This is exactly the problem with our government

“Think about it. I’ve spent the last six and half years yanking this economy out of the worst recession since the great depression."

~Barack Obama


Wow. I can't believe he actually said that. It's amazing and quite revealing.


Some thoughts:

I bet his back and hammies are KILLING him!

The economy actually came out of recession in June of 2009, so I'm not sure exactly what BHO has been yanking on the last 5 years.

Seriously, how to read this? One way is to say that fiscal policy and regulation control the economy and BHO has done a terrible job of yanking (or blame it on some other incompetent yankers like the damn Republicans). Another is to say that fiscal policy and regulation has very little to do with cyclic swings in the economy and BHO has been yanking in vain for 6.5 years!

I lean toward the latter view.

der Dukatenscheisser, and other things

We often comment, here at KPC, about two things:

1. The strangeness that is Deutschland
2. Poop

It turns out that one of the strange things about Germany is the many linguistic uses Germans have for poop.

And if you don't believe, here's the straight poop on it.

Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

That one about the fish is my new favorite saying. Anytime somebody complains about anything in a faculty meeting, they are going to hear that one. Inspired.

Nod to Anonyman; I bet you knew that, without looking. Anonyman has his sh*t together.

I got your evil empire right here, bud.

Closer to home, Hugo Chavez and his Axis of Anklebiters are descending towards farce. The economic success of Chile and Brazil cuts the ground out from under the "Bolivarean" caudillos. They may strut and prance on the stage, appear with Fidel on TV and draw a crowd by attacking the Yanquis, but the dream of uniting South America into a great anticapitalist, anti-U.S. bloc is as dead as Che Guevara

--Walter Russell

Loaded Questions: The interrogatory culture that is Germany

In an otherwise enlightening interview with Barry Eichengreen, I had to stop a couple times to compose myself after cracking up at the way the Speigel interviewer posed questions.

Here's my favorite:

Is there any desire in US political circles to do something about this problem? Just last December, President Barack Obama extended the Bush administration's tax cuts to 2012, even though tax cuts for the super-rich do nothing to stimulate the economy.

and another good one:

Are people in the US willing to save at all?

One more for the road:

Despite the current crisis, the economic fundamentals in the euro zone are still stronger than those on the other side of the Atlantic. Why are bond traders scrutinizing Europe but not the US?