Financail Crisis

Ding Ding!!!

And we have a loser…

McCain takes one to the gut that he thinks from

I might throw up some real analysis of the debate later, but I think this one was great on the split screen. I didn’t watch it with the dial-thingies, I really don’t like ’em, at least the first time through.

When you watch the debate (which can be quite boring and technical) with the dial, you tend to watch the stats, not the game. Kinda like all those “fantasy” players. Head lost in the numbers, they forget to enjoy the fact that it’s a game.

Politics, on the other hand, is a different kind of game, as the winners get the right to declare war on people and use nuclear weapons. So the sports things is fun and all, but as a metaphor it ultimately fails.

In that line of argument, I would have to say that of the two candidates, I liked the calm, friendly, smart one. Not the eye-rolling, thunderstruck, attacking one.

McCain seemed to be giving a lecture on conservative politics from the early 80’s, when he was elected to Congress. He seems to have missed what he has wrought with those policies. What policies you may ask? Cut taxes and spend.

Republicans always complain about Democrats being “tax and spend.” The sad part is that they do so with such vigor that their supporters (and even some themselves) miss the fact that “cut taxes and spend” is an even worse theory. Here’s the graph for the Federal debt since John McCain went to Congress in 1982.U.S. Debt Since McCain went to Congress.

U.S. Debt Since McCain went to Congress.

[source]

Pay special attention to that part of the top graph post-1982, when John McCain went to Congress.

THAT’S WHEN IT GOES CRAZY!! Is it a conicidence?

Not really, IMHO, as McCain continued to advocate all sorts of new programs and government support (buying mortgages [$300,000,000], buying banks [$?], fighting autism [$?], fixing healthcare [$?], winning wars [$?], achieving energy independence [$?], ) while at the same time arguing VERY stenuously against any posibility of raising any kind of tax on anything anywhere. In fact…saying he is going to…somehow…enact a spending freeze. Does that make any kind of sense at all? It works emotionally….”I’ll solve all your problems for less than free…”

[UPDATE: real analysis of the debate…listening while writing…late..McCain even goes to the point of using “Joe the Plumber” to accuse any type of tax increase as being against “The American Dream”….and in fact denying it. That’s crazy. It’s not “Joe’s the Plumber’s” money that needs to be spread around. It’s the guys who got $125,000,000,000 is bonuses the last 6 years…remember…those guys on Wall Street!!?!

“No one likes taxes, let’s not raise anyone’s taxes. O.k.?” Yea..and then let’s get high on Unicorn farts and live in peaceful communities sharing the means of production. Sounds great on paper. Works like shit on Earth.]

Unfortunatley, this is the type of politics that leads to a graph like the one above.

And he views any tax on anything anywhere to be a tax on everyone everywhere. It’s crazy, and it’s the exact same philosophy that Reagan and W used to run up such a huge debt. Bush I raised taxes and Clinton slowed the bleeding, even reversing it before W & The Republicans used the same “trickle-down, supply-side, voodoo, laffer-curve, tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves, debts-dont-matter” economics to erase $11,000,000,000,000 of U.S. wealth in just two weeks.

It’s a political and eoconomic philosophy the market just went crazy proving was nuts. An idea built on the confidence that it was true, rather than evidence it made any rational sense.

AND IT’S JOHN MCCAIN’S GUIDING ECONOMIC PRINCIPLE.

Check the 26-year record since he’s been on the dole in D.C. It speaks for itself. Very, very loudly.

Joe the Plumber notwithstanding, you have to pay for that lunch ’cause ain’t nothing free in this world except nothing and….as some would have you believe….tax cuts.