irisatrx

Ben Stein Watch: December 28, 2008

I've always found Stein's remarks to fall into the "common sense" realm. So far, I've found nothing hokey in his columns, and I tend to agree with his observations.

Having discussed the financial situation with a number of astute investors and analaysts, I doubt there are any folks out there who have a firm grasp of what the future will bring. So, I won't be taking investment advice from anyone, to include Ben Stein.

As for why we're in the mess we are, my darts go to such luminaries as Senator Schumer whose public pronouncement that Lehman Bros was insolvent led to a "run on the bank", a sell-off of its shares, and its sudden collapse -- setting off the falling of the dominos like Bear Stearns et al. Then again, we have Barney Frank who was taking his campaign contributions from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to prevent Treasury from exacting any oversight; he succeeded in helping them fail, with the subsequent collapse of the financial market -- which is an intricate system of smoke and mirrors and the ultimate con game now. A collapse in confidence there is akin to pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz..

We now have the Goldman Sachs team of Paulson and his understudy running Treasury, passing hundreds of billions of dollars to the financial community so they can buy each other out rather than lending to businesses which need the credit to continue operating. The Democrats are pushing for a bail-out of the car industry -- highlighted last week by a furlough of the workers for 45 days at nearly full pay. Now there's an incentive!

Getting back to Ben; leave him alone. Probability is that he did invest with Madoff; so did a lot of supposedly smart people. Then again, a majority of supposedly smart folks cast their vote for a complete unknown for President of the United States who is about to re-enact the FDR Socialist Manifesto which has burdened this country with countless welfare programs and unproductive taxes.

First Obama order of the day is to attack the transportation infrastructure with a convoluted tiered usage tax on companies, individuals, etc for a fair distribution of the cost [quick translation: massive bureaucracy], rather than simply tacking on 50 cents to the federal gasoline user tax -- which would raise $500 billion per year..

Hold on to your wallet;