Nov 4 2009 Election

So, apparently Obama wasn't watching tonight's election results. Guess they're not really that important.

I will say this again: It's not a matter of Democrat or Republican. This country is in a huge financial mess, and we're not going to get out of it by adding more taxes. Such as the VAT Value Added Tax that Pelosi wants to legislate. Or the Cap and Trade energy tax, or the Health Care tax.

This country is in a major recession and things are only going to get worse. To even think of adding more taxes, taking money and jobs away from citizens is even remotely the answer is ludicrous.

We have some serious issues. And it gets to the survival of our democracy, our country. Bitter pills will need to be swallowed. We need to at least start moving in the right direction, and that is what tonight's election is about.

This is from Market Ticker:

Political Winds Shifting?
Perhaps.

Two Democrats - governors - were ousted.

Why?

Taxes, lack of jobs, in short: It's the economy stupid!

The fiscal side of the picture is done. Those who are looking for some sort of fiscal stimulative posture out of DC? Forget about it. We had three of those (at least) which have been announced, and they have done nothing.

Now here's the challenge: The American People have had it with the job loss and with the vast and fast deterioration of their personal balance sheets and, more importantly, their cash-flow statements.

But these problems were two decades in the making with both Democrat and Republican governments. They are to a large degree the consequence of bogus and even fraudulent credit creation - practices that were not intended to help the economy along at all, but rather were designed to siphon off the wealth of ordinary Americans and hand it to a fistful of oligarchs.

This behavior has not only been tacitly approved by the silence of Washington DC it has been explicitly promoted and advanced by both Washington DC and The Federal Reserve - on both sides of the aisle.

Indeed, when it comes to Washington DC the government even went to court to block state laws that would have stopped a big part of the mess from happening - and succeeded.

Worse, the policies of both the Bush and Obama administrations have not addressed the problem nor forced the bad debt created by these policies out of the system - the millstone remains around the economy's neck!

You can't get away from the issues - "more taxes" isn't going to sell in a world of 10%+ unemployment and, whether the government claims it or not, high inflation in the prices charged for food and fuel over the last decade. The impact of this was masked by the fraudulent credit creation and asset bubble in houses, but now that's gone, laying bare the decimation of the average American's cash flow statement. The asset bubble intentionally blown in the stock market by Bernanke and his pals Geithner and Obama cannot make up for this; indeed, irrespective of the "big rally" the average American is still missing 30% or more of his money from the 2007 peak!

Yet now the budget deficits and fiscal debt of the government - the "big carpet" under which we shoved all the defaults of the private sector that should have bankrupted every large financial institution in the nation, now demands to be paid. You can either raise taxes dramatically or cut services dramatically, but in the end you cannot indefinitely grow debt faster than GDP, even if you're the government of the United States.

The bottom line is that the American People want "blood", and in fact they deserve it.

We the people, in the main, were scammed.

We didn't just make bad decisions, we were lied to.

We didn't just buy bubble houses, they were sold to us with outrageous misrepresentations of alleged "growth" in price to come; witness David Lereah's two books, and he was NAR's head economist!

We the people failed to understand the 6th grade math, but the banksters and government told us that there was no such thing as immutable exponential functions at work in the economy, and that this growth in a finite world - the world in which we live - was in fact possible.

The pain that is due to be taken has not been worked through the system, and in fact government has made the situation worse. Economic contraction is not over, despite the claimed "GDP" number - as I've said repeatedly if you go to the bank and borrow $20,000 on your credit card you are poorer, not richer, even though you might then spend that $20,000. Cook the books all you want but it won't change the average American's income - only a good job that pays enough to stay ahead of ramping mandatory personal spending does that.

Most of America has the true cost of health care ("insurance") hidden from them. Those who actually write the checks have seen those costs rise 10, 15, even 25% in a single year - every year for the last decade. You who are "W2" employees don't see it directly, but it in fact comes straight out of your pay, as employers do not offer you the salary increases you would otherwise receive - that money is instead diverted to your "free" insurance.

The Republican Party has a tough road here. They need to break up the oligarchs, and deal with the fact that the math is never wrong - and the sooner we deal with it, the better.

It won't be an easy sell, but if they fail to make it, or worse, win on the back Obama's refusal to deal with the banksters and then continue the "anything goes in ripping off America" policies that both Bush and Obama have countenanced and in fact explicitly endorsed, we will suffer a political and economic collapse unlike anything previously seen in the world - a catastrophe worse than Germany in the 1930s.

"May you live in interesting times" has new meaning this morning.....