Bad Logic

Yesterday morning as I flipped through the channels, I heard Senator Lindsey Graham expound the Republican talking points on why raising taxes to pay for infrastructure repairs won't fix the unemployment problem. See, it may work in the short run, but it won't work in the long run. Here's why he's wrong.

Right now we're in danger of a double dip recession because of high unemployment, which feeds low consumer confidence. Low consumer confidence means we aren't spending enough money to cause businesses to hire new employees.

Regardless of how "short term" the results might be in terms of hiring people to rebuild our quite literally crumbling infrastructure, all those newly working people would lower the unemployment rate. They would be paid real money, which they would then spend, pumping money into the economy. The result of lowering unemployment for a period of several years and the accompanying pumping of money into the economy would undoubtedly raise consumer confidence, which would pump more money into the economy, raising the demand for goods and services, thereby giving business more reason to expand their businesses.

And that, my friends, is the "long term."

Bad Logic

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Matt Taibbi

Grade: B+

"Follow the money" has long been my mantra, and Matt Taibbi's cogent reporting does the best job describing various economic crises of the last fifteen years of any that I've read, peeling away each level of complexity in a way that the layman reader can easily understand our world turned upside down as a result of greedy financiers and their collusion with the government. He details the creation and bursting of the dot.com bubble, the 2004 energy crisis, and the 2008 economic collapse, and like the prosecutor in a Mafia trial, lays out a scathing indictment of Wall Street and those who set monetary policy in the U.S., starting with Alan Greenspan, whose Ayn Randian views continue to pervade economic policy long after her death in the early 1980s.

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi