Robert Stacy McCain is infuriatingly addictive.
OK sometimes his Runyonesque shtick can be irritating and he mounts hobbyhorses that usually take him round into ever decreasing circles (on contraception he is more catholic than the pontiff himself, waxing ever lyrical about vast families)
His recent feminism cat fight with Little Miss Attila ended fairly quickly with him being tied into a reef knot and, very gently, plopped out of the arena. Somewhere AJ Kelshiker is smiling…
His current emergence as a military pundit lecturing the Libyan rebels on their tactical shortcomings is quite astonishing for a man who clearly loves history. Show me an example of a group of ill armed, militarily inexperienced insurgents who, within a month, have transformed themselves into a formidable fighting force and I’ll maybe concede some ground. Otherwise, Stacy, just leave the long distance commenting based on press reports to Allahpundit and his cat.
But for all of that when he is in common sense mode on the key issues vital to the day to day battle against the seductive prescriptions of snake oil salesmen like Krugman and their water carriers (often laughingly claiming to be “journalists”) Stacy is THE MAN…
How does deficit reduction take money out of the economy?
The federal government doesn’t have a Magic Pot O’ Money and, contrary to whatever Ben Bernanke apparently believes, it can’t create money from thin air. Every dime that the federal government spends must come from one of three sources:
- Taxation, which obviously takes money out of the economy.
- Borrowing (i.e., deficit spending), which also takes money out of the economy, in the form of drains on investment. Money that is spent by private investors to buy government debt (i.e., bonds) is money not available to private business either as loans or as investment capital (stock).
- Inflation, which devalues currency and thereby — yes, you guessed it — takes money out of the economy.
So Ben Adler’s idea that reducing the annual deficit means “taking all this money out of the economy” has no basis in reality.
= Stacynomics 101
RSM for Treasury in the Palin cabinet?
Whoops – I forgot….Stacy’s pledged himself to another…..
