Monday Morning Ramblings

The FT had an interesting article in the weekend edition commenting on "Now the Rich are Always with Us ... ".  Your humble blogger has complained about this modern phenomena before:  business news seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on the lives and attitudes of billionaires.  The article expanded that to the multimillionare sports and entertainment figures who get massive coverage in many media outlets. 

I tried to find the article in FT Online to provide a link, but failed.  Here's a quote. "The global elite has grown fantastically rich in recent decades: the average person on the Forbes's list pocketed an estimated $45m last year.  Consequently, we're forever reading about rich people.  Indeed, being rich has become almost the criterion for being newsworthy."

All this will eventually lead to trouble, bigtime social trouble.  In the US situation, the nation simply can't continue the 40 year process of all the benefits of productivity increases going to the upper income stratae.  The commonly spoken economic "cures" have failed the plain people (borrowing Lincoln's term for the "common man".  Yet we still hear that bloviation daily. 

Obama is doing nothing; his economic team has failed.  Only Ben has kept the US out of an endless recession, but Ben is now unable to move the economy forward.  His shells are now simple maintenance mode.  The massive public policy and public sector anchors prevent growth now.

The US needs real reform.  Policy makers:  read my prior blogs.

Word of the Day

"Parrhesia" - noun [$1000] Rhetoric [from Greek], seen in the FT weekend edition.
Parrhesia means 1. free-spokenness, frankness; freedom of speech; 2. [from FT] the ability to speak one's mind when doing so involves social risk.
Sentence:  Your humble blogger, Bunkerman, excells in written parrhesia.  An example:  the US has too few jobs because the US overtaxes jobs.  The Ruling Class uses taxes on jobs to keep the plain people more plain, while clamoring for lower taxes on capital.