BDR: How do you rate the job Barrack Obama is doing so far? TC: I would give him about a C-. On social issues I guess he is fine. On Economic issues he is wrong about everything. For instance he said that we have to stop pretending that deficits don't matter and now he is running the largest deficits any President ever has. BDR: But some would say we need to stimulate the economy now with spending.... TC: That is wrong. Most economist predict the recession will end at the end of 2009. As of now only 6% of the stimulus money has been spent and by the end of the year only 15% will have been spent which means the markets corrected itself. Or at the least it means that we only needed to spend about 15% of what Obama and people like Paul Krugman said. BDR: What about his long term plans for the stimulus? TC: Well let's take the high speed rail line he wants to build. Every independent study done shows it will lose money...even studies done by his own administration. Even Paul Volcker said he was hesitant about it. We know it won't work because no one in the private sector has tried to build the rail. If there was potential to make money then someone would have built it. Yet it appears we're going to spend money that we don't have and can not pay back to build something that will lose money and have to be maintained by these "made up" jobs. BDR: But are they not jobs none the less? TC: Yes but public sector jobs do not work unless you're exporting a service or heavily taxing private sector jobs. Otherwise you're printing money which is what got us into this mess to begin with. I liked that Obama was anti-war but now we've actually increased our DOD spending by 9% over the Bush administration. You can't just print money and borrow money because a lot of economist I've spoken to about this predict we very well might be bankrupt by the end of the next decade, that we won't be able to pay our debt payments. BDR: So what would you have done differently? TC: Well I would have let the Auto companies fail. We have Chrysler and GM about to finally reorganize under bankruptcy protection which should have happened last year when Bush bailed them out. All we did was throw away a bunch of money. The car companies aren't even properly replaying these bridge loans, so far it is all smoke and mirrors like the bans with the m2m writeoffs. I would have also started to look into tariffs to level the playing field. It's also interesting that non union States have lower unemployment than Union states. I don't think that is a coincidence. Not only do manufacturers leave the country to find cheaper labor, they leave states to move to other states. I would have let AIG fail, Bank of America, whoever. If no one from the private sector was going to bail out these places that means they had no value. Take BOA, they could have just reorganized. I would also tighten the money supply. Fluctuations in the money supply is another big problem. Loosening the supply is a short term fix and just reinflates the bubble. BDR: What did the Bush administration do wrong? TC: Start stupid wars that cost more than we can afford. BDR: What about the Bush tax cuts? TC: They were fine. We actually raised a higher percentage of tax revenue to GDP than any of the Clinton years in 2005 and 2006. People like Krugman have to use tricky numbers to try and frame the tax cuts as bad. Besides, taxing people at different rates is unethical. People like Krugman think gay marriage should be legal because everyone should be treated the same, but apparently not everyone needs to be treated the same when it comes to taxation. I read that something like 80% of constitutional scholars believe the progressive tax act is unconstitutional and it's hard to argue that it's not. Then again, the entire Federal Reserve makeup is unconstitutional. BDR: What about new Banking regulations? TC: They are fine. None of the new regulations are intrusive or affect the major banks. We didn't have a subprime program where I am at. I have no problem with the new regulations. But it's funny that I never heard the word "deregulation" for several years until it became a liberal buzzword last year. Bank laws have been deregulated since the 1970's and only now Thank for your time
Well, whether the war is/was "stupid" or not, is a debate left for another time. (Though if the prospect of a Saddam Hussein off sanctions, and his rival Iran getting nukes, motivating HIM to keep pace -- well if that doesn't give you pause, I am not sure what will). Anyway, as for the cost, I guess "afford" is all relative. At $8 bill to $12 bill a month (the range from CBO to the number cooked up by Joe Stiglitz), the Iraq war is positively chump change compared to what Teleprompter Jesus plans to spend on....well, anything and everything he wants to do to make us all just one big happy nation.
Ted: While I disagree with a lot of what you had to say, it's laid out pretty well and certainly captures your point of view. There are several references to fact that I found interesting. For example: I read that something like 80% of constitutional scholars believe the progressive tax act is unconstitutional and it's hard to argue that it's not. I've never seen a claim like this. I know that you don't provide cites when doing an interview, but I am curious if you have a reference to this somewhere.
A progressive tax in and of itself isn’t unconstitutional, but the Marx/Engels/Obama notion that a progressive tax designed to wrest control of capital from the bourgeois and centralize it into the hands of the state definitely is. And a couple of months ago I’d have said I was joking about lumping Obama in with Marx and Engels, today not so much.