has had their whole world undone in the last year. I’m not upside down or anything, but IF I’d pulled the pin on Alaska a year and a half ago, I could have turned my house into a Class I motor home and a condo someplace warm, all paid for. Now all I can turn it into is a a decent down on one or the other of those. My boat is essentially worthless because nobody can get credit to buy it. I’ve discounted the rent on my commercial property in Georgia twice in the last year just so I can keep money coming in for it. I own it fee simple, but somebody’s got to pay the taxes to send all the black kids that don’t want to go to school to school anyway. The whites long ago left the public schools system if they had any way to do so. I don’t want to sell it because it is just about the last of the old 1795 land grant land in the family, but that’s just as well because I couldn’t. I’m thinking I’ll see if I can arrange some money to build an apartment building on the roadfront part of it. Ain’t nobody in that part of the World buying a house again any time soon, so apartments ought to be OK. And if the soviet confiscates it, so what?

So, I don’t know what the Boomers do; maybe shuffle to the oven, maybe go to the hills.

By: Section9

Section9 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:06:55 +0000

When people get to DC, they join the “political class”. The notion of a larger duty to the posterity of the country becomes a quaint concept that sort of goes out the window.

I will say this for the R’s. At least one of the reasons we got run out of town on a rail in 2006 is that our people had the common decency to stay home because of all the spending.

Didn’t do much good, of course.

By: nessa

nessa — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:50:06 +0000

By: Section9

Section9 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:42:37 +0000

This is Unicorn Land we speak of.

Allowing for some dissent by the Blue Dogs, who really have no decisive power in their own caucus, the Democratic Party as an institution cannot excercise spending restraint. They can lie about it all day, but they are constitutionally incapable of spending cuts when they perceive that there’s Other People’s Money about that they can get their hands on.

By: Section9

Section9 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:38:20 +0000

I agree almost wholeheartedly with your analysis, Art. However, methinks you haven’t quite accounted for what’s going to happen with all the Bobos. They who voted for Obama in good faith, yet will see their savings get slowly eaten away.

First came housing leverage, which is where inflation first struck, in the Housing market under Bush. If that wasn’t inflation by another name, I don’t know what was. Now, there is an attack on the dollar, which will erode the value of their savings. Don’t think this won’t affect the politics of the Middle Class. It will.

There won’t be enough money to buy off the Middle Class. The Chicoms are getting off the Crazy Train to Weimar. You would too, if you were them.

And here’s where the wheels come off for the Dhimmis: there is no constituency in the Party of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Henry Waxman for cost containment of entitlements, much less cuts. It’s all about raising taxes so their piggies can continue to feed at the trough. You remember what Newt said about Bob Dole: “The tax collector for the welfare state!” This is true of Obama, in spades. That’s what the Dems think of him. His job is to bring home the bacon, no more, no less.

They can’t control costs. It’s a scorpion/frog paradox for the Democrats. It’s simply their nature to spend, spend, spend. It’s what will destroy them.

By: Section9

Section9 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:25:06 +0000

As in Weimar.

The Chinese, the Germans, the Russians. No one is buying into Obama’s con game. They will not be fooled.

It will amaze future historians how a jumped up lawyer from Chicago thought he could fool a regime led by the inheritors of the civilization that invented the abacus.

By: reason60

reason60 — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:26:39 +0000

Since it makes our goods cheaper for other countries to buy. There is a balance between a currency that is too strong, making our products uncompetitive abroad, and too weak, making foreign goods too expensive.
The bigger problem, as pointed out, is runaway spending. I pointed this out in my diary entry, where in order to balance the budget, we would need to cut a full third of spending.

There isn’t any way to cut this much, without gutting at least a few sacred cows, which will take political leadership and courage, commodities in short supply these days.

By: JoeG

JoeG — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:11:42 +0000

It sure beats declining or disappearing income…

By: johnt

johnt — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:18:57 +0000

how about the nation, the Constitution, private property, the war, the once valued “privacy”, budgetary restraint? And last, what remains of what used to be social and civic comity, as the swine in the WH, the other set of swine in Congress, and liberal swine in general, do their sickening best to engender a regime of domestic conflict, one that borders on civil strife.

By: Mario

Mario — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:17:39 +0000

or at least not more weak, relatively, but that all depends on your starting point. If you look at the currency markets starting from just before the current crisis (August ’08, say), the Dollar is up against every major currency except the Yen. Now it has lost since January, but it hasn’t been enough yet to wipe away the fear-induced gains made just a few months before. It’s true, as Kudlow points out, that the price of gold is high, but so what? Gold isn’t a currency, and its price is just about meaningless when it comes to international capital flows, despite what gold fetishists may wish.

People who buy and sell currencies every day and who have the most to gain or lose depending on sudden inflation spikes are not afraid of holding the dollar; if there were any credible risk of inflation, they would have priced it into the market.

The real economic risk right now is that the Fed may respond to improving economic conditions by raising interest rates prematurely rather than insisting that the White House roll back the stimulus first. As I said, though, I don’t think either is called for (beyond the obvious point that the stimulus is wasted money regardless, but in this case I’ll treat it as generic “fiscal stimulus,” would could have been useful, theoretically, and some people are still willing to believe it is). I do agree with the author, however, that the call to spend more, even as the Fed is making noise about raising interest rates (which is itself treated by the market as an interest rate increase), is completely insane.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:10:56 +0000

…and it just made things much, much, much, much worse.

Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:07:57 +0000

All this reckless spending by the Congress would not be possible without Ben Bernacke and the Federal Reserve system enabling the Congress to spend fiat money created out of thin air. If the Dems in Congress are the junkies, it is the Fed that is pushing the habit of spend, spend, spend! It is the cause of price inflation that diminishes people's purchasing power and savings, it is the source of these vicious boom/bust business cycles, and it is the lifeblood of big government. I am glad to see the monetary issue coming to the forefront in recent months. But it is going to get worse and worse until those in Washington embrace the principles of sound money. Good references on how the government has royally screwed the dollar over the last 100 years include: Murray Rothbard: What Has Government Done to Our Money? Jörg Guido Hülsmann: The Ethics of Money Production

By: mbecker908

mbecker908 — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:49:45 +0000

While I generally agree with your conclusion, Francis had a great column on the subject a couple of months ago at TNL and his conclusion was that the problem would be deflation.

Maybe Erick could persuade a diary on the subject from him… HINT, Erick, HINT!!!!