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Originally posted at Capital Gains and Games.

I can't tell you the number of focus groups I've watched and polls I read where the overwhelming opinion was that federal spending could be cut without any decrease in the quantity and quality of what the government does.

Hell...As I posted about in 2010, even the recommendation from the co-chairs of the Bowles-Simpson commission -- who definitely should have known better -- proposed a reduction in the number of federal employees and the number of consultants but, presumably based on the assumption that the government wouldn't have to stop doing anything it was already doing, didn't suggest any activity be eliminated.

That's why this story in The Washington Post from several days ago caught my eye. The Defense Department has decided that what since the 1950s has been an annual show for the public at Andrews Air Force Base (now officially Joint Base Andrews) in suburban Maryland will now be held every other year. The savings are projected to be $2.1 million a year.

False equivalence of the day:

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Newark Mayor and Obama bundler Cory Booker said he was “uncomfortable” with the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s career with Bain Capital.

“It’s a distraction from the real issues,” Booker said, of both attacks on Bain and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “It’s either gonna be a small campaign about this crap, or it’s gonna be a big campaign about the issues the American public cares about.”

“I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” Booker added. “If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses — to grow businesses. And this to me, I’m very uncomfortable.”

No, attacks on Bain are not the equivalent of attacks on Jeremiah Wright and no, it is not a distraction from the campaign, it is the campaign. Or it should be.

Facebook's initial public offering last week 'offered' the world another double dose of windfalls and greed. But Egypt's elections this week may bring an IPO of a different sort, the 'initial public offering' of an antidote to avarice.

When Jamie Dimon revealed that JPMorgan Chase had lost billions through risky and legally questionable trading, he said the losses would be about $2 billion and maybe more. Apparently it is more - a lot more. People in a position to know are saying the real figure is probably in the $5-7 billion range.

Which is better for an economy: millions of future jobs and trillions of future dollars, or a few people making a quick buck today by selling out their country? For decades America's 1%-backed conservatives have chosen the latter course, and we can see the results all around us.

From the House Republicans whose leader, Speaker John Boehner, just three days ago claimed that "we can’t go on spending money we don’t have," and "our economy is stuck in large part because it’s stuck with debt,"

Austerian Pride

by | May 18, 2012