I've been reading Darrell Delamaide's columns at MarketWatch for a while and have been often tempted to highlight them here. Although I wouldn't say he's particularly insightful, I like his sarcasm. One thing stopping me is the fact that MarketWatch is owned by the Wall Street Journal, one of Murdoch's rags, to say nothing of its historically conservative attitude. What amazes me is that they still let him write given his fairly liberal bent. Today, Delamaide's piece, "Smoke and mirrors with the federal deficit: Washington swaps magic show for vaudeville," is one of the better of his I've read. Some excerpts below the fold ...
As for the House vote yesterday ...
The new Senate plan came as House Republicans were engaged in more posturing, passing a balanced budget amendment they knew in advance was going nowhere. Symbolic votes are mighty important to these freshmen congressmen, impressed as they are with the power they now have to legislate nothing.
Coin seigniorage ...
Washington’s theater of the absurd reached downright zany proportions in recent weeks when a proposal emerged from the blogosphere to use the Treasury Department’s “coin seigniorage” to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin or two and deposit them with the Federal Reserve.
snip
Crazy as it sounds, the coin seigniorage idea has the advantage of being medieval enough that it might pass muster with some of the traditionalists in Congress. And at least the proposal has got it right that the U.S., as issuer of a fiat currency, can create any amount of cash it wants and doesn’t really need to borrow money to spend it.
The "immediate" $500B in savings ...
You’re probably wondering how they save $500 billion with the stroke of a pen, changing the way CPI is calculated. Easy, as the Washington Post explained a couple of months ago. Instead of saying that consumers will continue to buy apples when the price of apples doubles, you assume they will start buying pears, which are now cheaper than apples.
Deciding further cuts ...
The rest is just as easy. Congressional committees – those two-party panels that haven’t been able to agree on anything for two or three years now – are going to agree in the next six months on how to cut hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending on defense, homeland security, health, education, labor and so on.
The effect of closing loopholes and capping Medicare costs ...
All this allows the Gang of Six to cut tax brackets across the board, reducing the highest marginal rate to 29%! Hallelujah! We all know how important it is to keep cutting taxes, so that we have more of our own money to spend on the resulting higher costs for health care, education, personal security and all those other needs that most countries take care of by, well, paying taxes.
I've heard some say that the Gang of 6 plan is probably a good one because nobody likes it. Sometimes such broad, negative reaction is a sign that a policy is good. However, if a policy is an easy target of sarcasm, it's often a sign that it's crap. I think in this case, the latter will prove a more accurate assessment.
hhhhhhhhhhhhh