NP: No gov't; best gov't..from John Lanchester LRoB

[alice wellintown]

The sad fact is that the US has no functioning government and has done
nothing meaningful whatever to get the economy going or support
workers and the businesses that create jobs. In fact, the current
gridlocked policies are counterproductive, driven by political fear
and greed for power, we are turning more Japanese everyday. While the
Fed has done a great job, Ben has little left in his toolbox; that he
took the political idiots to the woodshed in his latest comments is a
sure sign of his frustration; he can't do much, the preseident and the
congress need to act. But there is limited leadership in this
generation of Americans. A bunch of Thanatoids and Paranoids high on
tea from China.



On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:53 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> The major cause of Belgium's slightly better performance is what it
> did back before the credit crisis, that is, it reduced its enormous
> debt.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belgische_staatsschuld.png
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying
>> them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite
>> the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic
>> gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically
>> accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing
>> 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone
>> average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and
>> alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and
>> then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that,
>> if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium
>> doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it
>> hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the
>> other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the
>> absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector
>> spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing
>> growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view,
>> in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any
>> existing government.
>