WRSTGD as an Excuse to Raise Taxes

The elite continue to set up the play for higher taxes.

Salon's David Sirota pimps the idea by writing that the Worst Recession Since the Great Depression (WRSTGD) is a perfect time to RAISE taxes:

But as history (and "Freakonomics") teach, such oversimplified memes tend to obscure the counterintuitive notions that often hold the most profound truths. And in the case of the WRSTGD, the most important of these is the idea that we are in economic dire straits because tax rates are too low.

When he isn't relying on the non sequitir method of analysis that Freakonomics brings to the debate, Sirota relies on that other great economist, Hillary Clinton:

...with USA Today reporting that tax rates are at a 60-year nadir, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Brookings Institution audience that "the rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing [major] employment issues ... whether it is individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are."

To top things off, he then quotes the Soros' front group, Center for American Progress:

...a Center for American Progress analysis shows that "Greece has consistently spent less" than Europe's other social democracies — most of which have avoided Greece's plight.

"The real problem facing the Greeks is not how to reduce spending but how to increase revenue collections," the report concludes, fingering Greece's comparatively "anemic tax collections" as its economic problem.

Then more from Hillary:

In summing up her remarks, Clinton said that this higher-tax/higher-revenue formula "used to work for us until we abandoned it."

Brace yourself, once mid-terms are over, Obama's next play is major tax increases.

Obama as the First Third World President

Lew Rockwell posts an article by Mary Ellen Synon about the roots of President Obama and why he is dissing Great Britain, France, etc. Scary stuff. Read it here.

Ditching the Car Czar

I'd like to see some inside reporting on what was behind Obama's decision to ditch the Car Czar concept and, to instead, put Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of auto industry monkey business. From a distance it looks like it is simply a consolidation of a bit more power in the hands of the Geithner-Summers wing of the White House.

Obama seems to be buying whatever those two are whispering.

Obama Comes Out Against Nationalizing Banks

The more I listen to President Obama, the more I think the way to understand his thinking is that he is knee jerk left wing, but as president he assembles facts and then makes decisions.

Now what facts are put in front of him and how he interprets them is a complex matter, but I don't think he will always grab the extreme left wing solution. Here's Obama during his interview with Terry Moran on why he thinks bank nationalization won't work in the U.S.:

TERRY MORAN: There are a lot of economists who look at these banks and they say all that garbage that's in them renders them essentially insolvent. Why not just nationalize the banks?

PRESIDENT OBAMA:Well, you know, it's interesting. There are two countries who have gone through some big financial crises over the last decade or two. One was Japan, which never really acknowledged the scale and magnitude of the problems in their banking system and that resulted in what's called "The Lost Decade." They kept on trying to paper over the problems. The markets sort of stayed up because the Japanese government kept on pumping money in. But, eventually, nothing happened and they didn't see any growth whatsoever.

Sweden, on the other hand, had a problem like this. They took over the banks, nationalized them, got rid of the bad assets, resold the banks and, a couple years later, they were going again. So you'd think looking at it, Sweden looks like a good model. Here's the problem; Sweden had like five banks. [LAUGHS] We've got thousands of banks. You know, the scale of the U.S.

Obviously, Sweden has a different set of cultures in terms of how the government relates to markets and America's different. And we want to retain a strong sense of that private capital fulfilling the core -- core investment needs of this country.

And so, what we've tried to do is to apply some of the tough love that's going to be necessary, but do it in a way that's also recognizing we've got big private capital markets and ultimately that's going to be the key to getting credit flowing again.

Who is Timothy Geithner?

Morgan Reynolds, who served as chief economist for the US Department of Labor during 2001–2, George W. Bush's first term, has done a little fact checking on the new Treasury Secretary:

Who is Geithner? He is a creature of the eastern banking establishment and ruling class through and through. His résumé nicely matches his actions in handing out government money and guarantees to the "right people." Geithner’s father Peter is director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation, a New World Order operation. Peter Geithner oversaw the "microfinance" programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother. Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Eisenhower and vice president of Ford Motor Company, according to Wikipedia. Geithner’s wife Carole Marie, like Geithner a 1983 graduate of Dartmouth College (Ivy League), is daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sonnenfeld of Princeton, N.J., a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University (Ivy League) for 27 years.

After Timothy Geithner graduated from Dartmouth he picked up an M.A. at Johns Hopkins in something called "international economics" and East Asian studies. That is the extent of Geithner’s formal training in economics, as far as I can tell. Then he worked for Kissinger and Associates for three years, a Rockefeller satrapy, before a series of government appointments, mostly at Treasury where he was Under Secretary for International Affairs under Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Rockefeller’s notorious Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and then Lawrence Summers of Harvard University (Ivy League), World Bank and CFR. Summers, of course, is currently Obama’s head of the National Economic Council. Want a solution for the financial and economic woes? Why, hire the same experts who caused the problem(s).

Geithner departed Treasury to join the International Monetary Fund and CFR in 2001–2. In October 2003 he was appointed president of the New York Fed where he subsequently arranged rescues of Bear Stearns, AIG and other well-connected,world-class losers, all in the best interest of the American people, of course.

Did you catch this:"Peter Geithner [Timothy's father] oversaw the 'microfinance' programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother" ?

Earlier, I reported that NYT identifies Peter Geithner, in Timothy's wedding announcement, as the "program officer in charge of developing countries for the Ford Foundation." This just smells to me like a spook cover. I said so back then, before I knew about the connection between Obama's mother and Geithner's father:

One side note. Geithner graduated from the International School of Bangkok, Thailand. His father appears to be a possible CIA agent...

It makes you wonder how long "they" have been grooming Obama as the "agent of Change" president.

Putting the Pieces of the Puzzle Together: Obama as Fabian Socialist?

Fabian socialists as detailed in Keynes at Harvard do not believe in violent overthrow of government. They believe in infiltration of current power structures and in hiding their true agenda.

Jerry Bowyer believes Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist. He wrote for Forbes magazine back in November 2008:

Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist. I should know; I was raised by one. My Grandfather...

Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect "fundamental change" and "social justice" was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites...

Arnold taught me to question everyone--my president, my priest and my parents. Well, almost everyone. I wasn't supposed to question the Fabian intellectuals themselves. That's the Fabian MO, relentless cultural and journalistic attacks on everything that is, and then a hard pitch for the hope of what might be...

So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the commanding heights" of the economy, not the little guy.

That's Obama's world.

So how does Bowyer's forecast of what Obama will do compare against Obama early on in his presidency?

Obama continues to move the banking sector towards more control, that started under the Bush Administration. There will be bank "stress tests". Tell me what you want to accomplish and I will tell you how to structure the "stress test".

New capital will come to banks "with conditions."

As for healthcare, Obama has done the big sneak of putting healthcare control into the "stimulus" package.

So do we have a Fabian socialist in the White House? This is a serious charge, and I am not prepared to make it at this point. However, there is nothing in his actions to date that can rule out that he is a Fabian.

Time will tell, whether he is a misguided do gooder or a calculating Fabian. There is some hope for change from a do gooder, there is little with a calculating Fabian.

Fascist Medical Plan Hidden in Stimulus Package

President Obama has been caught trying to sneak, in an ugly fashion, into the stimulus package, a fascist like health plan that will track and have a chilling effect on the type of health care every American will receive.

As part of the "stimulus" package, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective, according to Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Tom Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary .

So medical decisions will be taken out of your hands and put into the hands of tax cheat, multi-millionaire lobbyist scumbag Tom Daschle? Helluva a plan. The plan is bad enough, for Obama to try and sneak this in through the stimulus package without open debate is outrageous. This makes Obama look more evil than innocent. He may not understand basic economics, but it can be viewed that he is simply unaware, sneaking a major program like this into the stimulus package is none of that, it is sinister.

Creating a power center around which the likes of Daschle can lobby with regard to your health care will do more to lower the standard of living for the average American than any other legislation currently circulating in Congress. This is bad, real bad. Medical care based on who Tom Daschle can shakedown.

As Obama Hustles the "Stimulus" Package, It's Time to Keep the Armey Curve in Mind

Dick Armey explains:

...despite Mr. Obama's campaign promises to adhere to "Pay As You Go" budgeting, no one seems terribly worried about paying for what will likely be a trillion-dollar stimulus package. What everyone should agree on is that the money has to come from somewhere, either through higher taxes, borrowing or printing.

If the government borrows the money for the stimulus, then it will either have to print money later or raise taxes to pay it back. If the government raises taxes to pay for the stimulus, it will, in effect, be robbing Peter to pay Paul. If the government prints the money, it will increase inflation, which will decrease the value of the dollar. That would, in effect, rob Paul to pay Paul back with devalued currency.

Taking money out of the private economy -- either through taxes or inflation -- and spending it in a way that doesn't offset the loss of money with real economic gains is worse than doing nothing.

Years ago I developed the "Armey Curve" to explain the negative burden government has on prosperity. The idea, borrowing liberally from Arthur Laffer's curve (which demonstrates that tax revenues fall when the tax burden gets so high that it no longer pays to work), is that at some point the burden of government spending exceeds the private economy's ability to carry it. "Stimulus" spending often does more harm than good, because it takes more money out of the system than it creates and thereby destroys jobs and leads to stagnation and diminished prosperity for all.

The above appeared last week as an Armey Op-Ed piece in WSJ. The full piece is worth reading as the emphasis is heavy on Keynes versus Hayek analysis.

Presidential Logic

At tonight's press conference, President Barack Obama correctly said:

You know, if all we're doing is spending and we're not making things, then over time other countries are going to get tired of lending us money and eventually the party is going to be over. Well, in fact, the party now is over.

He immediately followed this up with:

Our immediate job is to stop the downward spiral, and that means putting money into consumers' pockets, it means loosening up credit...

Alert: President Obama News Conference Monday

President Obama will hold a prime time news conference Monday.

Mocking the Prez?

A few days ago President Obama, without mentioning names, shouted out against Wall Street bonuses and million dollar redesigns of executive offices, in these "difficult economic times". Aside from the fact that as a Keynesian, Obama should be hailing aggressive spending, as opposed to speaking out against it, Obama didn't have to mention a name when it came to the million dollar office redo. Everyone knew he was talking about former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.

Thain sounds like he is having some fun with the President's jab. NyPo's Page Six reports that Thain (who his worth hundreds of millions)...

was having dinner at San Pietro last week with BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink. He loudly told the waiter, for all to hear, "under the circumstances with this tough economy, I think I'll have tap water."

Mock surrender of personal sacrifce for the "greater good", I like the plan. Please pass the tap water.

Quick, Mail the Fire Department!

There is a lot wrong with the Obama "Stimulus" Package, mostly because it is simply a transfer of funds from one group to another. And, not much of anything else. But even based on the Keynesian principles upon which the package was designed, it is a bit short in the logic department. Thomas Sowell explains the problem from this angle, based on the CBO's analysis showing only $26bn of Obama's $355bn public works package will be spent this year:

Using long, drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire.

There is a lot of smoke and mirrors to this program, which is not necessarily a bad thing, since it is a bad program, smoke and mirrors, rather than creating actual distortions in the economy is a good thing.

Are Politically Correct Bank Loans Coming?

Will the fact that you are a tree hugging, Spanish-speaking, Afro-Asian, lesbian midget, be more important when you apply for a bank loan, than your income and credit score? That day may be coming. The government is now just trying out its big stick on the banks it provided TARP money to.

President Obama is taking the first micro-management, politically correct swing at the recipients of government money. The first swing is at an easy target, Wall Street bonuses. Says Obama:

We're going to be having conversations as this process moves forward directly with these folks on Wall Street to underscore that they have to start acting in a more responsible fashion if we are to, together, get this economy rolling again.

There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses. Now is not that time.

They always start off with the easy targets. This isn't about micro-managing, this is about outrageous bonuses, they say.

But once you start down that slippery slope of telling banks how to operate, how do you stop, when the next politically correct proposal from a powerful, politically correct, lobby is made?

The head of JPMorgan’s asset management and private banking operations, Jes Staley, understands the danger. During a seminar at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Staley said that bail-outs of Citigroup and Bank of America could distort the market if the US lenders succumb to political pressure when making lending decisions.

He said political interference in the management of those lenders that have turned to the US government for large-scale support was the “biggest risk” facing his bank.

Get that? The economy is a mess, there are bad loans everywhere, and political interference is the biggest risk.

“If the big banks start to be geared for public policy as opposed to economics we may end up competing against institutions that are being run for non-economic purposes,” Mr Staley said . “That is the biggest risk we see out there.”

Public policy loans could ultimately be the death of banking as we know it.

The big money players already know this.

Henry Kravis, founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, said in Davos, according to FT, that private equity groups were already looking for ways to bypass banks when raising capital.

Kravis said those moves could accelerate in the coming year, given the scale of capital that needs to be raised and the difficulties that banks face in using their own balance sheets.

“We have set up a broker-dealer so we can go directly to people who provide capital, people like Fidelity, Templeton, insurance companies, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds,” he said.

And so politically regulated loans will do what regulations always do, work against the entrepreneur and small businessman to the benefit of the power elite who have the money and connections to figure out how to work around the new regulations.

The oligarchy lives.

Dissing the Dollar in Davos, Russian Style

The Russian's want to ditch the dollar as the world's reserve. On Wednesday in Davos, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, during a speech, called for efforts to "facilitate the emergence of several reserve currencies."

Given current Fed money printing and the likely collapse of the dollar as a result, Putin's proposal may eventually gain traction internationally. There's already a good bit of de facto movement away from the dollar already.

And, note, while this is all brewing, Obama/Geithner seem to want to hasten the collapse of the dollar by calling on China to stop supporting the dollar! Madness. .

Putin wasn't the only Russian dissing the dollar in Davos. On Thursday German Gref, a former Russian Economics Minister, who is now CEO of Russia's largest bank--state-owned-- Sberbank, proposed during a panel discussion, something of a thigh slapper. In the absence of any serious competitors to the dollar, he advocated international control of U.S. monetary policy.

Since the U.S. seems to want to bring democracy to the world, why shouldn't the international community attempt to bring responsible money management to the Federal Reserve? There's kind of an international poetic justice to this Gref proposal, however, I am not planning on staying up late at night waiting for this to happen.

Barack Obama's First Blunder

Well that didn't take long.

On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama created an order that has unknown long-term consequences. Obama pledged to freeze the salaries of about 120 staffers in the White House, those that make more than $100,000 per year.

I am certainly not one to object to reductions in government spending, especially when it comes to the salaries of top dogs in the White House, but as a move by President Obama this move has to be classified as a blunder.

It strikes of naivete or, possibly, a freakish demonstration of power. As for the order having any impact on the economy, puhleeze. WaPo cranked out the numbers on this one:

Based on a 2.8 percent annual cost-of-living and merit increase (the average by the White House over the past five years, according to Froomkin's numbers), staffers making $172,200 will miss out on a raise of about $4,822 next year. Those earning $102,000 will miss out on about $2,856 extra.

The total reduction in pay out is, according to WaPo, roughly $443,000. That's minuscule in the whole scheme of things. Making the order even more bizarre is the fact that Obama appears to be a Keynesian when it comes to economics. Keyensians believe that you try to get more money into people's hands to stimulate the economy, not less, during a recession. The freeze does the opposite. Further, most price freezes occur when inflation is heating up, not during a deflation! A price freeze is bad economics during an inflationary period, but during a recession, for a Keynesian, it is worse. It is shutting off the heat in the middle of winter. Thus, from the way Obama views the economy, a price freeze is about as dumb an economic move as you can get.

With the US headed for a $900 billion budget deficit, 443k doesn't even amount to a rounding error. But, to a specific wage earner, who was scheduled to receive an additional $2,000 to $4,000 a year, and who may have been counting on it to help send a child to college, it is not happy news.

It probably can be argued that it was a message to set some kind of tone, but what kind of message, if Obama really wants people to spend? And, there are plenty of other ways to send a message rather than freeze the salaries of those close to you.

It will impact 120 people. Is that a large enough group that it will change 1 or 2 from friend to foe? I think so. You can mess with a lot of things, but not with people's paychecks. The media is all over the White House like a pack of crazed sex starved dogs. They are looking for leaks any way they can find them. This past week I had a conversation with one of President Obama's Kenyan relatives. She told me the media was breaking into her email account.

The media is super-aggressive, if there is a disgruntled White House worker, the media will eventually figure out who it is. Here's the list of those with frozen paychecks. (The one's on the list with a salary of $100,000 and up are the ones whose salaries Obama has frozen.). Did Obama create a disgruntled employee from this group that will leak some negative news at just the wrong time? My bet is yes.

This, of course, raises the question, is Obama naive, or even scarier, some kind of oddball power freak just letting the staff know who is in charge?

Either way, it's an Obama blunder, with no upside for him.

The 2009 Budget Deficit Mess and China

The Council on Foreign Relations house economist, Brad Setser, has crunched the numbers on China's purchases of Treasury securities and has come up with this data:

1) China has bought — according to the US TIC data — about $150 billion of Treasuries over the last three months of data. Annualized that is $600 billion, a huge sum. That data only runs through November. However, ongoing growth in the Fed’s custodial accounts implies that this basic pattern continued in December (data/ graphs can be found here)

2) The surge in China’s Treasury purchases has come even as China’s reserve growth has slowed. It consequently reflects a reallocation of China’s portfolio towards the safety of the Treasury market more than a surge in Chinese demand for dollars — and it may also reflect a decision by China’s reserve managers to shift funds out of the hands of private fund managers after Lehman (a decision that has had the effect of increasing reported Chinese purchases of US assets).

3) Once the shift in China’s portfolio toward safety ends, the pace of China’s purchases of Treasuries is likely to fall. It is hard to sustain a $600b annual increase in your holdings of Treasuries if your reserves aren’t growing. Hot money outflows will bring China’s savings into the global market, but in a less direct and harder to track way.

4) The Treasury has increased its issuance even faster than China has increased its purchases. The US is consequently selling more Treasuries to everyone, not just to China. The increase in China’s holdings of Treasuries consequently accounts for a significantly smaller share of the net increase in the supply of marketable Treasuries than in the past (Data here)

He also warns about the 2009 deficit:

One thing though is quite clear but strikes many as counter-intuitive: the large US fiscal deficit in 2009 will need to be financed primarily from domestic sources not from China. Let me put it this way. China currently has — in my judgment — about $900 billion of Treasuries. That is a truly staggering sum. But China also didn’t buy them all in a year. The US will need to sell more than $900 billion of Treasuries to cover its 2009 budget deficit. And China isn’t going to double its Treasury holdings in 2009 …

Thus, a number of conclusions can be made from this data. First, given the HUGE deficit financing that the US will conduct in 2009, it is truly bizarre that the Obama Administration wants to pressure China into providing less support for the dollar, i.e., They want China to buy less Treasury securities than they would without the pressure.

Second, much of the Treasury securities that have been absorbed in the second half of 2008, have been the result of a flight to safety. Once the markets calm down, the flight to safety will be reversed. Thus, not only will the Treasury market have to deal with newly issued Treasury securities as a result of a $900 billion deficit, but with the liquidation into the market of hundreds of billions of Treasury securities purchased in the second half of 2008.Can you say higher interest rates and inflation in the same sentence?

There is no way that so many Treasury securities will be able to be absorbed into the market at anywhere near current rates. Thus, we are likely to see a combination of rising interest rates and huge Federal Reserve purchases of Treasury securities. It will all be very inflationary.

The only sane option is for the United States government to declare bankruptcy. Super-inflation or bankruptcy, those are the only options folks. The empire is crashing. Talk of larger "stimulus" packages, and "we will worry about the deficit later", is insanity. The deficit is not going to wait. Be ready.

Wall Street Rapes America, Edition 9

Wall Street is a very tough place, if you don't know what is going on, your money will be taken from you. I can't think of a more outrageous rape of the taxpayer, ever, than the TARP program run by GW Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. It should be noted that Paulson's lieutenant in the rape of the taxpayer was Timothy Geithenr, who came up short paying his own personal taxes, but managed to help dole out $350 billion in taxpayer money through TARP and is likely to be confirmed by the Senate today as the new Treasury Secretary.

If you get the sense today that someone is laughing at you behind your back, you'll be right. It's Geithner.

Oh yeah, here's the latest outrage.

Merrill Lynch lost $15 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 and more than $27 billion for the year. In October, Merrill received $10 billion in bailout money. But the problems were so deep that Merrill CEO John Thain(surprise a former Goldman man) sold the company to Bank of America. The actual sale to B of A was a shrewd move by Thain. It does, however make B of A look like it is run by a bunch of country bumpkins,taken advantage of by a New York slickster. We indicated as much at the time, when we wrote:

Has Bank of America Chairman Ken Lewis come to his senses? Has the ether Merrill Chairman John Thain slipped Lewis during his sales pitch to get Lewis to buy Merrill, at a premium to the market price in the middle of a crisis, worn off?

Closing date on the B of A takeover: January 1, 2009.

Employee bonuses at Merrill are normally paid out in January. Since Merrill had lost $27 billion in 2008, it is likely that Bank of America would have looked good and hard before passing out those bonuses. Thain found away around the bonus payout problem, he paid out the bonuses in December, when he was still in full control of the company. Reports indicate the bonuses amounted to between $3 billion and $4 billion.

To recap:

Merrill loses $27 billion.

Treasury gives Merrill $10 billion in bailout money.

Merrill uses the money to payout $3 to $4 billion in bonuses.

Oh yeah, Thain also spends $1.2 million refurbishing his office.

Bottom line: Wall Street has always run circles around the American taxpayer, but the Paulson-Geithner era has brought in such disrespect for the taxpayer that not even Shakespeare would have thought of penning such an open and brazen tragedy.

Middle America better wake up, and with Obama bringing "change" like Geithner into the Treasury, Barack ain't the directon from where they should be looking for change. America is burning.

Obama Believes China is Manipulating Its Currency

Here's a headliner that should have been played up from the Timothy Geithner hearings.

According to WSJ, Geithner told the Senate Finance committee during his hearings that President Obama “believes that China is manipulating its currency” and plans to seek changes to its practices, but “the question is how and when to broach the subject in order to do more good than harm.”

Given the collapse the dollar is likely to experience, talk like this is the equivalent of the captain of the Titanic bitching about a paint job he once saw on a fishing trawler in the South Pacific.

Obama to Get Daily Economic Briefing

President Barack Obama has asked his top advisers to brief him every morning on the condition of the economy, the White House reports.

The president receives a similar daily intelligence briefing.

The bad news: Keynesian Larry Summers will walk him through the day’s economic news each morning.

At the first briefing, in addition to Summers, in attendance was Vice President Joe Biden, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Budget Director Peter Orszag, Domestic Policy Director Melody Barnes and Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein.

No Hayek, Mises or Murphy in this group.

Did Obama Dis Paul Krugman?

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes has a fascinating theory that Barack Obama recently dissed Paul Krugman. Karlgaard wrote:

While waiting in the Forbes on Fox studios this morning, I caught a video of Barack Obama talking up his stimulus plan. Did you watch it? Obama said he'd use the best recovery ideas from any source, Democratic or Republican. “If Paul Krugman has a good idea, we’ll use it.” Obama mispronounced Krugman’s name as "Kruggman" instead of "Kroogman"--with an emphasis on the “ugg.”

In other words, I thought I heard Obama dissing Paul Krugman. How wonderful is that?

Does Karlgaard have something here?

Krugman's name is an easy name to mispronounce, on the other hand, Obama has a track record of subtle disses in public. Diss or mispronunciation, it appears that Obama is not close to Krugman, not a bad thing, given Krugman's command and control recommendations for the economy.