Monday, February 25, 2013

Thats the way you do it

Refreshing to see somebody on the teevee challenging the GOP claptrap. In contrast to the dozens of stenographic posts carefully transcribing Bobby Jindal's word salad, delivered moments after the White House governor's confab, CNN business correspondent Ali Velshi calls out Gov. Bobby Jindal's nonsense:
VELSHI: It’s 3% of a small part of the federal budget which makes it a very big part of some major agencies. It’s misleading stuff Bobby Jindal is saying, number one. Number two when he says families understand they have to live within their budget. I don’t know a lot of families who buy a house with cash. Buying a house on a mortgage, is that living within your budget or not living within your budget? You would have to be 80 years old to be able to buy a house with cash. We have an understanding in our society, it may be flawed, that we borrow money based on our future earnings potential. All people do that, companies do that and governments do that. There’s a point at which you can say, we’ve gone too far with that or we’re too much of a risk of not paying back so we’ll end up paying a higher interest rate. When you borrow too much money, your personal interest rate goes up, credit cards go up. But to suggest within your means and balanced budget nonsense is just misleading. That is not how families live. It’s not how businesses conduct themselves. It is certainly not since the history of time the way governments run themselves. ...
The "run the government like your family budget" is one of the dumbest constructs to ever take root in the Beltway script. Even if it was at all valid, it's based on the false premise that responsible people don't take on debt. In reality, unless you literally live on the street, even if you paid off every single bill before you went to bed last night, you woke up in the morning with new debt. You owe that day's cost of living from utilities to mortgages or rent at the very least.

It would be helpful if more journos would remind their viewers of these simple truths.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Capt. Fogg said...

"Every nation should have a debt"

-Tom Paine-

2:06:00 PM  

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