You WILL finance what we have spent beyond our means because your property is ours. No we will not cut our spending. Who cares if it pushes you beyond your means???:
That’s the result of a credit economy based on exponential growth folks. At a certain point, there just isn’t enough real money in the system to cover stable growth.
The woman in this video (Renee Elmers) hits on an important concept in small business ownership and the choices we make that add to the economy. Called “regime uncertainty” by the economist Robert Higgs, it is the idea that investors are not keen to invest in much when the government is subject to changes in tax and regulatory policy at the whims of the executive branch or legislature. Are taxes next? More barriers to entry? If you have money and you don’t know because the Obama Administration has been all but clear about where government policy will go, chances are you won’t risk your capital by expanding your business or starting a new one. You can be clear of one thing, though. The direction the Obama Administration will take us will not be toward less government if they have their way. And the cost will, of course, be at the market’s expense… It is funny though. You will hear Bernanke and his buddies saying “I don’t know” quite often when anyone questions why QE2 and other liquidity programs (those where money is simply printed and put into the system) aren’t working. And they really don’t know why they can’t stimulate things by putting more money into the system. The answer is human choices, given that regime uncertainty. Putting money into the system and expecting the response to be simple and unified is a very childish way to look at the world. Consumers and human beings in general are not stimulus-response automatons. In some ways, the government and huge institutions can manipulate the public, but they cannot control it, try as they may. So next time you hear Bernanke say “I don’t know,” you can be sure he isn’t lying (for once). He does not understand free human choice.
And 9.1% unemployment??? I don’t know if anyone buys that number, even the Propaganda Department itself. We manipulate our stats so much that it is nearly impossible to know what the real number is, but anyone worth their salt in understanding economics includes those looking for full-time work who have part-time work only. Gallup puts that number at 18.6%. ShadowStats (one of the best sites for REAL & unmanipulated numbers on economic conditions), which calculates the values based on the old measures of calculating them, puts us at 22.3% unemployment.