Meyerson: Wall Street’s Just Desserts

I’ve been waiting for some doofus clown like Harold Meyerson to come along this week and blame Reagan-era economics for this week’s financial problems. And here comes the King of Doofus Clowns;

At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, what good was Lehman Brothers, anyway? And if Merrill Lynch was so bullish on America, why is it that, despite the torrent of foreign investment that flowed in to Lehman, Merrill and their Wall Street peers over the past half-decade, so few jobs were created in America during that period of “recovery”?

During the late, lamented Wall Street boom, America’s leading investment institutions were plenty bullish on China’s economy, on exotic financial devices built atop millions of bad loans, and, above all — judging by the unprecedented amount of wealth they showered on the Street — on themselves. The last thing our financial community was bullish on was America — that is, the America where the vast majority of Americans live and work.

Over the past eight years, the U.S. economy has created just 5 million new jobs, a number that is falling daily. The median income of American households has declined. Airports, bridges and roads are decaying. Rural wind-power facilities cannot light cities because our electrical grid has not been expanded. New Orleans has not been rebuilt. And as productive activity within the United States has ceased to be the prime target of investment, household consumption — more commonly known as shopping — has come to comprise more than 70 percent of our economy.

Here’s your explanation, Hal; Shut up!

The Reagan era economics gave us the expansion in the 1990s when money that had formerly gone to pay the highest tax rates in history (the top marginal tax rate was 70% until the Reagan tax cuts) went instead into investment and R&D projects. That, in turn, gave us the technology boom of the 90s. It gave us PCs, it gave us cell phones (do you think those cell towers just grew out of the ground on the day the first cell phone was bought?).

With the market in the US is saturated with new must-have gadgets, it’s only natural that money would shift overseas (in order to create new jobs, you clown, you have to have work). Just like your stupid government “investment” in alternate energies – if there’s no alternate energy source, the government is throwing money down a dark hole and they’ve been doing it for forty years.

Bridges and roads are deteriorating because you idiot leftists have moved control of the money for infrastructure away from local and state governments, and every resurfacing job, every tree planting, every dotted line painting depends on Federal money and deemed worthy or unworthy by another doofus just like Meyerson in Washington.

And just to prove he’s a blithering idiot, Meyerson trots out the BDS/McDS blather;

The Bush administration and congressional Republicans (John McCain among them) kept American incomes low by opposing hikes in the minimum wage;

How stupid can one person be? When is Meyerson going to draw the straight line between higher unemployment among entry-level workers and the higher minimum wage? And keeping the minimum wage low doesn’t effect most of the work force, since only 1.7 million people in the entire country get the minimum wage or less (compared to 76 million wage earning workers)…and more than half of them are under the age of 25 (uh, high school and college students working part time), the other half are all working in the food service industry (where tips supplement their wages). Check me at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yes, Harold Meyerson is a doofus clown…more evidence that the Washington Post doesn’t care who they hire or what they write.

Category: Politics