The White House Finally Takes an Actual STAND on Something That Was Not Dictated by Tim Geithner or the National Security Brotherhood. And It’s the Ethical Position in the Controversy, to Boot!
This isn’t trivial. One of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met was a waggly-tailed white pit bull that a neighbor of a friend of mine found roaming the street. As soon as the sweetie saw you approaching, she’d wag her tail excitedly and then lie down on her back to invite you to rub her belly.
These dog-breed-ban statutes are abominable. Now, a Tim-Geithner -White-House-ban statute would be another thing entirely. Maybe when Congress returns after Labor Day?
From Warren Mosler’s Book: “The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy”
Several years ago I had a meeting with Senator Tom Daschle and then Asst. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. I had been discussing these innocent frauds with the Senator, and explaining how they were working against the well being of those who voted for him. So he set up this meeting with the Asst. Treasury Secretary who was also a former Harvard economics professor and had two uncles who had won Nobel prizes in economics, to get his response and hopefully confirm what I was saying.
I opened with a question:
“Larry, what’s wrong with the budget deficit?”
To which he replied:
“It takes away savings that could be used for investment”.
To which I replied:
“No it doesn’t, all Treasury securities do is offset operating factors at the Fed. It has nothing to do with savings and investment”.
To which he replied:
“Well, I really don’t understand reserve accounting so I can’t discuss it at that level”.
Senator Daschle was looking at all this in disbelief. The Harvard professor of economics Asst. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers didn’t understand reserve accounting? Sad but true.
Book Link
http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf
Yikes. I don’t understand reserve accounting, either. Maybe Obama will conclude that Summers wouldn’t be approved by the Senate—and he’ll decide to appoint me, instead!
It’s crazy, because Bernanke does understand reserve accounting, and how governmnet debt functions along with taxes as a reserve drain. Summers, in my reading does not understand any of this. Scary.
If I belong to a club, a very big club with a great many members, and we all pay dues to that club so that the organization can carry out certain activities that we members deem to be worth doing. Obviously I don’t want to, not do I, pay dues to the club which are beyond my means. Some times the club as an independent organization borrows money from various others including its own members, members of other clubs and other clubs for that matter. No individual member of our club is responsible for the general debt that our club accumulates, but all of the club’s creditors have great faith in our club’s ability to honor its notes as they are offered for redemption by the creditors.
Our club members are on the average in good financial shape. Aside from paying our dues, which we endlessly complain about doing, we spend and we save. Some members are able to do this better than other members, but it is common practice amongst the membership to spend some of what we earn and save some as well. The club’s debt is increasing. As individuals we have no direct responsibility for the club’s debt. So we all see our personal financial circumstances as being distinct from that of the club as an independent organization.
So how does the club’s debt reduce its member’s likelihood of saving some of what they earn given that no individual member of the club bears a personal responsibility for general club debt?
Well, Jack
Larry and about a dozen others just like him cannot undertsand that the government can borrow and invest in the future productivity of the nation. It’s quite a bit like a corporation investing actually, except that at need the government can always pay its bills.
Maybe that last is putting it a little too strongly. But we are a long way from not being able to pay our bills. Except that “the rich” (not all of them) don’t want to pay taxes, because paying taxes takes away from their savings…. oh. and spending… oh. oh.
Well, I guess the point is Government Bad: Pfree Enterprise Good. And that’s what’s wrong with government borrowing, See.
At the risk of being the only person in this thread to actually comment on breed bans …
Such bans are a civic embarrassment, and not for the usual reasons quoted (“it’s the owner, not the dog!”)
First, sometimes it is the dog. No way around it. Some individuals, as in humans, are just nutso, for whatever reason. It might even be inherited.
BUT, this doesn’t mean it’s the breed.
A breed is not a single substance, like a block of cheese.* Cut a slice of Cheshire cheese and you can expect the same stuff all the way through. Breeds, by contrast, are an agglomeration of animals sharing a minimal number of qualities, physical and temperamental, but their population can vary widely depending on the choices of hundreds of individual breeders.
So if 99% of breeders are careful and exclude poor specimens and psychotics from their breeding programs, for many generations, this doesn’t prevent the 1% from choosing for incorrect, unhealthy, gonzo lunatics in their own bloodlines. Worse, there’s nothing to prevent people from breeding animals that aren’t even registered, or are crossbred “designer dogs,” and selling them as members of that breed, or crosses of that breed, sending them out into the world to be evil twin “poster dogs,” walking ads for breed ban by laws.
The good breeders have no control over the bad ones.
So breed bans essentially punish the majority of breeders for the choices of the worst, and make it impossible for the good ones to produce good stable stock.
I have met hundreds of pit bulls over the decades, and typically they are the roll-over-and-rub-my-belly type. But breed ban laws ignore the real animals and endow their idea of the breed with magical powers, ninja dogs that can chew through freight trains and leap tall buildings. They punish an idea, not a reality, and like all laws that deal with imaginary things, they don’t cure any problem, but instead create injustice and new problems that were never there in the first place.
This endeth the first lesson,
Noni
* except possibly cheetahs. They are as damn near clones as makes no difference.