Hopefully, my last Qwest Rant for a while...

So, basically the internet was completely down from lunch time to... well, when I checked before bed at 11:45 it was still off.  It was back this morning, but it looks like more than 12 hours out.  Everything seems to be working on my end now, although on the Qwest Speedtest I'm still getting "spikes" of over performance which suggests to me that there's something horrible still happening on the line.

I'd be excited about the 20MB/s coming if I didn't think they were going to charge through the nose for it. 

Excellent stuff on the stupidity of austerity...

Over at 538.com, there's a great piece on the stupidity of the austerity fans. 

The lack of critical economic thinking that I see with people complaining about government spending with the major economies in the mess they're in does leave me astounded.  The logic, as I read it on mostly Libertarian Blogs goes something like - the government is bankrupting us, if they would only lower taxes then trickle down economics would fix the economy like it did for Regan and Thatcher.

Let us ignore for a moment that both Regan and Thatcher had significantly higher tax levels to start with, and just focus on the concept of trickle down economics. The idea is the money that the wealthy would have left over is used by banks and the wealthy to engage in more wealth generation, which is magically more effective than anything a government can do with it.

That's a beguiling theory, especially for anybody who read far too much Heinlein and Rand as a teenager, but it suffers in one critical area, in that it's complete bollocks.

Firstly, in the current market, the banks still aren't actually lending all that much money to ventures - no wonder, the returns on ventures and business are highly questionable in the current economy - they can make more money indulging whims in the markets of the kind that helped get us into this mess.  The whole idea that banks lend to honest mom&pop operations to open a small machine shop and take on the furiners at their own game, is a nice image, but not one that really has any basis in the world we actually live in.

So the banks use the money to make themselves more money, so where does that money go?  Well, bonus payments, dividends and effectively back into bank accounts so banks can make themselves more money - but not necessarily doing economically useful things.  The bankers themselves are making a nice deal of the low tax returns and ensuring that, for example, the super home market in London is still doing nicely, and, of course, helping the German luxury car industry and others.

Secondly, for the vast majority of people there's the small matter of the personal debt hangover that we're still suffering from.  The extra few dollars a month isn't much help to a family underwater on their mortgage with thousands, or tens of thousands in credit card debt - that has to be paid back to the banks (see above) before the family can really think about any useful economic activity.

Like is often the case with Libertarians they're looking at a rose tinted world of the 1950s where things are so very simple, and ignoring the last 40+ years which they've helped to create.  They're also, conveniently, ignoring that if they think their tax rates are high now, they'd have been screaming in 1955...

While I'm on the topic of stupidity

I won't say who's Blog this is from.  Readers can guess.

There's no prize.

I note that today's Wall Street Journal has an editorial along the same lines as yesterday's observation here: if you want more unemployment, pay people to be unemployed.