On debt salvation, Keynesian economics, the nature of government policy and more South Park has some of the wisest critiques of just about everyone and everything to do with the financial crisis. Of course, don't look to South Park for solutions! Sure to offend. Hat tip to Steve Horwtiz at The Austrian Economists.
Funny stuff. Unfortunately “the voice of reason” on this episode was also speaking nonsense.
The ending is hilarious.
Bailout!
correction:
does NOT in the above
Of course, don’t look to Congress or to the White House for solutions!
Watch the entire episode, it’s a classic. Should be required TV watching for pretty much everyone.
Thanks for the pointer to The Austrian Economists blog.
I watched the clip, not the whole show, but what do you mean, “no solutions”? They depicted exactly the solution the administration is using — put it on the kid’s credit card.
Now we just need to find somebody to buy all our personal debt. If we had a Kyle to wipe the slate clean, our country’s consumption could recover and we could avoid deflation.
Really, in a half-assed manner they came up with the exact correct idea. Only it would be easier to just do a one-off debt forgiveness. The companies that Americans owe their debt to are all getting cash infusions from the government, so not paying them back isn’t going to break their backs.
But Obama did say that Reagan had some good ideas, like putting his big spending and increased entitlements on his grandkids credit card, so why are you complaining that Obama is adopting some of Reagan’s trademark fiscal policies?
Not to mention the massive increase in entitlements that Bush added, following in Reagan’s conservative footsteps.
While Reagan did increase the costs of Social Security, the real cost burden is Medicare and Medicaid which no conservative has done more than make the future burden worse. The growth in health care costs in the US not only outstrips the growth in the economy, it also outstrips by a wide margin the growth in costs in nations that deliver better health outcomes for 30-50% less.
South Park is a good refuge from the reality of the economic disaster that conservative politics have brought on the nation and the world. Of for the hoorible Clinton years of balanced budgets which conservatives kept arguing wasn’t balanced, even as they proposed massive tax cuts and increased entitlements, with conservative Cheney proclaiming, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
Remind me again, indiana, who won the Soviet-Afghan war?
And as far as Reagan winning “the Cold War”: ha ha, please! The USSR collapsed because of the economic and political limitations of communism, not because Reagan gave a little speech or plowed billions into futuristic weapons systems that were never used and never worked. Reagan could have gathered all the money in one big pile and burned it – it would have accomplished exactly the same thing.
“There is no doubt that Reagan ran a deficit, but then again he, arguably, won the Cold War.”
Oh, noez! Can I haz my thred unhijakked!
I thought the show usefully reduced abstract concepts such as securitization into concrete situations involving human agents. For example, Stan tried to return his father’s loan-financed margarita machine and had to visit bankers who had securitized the debt and no longer much cared whether his father would pay or not, nor could they return the machine even if they wanted to. Moral hazard and incompetence become easier to recognize when we can use our hard-wired empathy circuits, so this seems like a place where art can be especially useful. The formula would be: Instantiate abstractions into specific concrete examples, thereby improving our intuitions of the concepts.
Rob Zahra
Reagan inherited a horrible economy with about 14 % inflation and 20 % interest rates if I remember correctly. Yes, he (and a Democrat congress) ran deficits, but his policies also turned the economy around and enabled a fantastic 20 year economic expansion. Today his spending looks almost frugal.
Bush ran deficits of up to 400 billion, but he also inherited a (mild) recession and had 9/11 and a war on his hands. The deficit was shrinking every year from 2004 to 2007. And on the day Democrats took over congress in 2006 we had unemployment under 5 % and dynamite growth. Unlike Obama, Bush was not an anti-business, anti-liberty, pro-government crusader.
Of course, within weeks, Obama managed to make a 400 billion deficit look pathetically small – and he´s not finished. Yet there are people who insist that “Bush did it first”. These people probably also don´t understand the difference between someone stepping on your toes and someone putting a bullet in your head.
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