George Rebane

When the country has a problem, it is prudent to consider government guilty until proven innocent.

Today we hear of banks being squeezed by regulatory mandates that require them to lend to a broader category of borrowers (e.g. car buyers), and at the same time reduce risk.  Such strictures can only issue from the mindless mavens in DC who don’t understand that risk and quality of borrowers sit on opposite ends of a see-saw – you can’t lower risk and the quality of borrowers at the same time.

Guaranteed national income – tomorrow the prosperous Swiss (gasp!) will vote on whether to start down this road.  The referendum to pay every Swiss who can fog a mirror an annual $2,500 stipend is not expected to pass, but its appearance on the ballot is definitely an indication that the camel’s nose is under the tent.  In these pages we have discussed it here.  Ultimately, I believe some form of GNI will be implemented in order to delay blood in the gutters.

Hillary lit into Trump yesterday with an opening volley in their forthcoming foreign policy match.  She delivered a fair to middling message to her minions, but really made no gain with even the mildly read voter who knows her record in the Senate and at State.  Overall, she is playing her trump card against Trump who couldn’t wait for this phase of the campaign to start, and showed it by responding with his best 3^rd grade level vocabulary and demeanor.  Nevertheless, he did manage to point out that America knows in its bones that Hillary is a corrupt-to-the-core, lying bitch with a record of incompetence that is free of achievement in literally every area of governance.  That orange is not her new black is only testimony to the wretched level to which our federal justice system has sunk.

The unions are now also implementing Alinsky’s playbook, claiming that the feds are violating the Constitution’s takings clause when they deny them the right to collect dues from employees in the growing number of states with right-to-work laws.  There their argument is similar to our oft-repeated observations of how liberals equate government prohibition with government’s failure to fund.  In federal lawsuits filed in Idaho and Wisconsin unions maintain that “the alleged ‘taking’ isn’t the union grabbing a chunk of a worker’s paycheck without individual consent. It is that right-to-work laws take dues money that union officials say is theirs. This is the Takings Clause turned upside down.”  More here.

America’s proto-socialism is again on display in today’s release of employment and other data on the country’s economic doldrums.  Job creation (38,000) last month, and downward revision of previous months, reached lows not seen since 2010.  And the unemployment rate dropping to 4.7% reflected only that ever fewer people are still looking for work.  Our pathetic ‘recovery’ (loudly touted by Chief Community Organizer and lackeys) of around 2% annually is expected to dip below 2% for the current year.  But what continues to amaze me is that economists and the Fed never saw any of this as recently as a month or so ago when they were still planning to raise interest rates later this year.  Today, fuggetaboutit. 

All of this underlines the proposition (which I and others regularly make) that a national economy is extremely hard to model – i.e. develop reliable input/output relationships – and that to this day no such models exist (the careful reader will recall the same state exists in climate modeling).  People in academe and government claiming otherwise are simply charlatans or extremely ignorant about the modeling of large scale, complex systems which are difficult to observe.  But that makes no never mind to those prone to the siren song of central planning.  These economists and Fed board members regularly make predictions that miss the mark by hundreds of percents, and then go on to make more of them as if this time they really do know what will happen.  Oh well.