Transcript: 503 Lest We Forget editon of Idiot of the Week

there's lots of free sample there.
Now the lest we forget edition of idiot of the week
There is a reason the U.S. is stagnating, bouncing along the bottom, as we have said, a bottom sloped downward, a bottom littered with crises. it is an incompetent bureaucracy in charge of an out of control financial system educated into incompetence by a dysfunctional economic orthodoxy that refuses to die in the conflagration it created. Along with its sponsors in the financial sector and corporate oligarchy, this unnatural economic organism clambers over its victims for the best of the spoils, not realizing its victims are also its hosts, and as they die and are left behind, it has no independent strength or integrity. It only knows it must dominate, and threats to that domination only inflame its desperation.

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A lot was done wrong in the George W. Bush regime. His eight-year rule corresponded with stagnating incomes, a housing and debt bubble.

Brian Wesbury was an advisor to George W in his second term. This is the advice, this is the economic thinking of the Bush White House. It's like the Great Financial Crisis, the socialization of bank losses, the subsequent Great Recession did not happen, is not happening.

WESBURY 1
Buzz
Increasing productivity and growth. Not. As we've seen, after a spike in productivity as plants were emptied, that productivity has returned to its normal path, which is – contrary to the conventional thought – inversely related to the unemployment rate. The higher unemployment, the lower productivity. We went over that. Now productivity is negative.
The phrase "increasing productivity and growth" is slipped into conversation with the ignorant, say the Tea Party klatches, but we hope you don't buy it. Along with, "There's no such thing as global warming." FoxNews facts, fantasy the ideology needs to validate itself. Pretend it is real. It is la-la land.

WESBURY 2

Offsetting headwinds of regulation and government spending.

I wonder if those headwinds are coming over the fiscal cliff that seems to have caught everyone else's attention?
We have the image of Wesbury having pie and coffee with Edward Laffer wearing tinfoil hats and writing on their napkins like little trekkies. Apologies to trekkies. More discouraging. I see them actually in an office in DC with a button. I wonder what this does. Ooops. We'll pretend that didn't happen.

Facts to Wesbury. Total government spending, counting the negatives from states and locals is negative, going down. He's like reading from an old comic book hoping somebody will take him seriously again. Not in this life. Apologies to comic books.

But you haven't heard anything yet.

Here it is.

Edward Lazear, Brian Wesbury, Ben Bernanke, Glen Hubbard, Greg Mankiw.

Lest we forget.

break