lBut I Still Have Checks Left! (Stiglitz)

You’ve heard the old saw, right?  I can’t be broke – I still have checks left!

When was the last time you heard this out of a Nobel Prize Winner?

“Cutting back willy-nilly on high-return investments just to make the picture of the deficit look better is really foolish,” Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor, told Dublin-based RTE Radio in an interview broadcast today.

Willy-nilly?  This isn’t about choice, it’s about legal mandates and in fact treaties!

So what would Stiglitz do?  Ignore the law?  Well sure, why not!  It works so well everywhere else!

This sort of nonsense is infuriating.  The real key is that the Eurozone, along with the United States, has mis-managed their monetary policy now for more than two decades in an attempt to “repeal” the business cycle and avoid necessary recessions.  We have thus built a roughly 50-60% overhang of excessive debt into the economy and what went from 10% GDP excess in 2000 to a nearly 40% one today.

Now, facing the horror of their acts, instead of repenting and accepting reality, we’re furiously pedalling up an ever-steepening wall where the government continues to take more and more of the productive output of the economy and (literally) blows it via deficit spending:

So where does it stop?  When we get to the point that 100% of GDP is in fact government borrow-and-spend? 

Yes, that’s rhetorical – no nation will get anywhere near that.  But we’re sure as hell trying, both here in the United States and in Europe.

It appears that Europe has figured it out – having checks in the checkbook does not make one solvent.

It’s time for the so-called “Nobels” to shut the hell up until and unless they explain exactly how we’re going to pay for this bout of stupidity they wish us to continue to indulge in, and instead face reality: The pain we have been avoiding cannot be made better by kicking the can down the road – it only gets worse the longer we wait to face it.

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