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

[Bekah]

Even if it were a correct metaphor, I'd have problems with the idea of refusing to go into any kind of debt in the event of unexpected emergency.  If a family is trying to get out of debt and the youngest son is seriously injured - health insurance being what it is the bill is going to be about $1500+ (considering deductable and patient costs and office visit co-pays).  

But Dad says no to anything that will add to the family debt in any way?  Think if it's mom with cancer. 

Republican Rep (VA) Cantor advocates no relief without more budget cuts first.  
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/178-178/7226-cantor-no-disaster-relief-for-irene-without-budget-cuts

Bekah
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." 
 Thomas Pynchon 



On Sep 2, 2011, at 10:06 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> More from,
> 
> The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway
> John Lanchester on the global economy
> 
> 
> The problem is in large part to do with the application of an
> incorrect metaphor, the easy-to-understand idea that a household has
> to live within its income. But governments are not households, and the
> idea of cutting your way to prosperity cannot be read across from an
> individual’s finances to those of the state. It’s a manifest fact that
> these policies, and the refusal to embrace stimulus spending, are
> causing economic slowdowns all over the world that are triggering the
> current anxiety in the markets, which is in turn causing the
> predicament of governments to intensify, as confidence sinks and the
> self-fulfilling expectations of a second downturn take hold. This in
> turn puts pressure on expectations about governments’ abilities to
> repay their debts, which further lowers confidence, and so on.
> 
> An incorrect metaphor! Yes, governments, and as Lanchester observes,
> the US Government is a very special one for several reasons including
> the fact that it can print the reserve currency, are not households;
> they needn't balance their checkbooks or pay their bills when they are
> due. But when the confidence in this full faith and credit god we
> trust in is shaken, markets begin to fall into blind ditches of
> uncertainty. This uncertain, time-space of the subjunctive romance is
> not the New England town or the global village of either Mumford or
> McLuhan, but the land of IF, the land of maybe, the land of
> inconvenient falls of horses (if S/P aul did fall from a horse) that
> may have happened in places not on the map in books that, while
> certainly not cannonical, are surely the works of forces mysterious.
> But the invisible hand amde visible (Chandler) by American Managerical
> Capitalism, built on steel rails and and driven by an iron will, has
> approached a cul-de-sac, a dead zone, a land of thanatoids and
> paranoids.