From: bis@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Bis)
Subject: The Legend of Ronnie
Organization: Bis Information Services
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 09:19:12 GMT

In article <wegeF3K00h5yQ8il1S@andrew.cmu.edu> Conrad Poelman <conradp+@CMU.EDU> writes:
>Excerpts from netnews.alt.politics.elections: 12-Sep-92 Re: Email Copy
>of REPUBLICA.. Bis@chaos.cs.brandeis.ed (3833)
>
>> >          We have a Congress that can't even balance their personal checking
>> >accounts.  Only a moron would fail to see the connection between personal
>> >hot checks and a HUGE national debt.
>
>> ...
>
>> CLUE:  Bounced checks CANNOT incur a debt, no matter how much money
>>   they're written for.

>No, the problem with the Congressional check "bouncing" scandal is that
>the House bank *honored* the checks even though the Congressmen didn't
>have enough money to cover the account, giving in essense a penalty-free
>interest-free loan.  Thus Congressmen were "deficit spending" with their
>own money just as they do with ours.  I think much of the confusion over
>the issue is because it is erroneously referred to as the
>"check-bouncing scandal" when it fact it is a check-kiting scandal, but
>fewer people know what that means.

Are you saying that the bank honored the checks and they were NEVER
paid back?  I'll have to look into that.  It runs contrary to much of
what I've read about the check scandal.  Then again, since my primary
source on the subject has been the mass media, the Boston Globe in
particular, I could very well be misinformed.  (Too bad "K e n"
Robinson isn't here to see that one; he'd have an orgasm.)

However, this is not particularly relevent, considering that, as I
said, all the bad checks combined aren't even a drop in the bucket
next to hundreds of billions of dollars in YEARLY deficit spending.

If a man finds himself deep in debt with a huge short-term mortgage, 
8 empty credit cards, a reserve credit line over the limit, and a
number of bank loans, and can't pay his basic household expenses
without borrowing from friends and hocking posessions, is he justified
in blaming his son for the predicament, or for even for having a role
in creating the situation, for promising to pay the ice cream man for
a chocolate eclair the next day? 

Just an analogy to illustrate the order of magnitude we're dealing with...

>> >Speaking of clueless! That's the centerpiece of the revisionist 80s
>> >history, isn't it? Reagan presided over the longest peacetime economic
>> >boom in the nation's history-> ergo we will assert it didn't really exist.

>> CLUE:  There was no "boom" in the 1980s!  The economic "prosperity"
>>   was never anything more than an illusion.  Reagan borrowed money and 
>>   called it prosperity, and now we're paying for it.  And shockingly,
>>   when the man who was the first to aptly describe Reagan's
>>   borrow-now-and-spend-spend-spend-and-worry-about-it-later economic
>>   plan as "voodoo economics" took over as president, he continued the
>>   same idiotic policies.
>
>I agree, though clearly Congress deserves its share of the blame as
>well.

Certainly--for cooperating.  Although part of the reason Ronnie got
his harebrained economic programs through was that he had a Republican
Senate for a while.  Why it didn't all die in the Rules Committee is a
mystery (well, not quite, but it's still mind-boggling).  What's
significant is to note that all along it was the White House
initiating economic policy, with Congress following along like a
puppy.  Where was some good old-fashioned federalist stagnation when
we really needed it?  :)

As for George Bush, he did very little initiating, but hey, the status
quo he inherited (and extolled) was so bad that he didn't need to
initiate anything to let the economy sink like a rock.