Former Reagan economist David Stockman goes off the deep end into Doomsday Prepper territory,
and the New York Times is happy to run with it.
So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a
soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the
warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the
nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted
spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of
spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in
the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another
unsustainable bubble.
When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the
banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of
zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even
today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.
In other words, Stockman is now predicting America's collapse and a Second Civil War. And of course it will be all Obama's fault.
Instead, the White House, Congress and the Fed, under Mr. Bush and then
President Obama, made a series of desperate, reckless maneuvers that
were not only unnecessary but ruinous. The auto bailouts, for example,
simply shifted jobs around — particularly to the aging, electorally
vital Rust Belt — rather than saving them. The “green energy” component
of Mr. Obama’s stimulus was mainly a nearly $1 billion giveaway to crony
capitalists, like the venture capitalist John Doerr and the self-proclaimed outer-space visionary Elon Musk, to make new toys for the affluent.
Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly
needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of
poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state
and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax
loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic
Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts
(though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed
money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV
or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.
Nowhere does Stockman take responsibility for quadrupling the national debt under Reagan. In the end it's GOLD WEED END THE FED Paultard nonsense, only with a veneer of minor credibility. That veneer gets eaten through by the acid about halfway through the screed. It was all doom the second we went off the gold standard, which has been the case for generations now.
Nonsense is boring.