OK, most of the time I do finance related things here, but when I read and watched some of the stuff this woman put out today in her first day on the campaign trail I about puked. AND I AM A REGISTERED REPUBLICAN !!!! I have worked in local and regional politics for close to 25 years as a "labor of love". Now I will admit I am a fiscally conservative, socially middle of the road to liberal Republican with a fair amount of Libertarian tendencies.
Ms. Bachmann made the morning news circuit and here are a few of the gems she put out:
"This is the Obama debt, this is the Obama deficit, and this is the very poor working Obama economy." This was on the CBS Early Show. The Obama debt - yes for the past two years, The Obama Deficit - he contributed the past two years, BUT G.W. Bush took us from a surplus to a deficit with his adventures in Iraq & Afghanistan, and a huge prescription drug benefit to seniors while at the same time slashing tax revenues. And despite what the supply siders say, (and I learned from the best supply siders - David Stockman the author is the Reagan Era reincarnation of this idea is a family friend and fellow West Michigan ex-pat) in the medium to long term lower tax rates do not create more jobs - the economic stimulation comes from the benefactors of the tax cuts reinvest their capital in more personal assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate and the like.
Repealing the federal minimum wage is another idea Ms. Bachmann put out on CBS and also on ABC's Good Morning America. This would increase job growth and lower the unemployment rate so low as to "potentially wipe out unemployment". As I said above I have some large Libertarian stripes, but there is a reason there is a federal minimum wage = employers were not providing a wage for certain jobs that a person could live on. Try living on the federal minimum wage. It can be done, but you will not get rich doing it. In fact you will barely get by - which is exactly what the federal wage program was designed to do. Getting rid of the minimum wage laws will not wipe unemployment as we know it. Marginally it might provide a slight dip in unemployment, but the larger issue is that jobs that fall under the minimum wage law will have a lower wage rate which will improve the profit margins of the companies, but will do little/nothing for the workers that have those jobs. In fact the CBO (Congressional Budget Office and the GAO - General Accounting Office state that overall economic activity will be lowered because the low wage people who will be losing $$ in the pocket tend to spend creating the multiplier while the benefactors - the owners of the companies tend to save, effectively taking the money out of the economy. So the action that Ms. Bachmann says will "potentially wipeout" unemployment will most likely have little if any effect on unemployment and actually harm the larger economy.
I am sure that Ms. Bachmann is some intelligence. She is a tax lawyer after all. But her economic ideas not only misinformed they are actually wrong and will do much more harm than good.
OK any replies are welcome.
Still working on putting the trading rules into a readable form.
TTFN
Ash
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