DOOM: Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name

Just how bad a scam is Social Security, anyway? Answer: pretty damned bad.

What can you expect from Bammer’s jobs speech? If history is any guide...a big gaseous ball of cliche, pandering, perfidy, responsibility-dodging, magical thinking, tu quoque, historical amnesia, confusion, and unfounded assertions. In other words: the same old, same old.

President Obama: A trifecta of ineptitude.

The “green” FAIL train just keeps on rolling.

As a Department of Energy (DOE) spokesperson said, “the project that we supported succeeded. The facility was producing the product it said it would produce, and consumers were buying the product.”

Mark Steyn: Why Johnny can’t figure out which end of the hammer to hold.

IBD: Obama’s “recovery” a flop of historical proportions. Bammer might be moving out of Jimmy Carter country and into Herbert Hoover-ville if things don't pick up soon.

A depressing nonfarm productivity chart. We’re at 5th place productivity-wise among nations (which isn't as bad as it sounds, but then again we were as high as 2nd only a few years back).

A middle-class upbringing does not guarantee a middle-class life. It was easier to be “middle class” in a former age when there was little world competition. It is now more difficult, and not just in economic terms. A “middle class” requires, to a large extent, a shared culture and shared values among the citizenry, and that shared mental space is now smaller and more fractured than it has ever been. The “American Dream” means very different things to different people now -- sometimes diametrically opposed things. Still, as WRM points out, there are still some simple rules for being successful: get married, stay married, don’t do drugs, and get educated (though not necessarily at a college).

Greece: The good news? We’re not putting any more bad news on your plate for now. The bad news? You’ve already got a giant mound of bad news on your plate already, and it ain’t getting any smaller.

Bammer's cadre don't just suck at Keynesianism; they suck at understanding what Keynesianism is (and is not).

Bernanke’s Waterloo? If Bernanke is Napoleon...who plays the Duke of Wellington?

More on the demographic and economic issues surrounding the aging of the Baby Boomers. Er, you might not want to count on that inheritance if you’re the child of a Boomer. Just sayin’.

Apparently, we had to save the big banks in order to sue them.

The Fed's "beige book" report paints a gloomy picture. It just confirms what we already know: the economy is going to suck clear into 2013. There isn't much good to be expected.

Bernanke: "Hey, you know what would be cool now that our short-term debt is paying zero interest? What if we could drive down our ten-year interest to zero? That would be awesome! Well...not for savers so much because they'd kind of take it in the shorts, and it'd be hard on the old folks who live on fixed incomes, but screw those geezers. I'm not into rewarding prudence and responsibility. Throw on some Chubby Checker and break out your dancing shoes! Let's twist again!"

UPDATE 1: James Lileks (one of the best humorists this nation has ever produced) has some rather bitter words to share about His Majesty the King. (Via Michael Greenspan, by way of Insty.)

UPDATE 2: Tyler Cowen on Bastiat's famous "broken windows" fallacy and Keynesians, who ever seek to find loopholes in that fallacy.

Keynesians tend to overestimate the importance of flows and underestimate the importance of stocks and sometimes they neglect the latter altogether. Just as there is a spending multiplier, there is also a multiplier from changes in wealth. For instance declines in perceived wealth will cause people to spend less. The Keynesian AD gains from a broken window have to stem from the difference between the spending multiplier and the wealth multiplier.

UPDATE 3: From the sidebar -- jobless claims rise to 414,000 last week. Everybody together now: UNEXPECTEDLY!

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It turns out that Mister Pickles was actually a demon of the Outer Dark. They tried to take him back to the pet store for a refund, but the store had mysteriously disappeared.

posted by Monty at 08:45 AM

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