Lean Forward...

Holy schmoly... Something I made just blewwwwwww up.... Win!

So have you seen MSNBC's stupid "Lean Forward" campaign? All their anchors and hosts are in these short, 20-30 second, bits making asinine logical fallacies and exposing their abysmal failure to understand even the most basic concepts of economics in support of a massive state.

Now keep in mind that all MSNBC's people are doing this, so there are moronic videos from Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr., Chris Matthews and all the rest... But for my purposes today, I need to single out and pick on Rachel Maddow.

Maddow claims to be "obsessively devoted to facts" in one of these videos.

Thing is... She's not really all that good with facts, as it turns out. For example, she'd also like you to believe that it isn't going to be a "profit-making venture for some company" to build... A bridge.

You heard me. Check it out:

She says, "It's never going to be a profit-making venture for some company to build this idea...", as she points behind her to a bridge... Seriously. A BRIDGE!??

Miss "Obsessively Devoted to Facts" couldn't do the 30 seconds worth of research that it might take someone to discover that virtually all the bridges in America were built by private companies seeking to profit?

Really.

Of course we should all understand that even when the government pays for the bridges to be built, most bridges are designed and constructed by private companies competing with each other for those contracts.

But in fact, once upon a time, not even that long ago, government didn't have anything to do with it at all... For example, the uber-capitalist himself, Andrew Carnegie, was the proud owner of a major bridge-building operation called Keystone Bridge Company, which built dozens of bridges "for profit".

Why, here's one of their fabulous bridges now!

Pretty nice, right? Easily as nice as the bridge in the background of the Maddow video, no?

Wanna know something else? The Keystone Bridge Company was eventually purchased by a J.P. Morgan-owned company called the American Bridge Company, which owned around 30 additional for profit bridge manufacturing firms.

But hey, that's not possible, because building bridges isn't a "profit making venture", she says.

This is the beef I have with these Lean Forward videos in general. In each instance, the host/anchor is saying something flagrantly stupid yet with the epitome of arrogance and smug, self-satisfaction. It's such a perfect maelstrom of pretentiousness and ignorance that it was crying out to be parodied... Thus... That's exactly what I did.

Check it out:



MSNBC likes to talk a big game about being news for "smart" people... But what it really manages to be in most cases is simply news for ignorant, economically and historically illiterate people. For all of the Fox hatred, I don't think Fox would have done something like this... The worst they're going to do is say something silly about how ridiculously awesome America is, and how our militaristic power gives us the right to do whatever we want - possibly on the basis that someone else would fill the void if we weren't there, and they'd be "worse".

Fine... That stuff may be wrong, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't offend me intellectually the way MSNBC's Lean Forward campaign does.

Perhaps that's because the war-mongering and fist-pumping that originates at Fox isn't a problem with basic facts, it's a problem with bad philosophy and false premises... Actually, scratch that, it's not a problem necessarily of incorrect facts, so much as a problem of incomplete facts (e.g., yes, we were attacked on 9/11, but thinking that the story starts or ends there and whatever America does in response is perfectly acceptable is insane).

At least for me, this is what makes Fox irritating as a network, but I've never seen them do promotional videos like these and honestly... it's boring talking about Fox. Everybody talks about and makes fun of Fox.

The difference for me really comes down to the smug. MSNBC's overall editorial position is based on equally (perhaps worse in some ways) bad philosophy, and equally false premises to Fox, but given how insanely smug their network and all their anchors are... You'd think they could get something as simple as the idea of private, for-profit bridge companies correct. If you're going to be a preachy jagweed, you should probably have a point that actually makes some sense.

Unfortunately, their blatantly socialist propagandizing requires them to believe that government provides all the good, big and important stuff like bridges... Even when that's simply not true.

Notes From the Past

Had a long discussion with a friend today about many things, and I promised to email her links to my blog. So now that I'm home, I started thinking about what posts I thought best represented Logicology and my writing, and thus I began perusing old posts, starting with the beginning of my Blogger usage in late 2007.

I had been blogging for a few years prior to that, but not on any very good platforms, and at the time I think I was writing a few massive Facebook "notes" each week. And at the time, as I recall, my constant Facebooking was starting to annoy people.

Turns out my problem at the time wasn't the prolific amount of content I was generating, but that my audience wasn't really very interested or targeted. Apparently high school and college musician friends don't really care to spend much time talking about what's wrong with Paul Krugman's latest column.

Who knew?

Anyway... Now that I am reviewing some of these old blogs I figured it could be fun to pull some excerpts from my previous writings. Strap in, this may get interesting.

From June 7th, 2008:

"That said, we are now left with two shitty options for president, hooray! Aren't elections great???

Yeah. Ok, so Obama is a socialist who would like to "solve" our problems by contributing an extra 200+ billion dollars to the federal budget, expand the powers of the presidency some more (after 8 years of Bush doing just that, I'm a little surprised not one party-nominated candidate save Bob Barr is talking about *reducing* the scope of presidential authority!), keep us in an un-winnable war at least for a few more years, and push for more autocratic, monolithic government micromanagement of healthcare, energy and transportation industries.

Check.

McCain, by "contrast" might only raise the federal budget, according to some analysts, by about 15, Carl Sagan Billion with a "B", Billion dollars in clearly marked spending, but keep us in an unwinnable war for "100 years", advocates a lot of the same New Deal socialism that Obama does and would expand the powers of the presidency even farther in terms of military related issues.

Check."

Boy was I way off! Not only did Obama fail to "solve" America's economic problems, he did so far more spectacularly than I had imagined at the time. To be fair, this was a few months before George W. Bush kicked off America's version of a "lost decade" with a $700 Billion bailout.

Instead of a scant $200 Billion, Obama has increased spending by about $8 Trillion, and increased deficit spending to a whopping $1.4 Trillion per year! Just the 2011 deficit alone is well over 6, maybe 7 times what I'd predicted Obama would add to the budget.

AND, as a special bonus, he's kept us in the existing wars, expanding our presence in Afghanistan and adding a brand new war in Libya plus a huge amount of unspoken war in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Yay.

One can only imagine how much different McCain (who also stopped his campaign in late 2008 to go support the bailouts and stimulus nonsense) might have been. I struggle to see how he could have been "worse".

Later, on December 8th, 2008

"I need a presidential candidate to understand the Constitutional limitations of his power, I need a presidential candidate who will act as a legitimate check against the abuses of legislature by actually vetoing bills (as Bush almost *never* did), I need a presidential candidate who doesn't muck up the meaning of the document he's sworn in to protect by hiring teams of lawyers to find legalese loopholes in wording to do anything he damn well pleases in foreign & domestic policy... I need a presidential candidate who understands the Enlightenment philosophy that guided our nation's founders and created the framework for the greatest era of social, political, religious, & economic freedom the world has ever experienced. An era rapidly diminishing.

Still diminishing... Though we may be poised for a shift.

In one of the first instances of me talking about President Obama as Bush V.02, on March 9th, 2009 I wrote:

"Just to clarify here... Obama first blames Bush for *expanding* the government and deficit spending - a perfectly valid, and rather important criticism. Then he says that because of those policies, he has essentially no choice but to do the same thing.

Of course he also throws in the "lax regulation" bogeyman."

And.... He's still doin' that.

Then I got serious about the stimulus packages and Ben Bernanke's constant idiocy. In "Ben Bernanke's Pitiful Prognostication", on June 3rd, 2009, I wrote:

"Now, all that said, there is a much more insidious character to the fact that all this mad Government spending hasn't actually made it into the regular economy yet... What the time lag on the stimulus spending really means to us ordinary folks is that the coming hyper-inflation necessarily won't be noticeable or really "start" happening for a couple years yet. Unfortunately, that's going to lull an awful lot of people into a false sense of security and the belief that the "worst is over".

It isn't.

As inflation starts to set in and cost of everything rises, there is naturally a time lag between prices rising and wages rising and certainly history has shown that the faster the increase in inflation, the greater the gap between cost of living and wages can become. As that happens over the next 5-6 years, the real standard of living in America will continue to decrease significantly - and with it comes wonderful things like civil unrest, hunger and possibly increases in crime & violence."

Fortunately not too much of an increase in crime, but of course as I've written multiple times, inflation is most assuredly rearing its ugly head. Again, Bernanke is out there claiming that the increase in prices on raw goods & commodities, and the rising cost of living for everyone is no big deal.

Not so hilariously, a prediction I made in that blog came true a couple weeks later. On June 14th, 2009 there's this:

"A few of my predictions from the Ben Bernanke blog (below) have already come true...

Here's VP; Joe Biden spinning the "recovery" efforts as not going as well because things were worse than they'd estimated.

From this article:

"everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the stimulus, economy was worse off than anyone thought.

Everyone, huh? Evvveryone.... Right... Everyone.

Good lord..."

This isn't fun any more...

This whole process just kinda goes on like this. I make predictions, I generally say something is a terrible idea, I explain precisely why it's a terrible idea, and then I watch as the predictable consequences unfold in real time.

On Cash for Clunkers, I originally wrote this:

"There's simply no excuse for the idiocy that is Cash for Clunkers. No, it's not a huge program compared the rest of the bailouts and the massive printing of monopoly money that we've seen in the last year. No, it's not the worst thing that's ever happened in terms of big-government stupid, but it's a perfect example of Bastiat's broken-window fallacy."

Turns out I was right about that too... Cost of used cars has gone up 30% in three years, and there was no long-term boost to demand for new cars at all - simply a shift where all the new purchases for 2009 were concentrated into a few months.

Check it out for yourself:

I really don't know why anyone is surprised by this stuff, but it seems they always are. The same pattern can be observed throughout all the rest of the government stimulus spending. Stimulus spending only "works" so long as government is continually pumping money into the program.

By the way, Cash for Clunkers wound up costing over $3 Billion... Hooray!

Now that all that money has been consumed, there is no real consumer demand driving new purchases, so the spike goes away, and sales fall... and continue to fall. This stuff really shouldn't be rocket science. People as "smart" as Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shouldn't struggle with these realities so much.

The fact that they do suggests to me that they really aren't that bright after all.

At any rate, I could go on like this kind of endlessly until we get to the present day. Most of my predictions have been dead on. Obviously, like any sane economist will tell you, predictions in that realm  are not ever going to be perfectly timed - and I don't waste my time offering to predict precisely when something is going to occur, but the logic is always clear enough to understand the likely consequences.

If you print a ton of money, prices are going to shoot up. If you give people thousands of dollars to buy a new car, those who were already planning on committing to the expense will shift their purchase into the window of time alloted for them to get the "free money". If you raise taxes, increase the burdens of regulation and generally create mass uncertainty in costs for the business community, then the business community isn't going to do much investing or expansion. They might even leave the state, or the country, for greener pastures.

I honestly wish people weren't continually surprised by this stuff. It's way too predictable... See above.

What Inflation? Round 2

Last year in October, I wrote a blog called "What Inflation?", chronicling the depressing - yet meteoric - rise of commodities prices. Kitco's exposure of a 38.6% increase in the price of a basket of raw & wholesale goods really highlighted the gap between reality and the utter bullshit that Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and most of the rest of government would like us to believe.

Recently, the Heartland Institute posted a blog post on "deciphering" Bernanke's nonsense:

"Bernanke: FOMC participants see inflation remaining low; most project that overall inflation will be about 1-1/4 to 1-3/4 percent this year and in the range of 1 to 2 percent next year and in 2013. Private-sector forecasters generally also anticipate subdued inflation over the next few years. Measures of medium- and long-term inflation compensation derived from inflation-indexed Treasury bonds appear broadly consistent with these forecasts.


More broadly, the increases in commodity prices in recent months have largely reflected rising global demand for raw materials, particularly in some fast-growing emerging market economies, coupled with constraints on global supply in some cases. Commodity prices have risen significantly in terms of all major currencies, suggesting that changes in the foreign exchange value of the dollar are unlikely to have been an important driver of the increases seen in recent months.

Deciphered: The Fed doesn’t recognize a lag between its creation of money and an increase in current dollar spending. Instead we prefer to look at inflation over the past year as a guide to whether we create too much money. Just because this means we have often reacted two to three years too late in responding to any inflation threat doesn’t bother us at all."

Seriously though... Bernanke claims that inflation will be about 1.25-1.75% for this year.

Realllllllllllllly?

Well, why don't we look at a few graphs, huh? There aren't a lot of great ways to calculate price increases, but as we know, the Consumer Price Index is certainly one of them. So what's CPI look like over the last year? Let's check it out:

To be clear, I've chosen this graph, which includes commodities that standard CPI disincludes, because in my world, real people buy food and energy, and when those prices go up that actually effects real people. So let's ask ourselves.... Does it look to you like there hasn't been any inflation? Looks like that to me...

BLS is actually reporting that non-annualized inflation over the past year has been higher than Bernanke's comments would suggest:

" The 12-month increases of major indexes continue to climb. The all items index rose 3.2 percent for the 12 months ending April 2011, the highest figure since October 2008. The energy index has now risen 19.0 percent over the last 12 months, with the gasoline index up 33.1 percent. The food index has risen 3.2 percent while the index for all items less food and energy has increased 1.3 percent; both figures represent increases over recent months."

Of course, I'm only using government metrics so far, which are spectacularly weak measurements for inflation and are predictably ridiculously biased towards making the government look good... or failing that, at least to making them look not like the royal failures they actually are on economic issues.

So what's a more accurate inflation rate?

Economist, Marc Faber is calculating between 5-8% inflation. ShadowStats is calculating the real inflation rate (using consistent reporting standards from the 1990s) at around 11%. CPI measurements have drastically changed over the years, always to make the statistics seem "better" - just like the government's definition of "recessions" and their calculations for unemployment rates.

Note:

From www.dshort.com

The changes in data collection are usually packaged as "improvements", but the reality is that they make comparisons to historical economic events really tricky. People look at the 16+% unemployment rate during the Great Depression, and they think... Well hey, our 9-10% isn't so bad! Alas, by 1940 standards, our unemployment rate is around 17%.

Whoops! Metrics matter. Changing calculation methods matters. Without understanding this stuff, there's no way for people to understand the numbers the government has been churning out over the last few years.

Additionally... It's probably a good time to have a little refresher course on how ridiculously bad Keynesians predictions - who, it should be noted, make a special point of viewing economics as a "predictive" science - have actually been over the last 100 years.

Thomas Woods handles that nicely:



Yeah. They're not very good at this at all.

Yet we constantly listen to people like Bernanke, Krugman, DeLong, Summers, Romer(s), Goolsbee, Geithner, etc. and let them continually make adjusted "predictions" that turn out to be utterly false. These people are wrong time and time again, and yet each time they make a pronouncement about how the economy is doing, and what it's going to look like within the next 6 months, we act like they know what they're doing.

They don't.

Simply put, Bernanke is full of shit. I don't know how else to say it. Anyone with half a brain who has been doing their own shopping over the last year knows full-well that prices have shot up. Anyone who has remotely been paying attention to the job situation in the United States knows that the unemployment situation is still shockingly bad.

ShadowStats also provides a breakdown of unemployment rates.

Real metrics on that put us close to - if not well over - 20%. The 9% the government claims we're at right now relies on an extremely limited definition of the "labor force" and simply omits millions of people who would love to be working or who would love to work a hell of a lot more than they are currently working. If you're an engineer working at McDonald's part time.... Guess what, you count as "employed"!!

I suspect your family doesn't really see it that way though.

Get that? We're seeing consistently high unemployment (going on 3 years now). We've got a consistently high inflation rate, in spite of what the government has been saying. What does that mean to you?

Did you say "Stagflation"? Man... I did!

One way or another, I'm sick of going over this again and again and again. The government is lying. Simple as that. They've been doing it for pretty much the whole of its existence and I'm not sure why we should think they'd have stopped in the middle of a horrendous recession, caused primarily by the government's previously enacted policies. But no matter how nonsensical their numbers, no matter how much this stuff doesn't remotely line up with obvious, observable reality, a ton of people are still totally happy to lap it up.

What? GDP is increasing? Well that's great!!

Never mind that these numbers merely reflect the expansion of the currency and the inevitable price increases that have been generated as a result. 

Yes friends... Inflation is real. It's taking huge bites out of your dollar's purchasing power, and the fact that you're job situation and salary hasn't really improved at all means that each dollar counts more and more.

Seriously though... It's time we all started ignoring Bernanke. He's a moron.