Yesterday the New York Times ran an editorial so inflammatory and in such willful disregard of the facts and reason that I can do nothing other than spend today’s post calling the editors of that once proud newspaper out as the bitter and infantile hate mongers that they are.
The editorial, entitled “Goldman’s Non-Apology” starts with dismissive criticism of a mild and philosophical mea culpa, largely on behalf of the entire financial industry, made last week by the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.
Certainly, our industry is responsible for things. We’re a leader in our industry, and we participated in things that were clearly wrong and we have reasons to regret and apologize for.
This, the Times tells us, is a non-apology that falls far short of what is due. “Even if he had said, “we’re sorry,” it would have been hollow since he never actually said what he was sorry for….” Of course, the Times doesn’t get into all that much detail about what he should be sorry for either.
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There is a part of me that really wants to believe that politicians advocate dumb ideas not because they are dumb but because they are cynically trying 
to garner support from other people who they think are dumb. Imagining cynicism in others is more cynical than imagining simple cluelessness.
But then I read something like this from The New York Times.
In an effort to rein in the spread of the H1N1 flu, Representative George Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, introduced legislation on Tuesday that would guarantee five paid sick days for workers sent home by their employers with a contagious illness.
I’m sure that most of you are smirking already, but for those who don’t immediately see what is humorously stupid here, let me lay it out. This bill would force employers to pay for sick days when they send employees home with the flu. This means it will be more expensive to send sick people home, so employers will be less likely to do it. This, in turn, will have the effect of increasing the spread of H1N1, not reining it in.
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This time last week I created one of my more unique posts. A commenter suggested that if I was in search of a topic I could write about what I thought of the "ballooning national debt." I usually try to keep closer to the personal 
finance theme than that, but a request is a request. Gotta keep the readers happy.
The first thing to say is that anybody who confidently predicts any particular result from borrowing so much money is full of it. Nobody really knows what the long term effects are or what will happen next. We can speculate on it, and some prognostications may be more reasonable than others, but ultimately these are all just educated guesses.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s start with the big picture. Below is a chart of the US Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP. I got the data from the useful site usgovernmentspending.com.
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It’s time for another visit to the world of survey results. As I wrote when I last visited, poll numbers are not my favorite kind of numbers, but they are way better than no numbers at all. Particularly on economic issues, poll numbers are less informative than how people and companies actually spend money,
but they are way more useful than mere words put out by people like me. (Note I said "like me" not "me". My analysis is always first-rate.)
If you know the world through words from the media, some of the numbers the pollsters find may be jarring. For example, Gallup recently found that 45% of Americans think there is too much government regulation of business and industry and only 24% think there is too little. That’s a fairly wide margin in favor of less regulation, but what may be truly surprising is that in the past year that plurality has widened. In September 2008, just before it all hit the fan, too much beat too little by 38%-27%. In fact, 45% is the highest number in at least a decade.
You might have thought, and I will admit to having thought this, that the Great Recession had won over enough converts to the unbridled-capitalism-is-bad camp that there was now a broad consensus that we needed more regulation, with only the details of what and where to be worked out. Turns out the opposite is true. The GR seems to have, miraculously, won over more people to the less-government-is-better-government side. Go figure.
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Slate’s The Big Money had an amusing post the other day about some fake Treasury Bonds that were seized earlier this year. The post is mostly about the implausible conspiracy theories that were subsequently hatched, but 
what’s interesting to me is the implausible nature of the fake bonds themselves.
In two separate incidents, Italian authorities confiscated stacks of bonds with a total face value of $250 billion. A collection of US debt that large is itself pretty unlikely, but what really pushed it over the frontier of believability was the fact that these stacks weren’t all that tall. Denominations for single bonds, that is, single certificates, went as high as $1 billion.
To understand just how far beyond the realm of reasonable this is, you need to know that a) the government stopped printing paper certificates in 1986 and b) in the days in which it did print certificates the highest denomination was $100,000. The total amount of authentic paper bonds still in circulation is $105 million. That’s million with an M.
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The editorial, entitled “Goldman’s Non-Apology” starts with dismissive criticism of a mild and philosophical mea culpa, largely on behalf of the entire financial industry, made last week by the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.
Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
November 23, 2009 2:29 pm | 
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