Unemployment up to 9.2 percent. Ugly economic news.

Our economy is growing, even if unemployment is 9.2 percent.

That isn't a recession.

It is a shitty economy.

 

LTL, I am not suggesting "funneling money" anywhere.

I'm suggesting getting our politicians greasy, corrupt fingers out of the marketplace and letting demand dictate how money gets invested.

Economies are cyclical by nature. In simplistic terms, they heat up when things are going well, and consumers and producers start spending too much in their exuberance, at which point it overheats and then corrects and the economy slows down. Until it slows down so much that people start to see opportunity and they begin to spend again and the economy heats up again.

What we have done with this idea of "funneling" money is screwed up our economic cycles. We have a central bank, that under Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke purposely used interest rate policy to overheat our economy to an extreme level. It was politically motivated. Their policy kept the presidents they served in power. When the bubble they created crashed, it crashed in a spectacular way. That was/is going to take some time to clean up. Even without them fucking things up further.

Now we are paying for it. And the sad part is that rather than backing off, they have resorted to an even EASIER money policy, with the rationale that they now need to "stimulate" the economy. At the same time, our lawmakers have been on a "fiscal policy" spending binge that has wasted trillions of dollars and created a debt crisis.

Here is how fucked up they are. Our lawmakers have been spending like there is no tomorrow. At the same time, we have been issuing debt (treasuries) to pay for their spending. And during QE2, our central bank was buying back the debt they already issued creating even MORE debt. And the whole while, our lawmakers continue to spend, creating yet more debt.

As long as we embark on that kind of behavior, it will be an anchor on our economy.

Forget about "funneling" money anywhere, and you have your answer. Money has a way of finding its way to productive places on its own. Keynsian ideas about borrowing and spending don't find those productive places. It is inherently corrupt, and in our government, which is run by special interests, the money finds its ways to particularly unproductive places. It gets wasted, by and large. Not all of it. But out of $3 to $4 trillion over the last 2 + years, a large majority of it went to no good use, and now saddling us with debt. Don't bring up teachers, please. The reason Federal money was paying for teachers was because of state's enacting their own brand of fiscal irresponsibility that put them on the brink of bankruptcy, so they used Federal hand outs to buy time. There is no reason why we can't have a government (or state governments) that pay for things like teachers without trillions of dollars worth of debt.

The hard part about all the spending they pushed through is that once people -- who worked hard through payoffs and lobbying and quid pro quos -- get their hand into that cookie jar, it is extremely difficult to get them to let go.

So we are coming to a point where we won't have a choice but to cut our spending and/or increase taxes dramatically, but we have politicians making those decisions who are beholden to the people they put on the teet and won't force them off without a fight.

The key here: Look at your post. Forget about "funneling" money. Let the money take care of itself. It will.