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Jimmah Grab Another Prize

The late great Pat Moynihan used to say that anyone who won the Lenin Prize deserved it. That quip came back to mind this morning with the news that Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter have won the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award. He also deserves it.
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Jimmy Carter also deserves credit for starting the Reagan Revolution. Carter's incredible ineptitude in foreign and economic policy drove the country into a deep recession that he couldn't get out of.

Obama is taking a recession and extending it using Carters policies on steroids. The incredible Stimulus bill will not produce prosperity - it will only produce debt, unemployment and double digit inflation.

Obama is also a foreign policy disaster. Pakistan is about to fall to a rag-tag bunch of extremists. Obama had insisted on the removal of General Musharaff who at least kept the country in one piece and kept the Pakistanin nuclear bomb under lock and key. Obama now has to figure out how to deal with a collapsing Pakistan.

For a more satirical look at Obama's foreign policy disasters, you can hit:
Specter deserves some degree of humiliation. He has continually voted against conservative principles of small government and minimal taxation.

He will wind up paying for this defection though. Specter's exit will help Republicans raise money nationwide. When election time rolls around next year the Stimulus spending should bring inflation up to a double digit rate. Specter's opponents will be able to pin this on him personally, since he was one of the three Republican turn-coats that supported the bill.

Republicans' aren't going to miss this guy. For a more satirical look at why the GOP is happy Specter beat a retreat, you can hit:
https://firstconservative.com/blog/top-ten/top-ten-foreign-policy-disasters

For the record:

The United States experienced a brief and mild economic contraction over a five month period in 1980. The economic contraction occurred over the period running from July of 1981 to November 1982 (after Mr. Carter left office), was expected collateral damage in Paul Volcker's efforts to restore price stability, has already been exceeded in its severity by the current recession, and was readily disposed of by changes in monetary policy embarked on in August of 1982.

Mr. Carter and his subordinates (Arthur Burns, G. William Miller, Alfred Kahn, and Barry Bosworth) can and should be faulted for the uninterrupted erosion in price stability which occurred over the four years he was in office. The thing is, the Democratic Party was still very much addled by the notion that the unemployment rate could be manipulated at will without social costs (recall the 'Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act'). Mr. Carter was comparatively realistic, but he never made a point to educate the public about what it would cost to bring currency erosion under control, making use of Potemkin stratagems like 'voluntary wage and price guidelines' and leaving the impression that he could not be blamed because it was all out of his control. That did wonders for national morale.

There is one respect in which Mr. Carter did prefigure the Reagan Administration: administrative repeal of anti-competitive practices in the transportation and energy sector. Just to take one example, prior to 1978, airlines were run as a cartel supervised by the Civil Aeuronautics Board. Mr. Carter spent political capital to effect these sorts of reforms and should be commended for that.

Correction:

The economic contraction occurred over the period running from July of 1981 to November 1982 (after Mr. Carter left office),

should read

The economic contraction to which you are referring ('deep recession') occurred over the period running from July of 1981 to November 1982 (after Mr. Carter left office),

Art Deco (cool internet handle, by the way) makes excellent and sound points here, though I would quibble slightly in suggesting that the whole period of 1980-1982 should be viewed as a whole; in other words, we had a W-shaped recession, chiefly caused by the uneveness Art points to in Carter monetary policy. (The aborted credit controls and then open-spigot in the last half of 1980 by Volcker--intended, Milton Friedman thought--to help re-elect Carter, paved the way for the 1981-82 slump, which was much the worst since the Depression.

This is highly relevant today because we might experience the same kind of W-shaped recession experience over the next three years under Obama's and Bernanke's approach to the present crisis.

I sure hope we see a W. The price of the Stimulus Package seems like it might carry prolonged harm, via massive debt, to our otherwise robust economy. There is no symbol on here for a W with the last bar dropping, but that is what I imagine for the future, beyond our current rebound. How resilient is our economy, anyway?

During WWII, Gandhi advocated that the Jews just stand there and let their enemies shoot them.

Jimmah agrees. In fact, Gandhi deserves a Carter Award!

I wonder what a nonviolent guy like Carter would say about the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act. Or anyone on the right for that matter. Yay, more draconian laws and now cyber police state. freedom really means being free from bullies or anti government propoganda. Would Gandhi not want people to just take the cyber punishment? That hack sponsoring this bill actually uses the phrase "so called free speech." priceless.

Well, Brutus, you're somebody on the right.

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