The rigger's log

It came down for 37 years, then the national debt went out of control the year the supply-siders took power.  Supply-siders raised the debt 20 out of 20 years.  That can’t be just bad luck.  Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton each reduced it.

Are we trapped between national debt and recession?  The patriots of World War II showed us the way out.
[I find the first 10 sec. a bit cheesy, but bear with it, it’s worth it.]

Two score and eight years ago Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed that he’d been to the mountaintop, and seen the Promised Land.   He said that he knew he might not reach it with us.
The promise King saw for the American people was enormous, and still is, because sadly we have not reached that Promised Land either.

Princeton University Professor Cornell West contributed this to the New York Times:

Dr. King Weeps From His Grave

We need to keep up the fight to re-democratize America, and make the country’s government work for all the people, not the plutocrats. The wealthy class’ control of government has been bad for our economy, bad for our people, and bad for America’s ability to contribute positively to the world.

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I can’t emphasize this enough.

Barry Ritholtz has written an excellent economic summary in his blog, The Big Picture.

His main points:

“Can the US resolve these issues?

1) An excess credit problem, left over from the 2000s Housing boom and credit bubble � being solved v e r y s l o w l y through deleveraging and passage of time;

2) Slowing economy and high unemployment (including increasing High School drop out rates creating a structural employment problem);

3) Crumbling infrastructure: Electric Grid, Bridges, Tunnels, Roads, Naval Ports, Airports;

4) Medical Costs that are double the rest of the industrialized world’s yet produces worse results.

5) Systemic deficits caused by unfunded tax cuts, unfunded entitlements, and a military bigger than the next 20 countries combined, (plus a lack of fiscal discipline);

6) A wholly dysfunctional electoral process, including corporate control of what was once a democratically elected legislative branch;

7) Increasing wealth and income inequality (Historically not a long term positive for social unrest and political legitimacy)

8 ) An overt hostility to empiricism and science (which helped create most of our wealth) and an embracing of “magical thinking�

9) An intellectually bankrupt political class married to outmoded, disproven, fantasy based economic ideas.

Note that the last of these is directly responsible for much of the prior 8 problems.”

You can read the whole post, and others, here.

Socially Responsible Investing and socially responsible government are not espoused only by the American political left-of-center.   Here’s a message from a Republican activist, for his fellow responsible Republicans:

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