Al Hunt & Co. Follow Their Marching Orders...and Look Foolish

While the NY Times is doing its duty with a partisan hatchet job of John Boehner, Al Hunt over at Bloomberg News has been given the tax cut issue and so tasks a minion with reporting a strange tidbit about how the rich would react to a tax cut. Basically, Hunt & Co. say, the miserly rich will sock the money away rather than buy stuff so that the rest of us can get a job. This is preposterous on its face, but let's wait on that for a second. What the article doesn't tell you is that the study is from the shop of Mark Zandi, Moody's Analytics, one of last few economists around who thinks the stimulus worked (because he helped design it). Zandi's name has become a bit of a red flag given his constant pimping of Obamanomics and resulting loss of credibility, so I guess Bloomberg just figures it shouldn't even mention anything that he has a hand in hoping that no one is paying attention.

Anywho...on to the substance. First, remember that saving used to be good. Remember when George W. Bush was in office, we didn't save enough and it was going to be our economic Achilles' heel? Well, they couldn't even get the numbers right, never mind interpret them properly. But now that the government needs your money to bail out its staggering profligacy, saving money is bad bad bad, so the government will deny you more of your own money lest you save it. Morever, as that penultimate link points out, the rich in America don't save, we invest. If allowed to keep more of our hard-earned money by the good grace of our betters in Congress, we don't stick it in the mattress, we invest in businesses whether it be through stocks and bonds or your smart, hard-working brother-in-law's great new business idea. Taxing that money away means taking away seed capital for small business as well as taking away public market capital that keeps our world-leading companies well-funded.

I understand Al Hunt has no choice but to print this drivel - orders are orders - but this one is a double flop.