“I’m also not going to ask Rush his opinion of my child’s brain surgeon. You know?”
Exactly.
Which makes me wonder - I’m sure Rush has a capable financial advisor.
I wonder what he’s been advising Rush to do with his money these past couple of weeks?
I thought a lot about your post last night for some reason. Its simple truth kept resonating with me.
It’s not that I advocate blindly following the “experts.” It’s more that I am concerned to see people blindly following the amateurs!
What really gets me is someone like Rush, as much as I love and respect him, using his bully pulpit to go so far as to preach that “we don’t need the bailout.”
I can see arguing about how the bailout should be done, even, and of course about who is to blame for the situation (though I do think that discussion should be reserved for the day after this crisis is addressed). But to think our extremely limited understanding and experience in global economics gives us a leg to stand on in telling Bernanke, Paulson, et al. that they are wrong in their fundamental assessment that we are facing a huge crisis is just . . . crazy.
Worse than that, I fear it could be dangerous.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t want this once-in-a-century crisis decided by a popularity contest. Someone said, well, 60% of Americans are against a bailout. My response was *if* 60% of Americans are against doing what turns out to be the right and necessary thing, then I don’t want our leaders to cave to that. I want our leaders to take on the task of educating and persuading people on the necessary action.
However, such leadership is difficult in the best of times. When time is short and you have highly influential people popping off at the mouth on fundamental issues about which they have no way of knowing, such leadership may be impossible.
IOW, I am concerned that fundamentally ill-informed pop-populist blathering will lethally undermine the ability of those who do know what they’re talking about to at least get agreement that we have a crisis that demands immediate action.
Rush was talking yesterday that, oh, we just need to lift cap gains taxes for two years and the market will take off. Lifting cap gains taxes is ALWAYS a good thing. However, that is unlikely to cause this market to recover. Why? Because cap gains affect sellers. But this market has no money to lend-—credit is completely frozen (according to Rush’s buddy Jack Welch)-—so no one can buy stuff anyway.
Giving the seller a tax break upon sale of an asset doesn’t help produce the buyer to make the sale in the first place.
Anyway, I rant.