It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

So I browsed this article this morning, recalling how Obama had ridiculed the concept of establishing commissions to deal with serious problems, and contrasting that campaign stance to his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Now, the amusing part is more that this article came from CBS news, where normally I might least expect anything this on-point from the liberal media; maybe the story was just too obvious to ignore this time. On the commission conceptually, though, Obama was more/less correct during the campaign: a commission is Washington-speak for "we'll get back to you, we either don't have any idea how to address that, or we're not at all interested in addressing it and we hope this substantial delay and inaction will be enough time for you to forget about it." Commissions also have the bonus of being able to add an additional layer of responsibility and blame, in case the policies are contentious, and you can blame the commission fo...

I have a lot of thoughts about Paul Krugman from time to time. Most of them are negative, as he is a self-promoted liberal with some pretty horrendous ideas for how the government should operate. However, he's also a pretty smart guy, which makes it frustrating that he can fairly accurately assess a situation, then apply his liberal bias to come to a completely wrong-headed conclusion. Take, as a recent example, this piece about the danger of the world falling into another depression due (primarily) to the lack of jobs. The premise is sound, and entirely agreeable: without jobs, the economy spirals downward, generally making everyone unhappy. If you want to fix the situation and avert a more serious problem, you'd want to do a few things: make sure the climate is good for businesses to operate and employ people, provide a fair and level playing field to encourage people that all they would need to operate a successful business was hard work (as opposed to political friends an...

Now I know what you're thinking: any other day, and this wouldn't have even warranted a byline, much less a headline, in any respectable information source. Nothing in the headline is really that unusual, or that surprising. However, when it's couched as sound analysis, and in the context of how to advise the president , it seems kinda like one's duty to point out how monumentally idiotic this particular liberal is, and how people in power can drive nations to financial ruin by listening to bad and dangerous advice. Robert Reich, aka public enemy #1 for the day, lays out the current situation basically correctly, before moving out to lay out two different government approaches. In the first, he explains the typical Keysian/liberal economic approach: borrow/print more money, bail out the irresponsible states with new federal borrowing, make taxation more unfair, and waste another $300 Billion or so on corruption and insider payouts, all while doing nothing to address the...

I had a couple of topics I wanted to blog about recently, but haven't had much time; however, this caught my attention, and I wanted to take a bit to write about how dumb analysts are. When I say dumb, I don't mean the people are necessarily not bright or informed, but their analysis is often so off-base that you have to suspect they are either willfully ignorant or just lying for undisclosed reasons. The article in summary discusses analysis of recent gold and commodities prices; gold is going up, and commodities are going down. One person had this to say: “Bernanke is dispelling the argument that people are out there buying gold because of the threat of inflation,” said Matt Zeman, a metals trader at LaSalle Futures Group in Chicago. “Deflation is now more of a threat.” Well, that's all fine and good, but it's totally wrong. Commodities are a hedge against short-term inflation, and gold is a hedge against long-term inflation. Short-term inflation might be caused by a...