With Leaders Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

Please, somebody tell Keyser that this guy is some plant from Red China or Mars or some other place that aims to subvert the US. This can’t be how they “think” in DC, can it?

The U.S. government must spend its way out of the recession, the Democrats’ third-ranking House leader stressed Monday.

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, said that trying to find greater savings in the budget, which was released by President Barack Obama this morning, wouldn’t help alleviate the recession.

“We’ve got to make some decisions here as to what’s in the best interests of our country going forward,” Clyburn said during an appearance on Fox News. “And I think the best interest is to invest in education, control these deficits, while at the same time trying to get people back to work.”

“We’re not going to save our way out of this recession,” the majority whip added. “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that.”

Obama’s budget, which was unveiled Monday morning, calls for $3.8 trillion in spending for 2010, but is projected to cause a $1.27 deficit.

…

Clyburn suggested that talk of reducing the deficit was moot as long as the economy remained sluggish in the foreseeable future.

“You’re not going to bring down the deficits, you’re not going to eliminate these problems without growing this economy,” he said. “And you’re not going to grow the economy by wishing it; you’ve got to invest in it. And that’s what we’re doing with this budget.”

A denser collection of misunderstandings and false prescriptions that are the diametrical opposite of what should be done hasn’t been seen since Paul Krugman’s last op-ed piece in the Nude York Times.

“We’re not going to save our way out of this recession,” the majority whip added. “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that.” Well, then, in that case most economists (who no doubt were individually polled by this idiot) are imbeciles. The whole financial problem was caused precisely by spending beyond one’s means and by the lax creation of money by the Fed, which was used to bid up the price of assets to unsustainable levels. And this will be magnified precisely by taking on more debt to pretend that those unsustainable prices are realistic.

The only solution to the problem is “save our way out” by increasing real capital formation by forgoing consumption in the interest of reducing an unsustainable debt load and forming the capital necessary to produce real jobs rather than fabricated ones conjured up with phoney money produced out of think air either at the treasury through borrowing funded by the Fed or at the Fed itself.

One can only hope that this idiot is not indicative of actual thinking in Washington. But the evidence of recent years suggests the disturbing idea that he’s not just speaking for himself…

Things seem to have calmed down a bit from the maelstrom of impending doom that seemed to be the order of the day just a year ago. But this is just a respite. The US can attempt to put its house in order, which won’t be easy. Or it can continue blundering along the false course that it’s chosen since the fall of 2008, ignoring the underlying problems and trying to paper them over with comparatively easy but fundamentally misguided deceptions that serve only to postpone the inevitable denouement and aggravate it.

Which will it be? Rep. Clyburn certainly seems to know the answer.

[Keyser was going to post the YouTube scene from the movie Titanic where Ismay objects that "this ship can't sink" and Andrews replies, "She's made of iron, sir! I assure you, she can... and she will. It is a mathematical certainty." But after not finding it on YouTube through a simple search, Keyser looked back at the archive to find it, and what does he discover? "Fox" (as in 20th century?) has blocked it. As if someone's going to avoid buying a DVD of the movie because there's a clip of a single scene YouTube. Or maybe they think people will piece together the whole thing with little clips? Assholes.]