the dollar has declined by about 15% since the start of the year copper is up by over 50%

That’s true of gold as well.

But it’s not because a recovering economy suddenly found a new industrial use for gold.

It’s because investors and speculators, seeing the decline of the dollar, are betting on raw materials as a storehouse of value.

BTW, Bernanke himself said that the economic recovery will be weak and largely jobless for the foreseeable future.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/16/news/economy/bernanke_outlook/

Your fellow liberals are panicking: Robert Reich, Krugman, HuffPo, etc. I’ve been listening to them. They’re all telling Obama we need a new WPA (!!!) or else the Dems will take a shellacking in November 2010.

There is plenty of bureaucracy to purge before you get to police, fire and other safety personnel.

I agree.

You could get a “twofer” by using stimulus money, NOT to keep bureaucrats employed, but to upgrade automated information systems, databases, etc., to reduce the need for so many paper-pushers. That would employ programmers, engineers, information system architects–people who do real work. And at the end of their endeavors, you could lay off all those clerks.

How many times have you waited on a long line at some government office, only to be told by the bureaucrat you finally meet that you don’t have all your needed paperwork, or you were in the wrong line all the time–and you have to start all over again on another long queue for another bureaucrat? Automated kiosks in those offices could tell you precisely what information you need and how to go about getting it processed, before you actually get on any long lines. And then you wouldn’t need so many bureaucrats wasting your time and their time.

I had to do a double take at that. Surely, having the government plow hundreds of billions of dollars into non-productive enterprises cannot be considered an “answer” to the economic crisis.

You just confirmed Frum’s point: You went on to criticize what was done, instead of saying what should have been done instead.

I challenge you to tell us what YOU would have done about this economic crisis, if YOU were POTUS instead of Obama.

As I perceive it, and I have fought against this perception, the “base” is its fundamental opposition to very literally every Obama policy imitative and his every action, personal and otherwise, is determined to destroy his presidency.

What else can they do, when they’re diametrically opposed to Obama’s ideology, his culture, his vision?

The problem is that we elected a truly doctrinaire tax-and-spend transnationalist liberal to the White House, McGovern version 2.0. There’s very little opportunity for compromise, when Obama’s vision of America and the GOP base’s vision of America are so far apart.

Unfortunately the GOP is peeling a scab which has been several decades in the making. The strategy of pandering to racial and religious prejudices to pull more people into the tent worked well until they had to confront the reality that all these morons were actually IN THE TENT. Whoops…hence the inability to form a coherent message, and the pathetic descent into Party-of-No status.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that a lot of potentially good ideas get left on the table. Fiscal prudence, restraint in meddling about in foreign affairs, leadership in scientific innovation, and most glaringly the staunch defense of individual liberties are all “conservative” ideals that have been thrown in the trash over the last couple of decades. But I believe it will turn around eventually. Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say…

They don’t give a damn!

Jim Sheire
Great Falls, MT

I had to do a double take at that. Surely, having the government plow hundreds of billions of dollars into non-productive enterprises cannot be considered an “answer” to the economic crisis.

The soruce of the crisis is that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates were kept too low for entirely too long, enabling too much liquidity into the financial system, i.e., credit was made too cheap to too many people and firms who shouldn’t have had access to it. Another way of describing it: the federal government pursued inflationary policies. And, when that occurs — every time it occurs — the “boom” and “good times” (i.e., inflation) ends in financial recession.

We’ve already tried the borrowing/spending/printing way out. Is David entirely oblivious to the massive increases of federal spending and borrowing under the Bush administration, far outstripping that of any President, Republican or Democratic, since LBJ? Is he oblivious to the first stimulus in Spring 2008? Is he oblivious to TARP? To the bailout of GM?

All of this occurred under Bush and none of it stopped the recession because continued spending/borrowing/printing money cannot stop it. The recession will end, and not before, when all of the bad debt entered into over the past 10 years is restructured, written down, or the debtors (e.g. auto companies, banks, home builders, other companies that make crap, and the people who went into debt buying crap) go bankrupt.

David’s goal, apparently, is to keep unproductive enterprises on life support in perpetuity, taxpayer be damned and inflation be damned.

Is David heavily invested in Goldman-Sachs, Best Buy, Toll Brothers, and GM? Because the existence of those companies on the government dole is the problem that the recession is continuing. Bailing them out is hardly an “answer.”

“The solutions are quite simple: cutting spending and cutting tax. They’ve been proven worked every time.”

………The economic ignorance of the true believer has to be seen to be be believed…….and in this bit of unreality from pauldpan is summarised the GOP’s problem when it comes to economics…….As the honest conservative Bartlett keeps reminding us the GOP has invested all it’s economic intellectual capital in a series of policy prescriptions that are not only innapropriate in the present circumstances but would actually be hugely damaging if actually implemented……thus pauldpan and his ilk are reduced to parrotting nonsenses like this that totally ignore the fact that the problem in the first of this year and still, although to a lessening degree, is a shortage of demand from the private consumer and business sectors……..if you cut spending in this environment as Mr Hoover did when following pauldpan’s advice back in 1930 it exacerbates the problem…….73 years after Keynes published his general theory and you STILL have to explain this.