OT: Standard & Poor's Wake-Up Call!

Standard and Poor didn't get the credit rating right for the collateralised subprime mortgage securities whose failure gave us the current recession. Have you got any reason to believe that their opinion about the credit-worthiness of the curretn US government is any more reliable?

In fact Standard and Poor are just another branch of the banking industry, and they share the rest of the industry's right-wing political prejudices and delusions, one of which being that the free market is perfect, and that John Maynard Keynes didn't know what he was talking about.

So when right-wing political commentators get excited about Standard and Poor degrading the credit-worthiness of US government bonds, all they are doing is applauding their own opinions as reflected by another - different - crew of right-wing half-wits.

Anybody with more sense that Rich would have realised this was an entertaining example of a rather dim dog chasing it own tail.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You should have bought on the news Rich. S&P is now 2.25% higher than Monday morning.

-Bill

Except that USA is a lefty outfit, free-lunchers.

Obama's new budget is ~$3.73T, on revenues of $2.1T. That's a $1,650B gap, $1.79 in spending per dollar in receipts. Higher than the stimulus level spending, more money than during the bailouts, ~4x Bush's highest deficit.

Let's raise taxes. Obama's "rich" tax? About $35B / year. Chump change. Doubling everyone's taxes? That'd pull in another $900B (if people actually paid it), which would still leave us $750B a year short.

Hey, let's cut $750B AND double everyone's taxes! Does it make sense? Nope.

We're just spending too darn much.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

..

Only in the eyes of right-wing nit-wits.

Those figures don't have much to do with reality

The White House thinks that it's spending $1.19 per dollar in receipts.

James Arthur is pulling his usual trick of looking at some unspecified version of the budget - presumably found on some more than usually stupid Tea Party web-site - and no doubt apply his usual "corrections".

With any luck he will tell us where he got his numbers, and give us a bit more insight into the way his miserable excuse for a brain fails to work.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

k...

They are in my eyes. I'm not right-wing, and I'm not a nit-wit.

You might consider looking at the 2nd column of the first page of information (pg. 3) in your own link--OMB projects $3.82T on 2.17T in revenue, FY2011. (This is still 2011, isn't it?)

So, that's just $1.75 per dollar in revenue, only slightly different from my estimate. It's a moving target. You'll find my number for actual federal income tax revenue in Table S-3, $899B in 2010.

So, my math stands.

Obama's not very good with finance. Neither are you.

-- Cheers, James Arthur